New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Must Philosophy be Adverserial? (Hint: of course, not!)

Our very own Catarina has taken sides in the exchange between Rebecca Kukla (who started it in this very interesting interview), and Jennifer Saul. But in doing so, Catarina (a) endorses what I take to be a mythic origin birth of philosophy. (I hesitate to disagree with one of the great historians of philosophy of my generation!) This matters because consequently, Catarina (b) overlooks plausible alternative ways of doing philosophy available at the 'origin' of philosophy.  But even if I were wrong about (a) and (b), Catarina's argument (c) tacitly embraces optimal institutional design (whereas I am skeptical that we can attain the circumstances in which we would endorse those institutions). At one point Catarina writes:

As Rebecca points out, this argumentative model of inquiry is at the very birth of Western philosophy in Ancient Greece. Philosophy has always been a dialogue of people disagreeing with each other, and this is precisely what makes it a worthwhile enterprise. 

First, I doubt that a "dialogue of people disagreeing with each other" is "precisely what makes" philosophy "a worthwhile enterprise." I believe it's the searching after certain ends (truth, illumination, liberation, beauty, good, etc.) and the various to-be-expected by-products it generates (wonder, joy, insight, self-doubt, critical stance, etc.) that make philosophy a worthwhile enterprise. Second, Catarina endorses here an origin-myth of philosophy that is quite plausible if we focus on Platonic dialogues, but less so if we take a more expansive view of the origins of philosophy. For example,  Parminedes' poem is very philosophical (with important reflections on the nature of reason). It certainly has dialogical elements in it. But its predominant mode is a magisterial stance.

Critical Philosophy of Race journal launched

This is a wonderful development, and I hope folks will read and contribute to the journal. And ask their institutional libraries (if they have such!) to subscribe.

Website: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/critical_philosophy_of_race/.

Description: Critical Philosophy of Race will examine issues raised by the concept of race, the practices and mechanisms of racialization, and the persistence of various forms of racism across the world. It opposes racism in all forms; it rejects the pseudosciences of old-fashioned biological racialism; it denies that anti-racism and anti-racialism summarily eliminate race as a meaningful category of analysis. The journal is sponsored by the Rock Ethics Institute at The Pennsylvania State University.

From the Editor's Introduction to the Inaugural Issue: 

Erik Loomis's "This Day in Labor History" series

It would be unjust to allow Erik Loomis's presence in the blogosphere to be defined only as someone to whom those concerned with free speech rallied when he was attacked in the wake of the Newtown massacre. For Loomis is also the author of an extraordinary series of posts at Lawyers, Guns, and Money entitled "This Day in Labor History." 

Today's post begins: 

On January 25, 1941, A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the most important civil rights leader of the World War II era, called for a March on Washington to protest discrimination in defense industry work. The success of this movement in convincing the government to act on employment discrimination both opened unprecedented economic opportunities for African-Americans during the war and helped lay the groundwork for the modern civil rights movement after the war. 

One of the key insights:

Roosevelt was desperate to avoid the embarrassment of a nation preparing to fight fascism having its own caste system publicized before the world.

You should do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

#InvisibleNoMore

Why aren’t more people talking about #Idle No More in the United States?  Why isn’t there more (or any) formal media coverage of the movement?  Why did #OWS have that #INM does not?

#Idle No More and Settler Colonialism: We Are All Treaty People

A movement called #Idle No More is sweeping across Canada and into the United States.  First Nations from Haida Gwaii to Stephenville, Newfoundland, from Iqaluit to Windsor, Ontario – and Native Americans in New York, New Mexico, California, and many other states – have organized flash mobs in shopping malls and public squares to sing, drum, and perform traditional round dances.  Some First Nations have blockaded highways and railways.  Where did this movement come from, and where is it going?

Setting the moral bar low

From a CFP:

Despite this influence, and despite the reception Dingler's ideas found in Paul Lorenzen's constructivist “Erlangen School” from 1950 on, today neither philosophers nor historians take notice of Dingler's original approach. One reason for this might be his concessions to National Socialist politics, which pale, however, in comparison to those of a certain Martin Heidegger.

The German wikipedia offers a sobering account of Hugo Dingler's life (which is not quite captured in the English version).

Fanon’s Brain

My friend Barbara said the other day, “There are so many books I would like to have on my shelf.  But no one has written them yet!”  One of the books I would like to have on my shelf is about Frantz Fanon, activist models of decentralized political organization, and 4E cognitive science models of the brain as a distributed network.  If you want to write this book, here are a few quotes from The Wretched of the Earth to get you started.  If it’s already been written and I just haven’t found it yet, please post the title, and I will fill that spot on my shelf.

“The meeting of the local cell or the committee meeting is a liturgical act.  It is a privileged opportunity for the individual to listen and speak.  At every meeting the brain multiplies the association of ideas and the eye discovers a wider human panorama” (136).

“Let us reexamine the question of cerebral reality, the brain mass of humanity in its entirety whose affinities must be increased, whose connections must be diversified and whose communications must be humanized again” (237-8).

“No, it is not a question of back to nature.  It is the very basic question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhinge it.  The notion of catching up must not be used as a pretext to brutalize man, to tear him from himself and his inner consciousness, to break him, to kill him” (238).

Hey, it worked for Juan Williams, didn’t it?

[UPDATE, 7 May, 7:05 pm CDT: Schaefer Riley's master plan reaches Stage 2. All that remains is the call to Fox News.]

Feminist Philosophers and Brian Leiter have good posts on the Naomi Schaefer Riley affair at the CHE. 

My theory, which belongs to me, and is mine, is that Schaefer Riley is *trying* to get fired, so she can drive up her lecture fee on the “woe is me, the liberals have deprived me of my First Amendment rights” circuit as well as ditch the Chronicle for the greener pastures of Fox News.

Two updates on Schaefer Riley's vitriol

Faculty at Northwestern have now responded to the shameful attack piece in the CHE.  There is a wonderful response also by the graduate students who were attacked.

Is There Anything New To Say About the Death Penalty? – Part 2

Last week, I shared a glimpse of Willie Francis’ 1947 account of his own botched execution.  I argued that anyone who wants to understand the death penalty must engage with the testimony of people who are facing state execution. 

 Today, I will share a glimpse of another text in Katy Ryan’s important new book, Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism in the United States.   

 Steve Champion, now Adisa Akanni Kamara, is an inmate on death row at San Quentin.  He has been in prison for 30 years, since he was 18 years old.  His essay, “The Sword into a Pen,” narrates his transformation from a gangbanger into an intellectual, poet, storyteller, and activist.

Together with Anthony Ross, now Ajani Addae Kamara, and Stanley “Tookie” Williams, he read and studied work by Plato and Fanon, Heidegger and Che Guevara, Marx and Machiavelli.  “We had gone from thugs to bookworms,” he writes (65).  How did this transformation happen? 

40 Years of Solitary Confinement: Resisting Social Death at Angola Prison, Louisiana

Forty years ago today, three black men, Robert King, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox were accused of a murder they did not commit.  They were thrown into solitary confinement.  Twenty-nine years later, King was released and his initial conviction overturned, but Wallace and Woodfox remain in punitive isolation, despite a 2006 recommendation from the State Judicial Commissioner to overturn Wallace’s conviction, and a 2008 court decision overturning Woodfox’s conviction (later reversed by the 5^th Appellate Court).  The case against them is riddled with inconsistencies and evidence of bribery and corruption, detailed by Amnesty International and other organizations.

Together, King, Wallace and Woodfox are known as the Angola 3.  Their struggle for justice is not set in a repressive dictatorship on the other side of the world.  It is not a horror story from the U.S. War on Terror.  It is happening in our own backyard, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola Prison. 

Angola Prison is named after the slave plantation upon which it was built, which in turn was named after the Portuguese colony where the first slaves on this land were transported.  Even today, the forced labor of black prisoners working in the cotton fields of Angola Prison conjures up images of slavery.   

Multi-scale political affect: securitization and racial anxiety in the Trayvon Martin case

Anxiety is classically distinguished from fear by its "free-floating" character; while fear has an object, anxiety is alertness without an object, a potentiality, a tendency toward fear.* Using a Simondonian image, anxiety is metastable and pre-individual, like a super-saturated liquid, needing only a slight disturbance to start its crystallization. We should note that Simondon's notion of individuation, imaged by crystallization, centers on the putting into connection of different orders of magnitude; I use the notion of "events as crystallizations" to investigate case studies in terms of political affect as connecting the social, somatic, and subjective scales.

Rich Benjamin's NYT piece on the Trayvon Martin case, "The Gated Community Mentality," puts some (small-scale "geo-political," if you will) orders of magnitude on the table, but suffers by not getting below the personal and subjective to the neural and affective. The term "mentality" in his title indicates that personal or psychological subjectivity is his lower bound.

Robert Gooding-Williams on the Fugitive Slave Law and the Trayvon Martin case

Robert Gooding-Williams writes in NYT's The Stone: 

On Delany’s account, the effect of the Fugitive Slave Law, at least as Judge McClean interprets it, is to subject all unowned black persons to the domination of all white persons.  For by requiring that the self-proclaimed slave catcher be taken at his word, the law leaves unconstrained the ability of any white person to arrest and seize any black person.  In effect, it renders all titularly free blacks vulnerable to the power available to all whites in exactly the way that, according to Frederick Douglass, a black slave is vulnerable to the power exercised by his or her white master.

The affinity to the Trayvon Martin incident is perhaps obvious. Chief Lee’s statement that Zimmerman was not arrested for lack of evidence sufficient to challenge his claim that he had not acted in self-defense (“We don’t have anything to dispute his claim of self-defense”) appears to imply that, absent such evidence, a white or otherwise non-black man (there is some controversy as to whether Zimmerman should be identified as white, or Hispanic, or both, although no one seems to be claiming he is black) claiming self-defense after killing a black man is simply to be taken at his word.  It is hard to resist the thought that race matters here, for who believes that, had an adult African American male killed a white teenager under similar circumstances, the police would have taken him at his word and so declined to arrest him?

Feminism, slavery and reproductive rights

Catarina's post has provoked a lively discussion on the inter-relations of sex, race, and class in feminism. This Nation post by JoAnn Wypijewski* recounts a conversation with Pamela Bridgewater, Professor of Law at American University. Bridgewater's goal is to pull reproductive rights from an anhistorical arena of choice and privacy and into the historical struggle for civil (political and corporeal) freedom. The key intersection here is to expand the view of slavery from that of a narrowly economistic focus on exploitation in commodity production to a perspective that includes that of the exploitation of female reproductive capacity in slave breeding.

As Bridgewater puts it at the conclusion of this excerpt from Wypijewski's piece: “If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories [civil rights and reproductive rights], if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom.” 

Reflections on Academic Passing

[This post is an invited contribution from Professor Kristie Dotson.--ES]

Professional pressures exist for some of us to pass as mainstream philosophers. Academic passing is the performance of legitimating one’s projects as “properly” philosophical by attempting to conceal or neutralize what might be perceived as threatening identities, positions, topics, and/or methodologies (Dotson 2011 [or here]). Some strategies for passing concern taking great care to travel only trails blazed by previous philosophers, showing emphatically that one’s ideas flow from professionally acceptable intellectual traditions, when in reality they are inspired by rather different ones. For example, I know colleagues whose philosophical ideas spring from the writings, histories and social realities of members of their own non-European communities. Yet career maintenance requires them to show these ideas as being the natural outgrowth of some tradition in epistemology or political philosophy or phenomenology, for example, when in fact they are not.

While examples abound the issue I explore concerns a specific question that often prompts academic passing. That question, often asked of a paper written or presented by someone with a Ph.D. in philosophy, is “How is this paper philosophy?”

"Regrettable" and "Equally inexplicable"

Is the reviewer being too polite here? Or does the restraint make the message even more clear?

Precisely because this volume is likely to be widely read and used, however, it is worth critically reflecting both on its construction and on the tradition of political philosophy it represents. In particular, some commentary on the choice of thinkers and topics for a book claiming the authoritative title "Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century" is inevitable. In the introduction, Zuckert lists a number of thinkers who "could and perhaps should have been included," (p. 15) among them Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir's inclusion would have assured some direct reflection on the question of gender, as well as served as a marker of one of the most fundamental social and political developments of the twentieth century, the dramatic challenges to traditional gender roles and the expansion of women's rights and participation in politics. That a chapter on Beauvoir was not included is indeed regrettable.

Equally inexplicable is the exclusion of any sustained engagement with questions of race (indeed, no thinker primarily concerned with race even makes Zuckert's "B" list of should-have-been-includeds). Insofar as race was one of the central, constitutive components of twentieth-century politics and the central pivot point for civic activism and debates over social change in the postwar United States, this exclusion is impossible to justify. Further, insofar as one of the main uses of this text will be (as noted above) to allow different parts of the political tradition to speak to one another, it would have been a great virtue if the volume had slightly broadened the conception of what it is to do political philosophy by including a social theorist like W.E.B. DuBois, Oliver Cromwell Cox, or Frantz Fanon -- or alternatively, an essay focused on the rich discussions of the meaning of democracy and by extension the political condition found in mid-century African-American authors such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright.

Readers are invited to suggest authors for inclusion, and / or to discuss how "political philosophy" is conceived such that the choices of this volume are possible.