New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

We need more reviewing like this.

From a balanced review by Ron Mallon of Philip Kitcher's The Ethical Project: "the first part does not offer very detailed or critical engagement with up-to-the-minute literatures in moral psychology, human evolution, or evolutionary game theory. Nor does the second provide detailed engagement with recent work in meta-ethics."

"One Hundred Days of Student Protests in Québec: Printemps Érable or Much Ado About Nothing?"

Philosophers, Carlos Fraenkel and Adam Etinson, weigh in helpfully on "What started as a protest against an ostensibly modest raise of university tuition fees 100 days ago" and which has "become the midwife of a vigorous public debate about the political, social, and cultural physiognomy of Québec."

Naughty, naughty!

Hooray for professionalism in philosophy, but like many virtues, it can sometimes be a bit wearisome and taxing. One particularly depressing development of recent years is the status-driven fascination that philosophers have with each other’s jobs—where people are, where they are going, how much they make. (The last is furtively checked using public websites and private whispers.)

The silent questions: Is X doing better than me? Is she making more? Is she in a better-ranked department?

For these reasons, we are particularly underwhelmed by the anonymous website, prophilosophy.  (No, dear reader: ‘pro’ signifies not partisanship or advocacy, but ‘professional’.) This site is devoted entirely to “news” clips. On the home page, there are a few desultory items like this: “In light of the number of hires made at KCL this season, a summary post seems in order.” (No! Not “in order” at all. Redundant, actually.)

A plead from the editor

I frowned as I looked up from the computer. Yet another author complaining about the long turn-around. It had been six months since the author submitted his paper to the journal. That does seem like a long time. However, I didn't quite know how to reply. I am not a lazy person. I don't let submissions sit in the inbox for weeks. As soon as I receive them I start searching for qualified referees. But sometimes referees are hard to come by. I frequently invite 10 referees before finding two who will actually do it. At that point a couple of months have already passed. After yet another month I might receive the referee reports but sometimes the referees are late. In some of those cases, reminder letters help. At other times I am forced to uninvite the referees and find new people. After another couple of months, I may be able to make my decision. This decision then has to be approved by the editor-in-chief. Our editor-in-chief, Hannes Leitgeb, is super-fast and very efficient. But it is nonetheless another step on top of everything else.

Missouri Press Closing

The University of Missouri does not rank very high even among US state universities. It is my impression that, unlike Berkeley, Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio State, and other land-grant universities, the University of Missouri has never aspired to be a “public Ivy”. Nor has the state government encouraged such aspirations. The University’s history—an increasingly familiar story—is one of chronic underfunding, in recent years made worse by a heavily Republican legislature.

On Thursday last week, buried in the third paragraph of a boringly-titled press release that reiterated the President’s “six priorities for the coming year” (including, of course, “excellence”) was the news that the University of Missouri Press will be “phased out” in the 2013 fiscal year (which starts on 1 July 2012). Ten employees face, on very short notice, an uncertain future.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Morals, Medicine, and Mathematical Science

[This post is in honor of Christian Maurer and Mikko Tolonen, two terrific young scholars who are the source of much of the material discussed here.--ES]

Today Mandeville's Fable of the Bees (a book that evolved over many editions), is less read than it should be by Hume, Rousseau, Smith, and Kant scholars. It is completely forgotten by everybody else. There is, of course, a general sense that Mandeville defended the so-called (Hobbesian) 'selfish hypothesis,' but there is little detailed treatment of his brilliant moral psychology or his complex social theory in the literature (although Michael Gill's The British Moralists on Human Nature is a honorable, albeit partial exception). Libertarian students kind of know Mandeville via Hayek's high praise of Mandeville's treatment of unintended, spontaneous orders of all kinds of social institutions. Given that praise by Hayek dooms a reputation in some quarters, it is worth mentioning that Keynes happily recites and endorses part of the Fable at length in his General Theory.

Now earlier at NewAPPS, I already discussed Mandeville's critical attitude toward the high social status of mathematics in medicine (an argument that he anticipates in the Fable). Here I want to discuss a related criticism:

"Mr. Hutcheson, who wrote the Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, seems to be very expert at weighing and measuring the Quantities of Affection, Benevolence, &c. I wish that curious Metaphysician would give himself the Trouble, at his Leisure, to weigh two things separately: First, the real Love Men have for their Country, abstracted from Selfishness. Secondly, the Ambition they have, of being thought to act from that Love, tho’ they feel none. I wish, I say, that this ingenious Gentleman would once weigh these two asunder; and afterwards, having taken in impartially all he could find of either, in this or any other Nation, shew us in his demonstrative way, what Proportion the Quantities bore to each other."--Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, sixth dialogue between Horatio and Cleomenes (vol 2).

Sydney Opera House Collapses!

An amazing sound and light show that creates the illusion of the Sydney Opera House fluttering like sails, which are finally furled—the collapse of the house!

In memory of those who died for freedom

For several years now, in my very small way, I've been urging folks to reclaim jingoistic holidays.  The fact that, for example, the US government hides its war crimes by characterizing those they sent to die in Iraq as having been "fighting to protect us and our freedom" does not mean that it is bad thing to memorialize those who died for freedom.  There are many such.  And this year, I thought I'd ask everyone to remember those who fought for freedom in the most straightforward possible sense.  So from Spartacus to Haiti and beyond, let's devote a moment tomorrow - Memorial Day in the US, for our non-US readers - to thinking of those who gave their lives in slave rebellions through the centuries.  

And if you have two moments, maybe a thought about how one can support those who live in effective slavery today - whether they endure prisons or sweatshops, CIA torture facilities, or military occupations.  

“If I loved my city any more right now, my heart would burst”

One of the beautiful lines from this beautiful essay, an open letter to Anglophone media.

You write about our anger, and yes, we are angry. We are angry at our government, at our police and at you. But none of you are succeeding in conveying what it feels like when you walk down the streets of Montreal right now, which is, for me at least, an overwhelming sense of joy and togetherness....

I come home from these protests euphoric. The first night I returned, I sat down on my couch and I burst into tears, as the act of resisting, loudly, with my neighbours, so joyfully, had released so much tension that I had been carrying around with me, fearing our government, fearing arrest, fearing for the future. I felt lighter....

This is what Quebec looks like right now. Every night is teargas and riot cops, but it is also joy, laughter, kindness, togetherness, and beautiful music. Our hearts are bursting. We are so proud of each other; of the spirit of Quebec and its people; of our ability to resist, and our ability to collaborate.

[UPDATE 27 May, 8:00 am CDT*: philosophical comment below the fold]

Vote for the Shaitan?

Political commentary is often a tad heavy. But not with Ashraf Khalil, who said this about the Egyptian presidential election:

If it’s really Shafik vs. Moursi, I am launching a “vote for Satan” campaign. Why settle for the lesser evil?

The next step in crossing the (Analytic-)Continental Divide?

Richard Rorty used to say that every decade or so someone would grandly announce a position or approach that goes beyond the distinction between realism and idealism. As was his wont, Rorty would excitedly digest the new book for a few weeks. But in the end it always slowly dawned on him that the exciting new position beyond realism and idealism was. . . (wait for it) idealism!

Something similar should be said about the history of pronouncements concerning overcoming or going beyond the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy. While such thoughts typically occur in the wake of genuinely important work that brings together aspects of both traditions (Rorty, Margolis, Dreyfus, Wheeler, Shusterman, etc.), it is slowly dawning on me that this promised exciting new paradigm beyond analytic and continental philosophy somehow always ends up being. . . (wait for it) analytic philosophy!

The common consent argument for God's existence and cognitive science of religion

[X posted from prosblogion] I've just returned from a wonderful 2-day philosophy of religion workshop at Glasgow organized by Victoria Harrison, who put together a diverse and high-quality program. One of these exciting papers was by Joshua Rollins' (U of Oklahoma) on the common consent argument.

Roughly speaking, in its crudest form, the Common Consent argument (CCA) goes as follows:

1. Most people believe in God
2. Therefore, God exists

This argument, traditionally widely endorsed, has fallen on hard times. Not only does it seem problematic to infer the truth of a belief from its mere popularity, declining religiosity in the western world have challenged premise (1). However, the recent shift in epistemology to social epistemology has rekindled an interest in the CCA. As Joshua indicated, social epistemologists have convincingly demonstrated that we do (and ought) take other people's opinion into account as evidence. We do this in the case of testimony - where we acquire a vast amount of knowledge through other people - and in the case of peer disagreement, where disagreement with others is a fact we need to take into consideration in many cases. In what follows, I'll reflect on some ideas offered by Thomas Kelly, who wrote a recent paper on CCA, and implications of cognitive science of religion for CCA.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Djavan

It’s Friday evening, and I’ve been so absorbed the whole day with making the index for my forthcoming book that I completely forgot about BMoF today! So here I am, working on a Friday evening, husband out with friends, kids asleep, what could possibly cheer me up? Oh, I know: Djavan! As I think I mentioned before, he was my very favorite singer in my early 20s, and his music still has a bit of a ‘time tunnel’ effect on me. So here is a small selection of some of his upbeat songs: ‘Te devoro’ (1998), ‘Sina’ (1982) and ‘Maçã do rosto’ (1976). Ok, I may as well pour myself another glass of wine…

Why women leave academia: the Truth Values of Gioia de Cari

One of the high points of my short trip to New York last week was attending a performance of Truth Values -- One Girl's Romp through MIT Male's Math Maze in Princeton (at the very kind invitation of Juliette Kennedy!). The play is written and performed by Gioia de Cari, who in the 1980s was a graduate student in mathematical logic at MIT, and is an autobiographical account of her experience at the time. In spite of proving a highly interesting result (published in the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic), after three years (including an appointment as a teaching fellow at Harvard), she decided to quit graduate school and mathematics so as to pursue her interests in music and drama. The world may have lost a good mathematician, but it certainly gained a wonderful artist: the play is fantastic, extremely funny while also touching upon some very fundamental issues.

Why did Gioia de Cari leave academia? In fact, why do women leave academia? Coincidentally, today there is a blog post on the Guardian by Curt Rice, whom we’ve talked about before here at NewAPPS, reporting on a longitudinal study on women’s retention specifically in chemistry. Although some of the points emerging in this research are specific to chemistry, most of them generalize to academia more widely. It is interesting to notice that a general disillusion with the academic path seems to affect both men and women during their years as graduate students (grad school sucks for everyone...), but the blow is apparently considerably harder on women.

The two-fold function of kettling: production of crowd "violence," and extra-judicial punishment

As Montreal police are beginning to increase the use of kettling in their crackdown on protest, it's a good time to remind ourselves of the dual use of that tactic: 1) the production of crowd "violence" providing pretext for further crackdowns, and 2) as a form of extra-judicial punishment (I am choosing that term carefully; I do not mean "extra-legal" but simply "outside the courts" [as opposed to the legislature]).

The best new crowd psychology shows that the police can produce violent reactions from their adversaries, just by treating them as adversaries (thereby producing a group identity of the crowd as "enclosed" and "threatened"), cutting off their path ("kettling"), hell, just showing up in riot gear. This effect is not unknown in the policing community (paywall protected article, unfortunately). You can of course investigate the self-constition of police group identity as the "thin blue line protecting society from violent mobs," etc. along these same lines.

Furthermore, as Laurie Penny points out here, kettling itself is a form of extra-judicial punishment: humiliating, anxiety-producing, etc. Just keeping you from urinating for hours has all sorts of subtle or not so subtle physiologico-psychological anxiety effects. It also puts the relief of your anxiety in the hands of the agents of the State.

One other extra-judicial punishment, beyond kettling -- or maybe a prolongation of kettling is better -- is to make the arrest procedure as long and degrading and difficult as possible. And then to decline to press charges. But the 24-36-48-even sometimes 72 hours in custody is in fact worse punishment than a judge is likely to pass down. So even if the police don't break your ribs with a billy club or pepper-spray you, they can still punish you, for just keeping you handcuffed, humiliated, for hours and hours on end is already punishment.

Man ejected from plane for sexist remarks

Via the Feminist Philosophers, a delightful piece of news:

A Brazilian airline said Tuesday that one of its female pilots ejected a passenger from a flight because he was making sexist comments about women flying planes. Trip Airlines said in a statement the pilot ejected the man before takeoff on Friday as he made loud, sexist comments upon learning the pilot was a woman. The passenger, who was not identified, was met by police officers at the plane and escorted out of the Belo Horizonte airport. The jet continued on to the state of Goias after a one-hour delay. The airline said it would not tolerate disparaging remarks made about any of the 1,400 women working for it.

That is beyond awesome! I'll be flying with Trip Airlines this July for the first time (going to Fernando de Noronha, aka snorkeling paradise), and I so hope I'll have this pilot! (Only once did I fly with a female co-pilot, and got all emotional about it...)

A Hundred Million Canadians?

An interesting call for increased immigration to Canada by Doug Saunders, who thinks that 100 million is the right population for Canada.

He points out something that most people hardly ever take into account. The US has a huge population. In fact, it has the third largest population in the world, after China and India. It has 330 or so million; the next largest country (Indonesia?) is only two-thirds its size. (Next is Brazil, I think, with fewer than 200 million.) And that is what makes it so alive. (I guess it may also be what makes it so dead.)

Saunders' argument is partially economic, but largely cultural:

Putting a head / face on an acephalic movement

A perfect example here of the media's insatiable desire to annoint a leader of a mass movement. The linked BBC article not only looks to present GND (see, I'm falling into it myself, using the initials) as a "leader," it also uses "he said, she said" reporting to make sure the most reactionary creeps get air time to repeat the usual canards about the students as spoiled brats (and quite implicitly, but nonetheless there, unless I'm being hyper-sensitive, the Quebec Francophones as emotional and unruly compared to the sober and rational Anglos). Now I'm quite sure GND knows all this and has made a careful study of Camila Vallego's manipulation of and by the media. (Cf. as well David Graeber and OWS.)

What I'd like to ask for comments on is not so much that tactical level, as the philosophical question of what lies behind the mediatic creation of "leaders." What desire is at work here, what fear of the multitude is being assuaged? "Fascism" is terribly overused as an analytical category, but can that be remedied by making a distinction between micro- and macro-fascism? Is this an instance of micro-fascism, the desire to find a leader, so that all human relations are that of leader and led, crowding out the immanent self-organization of the multitude? I'm moving very fast here, from a combination of caffeine and time pressure from other tasks, but I hope some of this makes sense and is enought to elicit comments.

Inconsequential Adornian musings on art

As an undergraduate in São Paulo, I took four courses in aesthetics, but in truth three of them were art history courses (by one of the best teachers I’ve ever had, Leon Kossovich). We covered topics such as the tapestry of Siberian nomads and the development of art in the Persian Empire, from the Assyrians all the way to the Sassanids. The only ‘proper’ aesthetics course I took was on Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, and for my final essay I drew a comparison between Rousseau and Adorno on their respective criticisms of art. This must have been the last time I thought seriously about aesthetics, and since then, whenever I gave it some more thought, I was still convinced (and still am) that Adorno had hit the nail on the head with his concept of the paradox of objectification of artistic expression in (modern) art.

iPads and the Toddler's Brain

Just now on NPR, there was a discussion about toddlers and iPads that could have really used a Heideggerian intervention.  The issue was, more or less, what is happening when you give a 2 year old an iPad and they get completely absorbed for 5 hours straight?  Is this good for them or not?  And does it help them to learn what they need to learn in order to mature into smart, productive kids and adults?  NPR seems to love this stuff; there’s a shorter article on the same topic here. 

A range of experts was consulted, most of whom said that we don’t have enough (empirical) research to answer these questions yet, but that we shouldn’t panic – we just need to make sure that kids get a balance of screen time and face-to-face interaction with other people.  But the question that started the whole discussion was a father’s question about what is going on for his son when he “zones out” in front of the iPad.  This question remained unaddressed, as far as I could tell from my own zoning in and out of the radio discussion.  But isn’t this basically a matter of Benommenheit, or captivation, literally “being taken,” being absorbed in an object to the point where everything else fades away.