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    • Why do Christian philosophers of religion believe there is a God?

      A recent interview in the Stone by Gary Gutting of Alvin Plantinga gave rise to expected criticisms, for instance by Massimo Pigliucci. The wide media exposure of Plantinga puts him forward as somehow representative of what Christian philosophers believe, and if his reasoning is not sound then, as Pigliucci puts it “theology is in big trouble”.

      For Plantinga, as is well known and again iterated in this interview, the properly functioning sensus divinitatis is sufficient for belief in God, and one need not have any explicit arguments at all for God’s existence. Nevertheless, Plantinga does say that the “whole bunch taken together” of such arguments are “as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get”. In a brief digression to the problem of evil, Plantinga does not even fully acknowledge it as a problem (calling it the “so-called problem of evil”), although he acknowledges there is some strength to it. The problem is then quickly solved with a Fall theodicy, where God mends the abuse of freedom of his creatures through the horrible and humiliating death of his Son, which Plantinga thinks is a “magnificent possible world”.

      Overall, I found the tone of this interview somewhat placid. Eleonore Stump has termed this sort of approach toward evil "the Hobbit attitude to evil" (note and update: to clarify, she does not refer to Plantinga's work in the essay, the interpretation is mine). She writes: “Some people glance into the mirror of evil and quickly look away.  They take note, shake their heads sadly, and go about their business. … Tolkien's hobbits are people like this.  There is health and strength in their ability to forget the evil they have seen.  Their good cheer makes them robust.” — In fairness, Plantinga did write defenses to account for the problem of evil, but in my view, he does not take it seriously enough. Eleonore Stump does not share Plantinga’s reasons for being a religious believer, nor do other philosophers of religion who have spoken out in Morris' and Kelly Clark’s collections of spiritual autobiographies of philosophers who believe. So why do Christian philosophers of religion believe that something like Christian theism is true? 

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    • University of Illinois-Chicago faculty to strike next week

      Article in Jacobin here: 

      On February 18, the tenure track and non-tenure track faculty who make up the University of Illinois-Chicago faculty union UICUF Local 6456 will walk out of the classroom and onto the picket line for a two-day strike. Barring a dramatic change-of-heart by university administrators at the bargaining table the weekend, it will be the first faculty strike at a major research university in a very long time….

      Every entering UIC student takes at least one writing course; most take two. Not surprisingly, our writing courses are overwhelmingly taught by lecturers (i.e. non-tenure track faculty), on year-to-year contracts and paid a standard salary of $30,000. Furthermore, although the administration carries on endlessly about the importance of merit, they’re unwilling to mandate a promotion track for non-tenure track faculty, the whole point of which would be to reward merit….

      The term “shared governance” is invoked to disguise this evisceration of power but what it mainly means is that faculty senates can “advise” the administration and the administration can then do whatever it wants. To call shared governance real governance is like saying your dog has an equal say in how your household is run because sometimes when he whines he gets fed.

      One of our issues in this strike is to take back decision-making power over the issues that matter to us — curriculum, teaching conditions, the distribution of monies, and the like.  The administration is fighting ferociously to retain that power — since giving it up would in effect be returning it from management to workers.

    • Big Data and Privacy 4: Kyllo and the Collapse of the per se informative

      In a series of earlier posts (here, here, and here), I suggested that big data is going to pose problems for privacy, insofar as privacy depends on a distinction between information and data.  Here, I want to look at how that problem plays out in a specific 4th Amendment case on thermal imaging devices.

      In 2001, Justice Scalia, writing for a 5-4 majority in Kyllo v. U.S.,struck down the use of thermal imaging devices without a warrant.  Danny Kyllo grew marijuana inside his home, an endeavor that involved the use of high intensity lamps.  A police officer had used a thermal imaging device from his squad car on the street to detect the heat from the lamps.  On that basis, the police obtained a warrant to search the home.  The question before the Court was thus whether the original use of the thermal imaging device constituted a “search.”  Scalia reasoned that the Court had consistently held that “visual surveillance” did not constitute a search. However, “the present case involves officers on a public street engaged in more than naked-eye surveillance of a home. We have previously reserved judgment as to how much technological enhancement of ordinary perception from such a vantage point, if any, is too much.”  Scalia reasoned that this case crossed the line:

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    • Philosophers’ Carnival #160. . .

      is here.* Lot's of cool stuff in nearly every area of philosophy.

      [*(1) Hat-tip USC's own Kenny Pearce, (2) To host a carnival, go to the philosopher's carnival homepage and fill out the form.]

    • Ludlow releases statement denying student’s claims

      Article here in The Daily Northwestern.

      Update, 2pm CST, 14 Feb:< complete statement from Ludlow's attorney at Leiter Reports.

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Parabéns pra você’

      Ok, so today is my birthday (yes, somehow every year it coincides with Valentine's day), and most of it will be spent packing and then in the car, driving to the mountains. So not exactly the best birthday ever, but with a nice reward to come after: a week of vacation. (So no BMoF next week.)

      Anyway, to congratulate myself I'm posting the Brazilian version of 'Happy birthday', 'Parabéns pra você', quite possibly the most often sung song in the whole history of Brazilian music (damn, not an original Brazilian song!). So here it is, sung by soulman Ed Motta, who already made an appearance here at BMoF a while back.

      And yes, I'm happy to accept congratulations in comments.

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    • Muzzling Science, Vilifying Scientists

      In Canada, we've had a lot of concern recently about the Federal Government muzzing its scientists, those who work, for instance, in the Department of Oceans and Fisheries or in Environment Canada. These scientists cannot even publish their work or give talks or answer journalist questions without the clearance of some non-boffin.

      As bad as this is, it pales next to a story in the New Yorker (February 10th) about UC Berkeley biologist Tyrone Hayes, who fell afoul of the giant Swiss agribusiness, Syngenta. (The New Yorker story is behind a paywall.) Hayes found that the Syngenta herbicide, atrazine, causes birth defects and hermaphroditism in frogs (PNAS 2002, 2010). To make sure that his message was obstructed, Syngenta had him shadowed by hecklers and hired private sector scientists to contest his findings. A company emails says that they wanted to obtain Hayes' calendar so that they could "reach out to potential audiences with the Error vs. Truth Sheet." Ultimately, they interfered with his being hired at Duke. They also harassed other scientists, issuing a subpoena in one case demanding every email written over a decade about atrazine.

      One thing's for sure. These advanced business tactics are going to get a lot of imitators. Maybe the Government of Canada. 

    • Newapps comments policy and recent posts

      Dear readers: there have been lots of questions raised about our comments policy regarding the recent accusations of sexual misconduct in the profession.  We think we have made some wrong calls along the way.  In this brief post we want to explain how our thinking evolved over the last hectic 36 hours, and more importantly to put in place a new policy.  

      When we became aware of the accusations concerning Peter Ludlow, the bloggers at NewAPPS had a long internet conversation on whether to open comments or merely include a link to the news reports. In light of earlier discussions of similar topics, we suspected that an unmoderated blog debate on this case could become offensive and even cross the boundary of legality. So we did not open comments. This decision met with quite a bit of public criticism, some even hinting that we were protecting Prof. Ludlow. As a result, we decided to open comments, but to monitor them very closely. For nearly 24 hours, John Protevi – with some hours of others of us taking over – did this. Arguably some of the comments that stayed up should have been unpublished. But trust, us, the ones we did unpublish were worse. Comments were closed in light of a comment most of you haven't seen that we thought would push discussion in an unproductive direction.

      Since this followed a comment that raised a different case – the claim that another department has had and hidden allegations – some have speculated that we don't want such allegations made public. This was, of course, not so. But a blog discussion like this was not the place to responsibly consider other allegations.  We are not here to encourage a free-flowing discussion that will inevitably include anonymous speculation.

      In the future, our general policy on issues like this will be to close comments, merely posting links to information, until such time as there are professional or philosophical issues that we think it will be useful for the community to discuss.  We run this blog for a number of reasons. One of them, which we take very seriously, is to offer a discussion space for professional issues. However, our blog is not a soapbox, so although it is offered as a professional service, we can and will exercise our judgment as to what we want to appear here. 

      I'm not opening comments on this post either. 

    • In philosophy, there should be no male and female (some hard data on the adverse effects of underrepresentation)

      (Many thanks to Bryce Huebner for drawing my attention to this work) – There has been a lot of speculation about whether or not sexual harassment is worse in philosophy than in other disciplines. While there are few hard data on this issue, a new paper by Dana Kabat-Farr and Lilia Cortina throws new light on this problem, looking at the correlations between gender disparity and harassment in a large sample of employees in the military, academia and the court system. Across all these fields, the authors found that a low gender representation for women results in higher levels of gender harassment. Gender harassment is defined as "a broad range of verbal and nonverbal behaviors not aimed at sexual cooperation but that convey insulting, hostile, and degrading attitudes” about people of one’s gender". Concretely, "when comparing a woman who works in a gender-balanced work-group to a woman who works with almost all men, we find that the latter woman is 1.68 times as likely to encounter [gender harassment]." Remarkably, they found no correlation between sexual advance harassment (which we have been hearing a lot about recently) and underrepresentation.

      I think these data are highly relevant for the recent news about harassment in our profession, and that there are things to learn from it for concrete policies.

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    • Rawls on justification

      I have a PhD student working on justification in epistemology. He just got started a few months ago, so for now we are sort of ‘sniffing around’ before we define a more precise focus. (He wrote his Master’s thesis on John Norton and the justification of induction.) Now, by a nice twist of fate, last week I received a Google Scholar citation alert which put us on a very promising track: Rawls’ notion of justification. (My book Formal Languages in Logic was cited in this Pitt dissertation, in the same section where there is a discussion of Rawls on justification. The dissertation, by Thomas V. Cunningham, looks very interesting by the way.)

      Here is the crucial passage as quoted in the dissertation:

      Justification is argument addressed to those who disagree with us, or to ourselves when we are of two minds. It presumes a clash of views between persons or within one person, and seeks to convince others, or ourselves, of the reasonableness of the principles upon which our claims and judgments are founded … justification proceeds from what all parties to the discussion hold in common … thus, mere proof is not justification … proofs become justification once the starting points are mutually recognized, or the conclusions so comprehensive and compelling as to persuade us of the soundness of the conception expressed by their premises…[C]onsensus…is the nature of justification. (Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1999 ed.), 508-509).

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