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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: Gilberto Gil sings Bob Marley

      Yesterday (February 6th) would have been Bob Marley’s 69th birthday. As it so happens, I spent a huge portion of my adolescence and early adulthood listening to Bob Marley. In fact, it is difficult to express how much his music has always been and still is an integral part of my life. Reggae in general, and Bob Marley in particular, is extremely popular in Brazil, and I’ve posted before some samples of Brazilian reggae (here, here, and here). But today, to celebrate Bob’s birthday, it is time to post a few songs from the 2002 tribute album to him by Gilberto Gil, Kaya N’Gan Daya (which phonetically reads as ‘Caia na gandaia’, something like ‘Go party’, and is of course a reference to Bob Marley's song 'Kaya'). Gil is a long-time Marley fan; his version of ‘No woman no cry’, ‘Não chore mais’ is a classic from his Realce album (1979), and received a new version in the 2002 album (I like the older version better).

      It is hard for me to choose which songs from Kaya N’Gan Daya to post, simply because I’m such a huge fan of pretty much every existing Bob Marley song (and possibly the non-existing ones as well), but I’ll go with ‘Waiting in vain’ and ‘Positive vibrations’. Fellow Bob Marley fans, feel free to post your favorites in comments below!

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    • Existentialist Star Wars (hat tip Andrew Sullivan)

    • Critical Reasoning Materials with a Dialectical Focus

      Over on Facebook, Bijan Parsia asked a really great question.  

      [… are there] any critical reasoning courses/textbooks out there that focus at the dialectical (or beyond) level rather than at the argument level. My recollection is that they are very focused at the individual argument level with an unhealthy focus on fallacies rather than thinking very much about overall cognitive strategies (esp. in group settings) or other goals than the cognitive. I recall getting a lot of that from phil of science classes and pedagogy and (interestingly) online dissuasion analysis (see the "poisonous people" video floating about, or even troll bestiaries), but not so much from critical reasoning (which often was shoehorned into a symbolic logic class).

      While I haven't taught critical reasoning in a few years, I also can't recall having run across anything like what Bijan is looking for here. But I don't think it's difficult to see why materials of the sort would be of great value. In fact, I can see how they would be very helpful not just in the 'critical reasoning' context, but more broadly as part of the kind of instruction might give in philosophical process in a lot of our classes. 

      And with that, I throw the question out to the rest of you. Do you know of materials of this sort? Have you developed something of your own that you'd like to share?

    • The politics always look clearer on the other side of the fence.

      This is just a short note to express my hope that all the celebrities and ordinary folks celebrating the two former members of pussy riot will recall that there are political prisoners rotting in US prisons as well.  This is not to criticize TFMPR – I don't really understand the issues behind the split, but that aside, I take it that their primary moral responsibility is to stand up to abuses in Russia. On the other hand, while there is nothing at all wrong with cheering on these efforts from the safe Brooklyn sidelines, this is not the primary moral responsibility of someone in the US.  For those who would like to learn more about US political prisoners, there are quite a few excellent resources Here

    • Reimbursement Issues for Junior People

      I would like to call attention to a problem that may not be salient to university administrators or senior philosophers: Junior philosophers tend to be rather poor and in debt. They may have been paying for tuition and living expenses for five years or more (sometimes they have also been paying for kids in addition to that). Why should that concern you? Because (to mention just one issue) every so often you invite a junior philosopher to give a talk at a department colloquium or a conference. That's really great. Keep doing that. However, you may want to reconsider the whole reimbursement business. When I am asked to give an invited talk, and you promise to reimburse me, that's super-nice of you. If the reimbursement doesn't arrive right away (or occasionally never arrives), my kid won't starve. But I am not a junior person.

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    • Annals of obfuscation, volume 4501

      This is how you obfuscate, ladies and gentlemen: "There's a good reason for that, says Rex Ramsier, vice provost at the University of Akron, where Gallagher is teaching one class. "Institutions have to be very mindful that if we simply tried to staff every course with full-time faculty that have full benefits, the cost of higher education at any institution would go up 30 to 40 percent potentially," he says. "The public's not going to accept that."

      Notice the conflation of instructional labor costs and total costs (including admin salaries, fixed costs (building construction and upkeep, etc), which go to the bottom line of the school, and "cost" to "the public."

      There's another equivocation there, between the public qua set of individual consumers (in which case we're talking about "price" to them — tuition and fees) and public qua set of individual taxpayers. 

      Why is this important? A public uni could recoup its increased labor costs by two means. 

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    • What Eric said, plus this song

      Eric Schliesser's post HERE. In praise of the efforts of Profs. Hardcastle, DesAutels, and Fehr (as well as the good people at Boulder's philosophy department who are working to improve their climate) the following:*

      *(1) Apologies for whatever commercial shows up at the twelve second mark yellow bar; the only add-free version was a pretty bad cover. And who can begrudge Daniel Johnston a little bit of money at this point? You can hit the x and remove the add. (2) This is always a good song to listen to in honor of the monster slayers on the rare occasions when human depravity** takes a solid blow. One might end up being a bit like this, but that's O.K.

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    • A statement from the CU Boulder philosophy department “climate committee”

      Here at Feminist Philosophers.

    • The Funny Thing About Colorado

      One thing that attracted my attention in the Colorado situation was the university’s use of the APA’s Committee on the Status of Women Campus Site Visit program. Judging from the description of the program on the Committee’s website, campus visits are normally advisory. Departments request site visits in which a team investigates climate issues, with the purpose of “offering practical suggestions on how to improve the climate for women.” (The Committee also says: “The team will be attentive to issues beyond gender, e.g., race, sexuality, disability, and will make an effort to collect quantitative data on these groups.” Apparently, no practical suggestions, though, about these matters.)

      In this particular case, the context was rather different. It is clear that the Department, Dean, and Provost must have decided that they needed to know and do something about the spate of complaints from Department members (including students) to Colorado’s Office of Discrimination and Harassment. So the advice being sought was not general, but highly specific. In other words, the investigation of climate was not motivated by general concern but by a specific bad situation.

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    • Is jury duty a trolley type problem? What should one do?

      Once again I've been called in for Jury Duty.

      It's nearly a priori that they won't impanel me for death penalty or war-on-drugs type cases, since I'm up front about exercising my right to jury nullify in the case of unjust laws or state sanctioned murder.*

      But I have no idea what to do with respect to someone who has both broken a just law and who should not be on the streets.

      How can anyone in good conscience send another human being to an American prison?

      But as a juror the only choice they give you is sending the person to prison or releasing them. And many people are too predatory to be allowed to operate in normal society. 

      I've got two weeks until I have to go in. Any advice about from people agree with me that this is a genuine dilemma** and/or have some experience negotiating the system would be greatly appreciated.

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