recent posts
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 9): Alienation and Historicity in Logic and Existence
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 8): The Marx of Logic and Existence
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 7): Hegel via Heidegger
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 6): Logic and Existence, Nature and Subject
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 5): Alienation and Dictatorship
about
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Georgetown, like many Jesuit schools, requires philosophy of all undergrads – two courses. Since most of these students are not going to go on in philosophy, some of us spend a fair bit of time reflecting on what best to aim for in such a class. I don't really think the first steps of professional training are the goal – and so try more to instill habits of philosophical reflection – the examined life – that might be useful to them in the future. As part of this, a few of us have tried to tailor courses to particular groups of students. For myself, this has meant a philosophy of music course – now in its second iteration. I'm not any kind of expert in the area, but I know a bit of philosophy, have a history in music -I was an orchestral trumpet player, was one course short of a music performance major, and have performed with everything from brass quintets to rock bands to professional orchestras – and I'm a thoughtful guy, so I figured I could fake it.
For the first assignment in this course, I ask them to select a performance of a piece of music to analyze in Aristotelian terms – a piece that generates an understanding conducive collective emotional reaction in the audience by way of the integration of all the elements, in such a way that nothing is superfluous.
Well, really I have nothing to say in this post. I just wanted to offer you this performance, by one GU student, that was selected by another as the topic of his analysis for the assignment.
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It is not very difficult to give undergraduates advice about where they might pursue graduate study without egregiously insulting large numbers of your professional colleagues.
But then how to explain the ubiquity things like this not unrepresentative post by Spiros?*
In the context of a very nice post about an exceptional department, Professor Leiter claims: "The term 'pluralism'** has, alas, been debased to the point that everyone now knows it is usually a code word for 'crappy philosophy is welcome here'."
That's accurate, but a little too generous! For one thing, it understates the self-congratulation with which the term is deployed, and well as the ways in which it is wielded in order to deceive those most vulnerable in our profession.
I realize that many of our judgments of concerning philosophical work are somewhere between full-bore cognitive judgments and Kantian judgments of taste rather than judgments of things you happen to find agreeable. I mean, my distaste for a philosophical view or text is not the same as my distaste for bitter vegetables. And that's fine!
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We've recently had a NewAPPS post where it became clear in comments that many (presumably well-meaning) people are at loss when it comes to the appropriate terminology to use when talking about transgender people. (Interestingly, there is a recent post over at Feminist Philosophers on this very topic.) Conveniently, the Guardian just published an informative piece with very sensible guidelines on how to go about it (at least, they seem sensible to me, but I'd like to hear more from people more knowledgeable than me on this matter). For example, I often asked myself which pronoun to use when talking about a transperson's past, prior to her/his transition, and here is the answer:
Whether discussing a person's past, present or future, only use the correct pronouns for their gender. A person's gender generally does not change. Public presentation may change in transition and secondary sex characteristics may change with the aid of hormones and/or surgery, but one's sense of being either male or female is, in most cases, constant throughout life.
There is much more sensible advice in the article, so go check it out!
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There have been a number of discussions here at Newapps on various things that philosophical writing can legitimately aim for other than simply tell some truth or other. Here, I want to reflect on a distinction between telling and showing. In the simplest case, this distinction arises when we contrast being told some fact and seeing something for ourselves. So I can tell you about an apple, or show you one. I can tell you how to properly pull a sweep oar or show you. And there are clearly important differences here. For one, showing is "higher bandwidth". That is, the amount of information transfered in a typical observation or physical engagement with an object is orders of magnitude more than the information stated in a claim – even a very complex, say book-length one. And there may well be other important differences. One can talk about those in different ways – concrete embodiment in environmental-social context, phenomenal access, etc. I'm making no claims about what the difference is, merely pointing to the – I hope – uncontroversial claim that there is an important difference. And I claim that this is a difference that makes an epistemological difference. We can know more, know different things, have a different sort of understanding when something is shown to us than when we merely learn various facts about it.
My thought that something very like the showing/telling distinction can arise in language; that is, we can make use of language to show things to one another in ways that carry with them the positive features of material showing. That's to say that there are non-fact-stating features of speech acts that have the upshot of something very like showing.
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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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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?
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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
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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.
New APPS 