He is gone. When someone is 94, you can't call it a surprise. But when someone has always been there as a part of just about everything you cared about politically your entire life, it somehow is. We are much the poorer.
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In my regular visits to Munich as an external member of the MCMP, a frequent item on my program is meeting with Peter Adamson, of ‘History of Philosophy without any Gaps’ fame, to talk about, well, the history of philosophy (there are still gaps to be filled!). So last week, after another lovely 2-hour session that felt like 10 minutes, Peter told me about a chapter of Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, where everyone goes to heaven and gets to do whatever they want for however long they want. After some years of pleasurable life, almost everyone then gives up and wants to die ‘for real’, but a particular group of people is remarkably resilient: the philosophers, who are happy to go on discussing with each other for decades and decades. They are the ones who last the longest in heaven. (I haven’t read the book yet, but coincidentally I was reading another one of Barnes’ books.)
Coincidence or not, a day later I came across an article by Nigel Warburton, of ‘Philosophy Bites’ fame, on how philosophy is above all about conversation. (Those podcasters like their talking alright.) The article points out that, while the image of the philosopher as the lone thinker, associated with Descartes, Boethius, and Wittgenstein, is still influential, it is simply a very partial, if not entirely wrong, picture of philosophical practice. Warburton relies on John Stuart Mill to emphasize the importance of conversation and dissent for philosophical inquiry:
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Last week, I suggested that there was no meaningful difference between a “botched” execution and a “proper” one. Today, I will develop this claim and offer some phenomenological support for it. The analysis that follows is rooted in my present geopolitical context – Tennessee – but the issues apply to the US death penalty as a whole. Thank you to Geoff Adelsberg for his research assistance on the legal cases, and to Kelly Oliver for sharing this research with me.
The Supreme Court case Baze v Rees (2008) upheld the constitutionality of the standardized three drug protocol, which consists of 1) sodium thiopental (an anaesthetic), 2) pancuronium bromide (a paralytic), and 3) potassium chloride (an electrolyte which, administered in the right way, stops the heart). Building on Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, the Court argued that an “isolated mishap alone” (say, a botched execution) does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment because “such an event, while regrettable, does not suggest cruelty or a “substantial risk of serious harm.”” Baze established a 3-part standard involving an assessment of “(a) the severity of pain risked, (b) the likelihood of that pain occurring, and (c) the extent to which alternative means are feasible.”
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Page 163 of Eckart Förster's The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction*contains a footnoted dig about Heidegger I just don't get. The sentence in the text is:
Fichte's discovery is unprecedented in the history of philosophy: it is the insight that the proposition 'I am' expresses an utterly different kind of being than any existential proposition about a thing or state of affairs:14 "The initial incorrect presupposition, and the one which caused the Principle of Consciousness** to be presupposed as the first principle of all philosophy, was precisely the presupposition that one must begin with a fact. We certainly do require a first principle which is material and not merely formal. But such a principle does not need to express a deed [Tatsache], it can also express an action [Tathandlung], if it is permissible to wager a proposition which can neither be explained nor proven here" (GA 1,2:46; W 1:8) (164).
This is how Fichte is able to come up with non-divine instances of Kantian "intellectual intuition,"*** non-sensory experiences that, like concepts, are active. Just as for many theists (Kant included), God's creation and knowledge of the world are not two separate acts, for Fichte we become selves by the very act of gaining knowledge about ourselves.***** This makes self-knowledge radically different from normal varieties of empirical and a priori knowledge.
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Over the weekend I was talking to some people about how we might increase the number of women in philosophy. The sad truth is that there still are only around 20 percent women in philosophy jobs. But as has been pointed out numerous times, the problem starts at the undergraduate level. If we could get more women to major in philosophy, there would be a greater pool of female applicants for PhD programs to choose from and more women to hire in tenure-track positions.
Of course, there is a super-simple solution to this problem. Hire more women in TT positions to serve as role models for undergraduate students. Problem: Vicious circle. There aren't enough women to hire. The star programs snap up most of the women on the market. That makes it difficult for less well ranked programs to find women to hire. Or so I am told.
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I spent last year's graduation day on campus working through Dale Snow's book on Schelling. It was the fifth consecutive year I had successfully avoided having to put on the monkey suit and suffer through the interminable ceremony*. I was pretty happy.
Moreover, it's fun to walk around campus during the day, just because the outpouring of joy is so infectious. All these parents are there to honor their kids' accomplishments. You can hear laughter rising up from all these different groups of people distributed all across campus.
But as the day goes on and all of the parents (and most of the students) have left, the tone of the laughter beings to shift into something a little uglier, as if it is now at someone else's expense. It becomes less dispersed, centralizing at parties around campus, in some cases devolving into the kind of primal hooting that is perhaps the purest expression of unoriginal macho energy in all of its depraved imbecility.
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This piece up at Salon gives a good narrative account of the problems with the for-profit college industry. These colleges prey on vulnerable students, making sunny promises about life after graduation. Once those students enroll, the colleges pocket the students’ federal grant and loan money. An alarming percentage of the students don't even finish a class, much less obtain a degree of any sort. What they mainly obtain is student-loan debt. The industry thus combines an incredibly brazen rent-seeking to protect their access to student financial aid with a basic finance-capital accumulation by dispossession: student loans are unforgiveable, even in bankruptcy, and so these students will forever be owing ever increasing amounts of money, which gets sent directly to Wall Street.
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We have all read various things about various agents tracking us via our phones and our phone use. But none of them has struck me in such a visceral way as this.
The Ukranian Government sent a text message to thousands of protestors that said: “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” More on the technical details behind this here. What impact do you think this will have on the protests in Kiev? What about on future protests around the world? Does this make you think any differently about the NSA metadata collection?
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Dad music: Huey Lewis and the News
Cool uncle music: Elvis Costello
Creepy uncle music: Girls' Generation, Burzum, Kid Rock, Insane Clown Possee, etc.
[Brief reflections after the jump.]
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Last week's botched execution in Ohio has raised questions for many people about the ethics of experimenting with untested lethal injection protocols. But it’s not clear that the standard drug protocol is any less cruel, even if it is less unusual.
On Thursday, January 16, Dennis McGuire was injected with a combination of the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone. Witnesses report that he gasped, snorted, and struggled for air for over ten minutes before being pronounced dead. Why would Ohio turn to such a controversial and untested execution method?
Since 2011, one of the drugs in the standardized lethal injection protocol has become unavailable thanks to a combination of global capitalism and European law. This protocol consists of three drugs: sodium thiopental (an anaesthetic), 2) pancuronium bromide (a paralytic), and 3) potassium chloride (an electrolyte which, administered in the right way, stops the heart). Until recently, the only US manufacturer of the first drug, sodium thiopental, was Hospira.
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