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    • Everybody’s facial expression just changed. Let’s see. . . You’re either hungry or angry about something.

      I once had a student at the Ohio State University who, by very improbable means, ended up talking with then President Bill Clinton for over an hour. The guy was an Army Ranger who had been wounded in the Battle of Mogadishu (of Black Hawk Down fame) and Clinton had afterwards visited everyone in the hospital. It was pretty interesting to hear about the whole thing, but one of the weirdest aspects is that the student (with slight exaggeration) noted that everyone wounded in the battle ended up being Democrats as a result of the hours with Clinton. This was prior to Bush's wars, when even grunts overwhelmingly tended to be Republican. Also, the wounded soldiers in question had been so furious about the Somali cluster**** that an officer had yelled at them right before Clinton showed up, telling them that he was the commander in chief and they'd better be respectful. But Clinton just did his thing, staying there way over-schedule, and all of the solidiers had a blast talking with him.

      From this and other stories, I gather that Bill Clinton is an archetype of a kind of person who can have a mutually entertaining conversation with anybody in any circumstance. Of course, at the other end of the spectrum are Nietzsche's gods/monsters/philosophers, people who are only really comfortable talking with themselves.

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Problema seu’

      Rolling Stone Brasil announced their ‘Best of 2013’ lists. Topping the list of best Brazilian songs of the year, a curious item: ‘Problema seu’, by Felipe Cordeiro, a singer from the northern state of Pará. In Pará, the genre ‘brega’ (initially a pejorative word, something like tacky/distasteful/cheap, originating from a term for 'brothel') is particularly popular, with its over-the-top aesthetics and ultra-mellow lyrics, but in Pará mixed with local sounds and with a splash of Caribbean influences thrown in.

      Brega, like funk carioca, was for a long time considered to be ‘cheap music’ and frowned upon by the intellectual and cultural elite, while being widely popular with the masses. The fact that a song with a clear brega inspiration makes it to the top of Rolling Stone Brasil’s list of best songs of the year is remarkable (though in previous years brega diva Gaby Amarantos had also scored well on the RS lists), but for this song in particular, it is not that surprising considering the groovy guitar riffs, a high danceable factor, and catchy lyrics (Você pra mim/é problema seu…). So yes, a rather good song!

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    • ((Another (possibly boneheaded) question about a priori contingencies.

      I am going through David Papineau's beautiful little book, Philosophical Devices, and I've run accross a claim that I don't understand.

       

      He claims the following is a contingent fact that I can know a priori:

      (J) Julius invented the Zip.   (Where 'Julius' is defined as "the inventor of the zip.")

      He notes that "The inventor of the zip necessarily invented the zip" is ambiguous, and is true if "the inventor of the zip" is used de dicto, but false if used de re.  So far so good.

      But then he says

      (1)I can  know J a priori because I have defined "Julius" as "the inventor of the zip" but

      (2)  J is only contingently true because "Julius" is a proper name, and hence a rigid designator, and Julius might have been dropped on his head when he was a child and then not gone on to invent the zip.

      But I don't see how you can both define Julius as the inventor of the zip AND treat it as a rigid designator.  If I define Julius as "the inventor of the zip" than the statement is necessary and knowable a priori.   But if Julius is a proper name, then it doesn't admit of a definition, and hence the statement is contingent, but not knowable a priori  (if Julius is really a proper name, then a fortiori I could learn that he did not invent the zip–in some sense I take one of Kripke's main insights to be that we use names to track objects about which we could learn any number of new facts).

      The relevant passage is here.

      I'm not a philosopher of language so forgive me if I botched all this.  Thoughts?  Comments?

    • (Possibly Boneheaded) Question about Axiom of Choice, Soundness/Completeness, and Pi 2 Formulas

      I'm not a logician. Nor do I play one on T.V. So please be patient if I'm messing up something basic in what follows. An explanation of what I'm messing up and/or some relevant citations would be pretty helpful too.

      Gregory Moore's masterful Zermelo's Axiom of Choice: Its Origins, Development, and Influence contains the following passage:

      Vestiges of the first state – choosing an unspecified element from a single set – can be found in Euclid's Elements, if not earlier. Such choices formed the basis of the ancient method of proving a generalization by considering an arbitrary but definite object, and then executing the argument for that object. This first stage also included the arbitrary choice of an element form each of finitely many sets. It is important to understand that the Axiom was not needed for an arbitrary choice from a single set, even if the set contained infinitely many elements. For in a formal system a single arbitrary choice can be eliminated through the use of universal generalization or similar rule of inference. By induction on the natural numbers, such a procedure can be extended to any finite family of sets.

      I don't get this at all.

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    • Guest post by Zoe Drayson: Happiness-prediction and careers advice

      A guest post by Zoe Drayson (Stirling).

      ——

      Can you imagine being happy in a non-academic career? This question is often posed by academics to prospective graduate students, who are encouraged to pursue an academic career only if their answer is ‘no’. This advice came under Nate Kreuter’s scrutiny in a recent Inside Higher Ed column:

      Let me start this column by looking at what I think is a horrible but common piece of advice. […] I have often heard of faculty members advising prospective and current graduate students to pursue or continue their graduate studies only if "you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else." The implication, of course, is that you should only pursue an advanced or terminal degree if being a professor is the only way you can see yourself being happy […] [T]his is shockingly bad advice.

      While Kreuter worries that this advice fails to acknowledge the possibility of combining academic degrees with non-academic careers, my own concerns are more fundamental and focused specifically on the discipline of philosophy. I’m worried that, by dishing out this advice, we are unintentionally discriminating against precisely those groups of people we are trying hardest to attract and retain.

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    • Got Water?

      If you do, you must not live in California or West Virginia.     The water supplies of two different states are seriously threatened this year.  

      In West Virginia, we have two recent devolopments.   One is that the Governor has declared that he is not a scientist and has no opinion about whether his state's water supply is safe.   The second is that the EPA has just revealed that a second major contaminant was in the spill.  They are calling it "PPH, stripped," whatever that means.  It apparently is a skin and eye irritant.  So it may not be safe to wash or bathe with some of WV's water, let alone to drink it.    The latter link correctly wonders why it has taken the EPA 12 days to release this information, and why did "Freedom industries" not release this information?

      In California, the state is facing possibly the worst wildfire season and drought in its history.   See here for more details.     Noaa_snowpack630px_0

      The especially worrying thing about both of these developments is that each seem to be part of trend.    Decreasing precipitation in California is predicted by most climate models, and the recent explosion of enhanced energy exploration in North America does not bode well for the quality of the water we do have.

    • Plus ça change, masculinity anxiety edition

      This Salon piece looks at some recent movies through the lens of masculinity anxiety: 

      A friend of a friend of mine has big plans: quit his prestigious editorial job in New York, grow his beard a bit further out, and start working on the docks. In 2014, the sentiments behind such a decision aren’t anything new… Gender roles in the workplace and the family are blurring…

      I don't have any complaints about the analysis of the movies, just about the vast understatment of the phrase "aren't anything new." Because, let's face it, if there's anything men have been worried about the entire history of "Western Civilization" (TM; and yes, like Gandhi, I would be in favor of it), it's the decline in masculinity as soon as guys take up desk jobs.

      I would date it to Nausicaa getting turned on by the pirate, er, gangster, er warrior Odysseus when he appears on the beach, because frankly those nancy boy courtiers hanging around her dad's court just lack a certain something, know what I mean? But then again, really isn't it Enkidu teaching Gilgamesh what a real man is all about? And so on and so forth, through Plato and Tacitus and hell just about everybody, really, including turn of the century Americans. Turn of the 20th century, that is. Cf, too, for the latest in hard bodies. It's as if it were a theme or something!

    • Most Incompetent Letter from a Vanity Press Ever

      Yuck. This is the first one that didn't even bother to include a title of something I've published:

      Dear Jon Cogburn,

      I am writing on behalf of a German publishing house, LAP Lambert Academic Publishing.

      In the course of a research on the internet, I came across a reference to your paper on "philosophy of mind, language, and logic".

      Has anyone in the world ever written exactly one paper on "philosophy of mind, language, and logic"? Not only must the paper discuss all these things, but for the communication to be felicitous it must be the only paper you have written on these topics. And if the author of the e-mail really came across a reference to it, why couldn't they tell me the title? And why the quotation marks? Are these scare quotes and there's some Pythonesque wink-wink-nudge-nudge thing I'm missing. Or are they McWhorterian "shout quotes." Neither one makes sense.

      Purported Nigerians trying to get me to help them access frozen funds pen less infelicitous missives.

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    • What is a thug?

      Everyone who follows NFL football has surely heard about the Richard Sherman "controversy" by now.   After making the game winning defensive play against the 49ers in the NFC championship game, Sherman gave the interview posted below.   

      I found the following blog post about the media coverage of this "controversy" to be pretty much spot on.  Thoughts?   What do people think the word "thug" means?  Is "thug" the new N word?

      http://oliviaacole.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/richard-sherman-thugs-and-black-humanity/

       

    • Women of Philosophy!

      A new site was launched: Women of Philosophy, an online database collecting information about women currently working in philosophy and their research. It has lots of nice features, such as divisions per area (although some seem not to be operational yet), main and secondary areas of expertise per person, as well as personal and PhilPapers websites listed – and all this with an extremely user-friendly layout. It is a brand-new project, so there may well be quite a few women philosophers missing in the database (so go submit your entries!). However, in the long run, it is likely that all the numerous lists of women working in different areas of philosophy scattered around the internet will become superfluous thanks to this database (which is great news! There is much to be said about a unified database such as this one).

      Other laudable efforts to promote diversity in philosophy –  not only along the gender dimension – are underway: the PhilPapers crew seems to be working on a database to contain all professional philosophers (they do not shy away from big projects!), listed under a number of diversity categories. So more and more, there will be little excuse not to engage in promoting diversity in philosophy, now that there is an increasing number of useful resources available to all.