Eric has some very interesting things to say here, about giving credit where credit is due, and about boundary-enforcing in philosophy.
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Bob Dylan is often the worst interpreter of his own songs. Not because of the old saw that his voice is bad (it's not). Rather, the songs themselves often combine the angry and the elegiac, but when Dylan does his own songs there's often a kind of sneering quality and so you don't hear the elegiac. More generally, the best covers of his songs are almost in dialogue with Dylan, discovering aspects of them that are not prominent in his versions. The songs themselves are so rich that these facets are waiting there to be uncovered.* Consider for example, Bryan Ferry's cover of "Don't Think Twice," at right.
Unlike Dylan's (or Johnny Cash's version, for that matter)** there's just absolutely nothing sneering about it, and the melody and sentiment*** becomes even more universal, expressing what a drag it is when things have gone so comperehensively bollocks up that a friendship ends, and also what is sometimes the correct response. The narrator starts by simply blaming his friend ("You're the reason"), but (especially in Ferry's performance) can't really sustain this reaction even though he tries throughout. And its clear that the dawning realization of his own complicity doesn't really change anything. All he can do is evict himself from his friend's life, sadness slowly crowding out the anger.
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[UPDATE, Sat 18 Jan 2014: 4:00 pm CST: Moving to front to highlight this very important post by Tommy Curry and John Drabinski, with thoughtful comments by Jason Stanley.]
Many people have already read this important piece in NYT's The Stone. I have seen a few online reactions as well, including this one and this one by Eric Schliesser. Here's one by Peter Levine. What I'd like to do here is offer the comments to further reactions and / or to links of other online discussion.
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There are two complimentary Gendered Conference Campaigns petitions,* Jennifer Saul's here and Eric Schliesser's here.
Saul's petition and and supporting material (e.g. how to avoid a gendered conference here) focus on helping organizers of conferences and edited anthologies avoid having an all male lineup.
Schliesser's applies more leverage, also focusing on those who might present at (or submit to) a conference (or anthology) with an all male lineup.
What we are calling for is a strong defeasible commitment not to participate in exclusionary conference line-ups.) The aim of this call is not the refusal, but the deployment of leverage, where it resides, so that inclusiveness becomes an integral part of conference-planning. Further, we ask senior male philosophers to carefully consider refusing invitations to conferences and edited volumes in which the line-up is disproportionately male.
We call on all philosophers – male and female, junior and senior – not to organize male-only or male-almost-only conferences,workshops, or edited volumes. (Information on female experts in various areas is available here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).
Now here is my question. In what manner should the above be thought to apply to summer schools?**
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Article in Science Daily here, which claims that a lot of new evidence supports Roger Penrose's old conjectures about the the way that quantum physics is implicated in consciousness. If any philosophers of mind feel like explaining this to the rest of us, that would be very cool.
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In the same manner that world history is a struggle between grasses and trees*, the internet is a struggle between producers and consumers of media for control of the way in which media is displayed on the user's screen.
The earliest versions of HTML were specifically designed so that the consumer had maximal control over how the information was presented. The exeption was <table>, which allowed the producer to order the information in rows (<tr>) and columns (<td>). But one of the cool things about <table> is that it allowed nesting. You could do a new table inside the cell of an existing table. Producers of content very quickly begain to use this nesting to control how the information displayed itself on the user's desktop.**
And then along came movable gifs, videos that start automatically, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Things seemed to shift decisively in favor of the producer's colonization of the laptop.
Weirdly, in the early phases of this just about every "Web Design for Dummies" type book warned content producers not to put movable gifs on their web-pages, because they are distracting and a non-trivial percentage of users hate them. But as the web commercialized, "distractability" became a feature, not a bug, and most commercial web pages are like seething mounds of cockroaches, little bits moving here and there all over the place.
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Big pile of exams to mark here today, so this will be a short post. I’m going with an unchallenged classic: ‘Fé cega, faca amolada’, from Milton Nascimento’s 1975 album Minas (one of the albums I listened to over and over again as a child), in a duo with Beto Guedes. Besides the awesomeness of the song and of Milton’s voice, I really like the instrumental arrangement: it mixes jazzy undertones with some psychedelic distorted guitars, and the overall result is quite unexpected — and quite something!
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This has been a semester of not just one but two courses based on a a big classic. As I explained recently, I gave a course on the whole of Montaigne’s Essays. I also gave a course on the whole of The Spirit of the Laws, by Charles de Secondat, better known as Montesquieu. I won’t go so far as to suggest that Montesquieu should be given a central role in introduction level courses. Rousseau is just too obvious an alternative for dealing with Enlightenment political theory, and himself follows on from Machiavelli or Hobbes as the standard opening figures for introductions to modern political theory.
I will only go so far as to say that Montesquieu deserves to feature more frequently, though preferably with some attempt, which does creates difficulty, at incorporating passages that represent the different aspects of The Spirit of the Laws properly. A course devoted to Montesquieu is a great way of getting deeply into questions such as: the relation between history and theory, the relation between political concepts in antiquity and modernity, and not forgetting the Medieval concepts; development of law as key to concepts of sovereignty, and therefore the basic concepts of political philosophy, as well as key to political economy; the multiplicity of different political forms and examples; the role of physical geography in history, political economy, and political life; the importance of gender relations and desire as key to social and political forms; comparisons between European political systems and those of the rest of the world; the role of colonialism in the politics of the European metropolis; the importance both of classical models and of states on the periphery of the Greek and Roman worlds; the place of war, invasion, force, and ethnic domination in the formation of modern European states.
On the more negative side, Montesquieu’s understanding of gender relations does include an excess of fascination with the harem in ‘despotic’ countries and the social role of female flirtation in ‘monarchies’, his understanding of the ‘south' is bursting with negative stereotypes, and he certainly misunderstands the Ottoman polity as a pure naked personal despotism, with no restraints on the power of the Sultan apart from religion. Nevertheless, Montesquieu is no worse than we would expect from his time in these kinds of leanings, and even where he looks obnoxious now he is often advanced in at least raising issues that expand the range of historical and political thought, pushing towards what we now understand as the social sciences.
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