New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

recent posts

about

    • Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Lethal Injection

      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.”

      (more…)

    • What the heck is Eckart Förster talking about with his slam on Heidegger?

      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.

      (more…)

    • How do we get more women into philosophy (And a workshop)

      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.

      (more…)

    • When you tarry with the negative, the negative tarries with you.

      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.

      (more…)

    • Big Data and Big-Profit colleges

      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.

      (more…)

    • Ukrainian protesters receive text message

      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?

       

    • three new categoris of music, with examples

      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.]

      (more…)

    • Executions, botched and proper

      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. 

      (more…)

    • 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.

      (more…)

    • 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!

      (more…)