New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

recent posts

about

    • 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.

      (more…)

    • 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.

    • Schliesser on Geach and Anscombe

      Eric has some very interesting things to say here, about giving credit where credit is due, and about boundary-enforcing in philosophy. 

    • I’ve Been to the Mountaintop

    • Robert Kennedy’s Eulogy

    • Bryan Ferry (orig. Robert Zimmerman) – Don’t Think Twice

      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.

      (more…)

    • Stanley and Weaver on the US and “racial democracy”

      [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.