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    • Drummer Wanted

      I think that a lot of people in the straight world* react weirdly to disabled people for a couple of reasons. First, they recoil at just how much effort it takes the person to accomplish some task ("Jesus Christ, that person's killing himself just to get into a chair!"). Then, the imaginitive placing of themselves in the disabled person's body leads to a further feeling about how humiliating it would be to be like that.** There might also be some instinctive recoil based on the fact that it is initially harder to discern many disabled people's intentions just from scanning their posture and face. But one of the nice things about humans is just how easily they get past these reactions, not just cognitively but phenomenologically. The most ignorant clod will start to see people with Down Syndrome completely differently after a few days working with them. Now consider this bit of rock awesomeness: 

      Zimmer is amazing in part because nobody has to spend time with him to see beyond his disabilities. It's just impossible to ignore his beauty when he's playing drums.

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    • The Day Punk Died: Nardwuar the Human Serviette versus Sonic Youth

       Slate's Mark O'Connell (here) highlights one of the main virtues of Nardwuar the Human Serviette:

      One of the most interesting things about watching a lot of Nardwuar’s interviews (and if you watch one, chances are you’ll end up watching a lot) is the way that they tend to reveal aspects of artists’ personalities that we’re not accustomed to seeing. His aggressive uncoolness—the silly hat, the grating manner, the relentlessly pursued obsession with minutiae—amounts to a kind of challenge. The respect he gets from people like Big K.R.I.T., Grimes, Brother Ali, Pharrell, Snoop Dogg, Joanna Newsom, El-P, Questlove, and Ian MacKaye reflects the extent to which these people are, in their different ways, smart and empathic enough to see past the geeky, gimmicky surface to the value of what he’s doing.

      But that uncoolness brings out a lack of basic decency—a shabbiness and stupidity—in others. A 1991 interview with Sonic Youth, for instance, was especially difficult for me, a Sonic Youth fan, to watch—first for how it reveals their stunted and clichéd conception of what it means to be a bunch of cool people in a cool rock band, and then for how it reveals them as just standard-issue schoolyard bullies. Lee Ranaldo breaks a rare 7-inch record Nardwuar has brought them, and then he and Thurston Moore (then age 33 and 35 respectively) grab him and pull his T-shirt over his head as he struggles and shouts. “You idiot!” he screams at Ranaldo. “You fucking piece of shit!” It’s a grim spectacle, but worth sitting through as a reminder of how shallow and transparently fraudulent the performance of countercultural cool can often be.

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    • Some thoughts on tutes

      Next week, I will be teaching my first tutorials at Oxford University (the subject is philosophy of cognitive science). For those unfamiliar with the format, tutorials are one of the forms of teaching at Oxford that every undergraduate has. A lecturer and a student (or a small group of students, maximum 4) convene every week, and the student is guided and gets intensive feedback on the fruits of their independent study. A common procedure is that the student writes a brief paper each week, which they present at the start of the tutorial. The tutor suggests further reading, urges the student to think and to read on the basis of what they have said. There is no lecturing as such going on – it is rather a form of guided self-study. 

      Tutorials are sometimes misunderstood as a form of hand-holding or spoon-feeding the student, but in fact the format encourages independence and responsibility. The student has to make sure to do all the reading, digest it, and be able to do the final exam on the basis of it. As it's one-on-one (up to four) it is hard to hide and resort to shortcuts instead of actually doing the reading and the thinking. Tutors get support and training in how to guide students on the right track if they slack or lose motivation; timely interventions make sure the attrition rate and failure rate is very low. 

      Oxford's vice chancellor says the system will ultimately become too expensive, as tutorials cost more per student than the yearly tuition fees, which are capped at 9000 GBP . Educating an Oxford student costs about 16,000 GBP per student, which leaves a gap of 7000 GBP which is filled by various money-sources such as the endowments of colleges. His suggestion is to increase tuition fees – we know the outcome of unbridled student tuition fee increases – and it is a grim prospect. So one may wonder whether the tutorial is an institution worth preserving, given the costs. 

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    • We are the goon squad and we’re coming to town. Beep-beep. Beep-beep.

      The biggest failing in my generation is the inconstancy of our affections, driven by an inconsistent mix of ironic detachment and fear of being uncool. 

      Think of poor hair bands like RATT, on tour in 1991. In the exact same weeks as Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" starts its relentless climb up the charts RATT suddenly finds themselves playing to stadiums that are not even half full. Gen Xers' affections are so inconstant that poor RATT went from the Beatles to Spinal Tap in two weeks.

      And then when grunge did get over almost everybody was too scared to really be fans. What if these Nirvana guys end up like RATT?* Far better to mark an arbitrary point where the band "sold out" and claim to only like stuff before that (for Nirana fans Bleach and the material later released on Incesticide, for Soundgarden fans everything before Superunknown, for Nine Inch Nails fans everything before Downward Spiral, for REM fans everything before Warner Brothers debut Green, etc. etc. etc.). 

      Punk was in part supposed to be about freeing oneself from the hegemony of cool. Grunge was supposed to be a return to this, but it wrecked itself on the shores of a generation embodied by the content-free irony that characterized the television show Seinfeld (laugh track and all) at its best. Irony becomes not the appropriate response to certain aspects of life, but rather a detached way of engaging with everything.

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    • Getting papers accepted for publication: how?

      One of the skills philosophers-to-be must master is how to negotiate the ins and outs of getting their papers published in journals. Of course, the main thing is learning how to write good papers in the first place, but as we all know, writing a good paper is not a sufficient condition for achieving publication. As the years go by and I move steadily from ‘young, up-and-coming philosopher’ to someone with responsibilities for training other people, I’ve found it increasingly important to guide them in the process of finding the right home for their papers. Obviously, learning to do so is a never-ending process, and we ‘old people’ are still prone to making strategic mistakes; but there is a thing or two that we learn through experience regarding how to select the right journal(s) to submit a paper to. In this post, I’ll elaborate on some of the ‘strategies’ I’ve been passing on to the people I supervise; many of them will sound obvious to more experienced members of the profession, but I hope they can be useful to those still learning to navigate the seas of the publishing process.

      One well-known heuristic is to follow the order of a certain ‘hierarchy’ of journals, from top to bottom. So you start aiming as high as you can, and then go one step down the ladder if your paper is rejected. Now, while this is generally speaking a sensible approach, there is much to be said against it. For starters, it may take a very long time until the paper is finally accepted somewhere, and if you are a young professional in the job market, this is definitely something to be avoided. Moreover, some of the so-called top journals are known for taking much too long before getting back to authors, and this is a luxury that many cannot afford.

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Diariamente’

      This week, a friend reminded me on FB of this song from Marisa Monte's second album, Mais (1991), which I listened to a lot back in the day. (It has some other great songs, like 'Ainda lembro' and 'Ensaboa'.) The song itself is beautiful (and beautifully sung), but what makes it really cool is the accompanying video-clip and how it matches the lyrics. Here is the text in Portuguese, and you can try your luck with google translate; my favorite line: "Para dias de folga: namorado" (For your days off: a boyfriend). I was watching it with my kids this morning, and they loved it; indeed, the song has a lullaby ring to it, and the animation in the clip is simple and yet clever. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as we did!

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    • But Mom, I *am* full of great

      Even the noblest vocation carries with it spiritual dangers unique to that calling.

      Medical doctors are in grave danger of seeing all humans all the time as automobiles to be fixed. Police officers see too much depravity in every context. Dentists start to feel generally unloved. And for the humble professor, other people become lecture room audiences. Worse, in critical fields such as the humanities, the whole world starts to look like nothing more than grist for one’s favorite hermeneutic framework.  

      Part of the problem is the necessity of adopting a persona, which has far more to do initially with how you move your body in certain circumstances. With respect to teaching, it’s initially pretty terrifying to be up there in front of a bunch of people. So most of us find comfort in subconsciously aping mannerisms of the professors that strike us as confident and successful.

      It’s fun to consider particularly viral personality types in this regard. Consider the sort of limping way that Jim Morrison would stumble around. If I had a nickle for how many people I’ve known both in and out of the music industry who perfected the Jim Morrison stumble,* then my kid’s piggy bank would be appreciably heavier. Or consider Charles Bukowski’s Los Angeles patois, leavened by drink. Mickey Rourke got this perfect in Barfly and as a result a million drunk adolescents have at least at one point in their lives non-ironically intoned “To all my friends!” with exactly the same distinct vocal inflections. In philosophy, we all know of stories of students of Kripke who, when particularly moved by the Spirit/Mind, compulsively move their torsos back and forth, make an irritatingly high pitched keening sound, and (in the same rhythm as the prayerful rocking back and forth) do that little hand motion where it’s like they are screwing the idea into their head with their fingers.

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    • Eric Schliesser on “Lice and Biopolitics”

      Schliesser thought he could escape the Borg, but a senior philosopher elsewhere has tracked him down for us here. In this very interesting reflection, he writes about the head-lice inspection all Dutch kids undergo at school, and connnects it to Foucaultian analyses of biopolitics (or, with less fancy terms, that government rationality that licences, among other things, involvement in public health). But, as Schliesser recognizes,  it's hard to be simply "against" public health — what, you  *want* your kids and other kids to have lice?

      Also, any objections, like his about evidence of the effectiveness of school level inspection, share much the same rationality — what's the most effective means of obtaining a health-managed population? Now we could do some sort of neoliberal twist here: some sort of market in private insurance against the costs of head lice treatment with a tax penalty for non-compliance might fit — a AHLIA (Affordable Head Lice Inspection Act), if you will — but would this neoliberalization not still fit within a biopolitical horizon?* Or, if you prefer more direct means, do we continue at the level of schools or centralize ("up") to the level of the city or state, or further de-centralize ("down") to the level of the household with say, random house visits?**

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    • Was the Aufbau meant by Carnap to be a refutation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit?

      Thanks to Michael Friedman's heroic efforts, the outright distortions that governed much of our common sense concerning the logical positivists is finally beginning to fade. For example, most of us now know that the so-called "Quine-Duhem hypothesis" was explicitly (e.g. "one can hold true a proposition come what may") stated and defended by A.J. Ayer before Quine, and that Carnap was every bit as holistic. For example, the Aufbau contains the sentence, "The unit of meaning is the language as a whole." A lot of salutary reassessment of Carnap's philosophical value and standard Whig histories of analytic philosophy have taken place in light of Friedman's labors.*

      One of Friedman's major contentions is that both phenomenology and logical positivism must be seen in terms of the "back to Kant" movements in Germany. Heidegger's dissertation advisors were the two dominant Southwest School neo-Kantians, Windelband and Rickert. His very first lecture series, where something like the tool analysis actually appears, is on these two thinkers. Carnap also was writing in the millieu of key Marburg School neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen.**

      Friedman does not just establish various anxieties of influences, but actually provides substantive philosophical sense to the claim that twentieth century philosophy was overwhelmingly dominated by neo-Kantianism. He does not, however, do much with the fact that "back to Kant" was a rejection of German Idealism, and indeed wishes to take us back to a form of neo-Kantianism distinct from both Marburg and Southwest school, Ernst Cassirer's.

      Though I find Friedman's variety of neo-Kantianism fascinating, I don't think that Cassirerian notions of the relativized a priori (and both Rorty and Brandom are doing something similar) go far enough. I am more excited about re-examining the entire German Idealist tradition in light of the fruits of positivism and phenomenology, a project I have argued in the blogosphere and in print to be at the very heart of the recent "return to metaphysics" in Continental Philosophy.  

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    • Quote of the day #5,642 Adrian Johnston

      Lovely bit from the preface to Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: VOLUME ONE The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy:

      Stuck between capitalist techno-manipulation and its irrationalist discontents, seesawing between the twin big Others of the nature of scientism and the God of superstition within the constraining global space of a neo-liberal economy, humanity is stranded in the waking nightmare of a disgustingly reactionary and horrifically hopeless period of history.

      Thus, the main metaphysical task by which Johnston critiques Zizek (earlier work) and Lacan, Badiou, and Meillassoux (in this book) concerns the extent to which they can develop a non-scientistic naturphilosophie that does not fall into superstition. In this context I find particularly interesting Johnston's development of Lacan's claim that extant naturalisms almost always tend to even more strongly embody what they take to be wrong about superstition. There is a lot in here that challenges both naturalists and anti-naturalists, as these debates have been working out over the last century or so.

      Here (hat tip dmf) is a really nice interview where Johnston describes to Peter Gratton the trilogy and his conception of transcendental materialism. If anyone has any time, I'd be interested to see in the comments what people think of the interview, especially since I'm still early in the first episode and relatively new to much of the relevant background material.