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!
recent posts
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 9): Alienation and Historicity in Logic and Existence
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 8): The Marx of Logic and Existence
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 7): Hegel via Heidegger
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 6): Logic and Existence, Nature and Subject
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 5): Alienation and Dictatorship
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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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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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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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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.
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In a second court ruling on the NSA’s metadata collection program, Judge Pauley rejected virtually all of the arguments raised by the ACLU and other plaintiffs against the program. This opinion thus stands opposed to Judge Leon’s ruling of a few weeks before (my analysis of that is here). Here I want to look at Judge Pauley’s opinion, in the context of my original question about data and information as concepts in thinking about privacy in the era of big data.
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As a card-carrying Deleuzean, I'm supposed to be scornful of the concept of "ideology."* But it does have its uses, and here's a great example of ideology qua naturalizing the social.
Fatal traffic accidents occurred in New York, Michigan, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. Authorities said a woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease froze to death after she wandered away from her rural western New York home. And in suburban Philadelphia, as the storm approached, a worker at a salt storage facility was killed when a 100-foot-tall pile of road salt fell and crushed him. Falls Township police said the man was trapped while operating a backhoe.
I'd rewrite that this way:
A cruelly insufficient social safety net (the Alzheimer's patient) and dangerous work conditions caused by cuts to public workforce (the backhoe operator — I wouldn't be surprised if he was working for a private contractor; at the very best he was probably pulling a double shift, hence exhausted) plus the grossly insufficient public transport system and poorly maintained roads, coupled with economic desperation (the car drivers — dollars to donuts they were trying to get to a crappy service job, but don't worry, the Walmart where they worked will put out a collection basket) continued its reign of terror today, with the winter storm being the proximate cause that only a fool, knave, gull, or ideologue would blame for the social conditions that exposed these people to its effects.
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(Cross-posted at M-Phi)
Formal/mathematical philosophy is a well-established approach within philosophical inquiry, having its friends as well as its foes. Now, even though I am very much a formal-approaches-enthusiast, I believe that fundamental methodological questions tend not to receive as much attention as they deserve within this tradition. In particular, a key question which is unfortunately not asked often enough is: what counts as a ‘good’ formalization? How do we know that a given proposed formalization is adequate, so that the insights provided by it are indeed insights about the target phenomenon in question? In recent years, the question of what counts as adequate formalization seems to be for the most part a ‘Swiss obsession’, with the thought-provoking work of Georg Brun, and Michael Baumgartner & Timm Lampert. But even these authors seem to me to restrict the question to a limited notion of formalization, as translation of pieces of natural language into some formalism. (I argued in chapter 3 of my book Formal Languages in Logic that this is not the best way to think about formalization.)
However, some of the pioneers in formal/mathematical approaches to philosophical questions did pay at least some attention to the issue of what counts as an adequate formalization. In this post, I want to discuss how Tarski and Carnap approached the issue, hoping to convince more ‘formal philosophers’ to go back to these questions. (I also find the ‘squeezing argument’ framework developed by Kreisel particularly illuminating, but will leave it out for now, for reasons of space.)
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In a recent FB status update, Justin E. H. Smith cites James Scott approvingly:
As the anthropologist James C. Scott has compellingly argued, it is a fool's game to attempt to learn about human nature from 'isolated' or 'primitive' tribes, since every human group about which we have any knowledge has existed in some relation to a broader network of other human groups, and usually of states and empires. In this respect the idea of homogeneous national cultures attaching stably to territories is not only an illusion, to the extent that the homogeneity was initially imposed by a concerted campaign, but also to the extent that influence and goods are always flowing in from outside, even if in certain places and times foreign faces and foreign tongues are an unfamiliar occurrence. James C. Scott, "Crops, Towns, Government," London Review of Books, Vol. 35, No. 22, 21 November, 2013, pgs. 13-15.
While I agree grosso modo with Scott's point about skepticism about direct and naive conclusions from existing foragers back to pre-State times, I think we can make some reasonable, modest, and always open to re-interpretation, guesses (or if you want, hypotheses) for pre-State forager bands. When we do that we have to remember that claims that inter-group war was the dominant form of inter-group relation are themselves prone to illegitimate analogies with nation-state behavior (that is, society as boot camp: impose a homogeneous culture to better ensure success in war through loyalty to the group, etc).
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