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    • Tom Waits reads Bukowski’s Laughing Heart

      Nearly everyone with whom I find myself having long conversations* has at some time fallen into a kind of holidays era depression strong enough to take the comic edge off of Philip Larkin's "This be the Verse" (NSFW). The inevitable clash between promise and experienced reality is exacerbated by difficult family dynamics (even with respect to those we've lost) that seem to generally be our lot as rather depraved sentient beings.

      But there is grace too, and every Christmas I find that watching the following** comforts my inner Larkinism.

       Anyhow, here's a late wish to anyone reading this blog for a Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Saturnalia/Festivus/Winter Break/Solstice etc. etc. etc. filled with genuine grace.

      [Notes:

      *Selection bias!

      **I know it's schmaltzy, but I don't care. Beauty and truth just are sometimes schmaltzy and we ignore this in our own aesthetic practice at great peril. Johnny Cash himself in fact knew and lived much of his life in that schmaltz and anyone listening to his albums gains insight into the value of schmaltz.]

    • 2014 will be breakout year for Continental Philosophy’s return to metaphysics

      As an outsider I've been fascinated by watching continental philosophers shake off many of the neo-Kantian aspects of phenomenology in the same way that analytic philosophers earlier shook off many of the (sometimes identical!) neo-Kantian aspects of logical positivism.

      What's fascinated me most these past few years is the way in which lessons, themes, and issues from the glory period of German Idealism have been so much better recovered in the continental metaphysics renaissance. That is, one can easily trace the canonical set of issues that move Maimon all the way through Schopenhauer and Hegel* (that were thought to have been dissolved by logical positivists and phenomenologists) as all rising up again in various ways by once renegade Deleuzians such as Protevi and Delanda** and the Speculative Realist writers of the same recent era: Meillassoux, Harman, Hamilton-Grant, and Brassier.***

      The reason I think that 2014 is the Clash City Rockers gets released (or perhaps David Lewis visits Australia) moment for the revival of metaphysics in continental philosophy is that so much of this material a deepening of this very narrative of a dialectical recovery of what was covered over by twentieth century neo-Kantian philosophy. After the jump I'll list a few that are the most exciting to me.

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: Tom Zé

      I’m still waiting for Rolling Stone Brasil to publish their ‘Best of 2013’ lists, which often give me good ideas of music to post here at BMoF. But for now, let me post a 2013 song by one of the most experimental of all experimental musicians in Brazil, Tom Zé. He is relatively well known outside Brazil in alternative, world music circles, after having become of one of David Byrne’s protégés in the 1990s (he was an iconic figure in the Tropicália movement in the 1960s, but was then by and large ‘forgotten’ for many years). But one of the remarkable things about Tom Zé is that he continues to make music exactly as he sees fit, completely ignoring any ‘market pressure’ and not trying to please anyone with facile tricks.

      The song below is ‘Tribunal do Feicebuqui’ (‘Feicebuqui’ being a transliteration of ‘Facebook’), a song that shows not only that Tom Zé keeps up with current social phenomena (recall that he is 78 years old), but also that he looks at these phenomena with astute, critical eyes. I’m also posting ‘Curiosidade’, from his great 1998 concept album Com Defeito de Fabricação. There is much more memorable music by Tom Zé one should listen to, but these two give at least an idea of the work of one of the most creative, independent musicians currently in activity in Brazil.

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    • Invitation to post links to programs promoting philosophy in US high schools

      Taking off from a Facebook discussion on US high school philosophy programs, I thought I would propose an open thread asking for comments and / or links to programs.

      Here's a start, to PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization), and to the APA's committee on Pre-College Teaching, and to their page "So you want to teach pre-college philosophy?" 

    • Time capsule from 1958: Women in Physics

      After a recent move and going through my storage facility, I came across the following memo (below the fold–click to enlarge) among some of my late mother’s things.   The date is February 19th, 1958, and the author is Nobel Prize winner Polykarp Kush.  My mother was then a graduate student in Physics at Columbia University.  Do read it for yourself in all its blue mimeographed glory, but the money line is, of course, “If your personal lives are of such complexity that they require a continuing contact with family and friends in time that should be devoted to a serious concern with physics, I very much doubt that you have the makings of a good physicist.”  I heard my mother joke about seeing this memo posted in her lab at least a half-dozen times, but I never knew she kept a copy of the memo for fifty years!  She left physics with a Masters degree and returned to graduate school to get her PhD in data analysis in the late 70s.  She always told the memo-story as if it were a knee-slapper (“Physicists in those days were such characters!”) and she never really mentioned the climate for women as a reason why she left Physics.

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    • An important essay (and Special Issue) on “Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability”

      Shelley Tremain has authored a document that should be read with care by all members of the profession.  URL: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3877/3402. Standard ref: "Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability," Disability Studies Quarterly 33.4 (2013). 

      The article is the Introduction to a Special Issue on "Improving Feminist Philosophy and Theory by Taking Account of Disability" of which Tremain is the editor; the articles therein should be read carefully as well. 

    • Results of my qualitative study of religious attitudes and motivations of philosophers of religion

      (X-posted on Prosblogion) My last blogpost for this year will be a preliminary report on the qualitative survey I launched last month. In this open survey, I asked professional philosophers of religion (including graduate students) about their motivations and personal belief attitudes, and how their work relates to these beliefs. I am very grateful to all who participated (an amazing 151 respondents!), and to the British Academy for funding this research.

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    • Lowlights of 2013: un-blurring the lines

      Exactly one year ago I finished off my blogging year with a post on gendered atrocities, focusing in particular on the Newtown shooting and the widely discussed gang rape in India. At that point, the hope was that these two events would at least not have been in vain, and that they would stir changes in the right direction. It seems that this did in fact happen in India, where the horridness of rape was given much more attention in the aftermath of the event, which triggered a firestorm of protest. (As for mass shootings and gun control in the US, to my knowledge nothing much seems to have changed since last year…)

      And now, looking back on 2013, what strikes me as an absolute lowlight of the year is again something gender-related, at first sight of a much lesser degree of gravity – but only at first sight. One of the biggest hits of the year, Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’, is nothing short of a badly concealed rape apology (read the lyrics for yourself here). That millions and millions of young (and not-so-young) impressionable people should be exposed to the truly disturbing message of the song is very, very worrisome. The catchiness of the song (yes, I’ll admit to its catchiness, which is really the merit of singer, co-writer and producer Pharrell Williams — who, unlike Thicke, is a talented musician) only makes it worse, as it results in millions of kids singing ‘I know you want it’, ‘good girl’, and other horrific bits of the text. (It is particularly surprising that the three singers all seem fairly adjusted, family-oriented people; but what doesn’t one do for success…) The video is equally appalling, featuring three scantily clad female models interacting in unflattering ways with the three fully clad male singers (I’ll just mention hair-pulling and puffing smoke on one of the women’s face – see the video for yourself if you have to. Oh, and there is also an uncensored version!).

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    • Privacy and Big Data II: NSA Metadata between Juridical Power and Biopower

      In a previous post, I suggested that the concept of privacy is going to prove inadequate as a protection against big data.  This is the case for structural reasons: the concept of privacy is designed to protect information (generally, either information that is thought to be inherently intimate, or in the sense of control over the dissemination of information), whereas big data operates at what one might call a sub-information level: it siphons up enormous amounts of data, which becomes meaningful information only after it is analyzed in the context of vast amounts of other data.  As a result, big data knows everything about us, even though we have neither consented nor not-consented to the release of the information that condemns us.

      Today I want to leave that aside for the moment, and develop some background by way of a Foucauldian reading of Judge Leon’s recent decision issuing a preliminary injunction against the NSA’s collection of vast amounts of telephone metadata on American citizens.  In subsequent posts, I will offer a reading of Judge Pauley’s decision upholding the NSA program and an earlier Supreme Court decision that gets at the issue before returning to the question of privacy.  Although the analysis here is based on court cases and government programs, the intention is ultimately to make a more general point.

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    • Big Data: Why privacy is no help at all

      A federal judge today ruled that some of the NSA’s broad, warrantless collection of data from American citizens, particularly of so-called ‘metadata,’ which includes routing information for phone calls (what phone numbers have been in contact with each other, and so on.  This can be very damaging!) – did not violate the constitution.  This ruling contradicts an earlier federal court ruling that the data collection was unconstitutional, and the issue seems likely headed to the Supreme Court.

      If we set aside the details of this case for the moment, it seems to me that an important set of issues around big data is emerging.  That is, to be succinct, that the concept of ‘privacy’ is absolutely no good at all in slowing it down.  I don’t, however, think that the problem is either the frequently announced ‘end of privacy’ or the so-called ‘privacy paradox’ (that people say they value privacy but then act as if they don’t).  Rather, I think the problem is more basic.

      Today’s opinion correctly reports a fact about privacy law: if I voluntarily disclose information to a third party – any third party – I lose any Fourth Amendment claim to privacy over that information, no matter how many times it changes hands afterwards.  That’s a problem, one well captured by Helen Nissenbaum’s work on privacy as ‘contextual integrity’ (or see the original paper here), which argues that moving information out of one context and into another can very well change the appropriate norms for sharing it.  But the pairing of ‘voluntary’ and ‘information’ also suggests that I have some cognizance of the semantic content of what I am sharing.  I may not know why information is valuable to someone else, but I at least know what that information is.

      Big data challenges that.  We have no idea of the meaning of this material we are providing as we go about our daily lives, or even that it is meaningful: we are providing data, not information.  The NSA case is exemplary:

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