New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

recent posts

about

    • Individualized grading, combative philosophy, and neoliberal subjects

      Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber responds to Jonathan Wolff and to Brian Leiter on the question of the combative style in philosophical discussion. Bertram: 

      Sometimes combat might be the right stance, but seeing that as the default mode for philosophical discussion leads far too often to destructive Q&A sessions that aim at destroying the opponent and bolstering the amour propre of the aggressor. Where the aim is victory, then all kinds of rhetorical moves can prove effective: there’s no reason to think that truth will emerge as a by-product.

      For my part, regarding blood-on-the-floor seminar rooms, I wonder to what extent the practice of awarding individual grades creates the impression among students of a zero-sum game in grades (whether or not a true zero-sum game is in operation*), exacerbating the combativeness aspect: “if I tear down Jones, that’s one less person in the top grade cohort I have to worry about.”

      Perhaps more of a reach — but that's supposed to exceed one's grasp, isn't it? — is the connection of individualized grades with the neoliberal self-entrepreneur, which Jon discusses below, in relation to Mike Konczal's review of Mirowski.

      (more…)

    • How neo-liberal forces systematically compromise our ability to understand neo-liberalism

      Nice discussion of Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste here. The first half of the book theorizes neo-liberalism from a Foucaultian perspective and the second half excoriates the economics profession, e.g.

      According to Mirowski, there was a moment after the 2008 crash when the economics profession could have performed some rigorous self-criticism and made an honest assessment of what had gone wrong. But the proposed technocratic fixes — addressing the “efficient markets hypothesis” in finance, adding so-called bounded rationality to microeconomic models to make them “behavioral,” and adding various bells and whistles to macroeconomic models — were particularly ineffective in reforming or even clarifying what is going on in financial markets. And the various “explanations” of the crisis that were brought up for debate in mainstream publications and through a network of economic policy “experts” ended up not serving any notion of scientific inquiry but instead were means of deflecting, confusing, and delaying any progress toward uncovering truth or consensus.

      So how did the economists get away? According to Mirowski, they are protected through a web of prestige that stretches across the academy to quasi-accountable offices of the government like the Federal Reserve, as well as the network of policy think tanks that provide so-called expertise. This miasma of prestige has become too important to the actual logic of financial capitalism at this moment — elite economics dominates all these important international institutions, and there’s been a subtle wagon-circling at that level. Thus, like the banks, economists themselves are too big to fail.

      The whole article is a fascinating read, and shows what a scam neo-liberalism is. It's weird to think that we live in a carny-like reality, where something only succeeds to the extent that a certain number of marks systematically misunderstand how it succeeds.

    • Is it possible to engage in ethical career networking?

      Next week, I will be speaking at a career development workshop for female Oxford graduate and masters students. One of the things I want to focus on is the importance of building out a broad, strong, supportive professional network.

      Academia is built on trust and personal relationships. Rarely are people invited as speakers at conferences, workshops etc purely on the basis of merit. Merit is an important consideration, but people want additional information (e.g., is she a good speaker, will she turn up?) that they can acquire through their network, either by directly knowing the potential invitee, or by knowing others who know her. People from one’s network can alert one to opportunities, including job opportunities. Without a professional network, one has no letter writers (except the advisor and readers of the dissertation), one is excluded from many aspects of academic life that thrive on trust and personal relationships, such as being a keynote speaker or contributing to an edited volume. Moreover, people from one’s network provide opportunities for mentoring, friendship and mutual support in the very competitive environment that is academia. If one has to move state or country and has to leave friends and family behind, the ability to be able to fall back on a network of professional comrades for support and friendship is very valuable. Therefore, I will advise the students to work on their networks early on, and to nurture them.

      But there are problematic aspects to networking. Ned Dobos has argued that career networking is ‘an immoral attempt to gain an illegitimate advantage over others’. He makes clear that he doesn’t target emotional networking – plain old socialising – but specifically career networking, networking in the context of advancing one’s career, especially, but not uniquely, one’s job prospects.

      It does not seem clear to me, however, whether we can make a clean separation between career networking and emotional networking, especially in academia, where (for reasons I outlined above) the people in one’s professional network and one’s emotional (friend) network overlap to some extent. Dobos offers several arguments against the legitimacy of career networking. Insofar as the search process is meritocratic, career networking is morally objectionable because it attempts to distort the meritocratic allocation of positions, in a process analogous to bribery, or to ‘earwigging’ attempting to persuade judges outside of the formal process. In both cases, the career networker obtains an unfair advantage. Is it possible to engage in ethical career networking?

      (more…)

    • In the midst of good news, there are too often “sigh” moments

      The good news: NYU and the UAW have agreed to allow graduate teaching assistants to hold a union election. 

      The "sigh" moments come in the first and last clauses here: 

      Outside the South, graduate student unions are common in public higher education (where collective bargaining rights are determined at the state level), but have been the source of years of organizing and legal struggles in private higher education.

    • Human Beings are Fundamentally Unserious, Part 1.

      I had just turned nine years old when the Iran hostage crisis began. 

      For over a year it was the topic of dinner table conversation. Often we would eat dinner on trays in front of the television. If I remember right, the station we watched for national news had a little ticker on the lower right hand side of the screen which showed how many days we were into the crisis.

      Radio stations started playing "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" multiple times a day in honor of the hostages, and everyone in my neighborhood in Montgomery, Alabama put in extra work to maintain nice looking ribbons around their trees (I don't remember if they were oak or not). When the rain and whatnot had made the ribbon too frayed you had to cut it with some scissors and put a new one up.

      The Iranians were uniformly portrayed as barely human in their fanaticism (often in contrast with our "moderate Muslim" allies in Saudi Arabia) and I never got a satisfactory explanation as to why they might want to take the hostages (google "President Mossadegh" and "Savak"). This didn't bother me too much at the ages of 9 or 10. They were bad guys and we were good guys, and the whole thing was intensely humiliating day after day, especially after the failure of Operation Eagle Claw in April of 1980.

      And then, in November of that year, Ronald Reagan was elected. As a six year old I had voted for Jimmy Carter in my first grade class election, because I liked his smile. In the months of nightly news coverage following Eagle Claw, my ten year old self had learned a lesson. I even had a Ronald Reagan t-shirt. And I was right to wear that shirt, for he was so powerful that a mere twenty minutes after his inagurural speach, it was announced the hostages had been freed.

      The hostages are free! The hostages are free! 

      For some reason I was at home that day and my mom was at work. With shaking hands I dialed, for the first time, her phone number at the prison (long story for another post). 

      (more…)

    • Roger Waters & Friends – The Wall; Live in Berlin 1990

    • Is there some kind of Aristotelian mean for NDPR reviewer intrusiveness?*

      Book Review 2When I write a longish review, I put most of my work into having the piece work well as reader's guide, keeping my own views to myself as much as possible until the end. But since I've signed up for an e-mail subscription to the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (just go here to get it), I've noticed that this practice is by no means uniform. Consider the beginning of Bruce Russell's recent review of James Sterba's From Rationality to Equality:

      In this book James Sterba sets out to answer two central questions in moral philosophy: (1) Why be moral? and (2) What does morality require? (see Sterba's Preface and Introduction, esp., pp. 1-2). He understands (1) to be the question (1a): Are we always rationally required to do what we are morally required to do? However, I think the fundamental question is (1b): Is there always most reason to do what we are morally required to do? I may be rationally required to take a pill that I have overwhelming epistemic reason to believe will save my life when I am really not dying and the pill will actually kill me (imagine some doctor wants me dead and has presented me with conclusive evidence to make me believe that I am dying and that the pill is my only hope for survival). But in this case what there is most reason to do is to refrain from taking the pill even though the rational thing to do is to take the pill. I think what we want to know when we ask, "Why be moral?" is whether there is always most reason to do what is morally required. We want to know whether it is necessarily true that there ismost reason to do what is morally obligatory, not whether it's necessarily true that we are justified in believing that there is most reason to be moral.

      I worked hard to try to figure out what Russell meant here, and then was frustrated to find that the phrase "most reason" doesn't occur in the review itself.

      (more…)

    • Should Departments Be Promoting From Within?

      In the discussion that followed Anca Gheaus' guest post on the gender situation in the German academy, there was some mention of the fact that in many European job-markets, faculty searches are not truly 'open,' so that internal candidates are strongly preferred to those from outside the hiring institution. Clearly, when taken to an extreme—institutions becoming highly resistant to hiring anyone but their own PhDs and/or post-docs—such a practice can be very detrimental to any process of diversification within the academy. But I wonder if there might not be other situations in which an over-emphasis on 'open' searches is actually detrimental. 

      I'm thinking of the situation in the U.S. academy, where the norm is very strongly against not only hiring a department's own PhDs, but also hiring any currently employed non-tenure track faculty into tenure lines, or even adjuncts into full-time NTT lines.  Given that the galloping precaritization of the professoriate as a whole is fast becoming a structural crisis, I wonder if it is not time to examine the possible merits of encouraging departments to commit to making at least a certain percentage of their full-time and TT hires from within the ranks of their current part-time and NTT faculty. 

      (more…)

    • Nearly every publication on “Dummett’s Argument for Logical Revision” is wrong. An explanation of why.

      Arnoud999_Right_or_wrong_3This semester I'm teaching Stuart Brock and Edwin Mares' generally excellent Realism and Anti-Realism. If you want to quickly introduce students to a lot of canonical debates in analytic philosophy, it would be hard to do better. The first part of the book discusses generalized anti-realist positions such as Kantianism, and the second part goes over localized anti-realisms (color, morality, science, modality, etc.).

      The general excellence of the book sets in bold relief the manner in which the authors thoroughly botch their discussion of Michael Dummett. One can't really blame them though, as their botching does cite a lot of canonical secondary literature, where the mistakes continue to linger sixteen years after Neil Tennant pointed them out in The Taming of the True.

      (more…)

    • Shaking

      This summer I learned to walk. More precisely, I learned to walk normally. My gait had gotten unsteady, and I was dragging my right foot. Work with an excellent physical therapist helped straighten me out. But balance problems, tremors, and hesitations continued.


      At the beginning of August I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. I want to describe the phenomenology of my version of it, and begin thinking through its implications for the philosophy of perception and action. But first the disease itself.

      (more…)