New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

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    • some recent Clancy Martin essays

      Here's Clancy Martin's recent Chronicle of Higher Education review of Michael Clune's White Out.  

      When googling that for the link I found an earlier London Review of Book essay by Martin that's about as raw as the Neal Young song that he quotes in the Clune review.

      For some of the reasons Martin suggests, I find much of the philosophical debates surrounding action theory, autonomy, and akrasia to be nearly inscrutable. I just don't end up having enough of the intuitions that participants in the debates seem to take as shared. . .* but mostly (beyond what can be gleaned from the Neal Young lyrics and melody)** I just find people basically incomprehensible.

      As Martin does in his essay and Steve O does in the documentary to right, every person I've known who has  navigated addiction/recovery successfully(i.e. (1) without dying, while (2) managing to recover/sustain a state of basic decency to others) has ended up embracing pretty paradoxical views about volition. At one point in the documentary someone congratulates Steve O for staying clean for over a year, and he just good naturedly deflects the compliment by saying that for all he knows he might get high tomorrow. 

      I don't get this at all, because accepting that one has so little control over one's own actions strikes me as absolutely terrifying, but it does seem to be part of the healing process for so many people. I realize that this is all pretty standard AA boilerplate, and that AA should be thought about critically (as Martin begins to explore in the essay). Still, I think there's something true and paradoxical that the AA boilerplate is attempting to give voice to.  

      I do know that Martin's own experiences in the international jewelry business profoundly informs his fiction and his philosophical work on deception. Maybe there are some new (over and above the standard higher order belief/desire stuff) philosophical theses to be discovered about autonomy, etc. from the experience of addiction and recovery. 

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    • Tennessee Prepares to Commit Mass Murder

      Today, The Tennessean newspaper reported that the state plans to execute 10 people beginning in the new year ("TN makes unprecedented push to execute 10 killers"). This is almost double the number of people executed in Tennessee over the past 40 years. 

      While it may seem hyperbolic to describe these planned executions as a form of "mass murder," I believe that the hyperbolic nature of capital punishment warrants such a description.  And the state of Tennessee seems to agree, at least on some level.  The standard way of recording the "manner of death" on an executed prisoner's death certificate in Tennessee is as "homicide."  A homicide committed by the state, and by proxy by the people of Tennessee. 

      Over the next few months, I will explore some of the issues raised by state homicide in a series of blog posts on New APPS.  I welcome your constructive and critical feedback.

    • New Blog: “Philosophical Spaces: Answering questions about how to improve the professional environment of philosophy”

      Here's the URL: http://philosophicalspaces.wordpress.com/ The self-description: 

      This is a blog that discusses and advises people about how to make the climate in their philosophy department and other professional spaces more hospitable.  Some have argued that the norms of behavior in philosophy departments are part of what explains why Anglophone philosophy is not as diverse as other disciplines in the academy.  We are sympathetic to this hypothesis, but also believe that an inhospitable environment is bad for everyone and does not produce the best philosophy.

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    • Summer School: Mathematical Philosophy for Female Students (MCMP Munich)

      The Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy is hosting a pioneer event: a summer school exclusively for female students. Summer schools for female students are now well established in mathematics, but to my knowledge this is the first summer school in philosophy geared explicitly towards female students. (In a similar vein, Rutgers hosts the wonderful Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy.) I am posting below the official announcement that has been circulated today. Please pass on the information to anyone you think may be interested, and do encourage your motivated female students to apply!

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    • Consumer Risk, Producer Risk, and the politics of commercialized science

      I thought I would make my inaugural post on NewAPPS a follow-up to Roberta's post about the retraction of the article in Food and Chemical Toxicology.  I don't want to continue the debate about whether the retraction was justified; that debate can continue in the original thread.   Here, I want to discuss one of the reasons why we should be paying vigilant attention to events such as these, and why their importance transcends the narrow confines of the particular scientific hypotheses being considered in the articles in question.  What I worry most about is the extent to which pressures can be applied by commercial interests such as to shift the balance of “inductive risks” from producers to consumers by establishing conventional methodological standards in commercialized scientific research. 

      Inductive risk occurs whenever we have to accept or reject a hypothesis in the absence of certainty-conferring evidence.  Suppose, for example, we have some inconclusive evidence for a hypothesis, H.  Should we accept or reject H?   Whether or not we should depends on our balance of inductive risks—on the importance we attach, in the ethical sense, of being right or wrong about H.   In simple terms, if the risk of accepting H and being wrong outweighs the risk of rejecting H and being wrong, then we should reject H.  But these risk are a function not only of the degree of belief we have in H, but also of negative utility we attach to each of those possibilities.   In the appraisal of hypotheses about the safety of drugs, foods, and other consumables, these are sometimes called “consumer risk” (the risk of saying the item is safe and being wrong) and “producer risk” (the risk of saying the item is not safe and being wrong.)

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    • Gender differences in brain connectivity (if any) aren’t hard-wired

      A headline story this morning, featured in several news outlets, reported on a new study published online in PNAS yesterday that allegedly confirms that there are major brain differences between men and women. In the study Ragini Verma, an associate professor in the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues examined the neural connectivity across the whole brain in 949 individuals (521 females and 428 males) aged 8 to 22 years using diffuse tensor imaging (DTI).

      The researchers found that in certain age groups, females had greater inter-hemispheric connectivity in the supratentorial region (the part of the brain above the cerebellum), whereas males exhibited greater intra-hemispheric connectivity as well as greater interhemispheric connectivity in the cerebellum. The cerebellum has been implicated in certain forms of knowledge of action and knowledge-how, interhemispheric connectivity seems crucial for many social skills, and intrahemispheric connectivity in local sensory regions may lead to richer perceptual experiences. So, on the basis of these findings, many news reports concluded that men have a greater perception to action potential, whereas women have a greater potential for communicating and connecting “the analytical and intuition.” Some concluded that gender differences in brain connectivity are hard-wired.

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    • In memoriam: Francesco del Punta

      Francesco del Punta, a well-known and much admired scholar of medieval philosophy, sadly passed away yesterday. Upon hearing the news from his former student Luca Gili, I asked Luca to write an obituary for NewAPPS, and here it is.

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      After a long and dreadful illness, Francesco Del Punta (1941-2013) passed away yesterday evening. He was a great scholar and a great man, and he will be much missed. Del Punta is well known especially for his edition of Ockham’s commentary on Aristotle’s Sophistici Elenchi (St. Bonaventure, New York, 1978), and for his edition of Paul of Venice’s treatises De veritate et falsitate propositionis  and De significato propositionis (Oxford, 1978).

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    • Tolerance is not a virtue

      This is my first foray into newAPPS waters– and I thank the newAPPS coterie for the invitation!– so I thought I’d start by tossing out a fairly straightforward philosophical claim:  Tolerance is not a virtue.

      When I say that tolerance is not a virtue, to be clear, I don’t mean to imply that tolerance is a vice. No reasonable moral agent, certainly no moral philosopher worth his or her salt, would concede that.  Rather, I only want to point out that “being tolerant” requires at most little if not nothing more than refraining from being vicious.  Not only is it the case that we don’t define any other virtue in this explicitly negative way, but we also don't generally ascribe any particular kind of moral credit to persons who are merely refraining from being vicious.

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    • Discourse representation theory and x-phi

      I have recently been working on a paper about some of the testable implications of DRT (discourse representation theory) and related dynamic semantic frameworks. One of the questions I am stuck on is that of how to put the semantics of proper names to the test. The general framework of DRT does not commit us to a special theory of proper names. However, Hans Kamp traditionally treated them as individual constants, which is consistent with the philosophical (and post-semantic) theory that non-empty names stand in causal-historical relations to their referents. In subsequent work Kamp has treated names as predicates but with an anchor to a particular individual satisfying the predicate. This, too, is consistent with a causal-historical constraint.

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    • Survey: philosophy of religion – a qualitative study of motivations and attitudes

      [This call has also been spread on Prosblogion, but by posting on NewApps I hope to reach a wider audience]

      If you are a professional philosopher of religion (including graduate students), I would be very grateful if you could fill out the following survey: https://surveys.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_4UvmgvHInmoRgkR

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