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    • 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.

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    • 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.

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    • Making your published articles freely available – “green access”

      Over the weekend, I learned that journals published by the University of Chicago Press – this includes, e.g., Philosophy of Science – have a policy of "green access" for published articles.  (I believe this was a change made in the last few years, but I am not positive).  Details are here, but here is what I was surprised and pleased to learn. 

      First, authors may "post their article  in its published form on their personal or departmental web pages or personal social media pages, use their article in teaching or research presentations, provide single copies in print or electronic form to their colleagues, or republish their article in a subsequent work" (emphasis added).  It was the italicized part that was new to me; the rest I knew.  It's a big deal that they are allowing the published articles (with proper pagination, etc.) to be added to one's website or one's department website immediately after publication.  That is, it's not full open access (which would be better), but it still provides for good dissemenation given tools like Google Scholar.

      Second, "Authors may deposit either the published PDF of their article or the final accepted version of the manuscript after peer review (but not proofs of the article) in a non-commercial repository where it can be made freely available no sooner than twelve (12) months after publication of the article in the journal" (emphasis added).  Here, I knew that the final accepted version could be deposited on non-commercial sites like PhilSci Archive or PhilPapers after 12 months, but I didn't know that the published PDF could be.  Again, this is a big deal.

      So, I guess the moral is, check the publication policies for articles that you have published, even if you think you know what they are, and perhaps consider such policies when deciding where to send articles.  And if you know of other philosophy journals with similar policies, please mention them in the comments.

    • Rodney Brooks and the Enactivists

      I have been reading Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin’s book Radicalizing Enactivism for a critical notice in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Enactivism is the view that cognition consists of a dynamic interaction between the subject and her environment, and not in any kind of contentful representation of that environment. I am struck by H&M’s reliance on a famous 1991 paper by the MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks, “Intelligence Without Representation.” Brooks’s paper is quite a romp—it has attracted the attention of a number of philosophers, including Andy Clark in his terrific book, Being There (1996). It’s worth a quick revisit today.

      To soften his readers up for his main thesis, Brooks starts out his paper with an argument so daft that it cannot have been intended seriously, but which encapsulates an important strand of enactivist thinking. Here it is: Biological evolution has been going for a very long time, but “Man arrived in his present form [only] 2.5 million years ago.” (Actually, that’s a considerable over-estimate: homo sapiens is not more than half a million years old, if that.)

      He invented agriculture a mere 19,000 years ago, writing less than 5000 years ago and “expert” knowledge only over the last few hundred years.

      This suggests that problem solving behaviour, language, expert knowledge and application, and reason are all pretty simple once the essence of being and reacting are available. That essence is the ability to move around in a dynamic environment, sensing the surroundings to a degree sufficient to achieve the necessary maintenance of life and reproduction. This part of intelligence is where evolution has concentrated its time—it is much harder. (141) 

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    • On Leaving NewAPPPS

      I am taking an indefinite leave from regular posting at NewAPPS.*

      None of us ever imagined that our daily readership would include thousands of our peers. While undoubtedly some of the interest in the blog springs from less than noble impulses (philosophers are human, after all), I have been humbled by the size and loyalty of our audience. The huge interest of our readership in our daily postings has had many unexpected benefits and consequences. My greatest pleasure has been able to share this platform with many, long-admired guest-posters.

      It's sobering that the positions I express on the blog are — even with polemical distortion (and my rhetorical ambiguity) — much better known than my scholarly views. It remains disconcerting that a paper that consumed my intellectual life for a few years will have a smaller readership until eternity than this post will have during the next few hours. It's been strange to see snippets of my blog posts reappear as 'blurbs' on the back of books or in scholarly articles on the state of the profession.

      To be clear, participating in NewAPPS has been a source of joy and has brought me into contact with astounding intellects and generous souls within professional philosophy and economics as well as the wider academy. It has been thrilling to draw folk into multiple conversations that have enriched me, and I have enjoyed the unexpected attention that my opinions have received on a variety of professional issues and causes.

      Before NewAPPS had any readers other than ourselves, Protevi decided on grounds of higher order political economy that we would never accept any advertising. This, together with Cogburn's and Des Chene's design acumen, has resulted in our clean look. With the addition of Dutilh Novaes (and other regulars) our readership grew, and Matthen prudently insisted that we should reduce the number of announcements of conferences (etc.) on the blog. These decisions ensured that our editioral course has been guided primarily by our (sometimes conflicting) professional judgments. I am grateful to Lance for pushing us all into activism on a whole range of professional norms and practices. I take great pride in the fact that we have revived the art of the philosophical essay; when I feel melancholic, I turn to the 'NewAPPS back-lists' of Bell, Des Chene, Matthen, Brogaard, and Cogburn.

      My fellow NewAPPSies have graciously put up with my careless grammar and provocations. I have learned an astounding amount of philosophy and living wisely from them. 'Behind the scenes,' I cannot imagine a greater group of generous colleagues.

      I am leaving without rancor or disagreement. I have been eager, even restless to try new approaches to philosophy for a while now; I'll meditate a bit before I launch into new adventures, before long.

      Thank you.

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    • Punk Rock Monday #26 – Some Songs about Death

      Eric's post about how philosophers die hit home for me in part because it was posted a week after the first anniversary of my dear friend and colleague Ian Crystal's death. 

      When Ian died I had just been helping Mark Ohm translate Tristan Garcia's chapter on death in his Form and Object, and what Garcia writes continues to have an awful resonance for me. Garcia notes that the canonical wisdom of philosophers focuses* on how someone should deal with their own death. Plato, Seneca, Lucretius, Camus, and Heidegger are certainly the top five philosophers to have written about death (Boethius writing in the shadow of his own is certainly close), but in each case the normative lessons tell you first and foremost how to deal with the prospect of your own death.*** 

      At least the kind of music to which I regularly listen (excluding classical and opera here) usually falls down on this same thing. We get all sorts of moving meditations on ones own confrontation with mortality. Here's Ralph Stanley ripping it up.

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    • filibusters and the fetishizing of procedures

      Aside from the nauseating mythological reminiscences of the Kennedy presidency, news today is dominated by discussion of the US Senate's decision to eliminate the possibility of filibuster for certain nomination votes.  All manner of dire consequence has been suggested on both sides of this procedural issue.  (Has there ever been a more hyperbolic characterization of anything than calling this change in voting procedures a "nuclear option"?) It seems to me that there is a deeper issue here that points to a rather depressingly misguided focus of intellectual thought on collective rationality, one that cuts across a wide variety of disciplines.  

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    • On UF’s Investment priorities

      The University of Florida has been given permission to hire "100 faculty members to fill new positions it will create as part of a push to join the nation’s top 10 public research institutions," The Chronicle reports. [HT Pete Boettke] According to the university, the main fields targeted for expansion "are life sciences, massive data,  cybersecurity, Latin American development." Given demographics and geography, the first and last of these priorities make eminent sense, of course. (I ignore here the non-trivial issue to what degree Florida should be investing in higher education rather than, say, in K1-12.)

      Now, earlier in the year this very same university made national headlines by acknowledging that it is basically terminating its PhD program in economics. Given that "massive" data-mining is increasingly taking over economics, there is some logic in this decision (recall and here, here).  But before any philosopher has misplaced schadenfreude over the demise of the once-imperial human science in the face of market-forces, it is worth noting that the economics  department was "offered the opportunity to move to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences but opted to remain within the business college and become smaller." One wonders what is known about the investment priorities of the Gator's college of LAS.  For more on the internal political economy at UF  called "responsibility-centered management", see here.

    • Deathbed philosophy

      Last night I heard the Vertavo Quartet perform Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 in C♯ minor, Op. 131 in de Kleine Zaal of de Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. On his deathbed, Schubert had this piece performed. [Schubert was, in fact, no stranger to composing a haunting  C-minor quartet (unfinished).]

      Whatever Schubert intended with this request, I cannot imagine a greater compliment from one composer to another.

      Let's leave aside, those professional philosophers for whom philosophy is primarily a job or an interesting diversion from which one can 'retire.' Let's imagine, rather, those ('the infected philosophers') for whom philosophy is a necessity. Such an infected philosopher would keep at philosophy to the very end. Yet, on her deathbed, would she turn to a work by somebody else (e.g., as Hume did with Lucian), would she keep teaching (Socrates), would she, in fact, try to complete her last work(s), would she seek consolation, or would she ask to re-read or hear one of her own results/works?

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: Anelis Assumpção

      Here is one more for the ‘new sounds’ category (we’ve been surprisingly modern as of lately here at BMoF). Anelis Assumpção is a young singer who mashes Brazilian and Jamaican rhythms (dub, reggae etc.) in her music. She also happens to be the daughter of Itamar Assumpção, one of the main exponents of the alternative music scene of São Paulo in the 1980s and 1990s, known as Vanguarda Paulista (he died prematurely 10 years ago). But Anelis is her own woman, and has been making some great music for some years already. 

      I discovered her music through a school friend I reconnected with thanks to almighty Facebook, Giba Nascimento. Giba is himself a musician, and composed and recorded the reggae ‘Not falling’ with Anelis — he’s the guy on the bike in the brand-new (and pretty awesome!) video-clip below. (It’s not so surprising that so many of my friends from school ended up becoming musicians/artists, as until the age of 14, I went to a typical artsy/lefty school.) I’m also posting ‘Sonhando’ (a collaboration with another young singer, Karina Buhr), from her 2011 album Sou suspeita estou sujeita nao sou santa. Both great tracks but very different from each other, which reveals Anelis’ versatility. Good stuff!

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