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    • 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). 

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    • 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.

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    • 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. 

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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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