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    • Mary Wollstonecraft, Philosopher of Education

      By: Samir Chopra

      In 'Observations on the State of Degradation to which Woman is Reduced by Various Causes' (Chapter IV of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), Mary Wollstonecraft writes:

      Reason is…the simple power of improvement; or, more properly speaking, of discerning truth. Every individual is in this respect a world in itself. More or less may be conspicuous in one being than another; but the nature of reason must be the same in all…can that soul be stamped with the heavenly image, that is not perfected by the exercise of its own reason? Yet outwardly ornamented with elaborate care, and so adorned to delight man…the soul of woman is not allowed to have this distinction…But, dismissing these fanciful theories, and considering woman as a whole…the inquiry is whether she has reason or not. If she has, which, for a moment, I will take for granted, she was not created merely to be the solace of man…

      Into this error men have, probably, been led by viewing education in a false light; not considering it as the first step to form a being advancing gradually towards perfection; but only as a preparation for life.

      The power of generalizing ideas, of drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations, is the only acquirement, for an immortal being, that really deserves the name of knowledge. Merely to observe, without endeavouring to account for any thing, may (in a very incomplete manner) serve as the common sense of life; but where is the store laid up that is to clothe the soul when it leaves the body?

      In the second para quoted above, Wollstonecraft, after asserting the existence of reason in women–via a theological claim–goes on to establish a normative standard for education: its function is not purely vocational but also a spiritual and moral one. The task of education is the development of reason, the business of bringing to full fruition the divine gift granted all human beings by their Creator. The task of education is not mere 'preparation' for a narrowly circumscribed sphere of profane responsibility; it is, rather, to elevate and uplift each human being by making it possible for them to exercise their reason–as part of a process of gradually 'perfecting' their souls. Education is not prelude to the 'real business'; it is the real business itself.

      In the third para, Wollstonecraft asserts the importance of abstraction and generalization–implicit in these claims is the importance of pattern recognition. Humans cannot be content with particulars, with living from moment to moment; they must, through the mastery of these powerful intellectual tools, rise to a vantage point from which disparate phenomena can be tied together into explanatory wholes (and serve as the basis for future theory-building.) The 'common sense of life' is not the only standard that humans should aspire to; there are far loftier goals visible, the journey to which may only be made possible by the right kind of education.

      (My Political Philosophy class and I read and discussed some excerpts from Vindication of the Rights of Woman yesterday; these two paragraphs led to a very interesting digression (ending up in computer science and binary numbers). Which is why I make note of them today.)

      Note: This post was originally published–under the same title–at samirchopra.com. After posting a link to it on Facebook, I asked whether Mary Wollstonecraft features on philosophy of education reading lists. I would be very interested in responses. Thanks!

       

    • The Rainbow In My Roster

      By: Samir Chopra

      Two weeks ago, on 8 September, after finishing my morning stint my gym, I headed to the Brooklyn College campus. I arrived at 12:20, five minutes after the 11:00 AM to 12:15 PM classes had ended. The campus was overflowing with students: streaming out from classrooms and lecture halls, clogging the corridors, the walkways, the quadrangle, the benches outside the library and the library cafe. I walked among them, marveling once again at the splendid diversity–in the linguistic, cultural, ethnic, political dimensions–of our student body. I've been on this campus for just over thirteen years now, and these glimpses never lose their freshness.

      I could hear, around me, Russian, Bengali, Urdu, Punjabi, Spanish, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Caribbean Patois, Hebrew; I could see headscarves and hijabs and chadors, yarmulkes, turbans, colored hair, ponytails, topknots, shaven heads. They walked in groups; they walked singly. They talked among themselves; they zoned out on their headphones. They sat; they stood; they sprawled out on the grass. Some rushed to the local Starbucks to refuel on caffeine; others began their lunch, outside, in the still gloriously warm weather, before the next round of classes began at 12:50. I walked on, through this riotous medley, feeling a curious melange of emotions surge through me; I felt protective, proud, and hopeful.

      Like any teacher, I'm used to moaning and griping about my students: they don't do the readings; they're late for class; their writing sucks; they ask me questions whose answers are on the syllabus; they disappear for weeks on end and then show up, at the end of the semester, to ask whether they can still find redemption; they check their smartphones in class; they stare blankly at me when I ask them to show me they have understood the points made in last week's class; the list goes on and on. There is truth in all these complaints but there is much more to my students.

      As I have noted on this blog, my students' interactions with me in the classroom are a constant source of intellectual enrichment for me; my understanding and appreciation of many philosophical works has been enhanced by my discussing it with my students; I might have a PhD in philosophy and the title of 'professor' but I'm still a student, and my teaching is how I continue to learn. It wouldn't work without my students; it takes two to tango and all that.

      But the point I actually set out to make is that the diversity on display that day on campus reminded me that the sheer range of lives and experiences I encounter in my students is another education altogether. My students raise points in the classroom that are inextricably linked with their backgrounds: the Puerto Rican nationalist; the lesbian Orthodox Jew; the working single mother; the trans men and women; the young man struggling to break free of a family afflicted by alcoholism; the immigrants; the native New Yorkers; the senior citizens who audit; the first-generation students; the religious; the skeptical; the conservative; the politically radical; they all bring missives from worlds I only partially experience and understand. They are walking encyclopedias all on their own; they edify and enlighten. They make me realize that my life, varied and rich as it has been, is only the tiniest sliver of all in the giant mosaic of human experience. They point me to much more that lies beyond the narrow confines of my life. Every classroom holds a veritable United Nations, a pleasurable Babel of language, class, ethnicity and political orientation.

      I remain ever grateful that I'm a teacher–especially when my students write me appreciative notes!–and that moreover, I'm a teacher here in Brooklyn, in New York City.

      This post was originally published–under the same title–at samirchopra.com.

    • Vatter on Foucault on Hayek

      A while ago, Daniel Zamora’s (re)publication of a series of essays designed to say that Foucault ended up embracing neoliberalism caused quite a stir in the blogosphere.  As one of those invited to contribute to a forum in An und für sich), I argued that Foucault saw both that neoliberalism realized the need to create markets (as opposed to liberalism’s assumption that they just happened), as well as the need to create homo economicus as a form of subjectification.  As I put it then:

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    • Was Charlie Hebdo ‘Mocking’ The Death Of Alan Kurdi?

      By: Samir Chopra

      Charlie Hebdo has offended again. A recently published cartoon titled “So Close to His Goal”, shows Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler whose tragic drowning death sharply focused the world's attention on the desperation of the migrant crisis in Europe, lying face down on the sand near a billboard featuring Ronald McDonald and advertising a 2-for-1 McDonald's Happy Meal with the legend: 'Two children's' meals for the price of one." The caption reads, 'So close to his goal.' And above it all, "Welcome to migrants.' A second cartoon titled “The Proof that Europe is Christian” shows a toddler drowning in the ocean. waters. Next to him a Christ-like figure walks on water. The caption reads, "Christians walk on waters… Muslims kids sink.”

      Here is how I 'read' the cartoon, roughly: The West and Europe imagines itself the haven of liberal, secular ideals; it imagines itself the bastion of democracy, republicanism, and the social welfare state. In point of fact, it is as much in thrall to old-fashioned notions of Christian triumphalism and the blurring of the church and state as those regimes that it disdains. The West and Europe still fight holy wars; they still imagine themselves under attack from the 'Huns' and the 'Goths' and the 'barbarians' and the 'Moors.' The migrants might have thought they were escaping to this promised land where they would be welcomed with open arms and invited to make a new life. Little do they know that they were only heading for a vapid, shallow, xenophobic, insular, Islamophobic, consumerist culture, one whose patron saint is Ronald McDonald, and whose guiding slogans are not the call to arms of the great revolutions, but rather, sales pitches for cheap goods.

      That's how I read it. I did not take these cartoons to be 'mocking' a dead child.  I do not claim to know the 'intent' of the cartoonist, but given Charlie Hebdo's history, and the current context, my interpretation strikes me as at least halfway plausible.

      I am not going to offer a systematic defense here of Charlie Hebdo, but want to make note of a couple of what I think are relevant points:

      1. The famous cartoon of Barack and Michelle Obama exchanging fist-bumps in the Oval Office, while wearing 'Arab dresses' and carrying guns, appeared on the cover of the New Yorker. Had it appeared on the cover of the National Review Online, complete with a comments section of gibbering right-wingers rubbing their hands in glee, reactions to it would have been considerably sharper.
      2. The Onion once ran an article titled 'Redskins Kike Owner Refuses To Change Team's Offensive Name.' I did not think the article or its headline was anti-Semitic. Some Jewish friends of mine were offended.

      Charlie Hebdo's cartoons are bound to offend many and their choice of vehicle for making their political points might be questioned. But they have ample material to choose from and ample opportunity to offend; this world and its dominant species' arrogance and continuing self-destructive behavior will ensure that. Satirists exist and find work because we are worthy targets of satire.

      Note: This post was originally published–under the same title–at samirchopra.com.

    • A Proposed Heuristic For Academic Budgeting Decisions

      It occurred to me, in the midst of a conversation where folks were marveling at the money being spent by a flagship state university on a marketing initiative, that it should, at this juncture,* be possible to formulate a very simple test for evaluating the wisdom of this and other university spending initiatives:

      "How many part time lines could be made full time and / or how many adjunct lines could be made permanent with the money being spent on this**?"

       

      *A conjuncture defined, let us say, by the circumstance that the majority—or even a significant portion—of  faculty at US universities continue to be employed, against their preferences, in contingent positions without the full measure of academic freedom and the full participation in shared governance afforded by tenure and / or in positions that, by virtue of low salaries, lack of benefits, etc., make their very material existence substantially precarious.

      **Depending on the conversational context, one may wish to add something like "bullshit" here. Use your judgment.

    • PSA-WC’s Highlighted PhilosopHer of Science: Merrilee Salmon

      The PSA Women's Caucus is delighted to announce its first Highlighted PhilosopHer of Science, Merrilee Salmon. You can read about Merrilee's many-splendored career over at Science Visions. Congratulations, Merrilee!

    • APDA Final Report

      In the coming weeks I hope to be updating you with more details and analyses, but for now I am simply announcing that the final report for APDA is complete. Feel free to ask questions or comment below.

      *Update: we noticed an error in one of the charts and some potentially confusing language in that section, so we have updated the report at the link.

    • Philosophers on making difficult life decisions

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      What does philosophy have to say about difficult life decisions? Recently, there has been quite some interest in what philosophers have to say on this; for example, Ruth Chang’s TED talk on how to make hard choices has had over 3,5 million views. And recently, the new book by L.A. Paul, Transformative Experience, has been making quite a splash in the American mainstream media, with references in venues such as the New Yorker and the New York Times. A transformative experience is one that so fundamentally changes the person who undergoes it that she acquires a new self altogether, because she is transformed in a profound way. (See here for the shorter, article version of this idea.) The quintessential transformative experience for Paul is becoming a parent, and other examples include the death of a loved one, emigrating to a new country, among others.

      One of the upshots of this conception of transformative experience is that, for many of the most important decisions in life, we simply have no way of evaluating the pros and cons of each side because we have no idea of what we’re getting into. As put by the influential journalist David Brooks in the New York Times,

      Paul’s point is that we’re fundamentally ignorant about many of the biggest choices of our lives and that it’s not possible to make purely rational decisions. “You shouldn’t fool yourself,” she writes. “You have no idea what you are getting into.”

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    • Kierkegaard as Philosopher of the Novel

      The idea of a fully articulated philosophy of the novel does not really get going until Georg Lukács wrote Theory of the Novel during World War One, though it was not published until 1921 by which time Lukács’ political world view had changed. There may be some large scale work on the philosophy of the novel I have missed before Lukács, but there is nothing which has lasted as a point of reference.

      Of course there is important work on the philosophy of the novel before Lukács in remarks by Friedrich Schlegel (as well as other Romantic ironists), G.W.F. Hegel, and F.W.J. Schelling. Going back further there is some work which indirectly addresses the novel. The New Science of Giambattista Vico is the most obviously relevant since he gives great importance to epic, particularly those attributed to Homer. Not only are there ways in which the novel is the continuation of the epic that give Vico relevance: the way in which Vico places the epic in the context of a transition from heroic-aristocratic world to legal-democratic world sets up thinking about the novel and might have been influenced by the early modern evolution of the novel as a literary form.

      The whole development of aesthetic philosophy around ideas, sentiment, complexity, judgement, community and sympathy in Alexander Baumgarten, Anthony Ashley Cooper (Shaftesbury), Frances Hutcheson, Edmund Burke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant, even though they do not attach importance to the novel, can be seen in the context of the growing importance of the novel as a form of narrative which incorporates these in the prose of a world of changeable and plural points of view, in which the nature of subjective experience is always an issue.

      As the general silence of eighteenth century philosophers on novelistic form suggests, the novel had limited status as an aesthetic type. The end of the century sees some discussion of the novel, with the Romantics tending towards an elevated view, while Hegel and Schelling take a more sceptical view, though Schelling does at least allow some greatness to Don Quixote.

      Kierkegaard does not exactly directly suggest that the novel be taken as the aesthetic equal of any literary form, or even devote a major text to that topic, but the novel acquires considerable significance across his writing. Taking the early From the Papers of One Still Living first, Kierkegaard addresses the little known (certainly at the present time in the English speaking world) ‘adult’ novels of Hans Christian Andersen. They suggest a world of uncertainty to Kierkegaard, a world of uncertain judgements and changeable perspectives. This at least establishes the novel as important in the culture of the modern world.

      Sometime this work of Kierkegaard is regarded as just judging contemporary novels by the standards of a previously established aesthetic, but as the supposed aesthetic given different sources, including Hegel and Ludwig Tieck, by different commentators, it is perhaps possible to say that Kierkegaard made an original contribution. A contribution that continues a few years later in The Concept of Irony, which is more focused on Socrates than the modern novel, but does have notable discussion of the novel, which amongst other things suggests that thinking about Socratic irony may help understanding of the novel. The discussion of the novel there is also the discussion of German Idealism and Romantics, with Schlegel’s novel Lucinde bringing the theory in relation to aesthetic practice.

      Again this is sometimes seems as a not so original discussion, since Kierkegaard often seems to be following Hegel’s Aesthetics including Hegel’s relative endorsement of Karl Solger amongst the Romantics. The Kierkegaardian use of Hegelian references should not be confused with a Hegelian point of view, however, as Kierkegaard continues the earlier discussion of the nature of subjectivity, which is quite distinct from that in Hegel.

      More indirect contributions to the understanding of the novel can be found in the slightly later Either/Or in discussions of tragedy and opera. Here Kierkegaard gives a view of the distinction between ancient and modern literary forms, also looking at Mozart’s Don Giovanni in terms related to his earlier understanding of the novel.

      He returns to the novel as a form a bit later in A Literary Review, in which he discusses the contemporary novels of Thomasine Gyllembourg, which he touched upon in his earlier discussion of H.C. Andersen. Here Kierkegaard suggests both that the novel is a limited form in dealing with the absolute, but also that it does show important features of modernity including a longing for the absolute in the opposition between monarchist and revolutionary politics.

      The issue of Kierkegaard and the philosophy of the novel must also take account of the novelistic nature of some of his own writing. This is most clearly the case in Repetition, which is a short novel, but also applies to Either/Or and its sequel Stages on Life’s Way. These are not unified narratives on the lines of Repetition, but they are presented as fictional products containing a large amount of narrative mixed in with the essays by characters in these works. ‘Diary of a Seducer’ in Either/Or can be taken as a discrete novel within the book as a whole and is indeed often published separately. The status of literary aesthetics is not the guiding issue of Kierkegaard’s writing, but it plays an important role, particularly with regard to the status of the novel as an object of philosophy and as a way of writing philosophy.

    • Formal Methods in Philosophy: a Brief Introduction (Part II)

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      (Cross-posted at M-Phi) 

      This is the second and final part of my 'brief introduction' to formal methods in philosophy to appear in the forthcoming Bloomsbury Philosophical Methodology Reader, being edited by Joachim Horvath. (Part I is here.) In this part I present in more detail the four papers included in the formal methods section, namely Tarski's 'On the concept of following logically', excerpts from Carnap's Logical Foundations of Probability, Hansson's 2000 'Formalization in philosophy', and a commissioned new piece by Michael Titelbaum focusing in particular (though not exclusively) on Bayesian epistemology. 

      =======================

      Some of the pioneers in formal/mathematical approaches to philosophical questions had a number of interesting things to say on the issue of what counts as an adequate formalization, in particular Tarski and Carnap – hence the inclusion of pieces by each of them in the present volume. Indeed, both in his paper on truth and in his paper on logical consequence (in the 1930s), Tarski started out with an informal notion and then sought to develop an appropriate formal account of it. In the case of truth, the starting point was the correspondence conception of truth, which he claimed dated back to Aristotle. In the case of logical consequence, he was somewhat less precise and referred to the ‘common’ or ‘everyday’ notion of logical consequence. 

      These two conceptual starting points allowed Tarski to formulate what he described as ‘conditions of material adequacy’ for the formal accounts. He also formulated criteria of formal correctness, which pertain to the internal exactness of the formal theory. In the case of truth, the basic condition of material adequacy was the famous T-schema; in the case of logical consequence, the properties of necessary truth-preservation and of validity-preserving schematic substitution. Unsurprisingly, the formal theories he then went on to develop both passed the test of material adequacy he had formulated himself. But there is nothing particularly ad hoc about this, since the conceptual core of the notions he was after was presumably captured in these conditions, which thus could serve as conceptual ‘guides’ for the formulation of the formal theories. 

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