New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

recent posts

about

    • What Philosophical Work Could Be

      by Eric Schwitzgebel


      Academic philosophers in Anglophone Ph.D.-granting departments tend to have a narrow conception of what counts as valuable philosophical work. Hiring, tenure, promotion, and prestige turn mainly on one’s ability to write an essay in a particular theoretical, abstract style, normally in reaction to the work of a small group of canonical historical and 20th century figures, on a fairly constrained range of topics, published in a limited range of journals and presses. This is too narrow a view.

      I won’t discuss cultural diversity here, which I have addressed elsewhere. Today I’ll focus on genre and medium.

      Unamuno
      Consider the recency and historical contingency of the philosophical journal article. It’s a late 19th century invention. Even as late as the mid-20th century, leading philosophers in Western Europe and North America were doing important work in a much broader range of styles than is typical now. Think of the fictions and difficult-to-classify reflections of Sartre, Camus, and Unamuno, the activism and popular writings of Russell, Dewey’s work on educational reform, Wittgenstein’s fragments. It’s really only with the generation hired to teach the baby boomers that our conception of philosophical work became narrowly focused on the academic journal article, and on books written in that same style.

      Consider the future of media. The magazine is a printing-press invention and carries with it the history and limitations of that medium. With the rise of the internet, other possibilities emerge: videos, interactive demonstrations, blogs, multi-party conversations on social media, etc. Is there something about the journal article that makes it uniquely better for philosophical reflection than these other media? (Hint: no.)

      Nor need we think that philosophical work must consist of expository argumentation targeted toward disciplinary experts and students in the classroom. This, too, is a narrow and historically recent conception of philosophical work. Popular essays, fictions, aphorisms, dialogues, autobiographical reflections, and personal letters have historically played a central role in philosophy. We could potentially add, too, public performances, movies, video games, political activism, and interactions with the judicial system and governmental agencies.

      (more…)

    • Space and Time after Quantum Gravity

      Nick Huggett and Christian Wüthrich are happy to announce the award of a major grant from the John Templeton Foundation to fund a three year investigation into the philosophical implications of theories of quantum gravity, "Space and Time after Quantum Gravity." The work, which will be divided between the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Geneva, continues their "Beyond Spacetime" project. The premise of the project is that scientific research programs in quantum gravity simultaneously demand philosophical, conceptual investigation for their progress, and raise profound questions about fundamental philosophical assumptions resting on a non-quantum understanding of space and time. How physics thus ‘meets philosophy at the Planck scale’ has been explored so far in the various publications and meetings coming out of the project.

      The new grant, supplemented with funds from UIC and Geneva, will fund postdocs and predocs in the research groups at both institutions; regular speakers and visitors to the groups; essay competitions; a summer school at Chicago in 2016; a conference at Geneva in 2017; edited volumes; and a course of video lectures for non-specialists. Many of these activities will be made publicly available on video. For more information you can subscribe to the project blog at beyondspacetime.net or look out for calls for participation.

    • Occupy, Parrhesia, and (Virtual) Camps

      In the current issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric, Kelly Happe has an interesting paper interpreting Occupy Wall Street (or at least the Zuccotti Park component) as an example of cynical parrhesia.  In a time when all expression is always already co-opted by neoliberal capital as a source of surplus value (this point has been canvassed extensively by the autonomist Marxists as “complete subsumption,” and I’m going to take it for granted here.  I summarize it here in my discussion of Hardt and Negri’s Empire), it becomes hard to know what kind of speech would count as protest.  Anyone who has seen the branding of Che Guevera T-Shirts has some idea what the problem is.  It’s also one that has been very difficult to address; in Empire, for example, which lays out the problem quite clearly, we are offered the somewhat discouraging example of Coetzee’s Michael K, a character who drops out and nearly starves to death in caves. 

      Happe’s move is to suggest that Occupy succeeds in avoiding cooption by way of its rejection of politically expressive speech.  As she puts it, “what is striking is the time and space devoted to the material culture and everyday life of public, communal living.  Indeed, in the various accounts of the Zuccotti moment of Occupy, the radical imagination is inseparable from the otherwise unremarkable practices of day-to-day living in an encampment” (214).  That is, it is in the rejection of symbolic and explicitly “political” speech that Occupy evades neoliberal cooption.  Such speech, she proposes, is a good example of the sort of ethical parrhesia that Foucault recounts in the ancient Cynics.  For the Cynics, it is precisely the extent to which their speech is unintelligible to politics that makes it radical, suspends its subsumption into the political apparatus, and presents the contingency of a new way of life.  Happe writes:

      (more…)

    • Four ways to condemn violence against minorities in Pakistan that are all wrong!

      Another terrific reflection on affairs in Pakistan that should be of interest to philosophers of race by philosopher Saba Fatima here.

    • The 2014 AFB Fab Flock Five

      (Philosophical Aesthetics' answer to Philosophers’ Annual) has just been announced.

       

      A panel of seven judges were asked to nominate work in Aesthetics or Philosophy of Art published in 2014 they found to be particularly outstanding. From those initial nominations, the panel further deliberated and selected a final five works. Here's the link to the official announcement of the winners:

       

      http://www.aestheticsforbirds.com/2015/06/afb-fab-flock-five-2014.html

    • Why Is The University Still White?

      Readers of New APPS may recall Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman as the author of a powerful piece last March in Times Higher Education that drew attention to the discipline of philosophy’s overall, systemic failure to critically engage its own Whiteness.  And now, DailyNous draws our attention to a piece in The Independent, itself sourced (again) from Times Higher Education, in which Coleman announces that he will lose his position at University College London—along with the chance of that position becoming permanent—as a result of the rejection of a proposed MA in Critical Race Studies, which he had been hired specifically to develop over the past year.  
       
      One important consequence of Coleman's THE piece, which is now illustrated by his current plight, is to connect the problems that are specific to the disciplinary constitution of philosophy to a set of structural and systemic factors, present throughout the academy, constraining Black scholars’ ability to engage critically with material that is of importance to them, including Whiteness and White Supremacy. These factors remain operative despite the at least rhetorical—and at times much more substantive and sincere—welcome given to these scholars and their work, especially under the sign of diversity.  And because they do, not only has representative diversity remained problematic but also the more fundamental distribution of power and privilege centered around Whiteness has remained substantially intact. 

      (more…)

    • School Desegregation, Biopower and the Cold War

      One of my summer projects is to work up my SPEP paper from last year, which used the school desegregation decisions (like Brown v. Board) as a way to think about the relations between juridical power and biopower in the courts.  The role of the courts in the transition from hegemonic juridical power to hegemonic biopower hasn’t been studied a lot, and the tendency is to dismiss the courts as institutions along with juridical power.  The centrality of the judiciary in school desegregation convinced me that there’s more to be said, however.  Current litigation about whether corporate entities can use rights claims to deny contraceptive insurance coverage to their female employees seems to bear that intuition out.  So I’ve been reading, and one thing that didn’t particularly strike me until now is the complexity of the relation between school desegregation policy in the U.S. and what Foucault calls a “race war” at the end of Society must be Defended.

      (more…)

    • Facing the facts – Wittgenstein as a Kantian? (guest post)

      For my MA course on Wittgenstein earlier this year, students had to write a short essay, blog post-style, on the Tractatus. One of them, Joseph Wilcox, took up the challenge of asking what exactly it means to say that Wittgenstein's project in the Tractatus is essentially a Kantian project — something I kept hammering on them relentlessly. (To me at least this seems like the best and perhaps the only way I can make sense of the Tractatus!) The result is the insightful post below. (Proud teacher here!)

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

      By Joseph Wilcox

      Wittgenstein [in the Tractatus] is a Kantian philosopher. Or so I'm told.

      What exactly does it mean to say that someone is a Kantian philosopher? I always find it hard to grasp what is meant by such comparisons. Is it some fundamental belief that they share? Is it a field of thought that they both enter into? Is it a common goal that guides their thinking?

      As often seems to be the case when it comes to philosophy, I am inclined to say that all the options must have some truth to them. In the case of Wittgenstein, however, I've been led to believe that it is the goal he sets out to achieve that forms the main connection between him and the lifework of his Prussian predecessor. What is it then, that both of these thinkers desire above everything else? The answer is to limit. To designate a point or level beyond which something does not or may not extend or pass. To place a restriction on the size or amount of something permissible or possible. On first looking, this doesn't seem like a very encouraging, confident or even useful objective. Why in the world would we bother to spend our precious time thinking about that which we can't reach? Isn't it far more interesting to seek to pass over such borders? Isn't it more inspiring to think that the impossible can serve as a beacon to aspire to? Isn't the thought of placing limits a token of the kind of pessimism that might cause one to give up hope?

      (more…)

    • Facebook and the Ideology of Big Data Neutrality

      It must be summer: Facebook has released a controversial study of its users.  Last year, it was the demonstration that the emotional contagion effect did not require direct contact, and could in fact spread across social networks without direct, face-to-face contact (the controversy wasn’t in the result, it was in the fact that FB did the study by manipulating its users’ Newsfeeds to present more happy content)   This time, Facebook’s research wing published a paper in Science purporting to demonstrate that Facebook wasn’t responsible for whatever online echo-chamber effect its users might demonstrate.  Or, at least, if the site did contribute to an echo-chamber, it wasn’t the main contributor.  From the FB blog discussing the paper:

      (more…)

    • GMOs and the thing I should have said (or, why not all scientific expertise is created equal)

      By Roberta Millstein

      I'm sure we've all had the experience of committing to the final version of an article, only to think of that one more thing you should have said. Yeah, that just happened to me. Just the nature of the beast, I guess.

      My recent instance has to do with an article concerning GMOs I wrote for The Common Reader, an article aimed at a general educated audience. In the article, one of the claims I defend is that a critique of GMOs is not anti-science, and I note in particular that a critique of GMOs is not the same as a critique of evolution or climate change. (Comments welcome on the article, by the way).

      I was OK with my argument, although I knew that with more space I would have elaborated more than I did. But then I read this from Mark Lynas:

      (more…)