By: Samir Chopra
In 'What is An Author', Michel Foucault writes:
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Earlier this month, Andrew Cullison, Jonathan Jacobs, Mark Lance, Kevin Timpe and I launched a survey to gauge interest for an open access philosophy book press. Following the successful launch of open access philosophy journals like Ergo and Philosopher’s Imprint we wanted to see if there was sufficient interest for a book publisher that worked on a non-profit, open-access model.
A total of 416 philosophers took our survey. Of these, 223 respondents left their contact details, saying they’d be interested to help as advisory board members or area editors. Here’s the breakdown in % of how our respondents thought about an AO philosophy book press. 85.4% said they would definitely or probably be willing to serve as a referee (without renumeration), 66.7% would definitely or probably submit as an author, 64.8% would definitely or probably be willing to serve on an Advisory Board, and 59% would definitely or probably be willing to serve as an Area Editor (see below the fold for more detailed results and a selection of comments).
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Unlike Derrida, with whom he had frequent, highly public polemics, Foucault says relatively little about Heidegger. Much of that is incidental: in a 1983 interview, for example, while talking about the postwar influence of Sartre, he notes parenthetically that “the roots of Sartre, after all, are Husserl and Heidegger, who were hardly public dancers” (Aesthetics, 452). In his 1982 lecture on the “Political Technology of Individuals,” Heidegger’s name shows up in a list of those who are in the “field of the historical reflection on ourselves” (Power, 402). But, in a late interview, he says that “my entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger” (see the discussion here). He makes a comparable remark in one of the Hermeneutics of the Subject lectures; in response to a question, he names Heidegger and Lacan as the two 20c thinkers who have dealt with the subject and truth, and says that “I have tried to reflect on all this from the side of Heidegger and starting from Heidegger” (p. 189). What are we to make of this?
The limited point I wish to make here is that there is also evidence in Foucault’s last lecture course, The Courage of Truth (CT), of an engagement with Heidegger. I suggested in an earlier post that there was a specific “parting shot” at Derrida; the evidence for engagement with Heidegger is along the same lines: he doesn’t name names, but it’s pretty clear what he’s talking about. The references matter because they some of the luster off the idea that Foucault continued to get that much out of Heidegger. At the same time, I think they establish that Foucault is not only interested in Heidegger as an existentialist. Aret Karademir makes that case, aligning an existentialist reading of Heidegger with an existentialist account of the late Foucault, specifically aligning the two of them on the idea that the sort of creation of oneself as a work of art in late Foucault strongly parallels Heideggerian authenticity. The argument here is specific to the post-Kehre Heidegger. I’ll argue that Foucault’s Cynic would get the Heideggerian stamp of approval in this post, but then that this indicates Foucault’s disapproval in the next.
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The idea of Homer is significantly tied up with the idea of Europe, which is not to say that there is one thing which is Europe and that it has some pure ideal beginning. It is to say that concepts like ‘Europe’ have origins and histories, and that some ways of thinking about origin and history are particularly influential. Though Homer is associated with the beginning of Europe, the word ‘Europe’ does not appear in the two epics, and the same applies for ‘Asia’.
The ambiguities around identity, history, and origin, are very apparent in relation to the name ‘Homer’, which may or many not be the real name of an ‘author’ of The Iliad and The Odyssey which may or may not have had a single author, and which certainly build on a very old tradition of recitation and singing of poetic narratives.
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Philosophers: Please take the following survey to help us assess the feasibility and interest for an open access philosophy press, by following this link. It should take no more than 5 minutes to complete. https://surveys.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0pSC4gW1ciPOgWF
This survey aims to gage the interest of professional philosophers in helping to create, operate, and sustain an open access philosophy press.
Philosophers aim to disseminate ideas and knowledge as widely as possible. For-profit publishers introduce a price barrier that, with the wide availability of the internet, is unnecessary.
The success of high quality, open access philosophy journals, like Philosophers' Imprint and Ergo, has erased concerns about the viability of open access, electronic publishing.
But there is no similar venue for books. We see no reason that a successful open access philosophy press shouldn't follow in the wake of the open access philosophy journals.
While the details would be worked out by an Advisory Board or Board of Directors and would follow best practices, the basic idea of the press is to
- publish high quality books in philosophy
- that are rigorously peer reviewed
- and made freely available online to read, download, copy, distribute, print, and otherwise use in legal, non-commercial ways by all without financial barriers.
We ask you, therefore, to answer these few short questions to help us gauge the interest in and viability of an open access, philosophy press.
— Andrew Cullison, Helen De Cruz, Jonathan D. Jacobs, Mark Lance, Kevin Timpe
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by Eric Schwitzgebel
As Aristotle notes (NE III.1, 1110a), if the wind picks you up and blows you somewhere you don’t want to go, your going there is involuntary, and you shouldn’t be praised or blamed for it. Generally, we don’t hold people morally responsible for events outside their control. The generalization has exceptions, though. You’re still blameworthy if you’ve irresponsibly put yourself in a position where you lack control, such as through recreational drugs or through knowingly driving a car with defective brakes.
Spontaneous reactions and unwelcome thoughts are in some sense outside our control. Indeed, trying to vanquish them seems sometimes only to enhance them, as in the famous case of trying not to think of a pink elephant. A particularly interesting set of cases are unwelcome racist, sexist, and ableist thoughts and reactions: If you reflexively utter racist slurs silently to yourself, or if you imagine having sex with someone with whom you’re supposed to be having a professional conversation, or if you feel flashes of disgust at someone’s blameless disability, are you morally blameworthy for those unwelcome thoughts and reactions? Let’s stipulate that you repudiate those thoughts and reactions as soon as they occur and even work to compensate for any bias.
To help fix ideas, let’s consider a hypothetical. Hemlata, let’s say, lacks the kind of muscular control that most people have, so that she has a disvalued facial posture, uses a wheelchair to get around, and speaks in a way that people who don’t know her find difficult to understand. Let’s also suppose that Hemlata is a sweet, competent person and a good philosopher. If the psychological literature on implicit bias is any guide, it’s likely that it will be more difficult for Hemlata to get credit for intelligence and philosophical skill than it will be for otherwise similar people without her disabilities.
Now suppose that Hemlata meets Kyle – at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, say. Kyle’s first, uncontrolled reaction to Hemlata is disgust. But he thinks to himself that disgust is not an appropriate reaction, so he tries to suppress it. He is only partly successful: He keeps having negative emotional reactions looking at Hemlata. He doesn’t feel comfortable around her. He dislikes the sound of her voice. He feels that he should be nice to her; he tries to be nice. But it feels forced, and it’s a relief when a good excuse arises for him to leave and chat with someone else. When Hemlata makes a remark about the talk that they’ve both just seen, Kyle is less immediately disposed to see the value of the remark than he would be if he were chatting with someone non-disabled. But then Kyle thinks he should be try harder to appreciate the value of Hemlata’s comments, given Hemlata’s disability; so he makes an effort to do so. Kyle says to Hemlata that disabled philosophers are just as capable as non-disabled philosophers, and just as interesting to speak with – maybe more interesting! – and that they deserve fully equal treatment and respect. He says this quite sincerely. He even feels it passionately as he says it. But Kyle will not be seeking out Hemlata again. He thinks he will; he resolves to. But when the time comes to think about how he wants to spend the evening, he finds a good enough reason to justify hitting the pub with someone else instead.
Question: How should we think about Kyle?
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Recent close reading and teaching and Homer, along with some long standing interests leads me to reflect on the Homeric epics as a beginning in literature and a beginning in philosophy, which appears in later beginnings. It requires no argument to suggest that The Iliad and The Odyssey are foundational texts in the history of European or western literature, even making all allowances for the impossibility of any pure beginning and the ways that Homeric poetry emerges from a broad east Mediterranean world including northern Africa and southwestern Asia, as well as Anatolia, Greece, and Italy. Even the most radical sceptic of the centrality of ancient Greece in antiquity would surely concede anyway that the Homeric epics are at the beginning of Greek literature.
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I've been watching a few episodes of the BBC drama series "Foyle's War." Its a decent show, but what interests me right now is just an expression that the main character, Christopher Foyle, often uses that I had never heard before. It works like this: someone will ask him if he thinks that they ought to ____, or if he wants them to ____, and he replies "I should!"
For example "Do you want me ask all the jewelery stores in town if they've seen this necklace before?"; "I should!" or "Do you think I should check the oil in my car?"; "I should!".
Americans would, in a similar situation say "I would," which is short for, I take it, "If I were you I would do that." How to get from one expression to the other is obvious: you drop the "If I were you," and you drop the _proverb_ "do that." "Do that," is a proverb because its anaphoric for the verb from the previous sentence, e.g. "I would do that" is anaphoric for "I would ask all the jewelry stores in town."
So, first question: is this use of "I should," still idiomatic in British English? Or have y'all degenerated to "I would" too?
I say "degenerated" because it's pretty clear that what's being asserted is not just a subjunctive conditional–what I _would_ do if I were you–but a subjunctive conditional about a normative claim–what normative facts would obtain if I were you.
So the second question is, what is Foyle's "I should" actually short for. I take it is something like:
"If I were you, it would be the case that I should call all the jewelry stores." (1)
But notice that you can't even express that without the awkward "it would be the case that." If you try to say "I would should do that," it becomes unparsable and horribly awkward. "Should" doesn't like being embedded in a separate modal, and in fact even in (1) the brain recoils at the embedding of the "should" inside the "would." I don't think our brains are at all comfortable with the very form of the construction.
And yet, when Foyle says "_I_ should!" with the right emphasis on "<b>I</b>" we have no problem understanding what he means, not even if we are Americans who have never heard that idiom before.
I have some ideas about what this kind of example shows about language but they are fairly heretical, so I would hold off on expressing them for now. "_You_ should."
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By Catarina Dutilh Novaes
I finally have a complete version of my paper 'Conceptual genealogy for analytic philosophy', which I sent yesterday to the editors of the volume where it will appear: Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide: Pluralist Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century (edited by J. Bell, A. Cutrofello, and P.M. Livingston; in the series Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy).
As some readers may recall, parts of the paper were posted as blog posts a few months ago: Part I is here; Part II.1 is here; Part II.2 is here; Part II.3 is here; Part II.4 is here; Part III.1 is here; a tentative abstract of 2 years ago, detailing the motivation for the project, is here. The final version has two parts that I did not post as blog posts: III.2 Genealogy as explanatory, and III.3 The genetic fallacy. (The numbering in the final version is slightly different.)
I am deeply grateful for the wonderful feedback I received from readers along the way (also in the form of comments and discussions over at Facebook). I could never have written this paper if it wasn't for all this help, given that much of the material falls outside the scope of my immediate expertise. So, again, thanks all!
(And now, on to start working on a new paper, on the definition of the syllogism in Aristotle, Ockham and Buridan. In fact, it will be an application of the conceptual genealogy method, so it all ties together in the end.)
New APPS 