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    • An Act Of Philosophical Silencing

      By: Samir Chopra

      A few months ago, I noticed an interesting and telling interaction between a group of academic philosophers. A Facebook friend posted a little note about how one of her students had written to her about having encountered a so-called "Gettier case" i.e., she had acquired a true belief for invalid reasons. In the email, the student described how he/she had been told the 'right time' by a broken clock. The brief discussion that broke out in response to my friend's note featured a comment from someone noting that the broken clock example is originally due to Bertrand Russell. A little later, a participant in the discussion offered the following comment:

      Even though the clock case is due to Russell, it's worth noting that "Gettier" cases were present in Nyāya philosophy in India well before Russell, for instance in the work of Gaṅgeśa, circa 1325 CE. The example is of someone inferring that there is fire on a faraway mountain based on the presence of smoke (a standard case of inference in Indian philosophy), but the smoke is actually dust. As it turns out, though, there is a fire on the mountain. See the Tattva-cintā-maṇi or "Jewel of Reflection on the Truth of Epistemology." [links added]

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    • Neoliberal Handwashing

      By Gordon Hull

      We’ve all heard that regulations are bad, because they interfere with businesses doing what they want (rules about dumping toxic chemicals get in the way of dumping toxic chemicals.  Laws against murder hamper the business model of assassins.  And so on.).  New North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis made the media rounds this week for some odd remarks he made on the topic.  When asked to name a regulation he thought was bad, he came up with… the rule that restaurant employees wash their hands after visiting the toilet.  He then proposed that it would be better to have restaurants state whether or not employees have to wash their hands, and then “let the market” take care of it. 

      There’s two obvious problems here, both of which have been pointed out a lot.  One is that there’s a public health issue.  The other is that he hasn’t actually reduced regulation: he’s just replaced a public health rule with a rule about signage.  I actually think the second point is interesting, well beyond the “gotcha!” treatment it got, because it perfectly illustrates something about neoliberalism: it doesn’t think regulations that create markets are regulations (or, if you prefer, regulating to create markets is good, other regulations are bad.  This is the same mindset that concludes that the hyper-regulated Chicago futures markets are unregulated).  The cleanliness of restaurant operations is not something consumers can know much about on their own, since they don’t do things like follow employees to the restroom.  In this sense restaurant sanitation is a credence good (you have to believe the restaurant; you can’t inspect the product before you buy it).  Since dirty food preparation can make people very sick, rational consumers should be willing to pay more for the knowledge that their food is safely prepared.  But since they won’t be in any position to know about food safety, except (maybe) for places they’ve eaten before, we can expect market failure until some mechanism arrives to help consumers make their decisions.

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    • ‘Don’t Call Me A Philosopher’

      By: Samir Chopra

      I cringe, I wince, when I hear someone refer to me as a 'philosopher.' I never use that description for myself. Instead, I prefer locutions like, "I teach philosophy at the City University of New York", or "I am a professor of philosophy." This is especially the case if someone asks me, "Are you a philosopher?". In that case, my reply begins, "Well, I am a professor of philosophy…". Once, one of my undergraduate students asked me, "Professor, what made you become a philosopher?" And I replied, "Well, I don't know if I would go so far as to call myself a philosopher, though I did get a Ph.D in it, and…". You get the picture.

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    • The Philosophical Education of Scientists

      By: Samir Chopra

      Yesterday, in my Twentieth Century Philosophy class, we worked our way through Bertrand Russell's essay on "Appearance and Reality" (excerpted, along with "The Value of Philosophy" and "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description" from Russell's 'popular' work The Problems of Philosophy.) I introduced the class to Russell's notion of physical objects being inferences from sense-data, and then went on to his discussions of idealism, materialism, and realism as metaphysical responses to the epistemological problems created by such an understanding of objects. This discussion led to the epistemological stances–rationalism and empiricism–that these metaphysical positions might generate. (There was also a digression into the distinction between necessary and contingent truths.)

      At one point, shortly after I had made a statement to the effect that science could be seen as informed by materialist, realist, and empiricist conceptions of its metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions, I blurted out, "Really, scientists who think philosophy is useless and irrelevant to their work are stupid and ungrateful."  This was an embarrassingly intemperate remark to have made in a classroom, and sure enough, it provoked some amused twittering from my students, waking up many who were only paying partial attention at that time to my ramblings.

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    • On Not ‘Interfering’ With Others’ Self-Conceptions

      By: Samir Chopra

      Sometimes, when I talk to friends, I hear them say things that to my ears sound like diminishments of themselves: "I don't have the–intellectual or emotional or moral–quality X" or "I am not as good as Y when it comes to X." They sound resigned to this self-description, this self-understanding. I think I see things differently; I think I see ample evidence of the very quality they seem to find lacking in themselves. Sometimes, I act on this differing assessment of mine, and rush to inform them they are mistaken. They are my friends; their lowered opinion of themselves must hurt them, in their relationships with others, in their ability to do the best they can for themselves. I should 'help.' It seems like the right thing to do. (This goes the other way too; sometimes my friends offer me instant correctives to putatively disparaging remarks I make about myself.)

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    • Parrhesia (Part 1): Foucault’s Parting Shot at Derrida

      Foucault’s last lecture courses at the Collège de France – recently published as The Government of Self and Others [GS] and The Courage of Truth [CT] – are interesting for a number of reasons.  One is of course they offer one of the best glimpses we have of where his thought was going at the very end of his life; he died only months after delivering the last seminar in CT, and there is every reason to believe that he both knew that he was dying, and why.  There’s a lot to think about in them, at least some of which I hope to talk about here over a periodic series of posts.  Here I want to say something introductory about the material, and look at Foucault’s critique of Derrida in it.

      The lectures contain a sustained investigation of parrhesia, the ancient Greek ethical practice of truth-telling.  “Truth to power” is the closest modern term we have for such a practice, though you don’t have to get very far into the lectures to realize how richly nuanced the topic is, and how many different ways it manifest itself in (largely pre-Socratic) Greek thought and literature.  The lectures also contain a number of references to contemporary events and people (from the beginning: GS starts with Kant, before going back to the Greeks), and it’s hard to put CT down without a sense that, had there been another year of lectures, Foucault would have been more explicit in assessing the implications of the study of Greek parrhesia today.

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    • Reliable referees: a rare commodity

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      In recent weeks, there has been much discussion on journal editorial practices at a number of philosophy blogs. Daily Nous ran an interesting post where different journal editors described (with varying degrees of detail) their editorial practices; many agree that the triple-anonymous system has a number of advantages and, when possible, should be adopted.* (And please, let us just stop calling it ‘triple-blind’ or ‘double-blind’, given that there is a perfectly suitable alternative!) Jonathan Ichikawa, however, pointed out (based on his experience with Phil Studies) that we must not take it for granted that a journal’s stated editorial policies are always de facto implemented. Jonathan (correctly, to my mind) defends the view that it is not desirable for a journal editor to act as a (let alone the sole) referee for a submission.

      With this post, I want to bring up for discussion what I think is one of the main issues with the peer-reviewing system (I’ve expressed other reservations before: here, here, and here), namely the extreme difficulties journal editors encounter at finding competent referees willing to take up new assignments. Until two years ago, my experience with the peer-review system was restricted to the role of author (and I, as everybody else, got very frustrated with the months and months it often took journals to handle my submissions) and the role of referee (and I, as so many others, got very frustrated with the constant outpour of referee requests reaching my inbox). Two years ago I became one of the editors of the Review of Symbolic Logic, and thus acquired a third perspective, that of the journal editor. I can confirm that it is one of the most thankless jobs I’ve ever had.

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    • New Philosophy Blog on Discrimination and Disadvantage

      here.  (h/t Shelley Tremain)

    • Philosophy of Physics Graduate Program Wiki (courtesy of Shawn Miller)

      Shawn Miller, a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, has been kind enough to create a philosophy of physics grad program wiki in the mold of philbio.net, which you can find at philphysics.net.   He wanted me to be sure to note that the wiki uses, with permission, Christian Wüthrich's Philosophers of Physics list from his Taking up Spacetime website (https://takingupspacetime.wordpress.com/). And also that people should please feel free to contribute to the site, i.e., add people and programs that have been left off. Simple instructions on how to do this are listed on the front page. 

      Enjoy!

       

      UPDATE/REMINDER:  This is a wiki!  That means it is a community project, and everyone should feel free to be involved in keeping it accurate.  Anyone can edit it.   If you, or someone you know, is listed incorrectly, (because they are retired, or are determinately moving to another school) you can fix this yourself!

       

    • The art of writing brief philosophy papers

      I have always wanted to have a paper in Analysis or Thought. A really neat, short, paper, that is self-contained and makes an substantive philosophical point. Unfortunately, I tend to write articles of about 8000-9000 words, and first drafts are typically even longer. I've written some pre-read papers for conferences of 3000 words, but to get all the nuances in, they typically expand to 8000 words or more once they reach the article stage. What does it take to write brief philosophy papers? More generally, what does it take to write concisely?

      Flash fiction is a style of fiction of extreme brevity, 500 words or less, typically 100-150 words. One very brief example, attributed (probably falsely) to Ernest Hemingway goes as follows: "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn." Or take flash poetry. The Dutch poet Vondel wrote the shortest poem in Dutch, and probably in any language, "U, nu" (literally, "you now", or "now it's your turn"). It's also palindromic, and won him a poetry prize. How to write flash fiction? David Gaffney advises flash fiction authors to cut down on character development, and to jump right in the story. Place the denouement not at the end, but in the middle, that way you have some space left to ponder the implications of what has happened with your readers, and you avoid that your story reads like a joke, with a punchline at the end.

      So how do you write really short philosophical pieces that are substantive pieces in their own right? Which brief philosophical self-contained pieces do you particularly admire?