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    • 23andMe has a new business model…

      By Gordon Hull

      A couple of weeks ago, in a post on Theranos, which has been developing a new – and very fast and cheap – technique for blood-testing, I mentioned the woes of 23andMe.com, a site which originally offered direct to consumer genetic testing, before the FDA shut it down for any medical claims (the FDA letter is here).  As 23andMe put it (in a pre-shutdown version of its website), customers might “gain insight into your traits, from baldness to muscle performance. Discover risk factors for 97 diseases. Know your predicted response to drugs, from blood thinners to coffee. And uncover your ancestral origin.”  That sort of claim, and its dubious scientific basis, was the basis of the FDA’s shutdown order, which also expressed concern about false positives and the difficulty in understanding negative results in isolation.  In this, the FDA was echoing concerns of bioethicists, who have generally been alarmed about the spread of genetic testing outside of a clinical context.  As a 2011 piece summarized the concerns, the lack of regulatory oversight of these practices, which trade upon the public’s fear of cancer and limited understanding of genetics, creates potential problems with inappropriate referrals, misinterpretation of results, excessive anxiety about positives, false reassurances about negatives, and even the confusion between diagnostic genetic variants and surrogate genetic markers (which account for very little risk).

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    • Responses to Zamora’s “Can We Criticize Foucault?”

      Daniel Zamora’s interview in Jacobin (following the publication of a book he edited), in which he claims that Foucault ended up de facto endorsing neoliberalism, has generated a lot of renewed discussion about Foucault’s late work.  Over at An und für sich, Mark William Westmoreland has organized a series of posts responding to Zamora.  I’m one of the contributors; the others are Verena Erlenbusch (Memphis), Thomas Nail (Denver), and Johanna Oksala (Helsinki).  My contribution is cross-posted below, but you really should start with the interview and then read Erlenbusch’s post – she lays out the context of the controversy, and discusses the book (which came out fairly recently, and which hasn’t been translated yet) in considerable detail.

      I’ll update with links to Nail’s and Oskala’s contributions when they’re up.

      UPDATE 1:  Here's the link for Johanna Oskala, "Never Mind Foucault: What are the Right Questions for Us?"

      And for Thomas Nail, "Michel Foucault, Accelerationist"

       UPDATE 2: Zamora replies here.

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    • Observations on the Leiter vs. Jenkins-Ichikawa affair

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      Those of you who can’t get yourselves to be offline even during the Xmas break have most likely been following the events involving Brian Leiter (BL), Jonathan Ichikawa (JI) and Carrie Jenkins (CJ), and the lawyers’ letters regarding the legal measures BL says he is prepared to take as a reaction to what he perceives as defamatory statements by (or related to) Ichikawa and Jenkins. As a matter of fact, a blog post of mine back in July seems to have played a small role in the unfolding of these unfortunate developments, and so I deem it appropriate to add a few observations of my own. 

      On multiple occasions (and in particular in comments at Facebook posts), Leiter claims to have been directed to Jenkins’ ‘Day One’ pledge by this blog post of mine of July 2nd 2014, in defense of Carolyn Dicey Jennings. It begins:

      Most readers have probably been following the controversy involving Carolyn Dicey Jennings and Brian Leiter concerning the job placement data post where Carolyn Dicey Jennings compares her analysis of the data she has assembled with the PGR Rank. There have been a number of people reacting to what many perceived as Brian Leiter’s excessively personalized attack of Carolyn Dicey Jennings’s analysis, such as in Daily Nous, and this post by UBC’s Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins on guidelines for academic professional conduct (the latter is not an explicit defense of Carolyn Dicey Jennings, but the message is clear enough, I think). [emphasis added]

      Leiter claims that this observation is what led him to Jenkins’ post in the first place, which he perceived as a direct attack on him. He also claims that this is what the passage above implies, and continues to repeat that the post “was intended by Jenkins as a criticism of me (as everyone at the time knew, and as one of her friends has now admitted), and thus explains my private response, which she chose to make public.” However, there is nothing explicitly indicating that the post was intended as a criticism of BL beyond the fact that he read it this way and keeps repeating it. 

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    • “The Tyrant’s Headache” in Sci Phi Journal

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      According to a broad class of materialist views, conscious experiences — such as the experience of pain — do not supervene on the local physical state of the being who is having those conscious experiences. Rather, they depend in part on the past evolutionary or learning history of the organism (Fred Dretske) or on what is “normal” for members of its group (David Lewis). These dependencies are not just causal but metaphysical: The very same (locally defined) brain state might be experienced as pain by one organism as as non-pain by another organism, in virtue of differences in the organisms’ past history or group membership, even if the two organisms are molecule-for-molecule identical at the moment in question.

      Donald Davidson’s Swampman example is typically used to make this point vivid: You visit a swamp. Lightning strikes, killing you. Simultaneously, through incredibly-low-odds freak quantum chance, a being who is molecule-for-molecule identical to you emerges from the swamp. Does this randomly-congealed Swampman, who lacks any learning history or evolutionary history, experience pain when it stubs its toe? Many people seem to have the hunch or intuition, that yes, it would; but any externalist who thinks that consciousness requires a history will have to say no. Dretske makes clear in his 1995 book that he is quite willing to accept this consequence. Swampman feels no pain.

      But Swampman cases are only the start of it!

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    • Analyses of the Philosophical Gourmet Report

      As most readers probably know, the 2014 Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR), a “Ranking of Graduate Programs in Philosophy in the English-Speaking World,” was recently published; the rankings purport to be “primarily measures of faculty quality and reputation.”  Mitchell Aboulafia has done a series of postings analyzing the 2014 PGR.  If Aboulafia’s analyses are accurate, which they seem to me to be, they show why the rankings produced by the 2014 PGR ought not to be relied on.

      The postings:

      Some might think that some of these problems are at least partially the result of the September Statement.  However, the editors of the PGR made the decision to publish the report and seem to stand by it, so the reasons behind the problems (whatever they might be) seem beside the point.

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    • An Open Letter Concerning the Autonomy of Macedonian Universities

      The following open letter in support of the autonomy of the universities of the Republic of Macedonia was originally drafted by Todd May for the purposes of being circulated and gaining additional signatories. It is being published here with the names of its current subscribers.  Those who wish to add their signatures are encouraged to do so in the comments. Institutional affiliations are provided solely for the purposes of identification of the individual signers and do not express any official position of the named institutions. 

      Those seeking more information about the situation or who wish to discuss it should read and comment on the post below this one. 

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    • Macedonian Universities in Crisis

      I have been asked to pass along the following appeal—first circulated privately and signed by representatives of a student organization and several faculty, including noted philosopher Katerina Kolozova—concerning the situation of universities in Macedonia.

      The Macedonian government is moving to institute a set of external, government administered examinations that would become the condition for granting of any university-level degree. Billed as an anti-corruption measure, this initiative is being criticized by the authors of the letter below as having the effect of ending the autonomy of the country's universities (guaranteed in the Macedonian constitution) and subjecting their core academic functions to direct political control. Similar sentiments are reflected in the following news stories about significant protests which took place last week in Skopje (here and here)—the largest in a month of protests. 

      The letter is reproduced below. Those with more knowldge of the situation are encouraged to add their voices in the comments. 

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    • Conceptual genealogy for analytic philosophy – Part II.3: The historicity of philosophical concepts

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      This is the fourth and for now final installment of my series of posts on conceptual genealogy. Part I is here; Part II.1 is here; Part II.2 is here; a tentative abstract of 2 years ago, detailing the motivation for the project, is here. 

      I now discuss the five main features of the historicist conception of philosophical concepts that motivates and justifies the method of conceptual genealogy for philosophical concepts. In a sense, this is the backbone of the  paper and of the whole project, so I'm particularly interested in feedback from readers now.

      —————————————–

      We are now in a better position to describe in more detail what I take to be the five main characteristics of the historicist conception of philosophical concepts that I defend here, borrowing elements from Nietzsche’s conception of genealogy and Canguilhem’s concept-centered historical approach. In short, these are (they will each be discussed in turn subsequently):

      1. Historical change
      2. Superimposition of layers of meaning
      3. Contingency
      4. Multiple lines of influence
      5. Connected to (extra- or intra-philosophical) practices and goals

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    • Directory of Philosophers from Underrepresented Groups in Philosophy

      …is online! It merges the different lists hitherto available with specific underrepresented groups within philosophy and for different areas into a single directory. From the description:

      The UPDirectory publicizes information about philosophers who are members of traditionally underrepresented groups in philosophy. The purpose of the directory is to provide an easy-to-use resource for anyone who wants to learn more about the work of philosophers who belong to underrepresented groups within the discipline. […]

      For the purposes of the UPDirectory, traditionally underrepresented groups in philosophy include women philosophers, black philosophers, Asian philosophers, Latina/o and Hispanic Philosophers, Indigenous/Native philosophers, LGBTQ philosophers, and philosophers with a disability, among others. […] Inclusion in the directory is primarily a matter of self-entry.

      So, philosophers belonging to one or more of these underrepresented groups: go add yourselves! And everybody else: go check it out! Make sure you use this amazing resource next time you plan a conference, an edited volume etc.

    • Conceptual genealogy for analytic philosophy – Part II.2: Canguilhem on genealogy of scientific concepts

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      This is the third installment of my series of posts with different sections of the paper on conceptual genealogy that I am working on. Part I is here; Part II.1 is here; a tentative abstract of 2 years ago, detailing the motivation for the project, is here. 

      I now turn to Canguilhem as an author exemplifying the kind of approach I have in mind when I speak of 'conceptual genealogy'. The main difference is that Canguilhem focused on scientific concepts (especially from biology and medicine), whereas I am articulating a methodology for the investigation of philosophical concepts (though of course, often the line between the two groups will be rather blurry). The same caveat of the previous installment on Nietzsche applies: this is a very brief and inevitably superficial discussion of Canguilhem's ideas, on which there is obviously much more to say.

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      The thesis of the relevance of historical analysis for philosophical theorizing rests crucially on a historicist conception of philosophical concepts, namely that they are not (or do not correspond to) a-historical essences or natural kinds. However, ‘historicism’ can have different meanings (Beiser 2011, Introduction), so let me now spell out in more detail in what sense I defend a historicist conception of philosophical concepts.

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