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    • Conceptual genealogy for analytic philosophy – Part II.1: Nietzschean Genealogy

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

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

      I now present some of the basics of Nietzschean genealogy which will then be central for my general project. The goal here is thus not to offer a thorough account of Nietzsche's thought on the matter, obviously (a lifelong project!), but it should still be an accurate presentation of some aspects of it. If that is not the case, please do let me know! (I rely mostly on Geuss' and Leiter's interpretations.) Feedback in general is more than welcome.

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      The mundane, commonsensical sense of genealogy is typically related to the idea of vindication, i.e. of validation of one’s authority through the narrative of one’s origins. This is particularly conspicuous in historical disputes for political power within the traditional monarchic model: a contestant has a claim to the throne if she can prove to be a descendent of the right people, namely previous monarchical power-holders. In such cases, a genealogy is what Geuss (1994, 274) describes as ‘tracing a pedigree’, a practice as old as (Western?) civilization itself. The key idea is the idea of transmission of value: a person with noble ancestry inherits this status from her ancestors.

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    • Schmitt not so Decisionist

      Nothing new to say about Schmitt here, but I think there is something to be said for clarifying in what ways Schmitt is not ‘Schmittian’ in some senses that influence some people. This issue came up in a teaching context recently and I think refers to a widespread tendency, which I believe can be tackled without hopefully falling into assault and battery on a straw man in order to clarify what is distinctive about Schmitt’s contribution.

      The issue is of defining Carl Schmitt as a ‘decisionist’ who regards the question of who exercises sovereignty as arbitrary, as a question which begins and ends with the question who has the force to exercise sovereignty, with no regard for the legitimation of that sovereignty. This is severely one- sided, but does have some basis in some things Schmitt said, particularly in Political Theology, The Concept of the Political, and Crisis in Parliamentary Democracy. The opening of Political Theology and a slightly later in the text quotation from Kierkegaard, with related discussion, is where decisionistic Schmitt seems most apparent. 

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    • Moral Order and Immanent Justice

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      Let’s say the world is morally ordered if good things come to those who act morally well and bad things come to those who act morally badly.


      Moral order admits of degrees. We might say that the world is perfectly morally ordered if everyone gets exactly what they morally deserve, perfectly immorally ordered if everyone gets the opposite of what they morally deserve, and has no moral order if there’s no relationship between what one deserves and what one gets.

      Moral order might vary by subgroup of individuals considered. Perhaps the world is better morally ordered in 21st century Sweden than it was in 1930s Russia. Perhaps the world is better morally ordered among some ethnicities or social classes than among others. Class differences highlight the different ways in which moral order can fail: Moral order can fail among the privileged if they do not suffer for acting badly, can fail among the disadvantaged if they do not benefit from acting well.

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    • Conceptual genealogy for analytic philosophy – Part I: Analytic philosophy and the a-historical conception of philosophy

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      As some readers may recall (see this blog post with a tentative abstract — almost 2 years ago!), I am working on a paper on the methodology of conceptual genealogy, which is the methodology that has thus far informed much of my work on the history and philosophy of logic. Since many people have expressed interest in this project, in the next couple of days I will post the sections of the paper that I've already written. Feedback is most welcome!

      Today I post Part I, on the traditionally a-historical conception of philosophy of analytic philosophers. Tomorrow I will post Part II.1, on Nietzschean genealogy; on Thursday and Friday I will post Part II.2, on the historicity of philosophical concepts, in two installments.

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      Wiliams (2002) and Craig (2007) fittingly draw a distinction between genealogies that seek to expose the reprehensible origins of something and thereby decrease its value, and genealogies that seek to glorify their objects by exposing their ‘noble’ origins. The former are described as ‘subversive’, ‘shameful’ or ‘debunking’, while the latter may be dubbed ‘vindicatory’. (I will have much more to say on this distinction later on.) Nietzsche’s famous genealogical analysis of morality is the archetypal subversive genealogy, and has given rise to a formidable tradition of deconstruction of concepts, values, views, beliefs etc. by the exposure of their pudenda origo, their shameful origins. As described by Srinivasan (2011, 1),

      Nietzsche’s innovation prompted a huge cultural shift towards subversive genealogical thinking – what might be called the ‘Genealogical Turn’ – including Freudian analysis, 20th-century Marxism, Foucault’s historical epistemology, certain strands of postcolonial and feminist theory, and much of what goes by the label ‘postmodernism’. These ideological programmes operate by purporting to unmask the shameful origins – in violence, sexual repression, gender or racial hegemony and economic and social oppression – of our concepts, beliefs and political structures.

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    • Theranos and the Biopolitics of Blood-Testing

      By Gordon Hull

      The current New Yorker includes a profile of Theranos, a Silicon Valley start-up that is developing new techniques of blood-testing, and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes.  In the old way, you’d go to the doctor, who’d order some tests.  You’d then get a blood draw of a couple of vials of blood, and they’d get shipped off to LabCorps or Quest.  A few days later, you’d find out your lipid or other levels.  Theranos claims to have developed the technology to get much, much more information out of a couple of drops of blood – at a fraction of the cost.  Needless to say, such an innovation would be a game changer.  There is serious money at stake: Quest and LabCorps apparently generate $75 billion a year in revenue. Medically, it’s not just that routine lipid screenings would be easier; it’s that as researchers discover blood markers for more and more diseases, routine blood testing could enable early detection of some that are currently very difficult to treat.  For example, recent research suggests such biomarkers might enable early detection of the most common form of lung cancer (this follows the discovery of another lung cancer biomarker a year ago); such early detection is critical for treatment, and its absence is part of why lung cancer has such a high mortality rate.  The automatic testing for cancer biomarkers could simply be folded into the lab result.  Holmes puts it this way:

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    • Teaching Descartes: It Ain’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be

      By: Samir Chopra 

      In 'Five Parables' (from Historical Ontology, Harvard University Press, 2002), Ian Hacking writes,

      I had been giving a course introducing undergraduates to the philosophers who were contemporaries of the green family and August der Stark. My hero had been Leibniz, and as usual my audience gave me pained looks. But after the last meeting, some students gathered around and began with the conventional, 'Gee, what a great course.' The subsequent remarks were more instructive: 'But you could not help it…what with all those great books, I mean like Descartes…' They loved Descartes and his Meditations.

      I happen to give terrible lectures on Descartes, for I mumble along saying that I do not understand him much. It does not matter. Descartes speaks directly to these young people, who know as little about Descartes and his times as I know about the green family and its time. But just as the green family showed itself to me, so Descartes shows himself to them….The value of Descartes to these students is completely anachronistic, out of time. Half will have begun with the idea that Descartes and Sartre were contemporaries, both being French. Descartes, even more than Sartre, can speak directly to them….I do find it very hard to make sense of Descartes, even after reading commentaries, predecessors, and more arcane texts of the same period. The more I make consistent sense of him, the more he seems to me to inhabit an alien universe.

      A few brief responses:

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    • The Dickhead Theory Of Academic Philosophy, Revisited

      By: Samir Chopra

      A little while ago, I posited something I jocularly termed The Dickhead Theory as a possible explanation for the lack of women in academic philosophy (“there are too many dickheads in philosophy”). In response, one male reader commented:

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    • Results of my survey on religious disagreement

      Religious disagreements are conspicuous in everyday life.  Most societies, except perhaps for theocracies or theocracy-like regimes, show a diversity of religious beliefs, a diversity that young children already are aware of. One emerging topic of interest in the social epistemology of religion is how we should respond to religious disagreement. How should you react if you are confronted with someone who seems equally intelligent and thoughtful, who has access to the same evidence as you do, but who nevertheless ends up with very different religious beliefs? Should you become less confident about your beliefs, or suspend judgment? Or is it permissible to accord more weight to your own beliefs than to those of others?

      In November and December 2014, I surveyed philosophers about their views on religious disagreement. I was not only interested in finding out what philosophers think about disagreements about religious topics in the profession (for instance, do they consider other philosophers as epistemic peers, or do they take the mere fact of disagreement as an indication that the other can’t be right?), but also in the influence of personal religious beliefs and training. I present a brief summary of results below the fold; a longer version can be found here. 

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    • U Oregon and the Academic Labor System

      Over at DailyNous, we read that the University of Oregon has sent a letter to international graduate students warning them that they would face deportation if they were to join a strike being undertaken against the university by the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation (GTFF). 

      Several things should be said about this.

      1) The threat appears to be credible. As I understand matters on the basis of conversations with folks who have had hiring responsibilities that frequently involved graduate students on the type of visa that is likely involved here, all the university would have to do is report to Homeland Security that the students are no longer complying with the conditions of their visas. 

      2) The above highlights the extent to which international graduate student labor is an extreme form of the sort of captive, precarious labor provided by un-unionized graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) more generally—and the importance of which once led Marc Bosquet, in one of his seminal pieces on the academic labor system, to characterize actually granted PhDs as "the waste product of graduate education." Because international graduate students typically have no legal option but to work for their university employers, they represent possibly the perfect form of GTA labor. 

      3) Graduate Teaching Assistant unions—which may cover more than TAs narrowly so called, also including graduate students teaching as adjunct faculty, etc.*—represent a threat to this academic labor system. I'll say a little more about this third point, and draw some general conclusions, in what follows.

      [In the mean time, I encourage folks to consider adding their names to the open letter that John Protevi is hosting on his blog, calling on the University of Oregon to abandon its current tactics against the union and to grant them the very reasonable benefits they are demanding.]

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    • Thou Shalt Know All Before Offering Critique (Of The Police)

      By: Samir Chopra

      A common argument made in the ongoing national discussion about police brutality and violence is, very roughly, "We should be careful in criticizing the police because we have little idea of how difficult and dangerous their work is." Which reminds me: some ten years ago, when discussing the Abu Ghraib tortures and sundry atrocities with a serving military officer, he offered me the following piece of wisdom: "You cannot, from this safe couch-warming distance, judge the actions of military men; you have no idea of the dangers and stresses of their work."

      You know, whereof one cannot know every excruciating detail, one should not criticize or judge or pass moral judgment?

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