New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

recent posts

about

    • The September Statement: Some Numbers (Updated 10/10/2014)

      By Carolyn Dicey Jennings

      –out of 643 signatures* from philosophers at 290 departments, 33% are women (roughly 2 times the percentage of women who are full-time faculty in philosophy according to one source, and almost 1.5 times the "percentage of women on tenured/tenure-track appointments at Top-51 Doctoral Programs in Gourmet Report" according to another source). 

      –for all of the departments in the top 50 of the 2011 worldwide PGR, a mean 17% faculty signed the document**. (I am attaching the Excel spreadsheet I used here.)

      –there is little to no correlation between PGR rating and the percentage of faculty who signed for departments in the top 50 of the 2011 worldwide ranking (-.11). Of these departments, those with greater than 17% faculty signatures include: ANU, CUNY, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Indiana, King's College London, MIT, Northwestern, Rutgers, Syracuse, UCL, UCSD, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Leeds, U Mass Amherst, Michigan, Oxford, UPenn, Sheffield, USC, St Andrews/Stirling, UVA, Wisconsin.

      *I updated the list at approximately 2:45 p.m. PDT , October 10th, 2014. 

      **I did not match the names of the signers to the names of members of faculty, but compared the number of people who signed the document claiming a particular affiliation to the number of faculty listed in the current PGR faculty lists. It is possible that persons not included in the PGR list for a department signed the document with that department's affiliation, which would potentially lower this percentage as well as the percentage for that particular department.

      Update (October 1st, 2014): Nottingham is the first department to ask not to be evaluated by the PGR, due to these events. 

      Update (October 3rd, 2014): John Protevi is hosting the "October Statement."

      Update (October 6th, 2014): Sheffield is the second department to announce that it is not cooperating with the PGR this year. The October Statement has 111 signatures, as of October 4th. (I have not worked out how much overlap exists between these statements, so it would not be correct to say that these statements together constitute 745 signatures–the number is smaller than this, but I don't yet know by how much.) 

      Update (October 10th, 2014): Signatures on the September Statement have closed, and an announcement has been added, as below.

      "The September Statement, signed by twenty-one philosophers on September 24, 2014, and its addendum, signed by six hundred twenty-four philosophers in the weeks following, was a pledge not to provide volunteer work for the Philosophical Gourmet Report under the control of Brian Leiter.

      On October 10, Leiter publicly committed to stepping down from the PGR following the publication of the 2014 edition, which will be produced with Leiter and Berit Brogaard as co-editors. After its publication, Leiter will resign as editor, and become a member of the PGR's advisory board. (See Daily Nous's account here.)

      The September Statement did not specify the conditions under which the PGR is considered to be "under the control of Brian Leiter". It is up to each individual signatory to decide whether it is consistent with the pledge to assist with the 2014 PGR with Leiter as a co-editor, or with future editions with Leiter as a board member.

      We are grateful for the support of the philosophers who signed the September Statement, as well as that of those who worked in other ways to make clear that this kind of bullying behaviour is unacceptable in professional philosophy."

    • Paul Morel and Travis Bickle: The World-Dissolving Melancholic Gaze

      By: Samir Chopra

      In Sons and Lovers (1913), D. H. Lawrence directs many glances at the Derbyshire landscape, often through his characters' distinctive visions. Here is one, this time through Paul Morel:

      He was brooding now, staring out over the country from under sullen brows. The little, interesting diversity of shapes had vanished from the scene; all that remained was a vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy, the same in all the houses and the river-flats and the people and the birds; they were only shapen differently. And now that the forms seemed to have melted away, there remained the mass from which all the landscape was composed, a dark mass of struggle and pain. The factory, the girls, his mother, the large, uplifted church, the thicket of the town, merged into one atmosphere—dark, brooding, and sorrowful, every bit. [Bantam Classic, 1985, pp. 271]

      In this vivid passage, Paul's melancholia affords him a lens through which to interpret his surroundings, now infected with his own subjectivity. The world he 'sees' has the shapes and forms that it does because they are the ones he has imposed on it. So overpowering is his current sense of desolation that the boundaries between objects break down, principles of individuation fail to hold sway, and the substratum that is the foundation of the visible world is revealed. In this state of mind it can only be the 'vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy', 'a dark mass of struggle and pain.' As a daily coping mechanism, this brooding assemblage is understood as, and interacted with, as physical objects, including animate and inanimate ones, like 'houses and the river-flats and the people and the birds' but at times like these–a characteristically intense interaction with a woman, in this case, Clara Dawes, his lover–this construction crumbles, and the artifice of it all is revealed. As is the grim underlying reality. (Paul's interpretive scheme is not a linguistic one; it seems to be constructed from felt emotions and sensations.)

      An interesting analogy with Lawrence's technique here is that employed by Martin Scorsese in Taxi Driver when showing us Travis Bickle's New York City. Scene after scene shows a grim tapestry of violence, sexual degradation, and corruption of all stripes–'the filth'–which so corrodes Bickle's sensibilities and generates an ultimately violent retaliation. So relentless is this depiction of 'the open sewer', so ubiquitous its presence outside Bickle's car window, that viewers of Taxi Driver might wonder if Bickle was driving around the same city block again and again. But that, of course, is the point of it all: the diversity of the city has been dissolved and made shapeless and formless by Bickle's gaze. What we see on the screen is Bickle's subjectivity imposed on the landscape outside, now understood and contextualized by his distinctive perspective into 'one vast matrix of of vice and dirt', with its streets and corners and peoples and street lights all merged into one atmosphere–dark, brooding, and sorrowful, every bit.'

      Paul Morel and Travis Bickle live in distinctive worlds of their own.

      Note: This post was originally published–under the same title–at samirchopra.com.

    • The upside down world paradox

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      (Cross-posted at M-Phi)

      As most kids (I suspect), my daughters sometimes play ‘upside down world’, especially when I ask them something to which they should say ‘yes’, but instead they say ‘no’ and immediately regret it: ‘Upside down world!’ The upside down world game basically functions as a truth-value flipping operator: if you say yes, you mean no, and if you say no, you mean yes.

      My younger daughter recently came across the upside down world paradox: if someone asks you ‘are you playing upside down world?’, all kinds of weird things happen to each of the answers you may give. If you are not playing upside down world, you will say no; but if you are playing upside down world you will also say no. So the ‘no’ answer underdetermines its truth-value, a bit like the no-no paradox. Now for the ‘yes’ answer: if you are playing upside down world and say ‘yes’, then that means ‘no’, and so you are not playing the game after all if you are speaking truthfully. But then your ‘yes’ was a genuine yes in the first place, and so you are playing the game and said yes, which takes us back to the beginning. (In other words, 'no' is the only coherent answer, but it still doesn't say anything about whether you are actually playing the game or not.)

       

      (more…)

    • Continuing Comments on Christian Coseru’s “Philosophy’s Western Bias and What Can Be Done About It”

      … here, have been approved.  Some ended up in spam, some I lost track of in the flood of comments on other posts.  Sorry about that!  If you have submitted one and it's still not showing, please email me.  I'm delighted that the discussion has been so fruitful!

      — Eric Schwitzgebel

    • Possible Psychology of a Matrioshka Brain

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      Enclose the sun inside a layered nest of thin spherical computers. Have the inmost sphere harvest the sun’s radiation to drive computational processes, emitting waste heat out its backside. Use this waste heat as the energy input for the computational processes of a second, larger and cooler sphere that encloses the first. Use the waste heat of the second sphere to drive the computational processes of a third. Keep adding spheres until you have an outmost sphere that operates near the background temperature of interstellar space.

      Congratulations, you’ve built a Matrioshka Brain! It consumes the entire power output of its star and produces many orders of magnitude more computation per microsecond than all of the current computers on Earth do per year.

      Here’s a picture:

      (Yes, it’s black. Maybe not if you shine a flashlight on it, though.)

      (more…)

    • Ghost From The Machine: Once Again, The Dead Return

      By: Samir Chopra

      Matt Osterman's Ghost from the Machine (2010)–originally titled and known internationally as Phasma Ex Machina--is touted by its marketing material as a 'supernatural thriller'. A low-budget indie, it uses a cast made up of genuine amateurs who sometimes look distinctly uncomfortable and self-conscious on camera, and wears its modest production values on its sleeve. The story sounds hokey enough: a young man, an amateur inventor of sorts, tries to bring his dead parents back to life by building an electrical machine that changes the electromagnetic field surrounding it (I think.) The parents, unsurprisingly, do not return from the dead, but other folks do: a widowed, fellow-garage-tinkerer neighbor's long-dead wife, and a pair of murderous old folk. (The return to life of this latter bunch makes the movie into a 'horror' or 'ghost' film; bringing back the garage-tinkerer's wife would only have made it 'supernatural.')

      For all that PEM manages to often be genuinely thought-provoking. It is so because its treatment of its subject matter invites immediate analogizing–not comparison–with two cinematic classics: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Andrei Tarkovsky's  Solaris. 

      (more…)

    • Concerning events at the journal Science

      By Roberta Millstein

      My friend Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, a historian of science at the University of Florida, has drawn my attention to a number of concerning events at the eminent journal Science.

      One was an appalling magazine cover, for which they were roundly and rightly criticized. The Editor-in-Chief issued a non-apology for the cover, saying that she is "truly sorry for any discomfort that this cover may have caused anyone" and promising "that we will strive to do much better in the future to be sensitive to all groups and not assume that context and intent will speak for themselves." 

      A second recent development is the shortening of book reviews to 600 words, with an increased focus on popular books and fewer reviews coming from scholars in the history and philosophy of science as compared to the past. This is an unfortunate loss of an important perspective from Science.

      Now, a blog post from Michael Balter, who has been with the journal for over 21 years, talks about some of the behind-the-scenes troubles at Science and its publishing organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). These include the recent dismissal of four women in the art and production departments, with essentially no notice in three cases and very little notice in the fourth case, and the absence of any serious response to the concerns expressed by the overwhelming majority of Science's news staff about the way these dismissals were handled.

      I am not in a position to fully comment on these recent developments; I am only reporting what I have read and what I have been told. But as a member of the AAAS Section on History and Philosophy of Science (Section L) I am very concerned. Indeed, perhaps given the important role that Science plays, we should all be concerned about what what is involved with the "strategic transformation that AAAS is currently undergoing, to enhance its engagement with its members and to be in the forefront of the multimedia landscape of the future."

    • Cloud Computing and the Extension of the Price Mechanism

      by Gordon Hull

      Cloud computing – where users keep their data (and often their applications) online – poses significant theoretical and regulatory problems.  Many of these concern jurisdiction: it’s very hard to even know at a given moment where data is kept, and it’s often unclear (in the case of privacy, for example), which jurisdiction’s privacy and data protection rules should apply (the one for the data subject? the company that collected the data? the companies processing it? etc.).  Not only that, U.S. and EU law are wildly inconsistent on the point, even though any large big data company has to serve multiple jurisdictions.

      A recent piece by Paul M. Schwartz does some valuable work disentangling these issues; here, I want to focus on one moment.  Schwartz notes that cloud computing will likely induce significant changes in how firms are structured, and how they structure their data handling.  Back in 1937, Ronald Coase proposed that companies will decide between doing something in house and outsourcing it based on a comparison of the costs of each.  If it’s more efficient to do something in-house, using the hierarchical control structure of the firm and avoiding the complexities of dealing with markets, that’s what we can expect.  If, on the other hand, it turns out that it’s more efficient to hire somebody else to do the job, we can expect companies to do that.  Companies have to balance the difficulties of managing a project in-house versus the costs of negotiating contracts with independent vendors.

      (more…)

    • Style of Living versus Juridification in Foucault

      I'm making a brief exploration of one of the most significant oppositions in Foucaut's thought, which has not been discussed that much in my experience, but I may well have overlooked some vast bibliography. In any case, there is a major polarity in Foucault between the style of living in antiquity, related to care of the self, and in which 'style' can be replaced by 'aesthetics' or 'techne', while 'living' can be replaced by 'existence', in ways I do not think make much difference to the current discussion. There is also a relation with the discussions of the government of the self and the use of pleasure.  I am not getting into references and precise context, but outlining the general field.

      The most obvious opposition to 'style of living' is the emergence of 'subjectivty' in the sense of some deep subject behind speech and action. Foucault's understanding of this refers in large part to the development of the confessional in Christianity, with the standard Catholic confession in private to a priest taken as the end point. There is a suggestion in this historical discussion of a historical preparation for the development of assumptions about the sıbject that come to inform Descartes, and what follows Descartes with regard to consciousness and subjectivity. 

      (more…)

    • For the Record

      I have read in several places this description of my placement post and my response to Brian Leiter's criticisms of that post (most recently, in comments posted yesterday at Philosophical Comment): 

      "July 1:  I posted a sharp critique of some utterly misleading rankings produced by Carolyn Jennings, a  tenure-stream faculty member at UC Merced.  She quickly started revising it after I called her out."

      For the record, this does not strike me as an accurate representation of those events. 

      First, while I did post a ranking, I made it clear that I did this as an exercise: (from the original post, bold original) "As discussed here in the comments, one of the advantages of comparative data on placement is that they help fill in gaps left over by the PGR…To illustrate this, I below rank the top 50 departments by tenure-track placement rate**, providing for comparison these department's ranks from the 2011 "Ranking Of Top 50 Faculties In The English-Speaking World" by the Philosophical Gourmet Report. Please note that this placement ranking is provided only to demonstrate the potential utility of these data."

      Second, while Brian Leiter did find the rankings misleading, many others did not, and even commended the clarity of language in my post. Take these quotes from David Marshall Miller, who has also worked on placement data: "Andrew Carson and, especially, Carolyn Dicey Jennings have developed analyses that now strike me as very robust." and "I will say, to again quote Leiter, that “all such exercises are of very limited value.” Nevertheless, they are of some use, and should be made available, so long as the methodology and limitations of the analysis are made clear. I think the PGR and the placement rankings by Jennings, Carson, and myself all meet this standard." 

      Third, Brian did post criticisms of the ranking, but I did not make any substantial revisions to the ranking based on his criticisms, since I did not find those criticisms to have merit. Brian's way of characterizing my response at the time was "Prof. Jennings digs in her heels."

      (more…)