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    • Would knowledge of God’s existence interfere with our ability to make morally significant choices? Insights from the cognitive science of religion

      Although over half the world' population are theists (according to Pew survey results), God's existence isn't an obvious fact, not even to those who sincerely believe he exists. To put it differently, as Keith DeRose recently put it, even if God exists, we don't know that he does. This presents a puzzle for theists: why doesn't God make his existence more unambiguously known? The problem of divine hiddenness has long been recognized by theists (for instance, Psalm 22), but only fairly recently has it become the focus of debate in philosophy of religion. 

      In several works, J.L. Schellenberg has argued that divine hiddenness constitutes evidence against God's existence. A simple version of this argument goes as follows (Schellenberg 1993, 83):

      1. If there is a God, he is perfectly loving.
      2. If a perfectly loving God exists, reasonable non-belief in the existence of God does not occur
      3. Reasonable non-belief in the existence of God does occur.
      4.  No perfectly loving God exists. 
      5. There is no God.

      The controversial premises are 2 and 3. Authors like Swinburne and Murray have argued against premise 2: God may have reasons to make his existence less obviously true. Their arguments state that if we knew God existed, we wouldn't be able to make morally significant choices. This is an empirical claim. Obviously, it cannot be experimentally tested directly. However, research in the cognitive science of religion (CSR) on the relationship between belief in God and morality may indicate whether or not this is a plausible claim. 

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    • Normalizing Civility, Policing Critique, Enforcing Silence and Misunderstanding Collegiality

      By Leigh M. Johnson

      How we ought to understand the terms "civility" and "collegiality" and to what extent they can be enforced as professional norms are dominating discussions in academic journalism and the academic blogosphere right now.  (So much so, in fact, that it's practically impossible for me to select among the literally hundreds of recent articles/posts and provide for you links to the most representative here.)  Of course, the efficient cause of civility/collegiality debates' meteoric rise to prominence is the controversy surrounding Dr. Steven Salaita's firing (or de-hiring, depending on your read of the situation) by the University of Illinois only a month ago, but there are a host of longstanding, deeply contentious and previously seething-just-below-the-surface agendas that have been given just enough air now by the Salaita case to fan their smoldering duff into a blazing fire.

      In the interest of full disclosure, I'll just note here at the start that I articulated my concerns about (and opposition to) policing norms of civility/collegiality or otherwise instituting "codes" to enforce such norms some months ago (March 2014) in a piece I co-authored with Edward Kazarian on this blog here (and reproduced on the NewAPPS site) entitled "Please do NOT revise your tone."  My concern was then, as it remains still today, that instituting or policing norms of civility/collegiality is far more likely to protect objectionable behavior/speech by those who already possess the power to avoid sanction and, more importantly, is likely to further disempower those in vulnerable professional positions by effectively providing a back-door manner of sanctioning what may be their otherwise legitimately critical behaviors/speech.  I'm particularly sympathetic to the recent piece "Civility is for Suckers" in Salon by David Palumbo-Liu (Stanford) who retraces the case-history of civility and free speech and concludes, rightly in my view, that "civility is in the eye of the powerful."

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    • Council of UC Faculty Associations Statement on “Civility” and Academic Freedom

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      Just found this in my inbox:

      On Friday Sept. 5, Chancellor Dirks of UC Berkeley circulated an open statement to his campus community that sought to define the limits of appropriate debate at Berkeley. Issued as the campus approaches the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Chancellor Dirks’ statement, with its evocation of civility, echoes language recently used by the Chancellor of the University of Illinois, Urbana and the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (especially its Chair Christopher Kennedy) concerning the refused appointment of Steven Salaita. It also mirrors language in the effort by the University of Kansas Board of Regents to regulate social media speech and the Penn State administration’s new statement on civility. Although each of these administrative statements have responded to specific local events, the repetitive invocation of “civil” and “civility” to set limits to acceptable speech bespeaks a broader and deeper challenge to intellectual freedom on college and university campuses.

      CUCFA Board has been gravely concerned about the rise of this discourse on civility in the past few months, but we never expected it to come from the Chancellor of UC Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement. To define “free speech and civility” as “two sides of the same coin,” and to distinguish between “free speech and political advocacy” as Chancellor Dirk does in his text, not only turns things upside down, but it does so in keeping with a relentless erosion of shared governance in the UC system, and the systemic downgrading of faculty’s rights and prerogatives. Chancellor Dirks errs when he conflates free speech and civility because, while civility and the exercise of free speech may coexist harmoniously, the right to free speech not only permits, but is designed to protect uncivil speech. Similarly, Chancellor Dirks is also wrong when he affirms that there exists a boundary between “free speech and political advocacy” because political advocacy is the apotheosis of free speech, and there is no “demagoguery” exception to the First Amendment.

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    • Using Fiction in Philosophy Reading Lists

      By Samir Chopra    

      In my post yesterday, I had written of how discussion centering on a classic philosophical debate could be sparked by a reading of fiction. (The upper-tier core class I'm teaching, Philosophical Issues in Literature, is of course, all about that!) But fiction features in another reading list of mine–via Walter Kaufman's eclectic anthology, Religion from Tolstoy to Camus–which I am using in this semester's philosophy of religion class. We talked about The Death of Ivan Ilyich yesterday in class and it induced a fascinating, wide-ranging discussion covering religious feeling, existential crises, metaphysical rebellion, philosophy's relationship to death, Tolstoy's critique of organized religion and so on. I have too, in the past, used fiction in my philosophy of feminism class (Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness). I wrote about that experience over on my personal blog; it was a wholly positive one. 

      I would be interested in hearing from other folks on their use of fiction in their class reading lists. Where and how did you do so? What was your experience like? Links to sample syllabi would be awesome.  

    • RFID Tags, Informatized Subjects and Biopolitics

      By Gordon Hull

      Several months ago, I argued here that big data is going to make a big mess of privacy – primarily because of a distinction between “data,” understood as the effluvia of daily life, generated by such activities as moving around town or making phone calls, and “information,” which implies some sort of meaning.  Privacy protects the disclosure of “information,” since this can be an intentional act; big data allows surveillance of areas traditionally considered private without any act of disclosure, since the analytic computers will take care of turning the data into information.  My standard talking-point here is a recent study of Facebook likes which determined that all sorts of non-trivial correlations could be deduced from what people “like:”

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    • Intuitions and common sense in recent debates on philosophical methodology

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      I am working on a paper now (together with my student Leon Geerdink, for a volume on the history of early analytic philosophy being edited by Chris Pincock and Sandra Lapointe) where I elaborate on a hypothesis first presented at a blog post more than 3 years ago: that the history of analytic philosophy can to a large extent be understood as the often uneasy interplay between Russellianism and Mooreanism, in particular with respect to their respective stances on the role of common sense for philosophical inquiry. In the first part of the paper, we present an (admittedly superficial and selective) overview of some recent debates on the role of intuitions and common sense in philosophical methodology; in the second part we discuss Moore and Russell specifically, and in the third part we discuss what I take to be another prominent instantiation of the opposition between Russellianism and Mooreanism: the debate between Carnap and Strawson on the notion of explication.

      I am posting here a draft of the first part, i.e. the overview of recent debates. I would be very interested to hear what readers think of it: is it at least roughly correct, even if certainly partial and incomplete? Are the categories I carved up to make sense of these debates helpful? Can they be improved? Feedback would be most welcome!

      UPDATE: I forgot to mention that a paper that has been extremely useful for me to organize my thoughts on this topic is Michael Della Rocca's 'The taming of philosophy', which gets quite extensively discussed in other sections of my paper with Leon. It is an excellent paper. However, there is still a substantive disagreement between Della Rocca and us, namely that we think there is a lot more tension between Russell and Moore on the question of common sense's role for philosophy than Della Rocca recognizes (he describes both Moore and Russell as fans of common sense).

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    • Caring about particular wild animals

      Pups-in-log_stephenson_usfws-croppedBy Roberta L. Millstein

      In a summer overly stuffed with horrible and depressing news, it's comforting to find a good tidbit here and there. A few of these recent tidbits have been about particular wild animals: A baby orca was born in Puget Sound and given the designation L-120, bringing the population of the "L Pod" up to 79. For the first time in decades, the tracks of a panther were seen in the Green Swamp, north of Polk City, Florida. And the wolf known as OR-7, after famously trekking into northern California before roaming back to Oregon, has found a mate with whom he has produced several wolf puppies.

      People cheer, and are cheered by, these small stories of animal survival and reproduction. Is this silly sentimentalism? I don't think so, although I am not fully certain what to make of it, either.

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    • Nevil Shute’s _On The Beach_ And Normative Epistemology

      The first reading in my Philosophical Issues in Literature class this semester–which focuses on the post-apocalyptic novel–is Nevil Shute's On The Beach. I expected, more often than not, moral, ethical, and political issues to be picked up on in classroom discussions; I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the very first class meeting–on Monday–honed in on an epistemic issue, more specifically, one of normative epistemology: What should we believe? Are beliefs that comfort us–but that are otherwise without adequate evidentiary foundation–good ones? Can they ever be? Under what circumstances?

      Dwight Towers, the American Navy submarine captain, is one of those unfortunates who have, thanks to nuclear war, lost their all–their homes, their families–in the northern hemisphere. In Towers' case, this means his home in Connecticut, and his wife and child. Indeed, this loss provokes his host in Australia, Peter Holmes, to take the precaution of arranging extra companionship–as distraction–for him when Holmes invites Towers to his home for dinner. But Towers does not seem to regard his family as lost. As he attends a church service, Shute grants us access to his thoughts about home:

      He would be going back to them in September, home from his travels. He would see them all again in less than nine months time. They must not feel, when he rejoined them, that he was out of touch, or that he had forgotten things that were important in their lives. Junior must have grown quite a bit; kids did at that age.

      Later, Shute does the same with Moira Davidson, his new-found female friend in Melbourne, who has seen the photographs of his family in his cabin:

      She had known for some time that his wife and family were very real to him, more real by far than the half-life in a far corner of the world that had been forced upon him since the war.  The devastation of the northern hemisphere was not real to him, as it was not real to her. He had seen nothing of the destruction of the war, as she had not; in thinking of his wife and his home it was impossible for him to visualise them in any other circumstances than those in which he had left them. He had little imagination, and that formed a solid core for his contentment in Australia.

      Towers makes this explicit:

      "I suppose you think I'm nuts," he said heavily. "But that's the way I see it, and I can't seem to think about it any other way."

      These reflections bring us, as should be evident, to the Clifford–James debate. I have taught that debate before–in introductory philosophy classes and in philosophy of religion. The discussions–and judgments–it provokes are often quite illuminating; Monday's was no exception. The novelistic embedding of these attitudes in the context of a post-apocalyptic situation also enabled a segue into the broader ethics of 'coping strategies' and escapism, like, for instance, Moira Davidson's palliative heavy drinking.

      I  expect this issue to recur during this semester's discussions; I look forward to seeing how my students respond to the varied treatments of it that my reading list will afford them.

      Note: This post originally appeared–under the same title–over at samirchopra.com.

    • Steven Salaita’s First Public Statement Since His ‘Unhiring’

      Especially given the attention we've paid to the case here (see our new tag, and also Samir's posts here and here, and Eric Schwitzgebel's here), it is important to note that Steven Salaita had a press conference today, at which he issued this following statement.  

      The full audio of the statement and the press conference is here.  And in addition, there's a short video (embedded below) of Salaita addressing two of the core questions that have been raised in the affair, that of the nature of his engagements on Twitter and that of his approach in the classroom. 

       

      [Update: here is the full video of the event, including Salaita's full statement and the press conference.]

       

      Finally, as many of you surely know, the Board of Trustees at UIUC is meeting on Thursday. This is a very crucial day, and it is important to produce as many visible expressions of support as possible in advance of the Trustees' meeting. If you have not already done so, there is still time for you to email the Trustees.  Corey Robin's post on how to do so is here. Also, John Protevi is managing the philospher's boycott statement (see here for info on how to add your name). 

    • Where is the line and why?

      One of the few productive things that came out of the recent kerfufle about ableism was a useful discussion of where we should draw the line between what seem like acceptable uses of terms like "blind review", on the one hand, and obviously offensive terms like "spaz,"  on the other.   And if we can find that line, why is the line where we think it is?

      I can think of three factors that might go into such a decision:

      1. One is whether the term is being used pejoritively.   So, calling an argument lame is bad because I am disparaging the argument.  Saying "Justice is blind" is ok, because this is a positive characteristic of justice. (The first example was given by Keith DeRose on facebook in response to Eric S's proposal along these lines.  The second was Mohan M's in a comment in a thread here.)

      2.  A second is whether the term has a non-metaphorical use that is not related to disability.   I don't think the word "blind" is first and foremost a word for a disability.   It is a word for being obscured from sight.  Blindfold is not referencing a disability at all.   The disability "blindness" is only one source of blinding.  So, on this view, it's ok to say that someone is blind to important considerations.

      3.  A third thing we might cite is a long history of detachment.  Calling an idea "crazy"  might seem ok to you because it has referred to a colloquial category for so long in the absense of referring to a clinical condition.

      What do people think?    Are any or all of these principled reasons one could use to distinguish offensive terms from acceptable ones?