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    • Ethics and the Novel: Nietzsche’s Twist

      The slow emergence of the novel as a major literary genre is an ethical event. The novel as a form of literary writing goes back to Greek antiquity, and one novel from antiquity is still widely read,  The Metamorphoses of Apulieus (or The Golden Ass by Apulieus). One of the great writers on the form of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin, even claimed it went back to the Menippean Satire of antiquity. This is probably  not one of his most shared ideas. In any case, the idea of a unique moment of origin is not a good basis. There are a series of beginning, which include antique epics, behind the novel as it developed from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, when it did become accepted as a literary genre on a level with epic, drama, and lyric poetry.

      The modern origin is again ambiguous. Rabelais provides a strong candidate, with major attention coming from Eric Auerbach as well as Bakthin, but Don Quixote is the more widespread object of discussion. Nietzsche refers to it (Genealogy, II.6) as with regard to a change in ideas of humour, so explicitly ethical ideas about where we can find humour. The original readers of Cervantes could laugh without restraint at the suffering of Quixote, and the suffering caused by the ‘ingenious hidalgo’, but Nietzsche suggests that by his time, readers feel unease and even pain themselves at the suffering and humiliation. 

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    • On the Boycott of Urbana-Champaign

      I rarely post on hot political topics (unless quantitative analysis of philosophers’ lack of diversity counts), but one hot political topic has been very much in my mind this week: the boycott of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I’ve been forced to consider the issue especially carefully because I was scheduled to give a talk to the Philosophy Department there in December, and UIUC was starting to invite speakers for a proposed mini-conference on experimental philosophy the next day, where I would give the keynote address.

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    • What’s the big deal with consistency?

      (Cross-posted at M-Phi)

      It is no news to anyone that the concept of consistency is a hotly debated topic in philosophy of logic and epistemology (as well as elsewhere). Indeed, a number of philosophers throughout history have defended the view that consistency, in particular in the form of the principle of non-contradiction (PNC), is the most fundamental principle governing human rationality – so much so that rational debate about PNC itself wouldn’t even be possible, as famously stated by David Lewis. It is also the presumed privileged status of consistency that seems to motivate the philosophical obsession with paradoxes across time; to be caught entertaining inconsistent beliefs/concepts is really bad, so blocking the emergence of paradoxes is top-priority. Moreover, in classical as well as other logical systems, inconsistency entails triviality, and that of course amounts to complete disaster.
       
      Since the advent of dialetheism, and in particular under the powerful assaults of karateka Graham Priest, PNC has been under pressure. Priest is right to point out that there are very few arguments in favor of the principle of non-contradiction in the history of philosophy, and many of them are in fact rather unconvincing. According to him, this holds in particular of Aristotle’s elenctic argument in Metaphysics gamma. (I agree with him that the argument there does not go through, but we disagree on its exact structure. At any rate, it is worth noticing that, unlike David Lewis, Aristotle did think it was possible to debate with the opponent of PNC about PNC itself.) But despite the best efforts of dialetheists, the principle of non-contradiction and consistency are still widely viewed as cornerstones of the very concept of rationality.
       
      However, in the spirit of my genealogical approach to philosophical issues, I believe that an important question to be asked is: What’s the big deal with consistency in the first place? What does it do for us? Why do we want consistency so badly to start with? When and why did we start thinking that consistency was a good norm to be had for rational discourse? And this of course takes me back to the Greeks, and in particular the Greeks before Aristotle.

       

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    • California is 4 to 15 mm higher than it was in 2003

      because it is less weighed down by water*.   Story here.

      *about 63 trillion gallons less.

    • The Church – Endless Sea (Orig. Iggy Pop)

      The guitarist is playing with an "EBow"! Does anybody remember those? They peaked in the 1980s.

      I love this song (and this is a credible, if truncated, cover), but I'm kind of glad we're back to using the fingers of our left (right for Cobain, Hendrix, et. al.) hand  to get the strings vibrating. I'd bet a decent sum of money that Scott Thurston employed old fashioned volume swells* in the original.

      [Notes:

      *Cf. Eddie Van Halen's "Cathedral" for a canonical example. Isaac Dinesen/Karen Blixen once wrote something to the effect that you've never truly lived until you've played this solo note-for-note in front of a four dozen or so intoxicated rednecks in a dilapidated rural AlabamaVFW hall.]

    • Reverend J. Herbert Nelson, II (Director for Public Witness, PCUSA) on the killings of African-American boys and men

      The call to action:

      So, the response must be multi-faceted. It isn’t enough to feel outrage, but do nothing. Or to feel fear, but do nothing. Or to feel utter, bone-crushing grief, but do nothing. We must institute policies that limit access to guns. Weapons of war have no place in our homes, communities, or law enforcement. But more than that, we as Church must confront the social sin of racism head-on. We must get outside our church buildings, beyond our comfort zones, and say loud and clear, “this is my brother and I will not accept that his life is less valuable than mine. The violence has to stop.” We must be willing to challenge the culture that tells African American boys that their lives are worth less than the lives of White boys. We live in a culture that attempts to justify itself by claiming “self-defense” when we really mean fear and bigotry, or pride, or individualism. But all of this is sin.Our faith reminds us that God is all sovereign and that “God calls us to love our neighbors, not protect ourselves against our neighbors.”

      Read the whole thing, which focuses on both gun violence and racism (and concludes with a prayer) here.

    • “In a lethal situation, they used lethal force:” The Myth of the Myth of the “Angry Black Man”

      Only a couple of weeks after the Ferguson shooting, and only about three miles away, St. Louis police shot and killed another black man, Kajieme Powell, after he apparently shoplifted from a convenience store.  The details of what happened in Ferguson are in dispute, which has allowed the law and order crowd to defend putting six bullets into unarmed Mike Brown – two into his head – as a proportional act of self-defense.

      No such ambiguity exists in the Powell case.  The police released cellphone video yesterday, and it is absolutely chilling.  Powell emerges from the convenience store with a pair of canned drinks.  He seems a little confused – puts them down, paces around, and so on.  Then the police show up in a white SUV, and jump out, guns drawn (already! They decide to escalate before even arriving at the scene).  Powell backs away, says “just shoot me” a couple of times, climbs up on a retaining wall, takes a couple of steps in the direction of the police… and then they shoot him dead.  Total time between the police arrival and his death? About 15 seconds.

      The video, of course, completely contradicts the police department’s story about a drawn knife and aggression on Powell’s part.  When confronted with the contradiction, the police chief replied that “in a lethal situation, they used lethal force.”  The only thing harder to understand from that video clip than why killing Powell was justified by the situation is how anyone can continue to deny that the problem is structural.  I am not accusing the officers or the police chief of lying.  It’s much, much worse than that: I’d be pretty sure they really did think their lives were in immediate danger.

       

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    • Charlie Huenemann on what we should be doing instead of what we are doing

      Provocative essay here by Charlie Huenemann on how academic philosophy broke bad and what might be done to correct it. Most people that make these kinds of criticisms assume that it would be easy to fix the problems so that all of us could get back to doing old-style philosophy like Plato, Kant, and Hegel did. What's most interesting to me about Huenemann's essay is that he explicitly rejects this assumption.

      Huenemann first argues that the modern cult of management in academia brought about a situation where there is:

      (1) more attention devoted to narrow problem-solving activity rather then efforts to deepen philosophical wonder; (2) increasingly narrow specialization and less general knowledge of the discipline itself and its history; (3) less engagement with anyone outside the professional guild; and (4) development of various cants and shibboleths to patrol membership in the guild.

      There is a lot of wisdom here. However, as noted above, whenever I read this kind of whingeing (and I routinely write it in this forum), I'm almost always struck by the whinger's optimism that there could be any alternative, i.e. if we were all just less narrow we'd be able to do the same kind of stuff that Kant or Schopenhauer did. But is this not exactly like telling a music theory professor that he should compose late period Beethoven quartets and stop with all of the articles on Schenker Analysis? It's a transparently silly demand.

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    • On The Possible Advantages of Robot Graders

      Some very interesting news from the trenches about robot graders, which notes the ‘strong case against using robo-graders for assigning grades and test scores’ and then goes on to note:

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    • Calling Bullshit On ‘Outside Agitators’ in Ferguson

      A few days ago, a friend on Facebook posted the following as his status:

      Would any of you be down to help me organize a march on Ferguson, MO? Dead serious. It’s something I hope would send a powerful message to the powers that be, but I’d need help getting it all together. I mean, like a grassroots thing via Facebook to organize a march on Ferguson and get people from here in NYC and possibly the entire country to descend and march on Ferguson. A march to show solidarity. A march to show that we will not sit idly by and ignore human/civil rights violations at the hands of police against anyone, but most specifically to say that we will absolutely not ignore the deliberate genocide of black boys and black men in the United States.

      If my friend does manage–beginning with this powerful and passionate call to action–to organize this march,  and is able to bring to Ferguson other concerned citizens to participate in protests and rallies, and perhaps even get in the face of overzealous police to remind them loudly and verbally that they might be overstepping the bounds of reasonable policing, that the murder of Michael Brown will not be allowed to just pass idly into history, he will be regarded as a provocateur of sorts, an outside agitator, one meddling in affairs best left to locals, to the local community and their police, who can, and should, work out by themselves, a response to a highly particular, specific, local, problem, using highly particular, local, specific tactics to devise a highly particular…you see where this is going.

      It’s a road to unmitigated bullshit, toward the worst kind of self-serving political delusion.

      For as long as the cry of ‘outside agitator’ has been made–most notably, in the sad history of racist Southern resistance to the nationalization of civil rights–it has always been code for ‘butt out, and let us continue to address a political problem in familiar dead-end ways.’ In the South, the cry of ‘outside agitator’ was simply a euphemism for ‘we know how to deal with our blacks and we’ve been doing damn good job at it when no attention was paid us.’ The light often sends many scurrying for cover.

      What is happening in Ferguson is not a local affair. It never was and never will be. The shooting of Michael Brown was a national phenomenon, temporarily resident in a new setting. That circus will soon move elsewhere, to some other urban killing ground, where soon enough, some other young man of color will fall to a policeman’s bullets. The police in Ferguson are not a local problem; the response to the demonstrations in Ferguson–indicative of a dangerous militarization of the police–is not a local problem. These are American problems, of interest to all Americans.

      There are no ‘outside agitators’ in Ferguson. There is no arbitrary boundary that can be drawn around the problems of racism and police brutality; the stench of those wafts easily across one county line to the next.

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