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Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

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    • youtube channel for all Wooster piano performances

      This is what the internet was invented for.

      Twenty or so years ago some friends and I voted over and over again to try to get Wodehouse listed in the infamous Modern Library reader's choice of top 100 novels of the twentieth century. Due to our labors, for a week or so "Bertie Wooster Sees it Through" was in the top ten.

      Those were good times. In the end though we just couldn't compete with the objectivists, the scientologists, the Heinlein weirdos. . .  For what it's worth, we still can't, though I do hope to be able to play all of these songs at some point. That's a little bit of consolation at least.

    • The happiest kids in the world

      Exactly 15 years ago today, I arrived in the Netherlands with a suitcase full of dreams (ok, maybe two), ready to start a new phase of my life, but having no idea I'd end up staying for so long. I still do and always will feel a strong bond with my home country Brazil (as BMoF readers of course know!), but looking back on these years, I realize I feel entirely at home here now. Perhaps the main turning point in my relationship with this country was the birth of my children, who were both born here, and who, for all intents and purposes (sadly, including rooting at the World Cup…), are basically Dutch. After they were born, I started feeling a visceral connection with this place, which I didn’t experience before.

      However, it is not only because they happened to be born here and have lived here almost all their lives (except for 20 months living in NYC for my older one) that I feel this connection. More importantly, I simply see them happy and thriving, being given all the conditions they need to develop healthily and joyfully, and I am extremely thankful for that. And it’s not only my kids: the Netherlands is consistently ranked as number one at studies comparing the well-being of children in a number of developed countries. 

      Everyone’s next question is then: what’s the secret? How does one raise the happiest kids in the world? Obviously, the Netherlands is a prosperous country, with levels of social equality only to be compared to those in the Scandinavian countries, and that goes a long way of course. To start with, virtually every child here has access to health care, education, nutrition etc. (Which is not to say that everything is perfect! But even for what is not so good, it’s still probably better than in most other places.) However, there are more factors involved, and on the basis of my experience as a parent I would like to outline two of them. 

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    • Monk on scientism and Wittgenstein

      Nice discussion here.

      Since I'm not a naturalist, I'm sort of on Monk/Wittgenstein's side, but I find some of the dichotomies to be a little bit tendentious. Monk opposes "non-theoretical understanding" to the kind of understanding proper to science, and argues that naturalizing programs in philosophy all fail because they don't realize that the domains proper to the two forms of understanding are pairwise disjoint.

      Maybe something in the neighborhood of this is true but Monk doesn't mark the distinction in the Sellarsian way one would expect now in terms of the kind of normative presuppositions required by the relevant kind of understanding. Instead, we get this:

      One of the crucial differences between the method of science and the non-theoretical understanding that is exemplified in music, art, philosophy and ordinary life, is that science aims at a level of generality* which necessarily eludes these other forms of understanding. This is why the understanding of people can never be a science.

      I'm just not sure this is true. It's not at all clear to me that morphologists in biology aim at a greater level of generality than music theorists do.

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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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