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    • The scariest thing about Stephen King’s 11/22/63

      There's not much new that one can currently do to add to the variety of possible time travel metaphysics explored in literature. Try-to-improve-stuff-make-other-stuff-much-worse is a pretty reliable trope by this point. Stephen King's 11/22/63 (in addition to being a great novel) is still philosophically interesting though. 

      What 11/22/63 makes distressingly clear is that in King's universe Leibniz is correct that this is the best of all possible worlds. When the time-traveller goes back in time the universe supernaturally conspires (through standard horror movie tropes such as inanimate objects behaving as if they are agentive, people acting possessed, etc.) to prevent him from altering anything that would change the course of history or to put history back on track once he's altered it. When the time traveller finally beats the universe at this game, the results are catastrophic, and he then becomes part of the universe horrifically setting itself aright.

      For the poor time-traveller it is impossible* to improve history. The thought that one might improve history is only the result of ignorance.

      Again, this is not new stuff. It's one response to the problem of evil. What's new in King's book is that he shows Leibniz's conclusion to be itself horrific. It would be madness to worship whatever supernatural forces ensure that this is the best possible world. By realistically portraying the moral psychology of humans buffeted by these forces (made visible to humans by time travel) King is able to demolish the Leibnizian intuition more effectively than Voltaire.

      Reformation Theology can be summed up by three Gs: Guilt, Grace, Gratitude. For King, if this really were the best possible world, that's all the more reason to be ungrateful. We're not faced with a good God who can't do better than this (is that process theology?). But rather horrific processes that we can't understand making it impossible that things could be better. 

      [Notes:

      *To be fair, horror impossibility is not the kind of impossibility philosophers normally think about. In horror the impossible is sometimes actual. Noel Carroll comes closest to explaining how this works. Neal Hebert and I tried to expand on Carroll's analysis, but I think our account was overly epistemic. I'm going to teach Harman's book on Lovecraft next year and hopefully be able to rethink this.]

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: the last one

      After more than 3,5 years of weekly Brazilian music posts, I decided to discontinue the weekly regularity. For a number of reasons, it had become increasingly difficult for me to keep up with the rhythm (and NOT due to paucity of good Brazilian music!). I may still occasionally post when I come across or am reminded of something particularly inspiring, but it will be a ‘go with the flow’ thing rather than a weekly column. 

      For this last (regular) BMoF, I’m posting Caetano Veloso’s ‘If you hold a stone’, which I had intended to post at the very beginning of BMoF (at the time, BMoT) back in February 2011. After writing the whole text, I came to realize that the song was not available on youtube (beginner’s mistake…); for whatever reason, now it is. So if you are interested, go back and read what I wrote back then, and listen to the best song about being homesick that I know of — appropriate for a goodbye, I suppose.

      Many thanks to readers who regularly (or irregularly!) followed BMoF over the last 3,5 years; it's been great fun for me, and hopefully a bit fun for you too. Most likely, there will still be some Brazilian music here at NewAPPS, only less frequently.

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    • The Ferguson Lesson: Another Way to “Take Up Arms”

      As someone who has spent the better part of her career researching, analyzing and teaching not only about the structure and nature of oppressive power regimes, but also better and worse ways to resist or transform such regimes, I've nevertheless been unable to settle in my own mind, to my own satisfaction, my position with regard to the moral or political value of revolutionary violence.  I can say that my core moral intuitions (for whatever those are worth) definitely incline me toward favoring nonviolence as a principled ethical commitment… though, over the years, I have found those intuitive inclinations fading in both intensity and persuasiveness.  As a philosopher, a citizen and a moral agent, I continue to be deeply unsettled by my own ambivalence on this matter.

      First, a preliminary autobiographical anecdote: I spent a year between undergraduate and gradate school in the nonprofit sector, as the Director of the M.K.Gandhi Institute for the Study of Nonviolence.  (That was back in 2000, when the Gandhi Institute was still housed at Christian Brothers University in Memphis, which is now my academic home, evidencing the kind of bizarro turn-of-fate that can only be credited to some particularly clever– or ironically humorous– supernatural bureaucrat.)  I went to the Gandhi Institute initially because nonviolence was an all-but-unquestioned moral virtue for me at the time.  But, after a few years in graduate school and consistently since, the many and varied until-then-unposed questions about the moral or political legitimacy of violence pressed their way to the fore of my mind.  In roughly chronological order, I'd say that the combination of (1) my first real engagement with Frantz Fanon's argument in "Concerning Violence" (from his Wretched of the Earth), the arguments by Marx (and Marxists) in various texts advocating more or less violent revolution, and Noam Chomsky's considerations of the same, (2) my extensive research into human rights violations, transitional justice and transitional democracies, postcolonial theory, feminist theory and critical race theory, which collectively constituted the subject of my dissertation, (3) the radically dramatic shift in what counts as properly-speaking "political" and/or "revolutionary" violence in the post-9/11 world and (4) my own experiences, from near and afar, with the increasing number of (threatened, proto-, aborted, defeated and/or more-or-less successful) revolutions taking place in my adult lifetime (e.g., OWS, the Arab Spring and, much closer to home and far less violent, the current and ongoing academic revolution surrounding the Salaita case), all worked together to contribute to my rethinking the merits and demerits of violence as a way of resisting/combatting/correcting oppressive, exclusionary or otherwise unjust power regimes.

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    • Steven Salaita And The Feminist Professor Who Praised Valerie Solanas

      Here is a story of a professor, whose tweets got her into trouble.

      The professor in question is a feminist, Professor F, sometimes termed ‘radical’ by her friends, colleagues, and academic foes for her uncompromisingly feminist scholarship and her vigorous, no-nonsense rhetorical style, which is well-versed in the demolition of putative rebuttals to feminist theory and keenly honed by vigorous participation in political polemical debate. She has a distinguished record in scholarship, excellent teaching evaluations–from male and female students alike (though some unkind ones did call her “a typical nut-cracking feminazi”), and found, by dint of these accomplishments, a cohort of scholars and students who admire her work.

      One day, after reading in the news about yet another atrocity committed on women–perhaps a gang-rape by fraternity or football team members who then broadcast their deeds on social media networks, perhaps an obnoxious radio host leading a cheerleading squad of listeners terming women who use contraceptives ‘sluts’, perhaps a story like the Rotherham child abuse case. Today she is fuming; she is tired and dispirited–all that scholarship, all that debate, and the world continues on its merry misogynistic ways; this is the worst of all possible Groundhog Days–the same abuse, the same mealy-mouthed exculpations, the same offensive, tone-deaf defenses.

      She goes to her office, grabs her cup of coffee, and checks into Twitter. Her timeline is abuzz–her friends are talking about the latest case, posting links from journalists and bloggers, all weighing in with their considered opinions. Some even post links from clueless male politicians, offering their usual insensitive, sexist responses to the latest fiasco.

      The outraged, intemperate tweets follow:

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    • A ‘mathematical’ approach to the usefulness of blogs

      I expect many readers to be following the ongoing debate, prompted by a poll run by Leiter last week, on the (presumed) effects that blogs have had for professional philosophy, both at the level of content and at the level of ‘issues in the profession’. (Roberta Millistein weights in at NewAPPS, and I agree with pretty much everything she says; another summary at Feminist Philosophers.) Now, there is a sense in which I am personally not in a good position to have an opinion on this, simply because I haven’t been around long enough to know what it was like before, and thus to be able to draw an informed conclusion. But I can say that my very process of becoming a professional philosopher (not so much content-wise perhaps, but in terms of deciding on the kind of professional I wanted to be) was considerably influenced by reading in particular the Feminist Philosophers blog. Also, I won’t deny that my career as a whole has tremendously benefited from my blogging activity at NewAPPS and at M-Phi, both in terms of the opportunity to discuss my ideas with a larger number of people than would otherwise have been possible, and (more pragmatically) simply in terms of increased visibility and reputation. 

      But obviously, my individual experience (or that of other bloggers) is not what is under discussion presently; rather, the question is whether blogs have been good for the profession as a whole. This, however, is obviously a multi-faceted question; it may for example be read as pertaining to the quality of the scholarship produced, to be measured by some suitably ‘objective’ criterion. (As a matter of fact, I do believe that blogs have been ‘good’ for philosophy in this sense, for reasons outlined here for example.) But it may also pertain to the overall wellbeing of members of the profession, in which case the putative effect blogs will have had could be conceived of in terms of a simple formula: for each member the profession (I is the set of all professional philosophers), estimate the net gain (or loss) in professional wellbeing by comparing their situation before (wb) and after (wa) the advent of blogs; add it all up, and divide the total by the number of members considered. 

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    • Cassandro’s Big Fight (hat tip Andrew Sullivan)

      Fantastic New Yorker article here about gay luchador Cassandro, with an explanation of the exótico wrestling arechetype and how it fits into lucha libre. The video at right is great too.

    • Philosophy Is Incredibly White — but This Does Not Make It Unusual Among the Humanities

      Tina Fernandes Botts and colleagues have recently posted a fascinating analysis of the shockingly low numbers of black- or African-American- identified philosophers in the United States. According to their data, 1.3% of U.S. philosophers self-identify as black (compared to 13% in the general U.S. population).

      Now I was all set today to work up some speculations on why philosophy is so different from the other humanities and social sciences in this regard (a favorite hypothesis: a disciplinary addiction to the cult of genius plus a high degree of implicit bias in anointing geniuses). Then I went to the Survey of Earned Doctorates to look up some of the raw data. There, I found that the overwhelming whiteness of philosophy is not so unusual among the humanities, if one digs down into the subfield data.

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    • Salaita, Academics and Social Media

      Mark Graber (Law and Government, Maryland) has an interesting post up on the Salaita case and academic culture over at Balkinization.  Here's the paragraph that jumped out at me, as I haven't seen this particular point made before:

      Each year, more and more pressure seems to be put on faculty to spend less time on traditional forms of publishing and rely more on social media in which significant incentives often exist for vulgar, juvenile, and insulting speech (I’ve never been told I should be especially careful to avoid such temptations).  Take a look at the website of many law schools and other academic institutions.  Many strongly suggest that the way to gain fame and respect at the institution is through the social media or other outlets where eight second soundbites are norm and footnotes forbidden.  More and more of my friends who do traditional, lots of footnotes, scholarship complain that they have fewer and fewer friends (if any) in the administration and they are becoming the first to be asked about buyouts.  In short, Salaita strikes me as doing exactly what a great many professors are now doing to get ahead in our professions.  Having pressured us to get on the social media, the administrators at our universities can hardly complain if we adopt the conventions of the social media rather than what I think are the better norms of academic discourse.

      In other words, and in a perverse sense, Salaita is being unhired for doing precisely what new academic norms and academic institutional imperatives of "relevance" encourage.

    • Why philosophy blogs have been useful

      Here are some reasons I have found philosophy blogs to be beneficial; here I include New APPS (so my bias is obvious), but my comments here are not limited to New APPS, by any means.

      First, while I had heard stories here and there of sexism and exclusion of other underrepresented minorities, they seemed like isolated incidents.  One could brush them off as the occasional jerk, and think that we didn't need to worry about them as a profession.  Because of philosophy blogs, it has now become abundantly clear that we do need to worry about the treatment and the exclusion of women, people of color, people with disabilities, people who are LGBT, etc.  And we have started to see changes in the profession to address these longstanding problems.

      Second, philosophy blogs have provided a way to share and discuss issues in the profession that aren't directly related to exclusion, but are important to discuss anyway.  My recent post on methods for anonymizing papers is a small, if unexciting example of that.

      Third, philosophy blogs have provided a way to disseminate news and information (e.g., statistics).

      Last but not least, philosophy blogs aren't just about the profession; they are also about philosophy.  They have provided a format for wider dispersal and discussion of philosophical issues.  This couldn't have come at a better time; philosophy had been becoming increasingly siloed.  I think it's still pretty siloed, but blogging has made connections between philosophers that wouldn't have occurred otherwise and let philosophers know about work that they wouldn't have known about otherwise.

      Of course, we can all think of postings on philosophy blogs that we found objectionable/harmful or comments that we found objectionable/harmful.  On balance, I still think they have done more good than harm.

    • Wow, Eddie Vedder has a good pair of pipes

      When I watch this I realize how stupid I was to take to heart Cobain's* claim that Pearl Jam was the 90's version of Boston. In this performance he's not doing that Jim Morrisony thing that he did in Pearl Jam's first album and that the lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots did too.

      It's pretty powerful stuff, and wonderful to watch Roger Waters digging so much Vedder's performance. I'm going to go dig through Peral Jam's back catalog now.

      [*DNA testing reveals that Cobain and I  share Gospatric, Earl of Northumbria** as an ancestor. All of the extant Cogburns and Cobains descended from him. This isn't actually that weird though; if you go back far enough any two people share a common ancestor. . . It would be nice if this fact led us to treat one another more nicely.

      **One of the many lords in Saxon England whom the Normans displaced. The wikipedia article on the "harrying of the north" is pretty good. William the Conqueror was a real bastard. No less an authority than Orderic Vitalis wrote:

      The King stopped at nothing to hunt his enemies. He cut down many people and destroyed homes and land. Nowhere else had he shown such cruelty. This made a real change.

      To his shame, William made no effort to control his fury, punishing the innocent with the guilty. He ordered that crops and herds, tools and food be burned to ashes. More than 100,000 people perished of starvation.

      I have often praised William in this book, but I can say nothing good about this brutal slaughter. God will punish him.

      I remain obsessed with the Saxons, the very week they finally defeated the Vikings they were invaded by the Normans. Then a somewhat crap 80's hair metal band was named after them. Can it get much worse?]