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Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

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    • Cool conference on analytical existentialism

      I'm breaking our policy* of not posting calls for papers for three reasons: (1) two friends of the blog are involved in this, (2) the topic concerns things we've blogged about at newapps before, and (3) crossover material is part of this blog's raison d'etre (prounounce that like Joe Bob Briggs would).

      The department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium, is pleased to host a workshop on "Analytical Existentialism," October 20–21, 2014
      Keynote: LA Paul (UNC): "Transformative Experiences"

      We welcome abstracts on topics related to Analytical Existentialism, which is the use of an analytical style to investigate topics that matter to us as human beings capable of feelings and anxieties or joys while doing justice to our first-person (even phenomenological) perspective. In particular, we welcome papers that instantiate and theorize Analytical Existentialism (and its history) as well as criticize it. In addition, we welcome papers on transformative experiences from any perspective, including phenomenological and other non-analytical traditions.

       
      Please send abstracts (maximum 500 words) to Eric Schliesser by August 15.
      Cool stuff!
       
      [*The exception who proves the rule!]

    • Yosef Kirman – After The Blockade (A Chronicle)

      Gaza-damage
      Who is the hidden one? The last one here? After the blockade?
      Who, in the violated courtyard, walks around on feathers of torn bedding,
      strewn about,
      Who walks on wrecked crockery and kitchen gear, thrown, broken, of no human use?
      and too on family photographs of those driven from their homes ,pursued
      to be destroyed?
      The armoire is turned round and the person gunned down, lies at the open door,
      but his wife and children, those he loved, still live,
      they were just now brought to the Umschlag Platz,
      and they receive, as promised would be parceled out,
      a two kilo bread for every head-;
      God how long will their lives endure in your care? How long?
      And this tragedy goes on day after day? Day after day?

    • Vico and Nietzsche

      Gary Shaprio raised the issue of the relationship between Nietzsche and Vico in the comment thread of my recent post on Vico (comments 2 and 5), and that is a topic well worth exploring a bit further. I've looked at it in the past in my personal blog, but too far back to bring in thoughts I've had in the last year, which has included some intense study of both Vico's  New Science and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. I won't get into the exact lines of possible influence, because that really is deep and complicated work on the detail of intellectual history, though also it must be said if not carried out in the right spirit it carries the danger of ignoring the elements of diffusion, convergence, and relayed unconscious influence in the history of philosophy. Or maybe that is just my justification for making big comparisons and not working so much on the details of intellectual transmission. 

      (more…)

    • Types of men that can’t sit still

      1. Leg bouncers – Tend to bounce at a rhythm of around ten times per second, achieved by pressing and releasing the forward part of the metatarsals on the floor while the calcaneus remains consistently raised.
      2. Foot bouncers – Legs are crossed, and the tallus of the raised foot is held still, while the phalanges move side to side at about ten cycles per second.
      3. Thigh massagers – Feet are ususally flat on the floor, and knees move closer together and further apart at a rate of about three times per second.  Each knee moves horizontally about three to five inches each half cycle with the average distance between the knees somewhere between one and a little over two feet, depending on the particular man who can't sit still's style of thigh massage.
      4. Foot rotators – Langorous, veering into laconicity, phalanges make a slow circle at about once per second.
      5. Gum chewers – Styles may vary.

    • Probability in Many Worlds: Is the cart in front of the horse?

      I know a few regular readers of this blog have views about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.   I want to ask a question about what is supposed to be the response to a basic worry about a whole family of approaches.  (David Wallace's recent book would be an obvious case, but so would Sean Carrol's recent contributions.)

       

      The many worlds interpretation basically says that whenever you make a "meausurement" in QM, (say you have a particle that is spin up in the y direction and you measure spin in the x direction,) the world contintues to evolve according to the Schroedinger equation, and the only thing that makes it look like the measurement has a determinate outcome is that the world splits into two emergent worlds, with an emergent observer in each one.    The trick of all this, of course, is to somehow explain why there is probability when all of the outcomes are occuring.  One problem I have with all of these attempts to get probability out of  is that they all go like this.

      1. Assume decoherence gets you branches in some preferred basis.
      2. Give an argument that the Born rule applied to the amplitudes of these branches yields something worthy of the name ‘probability.’

      The problem is that these steps happen in the reverse order that one would like them to happen.

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    • Yisroel Rabon – Pain

      IndexDo you know the pain of women you sometimes see flying
      on carts with bottles of vitriol in fingers that burn?

      Do you know the sorrow of strong wild madmen,
      when hoses of water stream on their bare necks?

      Do you know the hatred to life of people dying
      with a rope on their neck and a bullet in their skull?

      Do you know the grief of children from beds of sin,
      who are found strangled in toilets?

      Do you know the pain of waxen fading lips
      of the dying who no longer have strength to sob?

      Can you fathom the pain of pregnant mothers
      who in their bellies carry dead children?

    • Yehuda Amichai – The Diameter of the Bomb

      1406578934541.cachedThe diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
      and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
      with four dead and eleven wounded.
      And around these, in a larger circle
      of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
      and one graveyard. But the young woman
      who was buried in the city she came from,
      at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
      enlarges the circle considerably,
      and the solitary man mourning her death
      at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
      includes the entire world in the circle.
      And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
      that reaches up to the throne of God and
      beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.

    • Happy Birthday, Paul’s Boutique! (hat tip Joshua Heller)

      Twenty five years ago today, the last great example of an artform destroyed by the Disney copywrite regime.The band members are still being sued for the sampling.

      I was going to post one of the videos from the album, but MCA would have preferred the video at right.

    • Privacy, Chastisement and Biopower

      I’m teaching a course on privacy and surveillance this fall, and one of the things I’ve been doing is reading up on aspects of privacy theory that I didn’t know much about, such as the feminist critique of privacy.  The basic feminist argument is that “family privacy” has been historically used as a cover to shield domestic abuse from legal scrutiny (and not only against women – see this disturbing Supreme Court case about a stepfather who beat a four year old into serious and permanent cognitive disability; the Rhenquist Court argues that state social services had no enforceable obligation to intervene because of family privacy).  It is in this context that I ran across Reva Siegel’s (Law, Yale) fantastic article on the way that claims of domestic privacy emerged out of the collapse of a husband’s legal right to “chastise” (beat) his wife.  Siegel’s larger purpose is to study the ways that legal reforms can serve to “modernize” status regimes, a process in which old hierarchies are given new justifications and (perhaps) weakened, but not eliminated.  It’s not that the legal reforms don’t achieve anything – it’s that it’s very, very difficult to dismantle regimes of social privilege, and that (as Foucault noted), power always entails resistance.

      Here, I want to focus briefly on the move from chastisement to privacy, because I think it suggests something important for our understanding of biopolitics.  As Siegel outlines it, the basic story is that, over the course of the nineteenth century, a couple of groups made substantial inroads into the old common law right of chastisement: temperance groups used stories of horrific abuse of women by drunk husbands to advocate banning alcohol, and feminist groups use the same stories to advocate for the banning of wife-beating.  The feminists eventually won, and a pair of state supreme court cases around 1870 (one in Alabama and one in North Carolina) emphatically – perhaps a little too emphatically – pronounced wife beating to be the unwelcome vestige of a primitive, bygone era.

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    • Got Water? (part n)

      Shocking report here on how bad the California ground water situation is to go along with the terrible drought conditions.  Groundwater is the only thing keeping California afloat, so to speak, through the last 3 consecutive years of drought.