The article by Atlantic Monthly Senior Editor Rebecca Rosen is HERE.
Pretty Cool! De Cruz's posts actually produced postive national coverage of academic philosophy. The Rosen article is currently at the top of their web page.
recent posts
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 9): Alienation and Historicity in Logic and Existence
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 8): The Marx of Logic and Existence
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 7): Hegel via Heidegger
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 6): Logic and Existence, Nature and Subject
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 5): Alienation and Dictatorship
about
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Check out all the people chewing around the 4:00 minute mark of the video at right. I don't get this. Close ups of people eating are disgusting, yet they form a fairly reliable trope in LSD movies.
If you've suffered through the entire Magical Mystery Tour movie, then the infamous spaghetti scene is traumatically imprinted in your mind (if you dare, go to the thirty minute mark at the video here). Or consider the Mad Hatter scene of the Ringo Starr directed T-Rex documentary where the band's tamborine/conga drum player and a group of nuns masticate wildly to the T-Rex's Jeepster. Yuck. Why? Why? Why? Or consider the amount of gratuitous eating in Easy Rider, the old man's farm, the commune, and the diner with the rednecks that end up beating Jack Nicholson's character to death.
Interestingly, the pivotal scene in Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas also occurs in a diner. Benicio Del Toro's character's bullying of the waitress completely changes the tone and reality intrudes on what had to that point been an absurdist escape. Fear and Loathing isn't really a drug movie in the sense of classic LSD movies, or even Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (Vitamin B injections). In classic drug movies, some large subset of the performers and off-camera people are abusing the substance themselves. Unfortunately, this tends to eliminate the aesthetic distance necessary for making something non-horrible. Clearly, Gilliam gets this, and thus we can see that the food scene in his movie works as an implicit critique of the trope and its associated genre.
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The biggest policy issue of the moment is the Euro, which it can be said without much controversy needs some form of fiscal integrationism, or federalism, to stabilise it. That means Eurobank bonds and a stronger Eurobank. There is no chance of the UK being part of the setup without a very big change in attitude, which is not likely to come before the end of a period to be measured in decades. Something similar applies to Denmark and Sweden. Germany is clearly not eager to be in the position, as the major payer for the European Uni0n, where it is bearing the responsibility for debt in less prudent or less fortunate countries, so some major changes are necessary to make the liabilities acceptable. Of course it is already implicitly liable and has acted accordingly, but there needs to be structural changes and more explicit policies to create a situation acceptable to all.
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Near the end of summer the LSU philosophy reading group is going to begin reading things on vagueness. We're going to start with Rosanna Keefe's excellent Theories of Vagueness, which gives an excellent overview of the state of the field circa 2000.
We don't really know where to go from there, since so much has been done in the ensuing 14 years. Are there any more recent books that achieve what Keefe managed, presenting an overview of the state of the field? Barring that, are there a handful of more recent canonical texts that one must cover to get reasonably up to date? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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One of the worst things that can happen to someone is that they become so powerful in their field that the community no longer works as a check on their behavior. We should pity their victims more, but we should also have some sympathy for people like Dov Charney and Terry Richardson. Who in their right mind would want to be so controlled by the awful desire to control?
Reformed Christianity speaks to this. Not only do we believe in Calvin's (insert Schopenhauer if theism isn't your bag) "depravity of man" thesis, but we also believe that the solution involves moral communities willing to publicly call people on their depraved behavior (Presbyterians call this "discipline").
When I screw up even in little ways there are lots of people near and far who publicly call me on it. I don't know what kind of monster I'd be if I had the resources to silence them.*
Academics are a little bit like the fashion industry, like rock and rollers, like dictators. We have this awful cult of genius where someone's awfulness can be evidence that they deserve to get away with being awful. I don't know if philosophy is worse than other fields in this respect.
[*UPDATE 7/7/2014 I removed a parenthetical involving people who threaten lawsuits that some readers with justice took to be both unfair and passive-aggressive. When writing it, I didn't mean for this post to single out one person. But we know what good intentions pave. And to be honest, while writing it I was pretty depressed about the latest brouhaha concerning Brian Leiter reacting to criticism in ways that strike me as frankly abusive. So the criticism is fair.
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A Portuguese colleague (who has good reasons to remain anonymous) has brought to our attention some very important and worrisome recent events/developments pertaining to research funding in Portugal and Europe, which are described below. Academics in Europe (and also outside Europe) wil do well to pay close attention to these developments.
UPDATE: Perhaps my original phrasing was ambiguous, so to be clear: I am not the author of the post below, rather it is a guest post by the Portuguese colleague in question.
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This post serves as a warning, and a plea for help, to academics around Europe.
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It’s Friday evening, so I’m just in time for another BMoF. The reason for the ‘delay’ is that I just came back from Munich, and the notorious paucity of German youtube did not allow for a timely BMoF. But it was also in Munich that I finally got to meet Steven French, who besides being an accomplished philosopher of science and the editor of a ‘small, provincial journal’ (his words), is a big fan of Brazilian music. (He lived in Brazil for some time in the 1980s.) I asked Steven what his request would be for today’s BMoF, and his answer was: ‘Faroeste Caboclo’ (1987). It is an interesting choice: an extremely long song, with even longer lyrics (not a single line gets repeated), by a band that was hugely popular in my youth, Legião Urbana. (I posted a few songs by them a few years ago.) After the tragic death of leader Renato Russo (a victim of AIDS) in 1996, the band ceased to exist, but their music remains immensely popular among successions of younger generations.
‘Faroeste Caboclo’ tells the story of João de Santo Cristo, a criminal who ends up dying as a hero. The story is so elaborate that a whole movie was recently made based on the song. Below I am posting a video of the song illustrated with scenes from the movie, so that gives listeners who do not understand Portuguese at least an idea of what the whole thing is about. So all in all, a terrific suggestion by Steven, who I hope will like the video I'm posting below.
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I recently signed a pledge with the aim of being more respectful toward my colleagues and of trying to uphold a culture of respectfulness in our profession. Following conversation over a previous post, I have come to the belief that I should provide a safe space for people to discuss departmental rankings in philosophy. When I made critical comments at the Leiter Blog on the inclusion of women among the rankers of the PGR in 2011 as a graduate student, I felt shut down. My comments were edited without permission in a way that made me appear less reasonable, while the original post and other comments were edited to make my interlocutors appear more reasonable. I think that it is healthy to evaluate ranking methodologies critically and openly and I think that there must be a public space for this. Since I have already earned the ire of those who appear to be opposed to a public discussion, I am a good candidate for putting forward a post that will allow for discussion. I will thus allow anonymous postings and will aim to respect that anonymity both privately and publicly (except when required by law or conscience to do otherwise).
I will start with some of my own thoughts: I think that reputational information is helpful and important, but that it would be better to combine this information with data on placement, publications, and other such objective measures. (With this in mind, I sent my original findings on the job market to Brian Leiter and Kieran Healy in April 2012 without response.) An ideal ranking, in my mind, would be customizable. The viewer would have to choose metrics before a ranking would be created. I am open on what the relevant metrics might be. This is where you come in. Should we have rankings at all? What metrics do prospective graduate students care about (a variety of voices is of value here)? How should this work be completed, and by whom? Comments that appear to violate the norm of respectfulness will not be admitted as is, but anonymity is both welcomed and encouraged. Update: commentators should feel free to leave off their email addresses when posting comments.
Update: Creating (or updating) a ranking of this kind, with multiple objective values, is beyond my current capabilities. I fully and wholeheartedly welcome someone with more time and competence than me to take on this task. Better yet, I think, would be a task force involving those familiar with the PGR, since they already have lots of expertise. I am welcoming discussion here not because I plan to create a new ranking, but because I think it is important to have a discussion about all such rankings in the open. I am limiting my personal contribution to the placement data for now.
New APPS 