So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned, both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake, and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets the trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
recent posts
- (Very) Early Foucault on Humanism, Part 4: Kant, Anthropology, and Departing from Heidegger
- (Very) Early Foucault on Humanism, Part 3: Heidegger and Foucault on Kant
- AI Literacy Paper
- (Very) Early Foucault on Humanism, Part 2: Heidegger?
- (Very) Early Foucault on Humanism, Part 1: From Order back to Lille
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Last year we announced the launch of Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy. Today is the grand day of the publication of Ergo’s very first issue, with four amazing papers. To commemorate this occasion, the Ergo editors asked four distinguished philosophers each to comment on one of the four papers by means of blog posts. These are:
- Julia Jorati (OSU) on a paper in early modern by Paul Lodge (Oxford), at The Mod Squad.
- Anna Mahtani (LSE) on a paper by Michael Caie (Pittsburgh), at Choice and Inference and M-Phi.
- Ellen Clark (Oxford) on a paper in philosophy of biology by Christopher Hitchcock (Caltech) and Joel Velasco (Texas Tech), at Philosomama.
- Thomas Nadelhoffer (Charleston) on a paper in experimental philosophy by John Turri (Waterloo), at Experimental Philosophy.
We hope you will enjoy the papers as well as the commentaries. Ergo remains of course open for submissions in all areas of philosophy, so do send us your best papers!
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It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fulttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory with stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.
It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.
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Back in March, I wrote a long piece about the effects of institutional debt on the current, destructive trends in U.S. Higher Education. In the same vein, there's a new article by Michelle Chen up at The Nation discussing a new report by the Debt and Society group called Borrowing Against the Future: The Hidden Costs of Financing U.S. Higher Education.
The report concerns the ways in which debt manifests itself throughout the system, and how these various forms are tied to one another—thus the titlte of Chen's piece "Colleges Are Buying Stuff They Can’t Afford and Making Students Pay For It." But Chen is right to highlight the institutional debt side of the equation, which has been overlooked despite the fact that it appears to be a structural driver for other forms of debt and institutional disinvestment in education, etc. She also emphasizes the degree to which one of the most pernicious consequenes of rising debt: the degree to which it makes even public institutions essentially subservient bond ratings agencies.
In the long run, however, these amenities often don’t pay off in terms of revenue for the schools, which grow increasingly beholden to bond investors. Those financiers, in turn, often favor not the highest-quality schools but rather “the safest prospects for investment.” Because of market pressures, the researchers warn, “bond markets can reward behaviors that generate greater revenue but are at odds with the goals of public higher education.” In other words, do you want your university’s future budget projections dictated by a Moody’s rating?
Or, as I've been arguing for awhile, rising institutional debt is what is making 'revenue at any cost' into a management imperative that trumps all others and essentially stripping institutional leaders of the freedom to make management decisions on the basis considerations like their institutions' primary missions, the best interests of their faculty, staff and students, etc. I urge folks to read the whole piece.
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Of course, the rise of fascism all across Europe has many causes and origins. But is the monetary union pushing a critical mass over the edge in a dangerous way?
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One of the worst things about WWE's "attitude era" was that parents had very good reasons not to let their kids watch professional wrestling. The story-lines went beyond R rated and were often morally reprehensible as well. The promotion also at times seemed to be competing with ECW to see who could injure the most wrestlers.
It's been very nice to see something of a return to the classical mode (Roland Barthes' titanic struggle between good and evil) these last few years. As a "smart fan" I'm not supposed to appreciate John Cena, but maybe being a parent has changed this. The guy's never been afraid to do gimmicky stuff to appeal to children (part of why he alienated smart fans) and as part of that he's never taken a heel turn in over a decade. His work with the Make a Wish foundation has been indefatigable (over 300 visits), going well beyond what would be required if it was just a work.* I also think he helped change things where you could have an old fashioned face like Daniel Bryan actually get over with the kids and the smart fans.
Anyhow, the most Cena-centric Froggy Fresh video after the jump (second verse is sort of sexist, only sort of because partially satirizing his own incompetence with respect to standard rap music sexist tropes):
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I’ve written a few posts in the recent past questioning the whole idea of anonymous peer-review as a reliable guide to quality – in philosophy as well as elsewhere. In other disciplines, there have been numerous recent cases of ‘false positives’, i.e. papers which made it through the peer-review process but then were discovered to be fundamentally flawed after they were published (leading to a very large number of retractions).
The issue with false positives is well known, but as I’ve suggested in some of my previous posts, the issue of false negatives is equally serious, or perhaps even more serious, and yet it tends to be under-appreciated. A recent piece by JP de Ruiter, a psycholinguist at the University of Bielefeld, articulates very nicely why it is serious, and why it remains essentially invisible.
The two main goals of a review system are to minimize both the number of bad studies that are accepted for publication and the number of good studies that are rejected for publication. Borrowing terminology of signal detection theory, let’s call these false positives and false negatives respectively.
It is often implicitly assumed that minimizing the number of false positives is the primary goal of APR. However, signal detection theory tells us that reducing the number of false positives inevitably leads to an increase in the rate of false negatives. I want to draw attention here to the fact that the cost of false negatives is both invisible and potentially very high. It is invisible, obviously, because we never get to see the good work that was rejected for the wrong reasons. And the cost is high, because it removes not only good papers from our scientific discourse, but also entire scientists. […] The inherent conservatism in APR means that people with new, original approaches to old problems run the risk of being shut out, humiliated, and consequently chased away from academia. In the short term, this is to the advantage of the established scientists who do not like their work to be challenged. In the long run, this is obviously very damaging for science. This is especially true of the many journals that will only accept papers that receive unanimously positive reviews. These journals are not facilitating scientific progress, because work with even the faintest hint of controversy is almost automatically rejected.
With all this in mind, it is somewhat surprising that APR also fails to keep out many obviously bad papers.
New APPS 