In less than a week from now, the opening match of the World Cup will take place, between Brazil and Croatia. Inevitably, the World Cup exposes spectators to a variety of national anthems from around the world – many of which we’d be just as well not having to listen to. To be honest, the Brazilian national anthem is not particularly beautiful, especially as the lyrics contain the usual dose of chauvinism; but in an instrumental version, here with the virtuoso mandolin player Hamilton de Holanda, it actually sounds surprisingly good.
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
-
10. You can get an accepted but-not-yet-published paper read right away, without waiting for those sometimes lengthy publication times.
9. You can increase the visibility of your work because
a) PhilSci-Archive articles score highly in Google searches and
b) sites like PhilPapers scan PhilSci-Archive and will include links to your papers automatically.8. You can get feedback on a work-in-progress from a wider audience than just the couple of people you can think to email.
7. Your work can be read, for free, by anyone, even those without institutional library access.
6. Work that was presented, but never published, can be made accessible.
5. Papers in those harder-to-obtain volumes will be more widely accessible.
4. If you are in an underrepresented area of philosophy of science or are an author in an underrepresented group in philosophy of science, you can help to increase the visibility of your area or your group. [Right now, the papers are disproportionately in philosophy of physics – you can help change that].
3. PhilSci-Archive is a non-profit organization – like PhilPapers, but unlike, say, Academia.edu or Research Gate. You can feel good about contributing to its flourishing.
2. After posting your articles, you can linger a bit and check out some of the good work that is there already, including conference papers and (in a new venture) open source journals. Or you can sign up for an email subscription, the Twitter feed, or the Facebook page.
1. It's cool, and all the cool kids are doing it. You can be cool, too.
-
Eric Schwitzgebel recently took up the question of whether an infinitely extended life must be boring. The discussion ended (when I looked at it) with Eric’s fruitfully suggesting that we look at various cognitive architectures and their capacities for boredom over the long run.
No doubt there are many kinds of minds. Let’s radically simplify the problem, in hopes of arriving at a precise answer for at least one case. (After all, if a mind without much to think about can escape boredom, then presumably a more amply stocked mind can too.) The mind I want consider thinks only of natural numbers and number theory (algebraic and analytic). Its “perceptions” consist in presentations of random natural numbers. Will it be bored? -
I have a new theory of the jerk, just out in Aeon.
The piece uses the term “idiot” in several places to characterize how the jerk sees the world: “I’m important, and I’m surrounded by idiots!” In light of Shelley Tremain‘s remarks to me about the history of the word “idiot”, I’m wondering whether I should have avoided it. I’d be interested in the thoughts of NewAPPS folks about this. In my mind, it is exactly the sort of word the jerk is prone to use, and how he is prone to think of people — and of course he thinks of people in offensive ways and won’t be bothered by offensive terms unless that’s his particular moral high horse. So there’s a conflict now between my desire to capture the worldview of the jerk with phenomenological accuracy and my newly heightened sensitivity to the historical associations of that particular word.
[illustration by Paul Blow]
-
At the CHE, with discussion, here:
- Never give copies of your books to friends and family.
- Never call students by their first names.
- Never try to be cool.
- Never lament the building of new football stadiums rather than new library wings.
- Never become an administrator.
- Never allow the Internet in the classroom.
- Never teach a class outdoors.
- Never refer to yourself by the title "Dr."—unless you are a real doctor.
- Never confuse a syllabus with reality.
- Never turn down a plum administrative position.
Rod Dreher is soliciting additions to the list. I would add: (11) Never become visibly angry in the classroom, and (12) Never try to influence your students' political beliefs.
-
Shortly after elections to the European Parliament, and in the midst of political jostling over the name of the next President of the Commision, is a timing that makes a post on European politics and the idea of Europe timely, though the issues are constantly with us and I suspect that problems in the European Union will keep it constantly in the news. What looks like serious legitimacy problems for the European Union also has the consequence of creating a European public opinion of a kind, in that Europe is in the news across the nations of the continent.
One theoretical approach to Europe seems to me very much questioned though advocates presumably will not think so. That is the approach of Habermas, who has become the uncrowned philosophical prince of the European Union. The radical egalitarian who makes some claims to some continuity with Marxism is invited to speak events with the highest EU dignitaries present and so appears to be de facto accepted by the European centre right as well as the more left inclined, as the philosophical voice of the European project. His version of Neo-Marxism, Post-Marxism, Liberal-Marxist fusionism, or however else his thought is best described, is an interesting case of apparent radical critique becoming part of the self-understanding of an elite. His emphasis on the rationality and ethics of political discourse evidently has some appeal to those who make a living from the European Union, and researchers close to that world. The thinking of such people (and I have been personally acquainted with some) is very much along the lines that the EU institutions represent reason and informed decisions making, while strong criticism reflects 'populist' ignorance, stereotyping, and scapegoating.
-
Very nice report from the folks at Debt and Society here about higher ed's tango with Wall Street. Lot's of distressing stuff, including the change from old fashioned bonds to newer, more risky types of debt:
Private and public colleges in the past more commonly issued municipal bonds that would be repaid using only tax revenue or revenue from a particular project like a dormitory. Investment banking houses like JP Morgan and Barclays today have helped some higher education institutions to issue general revenue bonds that collateralize all college revenue in exchange for lower interest rates. Such bonds pledge state appropriations, project revenue, and even future tuition increases if necessary to repay bonds. Other institutions have gone a step further, adding variable rate bonds to their debt mix. Other institutions still, from Harvard to the Peralta Community College district have securitized these variable rate bond offerings with derivatives known as interest rate swaps. For-profit institutions, on the other hand can turn to corporate bonds, stock offerings, and private equity capital.
There is also a nice history of higher education financing, describing how and why student and institutional indebtedness has exploded recently. In one decade alone the amount of institutional debt has tripled, much of it spent on new buildings and things related to athletics programs. It's a vicious circle. Colleges take out loans to expand amenities to attract students who will pay higher tuition, which requires raising tuition to pay off the debt, which requires expanding amenities, which requires taking out loans to expand amenities. . .*
It's a very weird thing to have happened right after the financial crisis that caused the current recession.** Maybe not that weird though. . . If history teaches anything it's that very smart people can collectively do very stupid things.
[*Also remember that, as recounted here, universities with the highest paid administrators and coaches also are the worst at larding their students up with debt and adjunctifying the faculty.
**Also, check out Ed's piece from March here, which has a nice discussion of how the expanded institutional indebtedness ends up dictating administrative policy.]
-
Must an infinitely continued life inevitably become boring? Bernard William famously answers yes; John Fischer no. Fischer’s case is perhaps even more easily made than he suggests — but its very ease opens up new issues.
Consider Neil Gaiman’s story “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories” (yes, that’s the name of one story):
He nodded and grinned. “Ornamental carp. Brought here all the way from China.”
We watched them swim around the little pool.”I wonder if they get bored.”
He shook his head. “My grandson, he’s an ichthyologist, you know what that is?”
“Studies fishes.”
“Uh-huh. He says they only got a memory that’s like thirty seconds long. So they swim around the pool, it’s always a surprise to them, going ‘I’ve never been here before.’ They meet another fish they known for a hundred years, they say, ‘Who are you, stranger?’”
-
Its pretty damning. The most appalling behavior, in my opinion, is the manner in which he threw the people below him under the bus to protect his fraudulent findings.
New APPS 