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    • Great Sam Wheeler interview

      If Derrida's Baby Boomer detractors were correct about him being a charlatan, then thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Sam Wheeler, Lee Braver, and Martin Hagglund would have to be the lowest kinds of carny marks, about as gullible as the professional wrestling connoisseur from the American South who has yet to cotton on to the fact that the match endings are predetermined. You can always pick out this type because he tells you during intermission just what he's going to do if CM Punk tries to shave his kid's head.

      Wheeler's Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy probably did the most to help me get over the analytic/continental culture wars that I saw so many of my undergraduate professors wage. But Wheeler's recent NeoDavidsonian Metaphysics (the introduction is available here) looks fascinating independent of that context.

      Check out this recent 3AM magazine interview, (hat tip Leiter*) where Wheeler articulates the connections between Davidson and Derrida. It's fascinating stuff, making explicit a number of issues sympathetic readers of Rorty will have already sort of suspected:

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    • In memoriam: Sandra Bem

      Another sad loss this week: psychologist Sandra Bem, a pioneer in the empirical study of gender roles, passed away on Tuesday, May 20th. Here is the most complete obituary I could find so far, which details nicely her scientific contributions and the practical impact they had in gender policies. For example, it was largely based on her scientific work that the infamous practice of segregating classified job listings under "Male Help Wanted" and "Female Help Wanted" columns was finally abandoned, after a 1973 decision of the US Supreme Court ruling against the practice. (The case was against a particular press, but within a year all other newspapers in the country changed how their classified ads were listed.)

      There are many other aspects of Sandra Bem’s life and work worth mentioning, but let me focus on two of them. As an undergraduate in 1965, she met Daryl Bem, then a young assistant professor, and a romantic relationship between them began. (Yes, there are successful stories too, apparently…) Initially, she did not want to get married, as this course of events seemed to preclude the professional path she had in mind for herself. But Daryl was not deterred, and so together they agreed on an arrangement that would allow her to flourish professionally, and which would basically consist in what is now known as equally shared parenting – an ideal that many couples aspire to, but which remains a challenge to implement (speaking from personal experience!). The ‘experiment’ was largely successful, and Sandra narrates all the ups and downs of raising two children (a boy and a girl) on this model in her 1998 book An Unconventional Family. (I’ve been meaning to read the book for years, and now may well be the time to stop procrastinating.)

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    • A minor annoyance with “Breaking Bad” – Biomedical Ethics Edition

       There is a story told about “Breaking Bad”* and our healthcare system, and it goes like this: “Breaking Bad” demonstrates what’s broken (less so now with the ACA perhaps, but perhaps not) about the healthcare system in the U.S.  Walter had to go in the meth business in order to pay for his healthcare costs.  Had Walter not stepped up, meth money in hand, Hank would never have walked again.  For-profit insurance ensures that the people who need care will be denied it, in order for those insurance companies to reap ever higher profits.  There is a joke, told in comic-form, and in other formats, that implies that had Walter had access to universal health insurance, as exists in most reasonably well-off countries, none of this (the meth, the show) need have happened.

      OK, that’s the story, but it’s just wrong.  Really.

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    • Next best thing since The Bell Curve

      In an earlier post, I discussed Nicholas Wade provocative new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, and mentioned that it had been getting a lot of reviews and attention because of its controversial claim that contemporary science supports the view that biological races really exist after all.  But now, the definitive review has been written and posted to the Gentopia blog. Stephen Colbert couldn't have said it better himself.  Check it out.

    • Death and Taxes: The Real Story Behind Tennessee’s Electric Chair

      Yesterday, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed a bill to bring back the electric chair as the default method of execution, should lethal injection drugs become unavailable or unconstitutional. While the first version of the bill restricted its application to death sentences issued after July 2014, a last-minute amendment lifted this restriction, making it applicable to those who are currently on death row. Theoretically, this means that we could be facing an execution by electrocution in Tennessee as early as Oct. 7, when Billy Irick is scheduled to be killed.

      It is tempting to decry this return to the electric chair as a “barbaric” lapse into brutal forms of violence that do not befit a democratic nation such as the United States. It is also tempting to affirm this legislation as a more “truthful” display of what is really going on when the state kills, and to hope that the unconcealment of state violence will lead to more vigorous opposition. But it’s not at all clear that more truth leads to more activism, nor that brute violence is incompatible with US democracy.

      In order to understand what’s happening in Tennessee – and in other states that are currently going out of their way to kill people, such as Oklahoma, Missouri, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Utah – we must move beyond moral discourses on the death penalty and trace the material, political connections between state violence, economic inequality, and white supremacy in the United States.

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    • The Problem of Captured Attention

      Readers of the Brains blog might know about a symposium there concerning a paper by Philipp Koralus. In his commentary on the paper, Felipe de Brigard mentions the problem of captured attention: 

      "I have a hard time understanding how ETA may account for involuntary attention. Suppose you are focused on your task—reading a book at the library, say—and you hear a ‘bang’ behind you. A natural way of describing the event is to say that one’s attention has been involuntarily captured by the sound. Now, how does ETA explain this phenomenon?"

      Koralus' response is binary: 

      "So, you might have been asking, as part of your task of reading the blog, 'What does the blog say?' Now, you are getting the incongruent and irrelevant answer 'There’s a loud noise behind you.' There are now two possibilities, similar to what happens in the equivalent case in a conversation. One possibility is that you accommodate the answer, adopting a new question (and thereby a new task) to which 'There’s a loud noise behind you' would be a congruent answer, maybe, 'what sort of thing going on behind me?…You could also refuse to be distracted and then exercise some top-down control on your focus assignment to bring it back to something that’s relevant to your task.'

      When I coined "the problem of captured attention" in my 2012 Synthese paper, "The Subject of Attention" (not cited by Koralus/de Brigard), I took a similar line, but focused on the activity of the subject, rather than on questions and answers:

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    • On friends and lovers

      One of the most frustrating things about getting married in the United States is that for two days you are surrounded by all of these old friends, but then with all the preparations and whatnot you have no time to have decent conversations with any of them.

      I used to think this was a significant bug, that if we were going to persist in moving our domiciles across such a huge country, then marriages should last at least a week, enough time to get a couple of meals alone with old friends. But now I'm wondering if not having enough time is a feature.

      When you've lived long enough and moved enough times you start to get walloped by affective connections withering away.

      It's just weird. You can maintain intensely warm regard for a person you haven't seen in years yet when you get a chance to share space again find yourselves struggling to know what to say next. What happened? Sometimes alcohol and other people being there can help. But sometimes that doesn't even work very well. The distance between what was and what remains is painful.

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    • Prostitution and drugs to be included in Italian GDP

      Since deficit limits in the Euro zone are indexed to GDP, Italy will "boost" its economy by including drugs, prostitution and smuggling in the calculation of its gross domestic product.   Story here.

       

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘É uma partida de futebol’

      In a few weeks, the football World Cup will start in Brazil, so in the coming weeks I will be posting a few football-themed songs. Don’t worry: I will not be posting the monstrosity that is the official theme song (with Pitbull & co. — I refuse to put the link up). I will focus instead on some classics about football in Brazilian music.

      Some may recall that the World Cup in Brazil has been surrounded by controversy, especially with the truly astonishing amount of money that seems to have gone into the construction of the stadiums. But like it or not, it will happen, so we may as well get ready for it. 

      Let me start with ‘É uma partida de futebol’ (1996) by the pop/ska band Skank (I’ve posted about them before). Both the song and the video nicely convey the fanatic, euphoric approach to football among fans in Brazil, with lots of footage from actual matches and the supporters; so quite a treat for football fans!

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    • Still more on Neil deGrasse Tyson – philosophy and biology, too

      M. Anthony Mills has a very nice reply to Neil deGrasse Tyson's dismissal of philosophy.  Among the points he makes, Mills notes:

      Helmholtz, Mach, Planck, Duhem, Poincaré, Bohr, and Heisenberg are a few noteworthy modern scientists “distracted” enough to engage in philosophical question-asking. Einstein himself read philosophy voraciously beginning from an early age (he read Kant when he was 13) and engaged in lively disputes with many leading philosophers of the era. Mach’s empiricism, Poincaré’s conventionalism, and Duhem’s holism all influenced Einstein’s thinking. Such cross-pollination between philosophy and science did not stall the progress of physics, but instead led to one of the greatest scientific revolutions in history.

      Lest we think that only noteworthy modern physicists engaged in philosophical question-asking with actual philosophers, let me point out some noteworthy modern biologists who have done likewise — a list off the top of my head, so no doubt missing some (and thus, please feel free to add names in the comments).  And to be clear, I am citing here only some of the most famous ones — there are many less famous ones who have nonetheless had important and influential (in both directions) exchanges with philosophers.

      • Michael Ghieselin – nature of species, sexual selection, and more
      • Stephen Jay Gould – importance of constraints, contingency, species selection, adaptationism, and more
      • Eva Jablonka – epigenetic inheritance and more
      • Richard Lewontin – fitness, natural selection (especially levels of selection), adaptationism, and more
      • Ernst Mayr – concepts of species, nature of speciation, and more
      • Joan Roughgarden – natural selection, social selection (different from MW's), and more
      • Mary Jane West-Eberhard – development, social selection (different from JR's), and more

      In other words, biologists and philosophers have had productive exchanges about important biological concepts, theories, processes, and (although I haven't emphasized it here) methods.