New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

recent posts

about

    • Pity the nicotine addict

      10341757_785651334802934_8978077757976073462_nI don't mind people smoking outside, but as one of the 15-20% of the population psychologists are now calling "highly sensitive"* I do find gum chewing incredibly distracting.**

       So this doesn't look good. All the nicotine addicts at LSU are going to walk around furiously chomping little pieces of rubber with their mouths open. Some percentage of them will do that thing where you make the gum snap, irritating even the lowly sensitive people.*** I'll be hiding out in my office blaring FIDLAR.

      On this gum business, it's really weird that the ban will apply to e cigarettes, but not to nicotine gum, even though nicotine gum doesn't really help people quit. The second weird thing there's no enforcement mechanism:

      The policy doesn’t exactly have teeth. Campus police won’t be able to write tickets for smoking, and leaders acknowledge that it will be more of a recommendation to campus visitors and tailgating football fans.

      But Sylvester said she hopes the campus community will take on the role of self-policing to stamp out tobacco.

      “We’re definitely going to use the social-norming approach,” she said. “Seventy percent of us do not use any kind of tobacco products. We are the norm, not the tobacco user.”

      So at best you are going to get all these busy bodies telling people "you can't smoke here," and smokers patiently explaining that actuality implies possibility as they continue to puff away. I don't see this ending well.

      (more…)

    • Sextus Empiricus and Virtue Theory

      I may be missing something, but I really cannot see much out there about the virtue ethics as informed by Sextus Empiricus. I find this at least a little surprising since it would not be terribly controversial to suggest that we can look at Montaigne or Nietzsche as contributors to virtue theorist in ethics; and equally it would not be terribly controversial to suggest they have sceptical ideas, which draw on the antique tradition of Pyrrhonism. It is certainly not controversial to identity Pyrrhonism as an antique form of scepticism, which culminates in the writings of Sextus Empricus,writings some suspect to be repetitions or compilations of a previous Pyrrhonic philosopher, or some multiplicity of such thinkers.

      Whatever the truth of any of that, Sextus is what we have as the name associated with a set of full length writings from the ancient world concerning scepticism.  What he offers is not the abstract  speculation on possible doubts, unengaged with any possible alternative, which some (including Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) have associated unfavourably with modern scepticism. Like antique philosophy in general, the Sextus texts are concerned with the good life, which  includes a properly conducted life of thought and intellectual doubt. That is to say a life of thought and intellectual doubt can only be considered a good life, rather than a loss of the goods of human life, if it is itself part of happiness and a life lived well as a whole. Still the unity of that whole seems less obvious than it would without Pyrrhonian interrogation. 

      (more…)

    • What’s the point of just apologizing?

      It would be nice if the suits at N.Y.U. had some cultural exposure to the Christian tradition (or even AA), where a confession is supposed to include at least attempted resolve not to do the same kind of thing and to make things better. Andrew Ross gets this:

      “Apologizing to the workers is a good thing to do, but the university should use its resources and leverage to change the system that created the abuses,” said Andrew Ross, a professor at N.Y.U.’s New York campus and a leader of Coalition for Fair Labor, a student-faculty group that has called for better worker treatment. “N.Y.U. could help to ensure that all Saadiyat Island workers have a living wage, debt relief and the right to organize.”

      . . .Ramkumar Rai, a Nepali immigrant who worked on the N.Y.U. campus until a year ago, told The Times that he and a friend were still waiting for the last six months’ of his wages, which were 16 months overdue. Told of the apology, he asked, “When will the money come? If the money comes it will be O.K.”

      This makes as much sense as the embedded song above.* We're really sorry, and we're not going to do anything at all to rectify the situation? Why would you think that unless you really felt that there was nothing you could have done about the problem? But then why apologize at all?

      [*Upon hearing it, poor John Lennon realized that side two of Abbey Road (mixed by McCartney and Martin) was really the first Wings album (not withstanding the fact that Sun King, Mean Mr. Mustard, and Polythene Pam were his).]

    • another bit of 80s nostalgia

      This song so easily could have been an outtake from Seven and the Ragged Tiger. It has all of the hall-marks of that era Duran Duran: quasi-religious lyrics, insanely catchy chorus, O.K. verse, and not very good bridge. There's even visual shout-outs in the video to that terrible 80's Patrick Nagel aesthetic many of us associate with Duran Duran.

      I think Arcadia was the singer, keyboard player, and drummer's message to the bass and guitar player that if they wanted to keep making crap music with Power Station,* the rest of the band could keep doing this thing without them.

      The band actually got back together after that and has had its ups and downs in the succeeding decades, but they did a more than creditable job of soldiering through the grunge era with no love from the record labels they had enriched. There's a very good chance that a Tarantino or Aranofsky protagonist will praise them in a future film, and that they (sans guitarist) will be playing at a casino near you sometime soon. 

      (more…)

    • What Wayne Myrvold was too generous about

      I find much to agree with in Wayne's post.   I particularly agree with the point that "Our educational system isn’t particularly well suited for training philosophers who can engage seriously with the sciences."  I don't, of course, know what can be done about this, since I don't think the solution can be to spend less time learning philosophy and more time learning, e.g. physics. 

      But I also have two points on which I think I need to respond to Wayne.

      (more…)

    • What Wayne Myrvold thinks Neil de Grasse Tyson got right (guest post)

      Over on Facebook, I invited Wayne Myrvold, philosopher of physics at The University of Western Ontario, to post his thoughts about Tyson and the responses Tyson has gotten from philosophers.   In another post to follow, I will post my reaction to Wayne's post.

      What Neil de Grasse Tyson got right Wayne Myrvold, Department of Philosophy, The University of Western Ontario, Rotman Institute of Philosophy

      Neil de Grasse Tyson has made a few remarks about philosophy that have bothered some members of our profession. One reaction to this has been to resort to name-calling; he’s been called a “philistine,” and a “dumb astrophysicist,” and “clueless astrophysicist.” My attitude towards this is: if we’re engage in that sort of behaviour, we should at least do it right. A six-year-old acquaintance of mine advises me that the appropriate term when expressing sentiments of this sort is “poo-poo head.”

      (more…)

    • In memoriam: Laurence Goldstein

      This morning, Daniele Moyal-Sharrock posted on Philos-L the sad news of Laurence Goldstein’s passing, after a short illness. I suspect that this comes very much as a surprise to most of us in the philosophy community, as Laurence seemed to be active and thriving; among other things, his edited collection Brevity came out just last year.

      This website at the department of philosophy at Kent, where Laurence had been for the past decade or so (after many years in Hong-Kong), has a very nice summary of his work and research interests. He was mostly interested in philosophy of logic, and more specifically in paradoxes. I’ve corresponded quite extensively with Laurence on the topic of medieval solutions to the Liar paradox, a topic which he had grown particularly fond of (e.g. his paper in this volume). But Laurence also had a keen interest in the teaching of logic, and in particular developed a number of devices to make logical properties more perspicuous, as it were. In my opinion, one of his most original achievements was the development of a method to teach logic to blind students, based on a device he developed for this purpose, the Sylloid.

      I last saw Laurence last year in Rio for UNILOG, where he was teaching a tutorial on ‘Logic for the blind’. This initially practical concern had led him to reflect deeply on some of the ‘material aspects’ of logic, a field thought by many to be quintessentially abstract. (Here our paths had met again, as I have also worked quite extensively on the ‘materiality’ of external devices for logical reasoning, in particular formal languages.) He seemed energetic and healthy, and so it is a bit of a shock to hear of his passing. But his work will stay with us, as well as the memories of friends and colleagues who interacted with him more closely. Please feel free to share your memories of Laurence in comments below. 

      (This reminds me that we did not post anything to mark the passing of David Armstrong here at NewAPPS. Perhaps we should still have a belated in memoriam for him too.)

    • What does time tell us about troublesome views on race?

      Nicholas Wade's new book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History is barely off the presses and it has already been the subject of numerous reviews, largely because of its provocative argument for the reality of human races, based on recent studies that associate different statistical genetic clusters with particular continental groups.  I have yet to read the book, but one author of such reviews in particular caught my eye: Agustin Fuentes (see here and here), in part because of his assertion that:

      If you are making a scientific argument about genetic variation, you need to focus on populations — and be clear about your definitions. Throughout the book, Wade uses the words "cluster," "population," "group," "race," "subrace" and "ethnicity" in a range of ways, with few concrete definitions, and occasionally interchangeably.

      I focused on the connection between the concepts of race and population – and time – in a recent talk; for those who want the gory details, it's at minute 43 of this video. (I recommend the other talks as well!)

      (more…)

    • The One Percent at State U

      A few years ago in a discussion thread at Leiter Reports I was roundly pilloried for suggesting that universities would be better off if they went back to the system where university administrators worked part time and were appointed by faculty senates.*

      But consider the takeaway from this article about university executive compensation during the great recession:

      “The high executive pay obviously isn’t the direct cause of higher student debt, or cuts in labor spending,” Ms. Wood said. “But if you think about it in terms of the allocation of resources, it does seem to be the tip of a very large iceberg, with universities that have top-heavy executive spending also having more adjuncts, more tuition increases and more administrative spending.”**

      How many people reading this got merit, let alone cost of living, raises during the three year period from 2009-2012?

      While the average executive compensation at public research universities increased 14 percent from 2009 to 2012, to an average of $544,554, compensation for the presidents of the highest-paying universities increased by a third, to $974,006, during that period.

      (more…)

    • Adversariality and maximizing true beliefs

      Last week I was ‘touring’ in Scotland, first in St. Andrews for a workshop on medieval logic and metaphysics, and then in Edinburgh for a workshop on philosophical methodologies, organized by the Edinburgh Women in Philosophy Group. In the latter, I presented a paper entitled ‘Virtuous adversariality as a model for philosophical inquiry’, which grew out of a number of blog posts on the topic I’ve been writing in the recent past (here, here and here). Quoting from the abstract:

      In my talk, I will develop a model for philosophical inquiry that I call 'virtuous adversariality', which is meant to be a response to critics from both sides [those who criticize and those who endorse adversariality in philosophy]. Its key feature is the idea that a certain form of adversariality, more specifically disagreement and debate, is indeed at the heart of philosophy, but that philosophical inquiry also has a strong cooperative, virtuous component which regulates and constrains the adversarial component. The main inspiration for this model comes from ancient Greek dialectic.

      And so I gave my talk, and somewhat against the spirit of it, everybody in the audience seemed to agree with pretty much everything I had said – where are these opponents when you need them? But one person, Amia Srinivasan (Oxford), raised what is perhaps the most serious objection to any adversarial mode of inquiry, virtuous or not: it may well minimize our endorsement of false beliefs, but it does so at the risk of also minimizing our endorsement of true beliefs.

      (more…)