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.
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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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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.
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I 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.
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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.
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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).]
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.)
New APPS 