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    • 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!)

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    • 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.

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    • 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.

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    • How did this band ever produce Revolver?

      Lester Bangs famously wrote that the only rocker in A Hard Day's Night is Paul's grandfather.

      It's a relentlessly weird movie, far weirder than the justly maligned Magical Mystery Tour. The oddest thing is that in A Hard Day's Night all of the songs concern romantic love, but nothing in the film has anything to do with romantic love. I mean, if you were an alien anthropologist limited to understanding human beings from repeated watching, you'd just have no idea what these guys were singing about.

      There are three main tensions: (1) Paul's anarchic grandfather causing trouble, (2) the bossy manager not letting them go to parties where people stand around smoking cigarettes and yelling at one another over the din, and (3) the variety show squares not getting the Beatles in various ways. All of this is set against a background of screaming teenage girls and odd facets of the British class system. And there's a truncated concert at the end with close up shots of kids screaming.

      Bangs wrote a controversial eulogy for Lennon, which included this gem:

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    • Speculations V (on Aesthetics)

      Sometime in the next two years I hope to teach a class where the only texts are issues of Speculations.

      Ridvan Askin, Paul J. Ennis, Andreas Hägler and Philipp Schweighauser did a great job editing Issue V. The introduction by Askin, Hägler, and Schweighauser is worth the price of admission alone.* Anyone interested in all the hoopla surrounding Speculative Realism could do much worse than to begin there.

      Analytic philosophers tend to dismiss Continental metaphysics because they don't think that the principle historical figures (German Idealists, phenomenologists, soixante-huitards) have much to offer. Continental philosophers tend to dismiss it because they misunderstand Meillassoux's critique of correlationism as a critique of transcendental epistemology, instead of as a recapitulation of Hegel's critique of the claim that transcendental epistemology must replace metaphysics.

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    • This is what a philosopher looks like

      Awhile back, there was an campaign to show all the different ways that philosophers can look, called "This is what a philosopher looks like." I thought this was a good project, with the goal of making a small dent in implicit bias, but it looks like it hasn't gotten any love in awhile; the last entry was in August, 2013.  So, if you haven't sent in your photo and brief description yet, you might want to head on over there and submit your stuff!

    • A principle of parity in gender matters

      Some years ago, at the end of an evening that probably involved more alcoholic beverages than it should have, I found myself as a member of a small party of four, composed of two colleagues (and incidentally, good friends) and one PhD student (all three male). As the conversation progressed, I ended up saying things that were somewhat sexually explicit (as some readers may recall, I don’t shy away from talking about matters pertaining to sexuality – see a recent lecture of mine on the science of female orgasm). To be clear, what I said could not have been construed as ‘flirtatious’ in any way, but the next day I came to deeply regret the whole episode. My reasoning was as follows: had I been a male individual, and had the student in question been a female individual, what I said would have been undoubtedly inappropriate, by my own lights. (Similar considerations could be offered concerning interactions with colleagues, but I was particularly concerned with the asymmetry between me and the student).

      This episode led me to formulate and since then apply a principle of parity to regulate my behavior in professional situations: not to say or do anything that would be construed or viewed as problematic, had I been a man dealing with (especially more junior) women, be they colleagues, students etc. Until then, I would on occasion make remarks during class (e.g. ‘here, size does matter’ when talking about some issue pertaining to model-theory) which seemed to me to be ok (and in a sense, even a ‘political statement’ in some way), but which would not have been appropriate if uttered by a man. I do not make such remarks in class anymore.

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    • PC163

      Philosophers' Carnival #163 is HERE.

      One of the cool things about PC is you discover blogs you might have missed before. This month it's being hosted by Amod Lele, Elisa Freschi, and Mathew Dasti's Indian Philosophy Blog. There's lots of cool stuff.

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘I’m alive’/’Nine out of Ten’

      A few weeks ago, the Rainforest Alliance, an NGO whose aim is to "conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods", released a promotional song, ‘I’m alive’, recorded in the Tijuca Forest in Rio de Janeiro, celebrating the wonders of Brazilian rainforests. Some of my favorite Brazilian musicians (Caetano Veloso, Lenine, Criolo) were involved, and the song is inspired by Caetano’s ‘Nine out of Ten’, from his classic 1972 album ‘Transa’. There is a sense in which it is yet another slightly embarrassing attempt by musicians to get involved in a ‘good fight’, but the result is musically not bad at all actually, hence me posting it here at BMoF. But I’m also posting the original ‘Nine out of Ten’ by Caetano Veloso, which, as my friend Jeroen would put it, has a lot more ‘balls’ than this newer version….

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    • Copy this Sheep!

      A few days ago, the Federal Court of Appeals issued a decision denying patentability to Dolly the Sheep.  Dolly, as one will recall, was the first successful mammalian clone from an adult somatic cell.  Essentially, researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh took an unfertilized donor egg, replaced the nucleus with one taken from a different animal, induced the clone egg to divide, and implanted it into a surrogate.  Dolly thus came into the world with nuclear DNA identical to that of the sheep from which the donor nucleus was taken, although you could also plausibly say she had three “mothers:” the egg donor, the nuclear donor, and the surrogate.

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