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Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

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    • Does anyone remember this?

      My generation inherited from the Baby Boomers the bizarre idea that one of the most important things about you was the bands you like. This is actually not that weird, since it's just one more instance of the late capitalist Boomer belief that people are to be classified in terms of what they consume (as opposed to the traditional classifications in terms of origins, beliefs, and activities). So I can attain a certain kind of quasi-religious purity if I shop at all of the right stores and recycle, no matter that me doing these things will make no difference at all to the state of the world, no matter that this ideology legitimates the very problems from which our virtuous consumption is supposed to be absolving us.

      Nonetheless, we are all creatures of our age. I have a blue Burberry raincoat with a tear in the front left pocket. One of the stupidest thing I do is tell colleagues, "at least it's not the shoulder," and then judge them harshly when they don't get the reference (nobody I work with has yet).

      The embedded video is almost perfect for this dysfunction as applied to Generation X. I.R.S. The Cutting Edge! RE/Search magazine! If Nirvana had stayed safely on the pages of Maximumrocknroll magazine and if you still had these small bookstores with every issue of Semiotext(e) the Millenials never would have happened.

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    • Is climate change to blame for the kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian school girls, and the massacre of as many as 300 civilians in the town of Gamboru Ngala?

      This piece in the Gaurdian argues that it is.   So does the  the Congressionally-funded US Institute for Peace.

      "…poor responses to climatic shifts create shortages of resources such as land and water. Shortages are followed by negative secondary impacts, such as more sickness, hunger, and joblessness. Poor responses to these, in turn, open the door to conflict."

      Many of the foot soldiers of Boko Haram, it is claimed, are people displaced by severe droughtand food shortages in neighbouring Niger and Chad and are motivate more by a need to survive than by any ideology.

    • Leiter, Schliesser, and Feminist Philosophers on Protecting Lisbeth fundraising campaign

      Especially given the amount of sock-puppetry and trolling by anonymous internet voices prior to the point where most philosophy blogs started pre-moderating, I was extremely uncomfortable with anonymous people recently making public allegations against a semi-anonymous perpetrator, and then an anonymous person soliciting money.* I also know that I'm not the only person troubled by this.

      So I think it's worth publicizing a number of things have happened very recently:

      1. In the original fund-raising campaign, the accuser claimed that the bloggers at Feminist Philosophers would vouch for her identity. Given their recent posts on the issue, (e.g. here)I don't think I'm betraying confidences to share that I contacted them and they did (without in any way telling me the identities of the two people who have made public allegations).
      2. In this post, Brian Leiter (making clear not to endorse claims which he could not have the evidence to substantiate one way or the other) unequivocally states that he knows the identity of the accuser taking legal action and that her claims deserve to be formally adjudicated.
      3. A non-anonymous friend of the second accuser, Emma Sloan, has taken over the fundraising site.
      4. Eric Schliesser provides an argument for contributing here.

      I should note that nobody I've linked to here is trying to have a trial by public opinion about the veracity of these specific allegations against the person in question. In spite of this issue, I've left comments open (though premoderated to prevent public trial by commentor).

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    • Social Policy and Explanations: Within- and Between-Population Variation

      In a post last month for Demos, Matt Bruenig argued that if one in fact cares about childhood poverty, a recent conservative position promoting marriage as a means of reducing childhood poverty rates is as cruel as it is misguided (http://www.demos.org/blog/4/14/14/single-mother-child-poverty-myth). In a nutshell, Bruenig notes that countries with low childhood poverty rates have not achieved this success via promoting marriage, nor are their rates of single-parenthood markedly different from those in the U.S.

      One way to put this basic observation is that people promoting marriage are deliberately ignoring most of the variation that matters.  Yes, it is true (ceteris paribus, of course!) that in the international sample Bruenig looks at, in every country, the children of single parents are more likely to be poor than the children of married parents living together.* But far more variation in childhood poverty rates is associated with different policies in the different countries, and not with the relationship status of the parents; indeed, even if the child poverty rate in the U.S. dropped to the level associated with children living with married parents living together in the U.S. today, it would still be substantially higher, indeed, quite grossly higher, than in the other countries Bruenig looks at.

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    • Reformation Theology

      Guilt.

      Grace.

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    • Professors’ non-existent privacy rights

      FIDLAR song NSFW, so whole post is after the jump.

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    • On Professionalization and Greatness

      Ruth Millikan’s Dewey Lecture has been getting a lot of favorable attention in the blogosphere recently. Rightly so. But I want to challenge one part of it that most philosophers seem to like. I’ll quote almost all of the relevant two paragraphs, since when I try to trim I think I do a disservice to her argument.

      Millikan writes:

      Philosophy is not a field in which piles of small findings later help to secure
      fundamental advances.       Little philosophical puzzles do not usually need to be solved but rather dissolved by examining the wider framework within which they occur. This often involves determinedly seeking out and exposing deeply entrenched underlying
      assumptions      , working out what their diverse and far-ranging effects have been,
      constructing and evaluating alternatives, trying to foresee distant implications. It often involves trying to view quite large areas in new ways, ways that may cut across usual distinctions both within philosophy and outside and that may require a broad knowledge across disciplines. Add that to acquire the flexibility of mind and the feel for the possibility of fundamental change in outlook that may be needed, a serious immersion for a considerable time in the history of philosophy is a near necessity. This kind of work takes a great deal of patience and it takes time. Nor can it be done in small pieces, first this little puzzle then that. Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason at age fifty-seven and the other critiques came later. Closer to our time, Wilfrid Sellars published his first paper at thirty-five, having lived and worked with philosophy all his life up to then. I have never tried to research the matter but I have no reason to think these cases unique…. Further, because a serious understanding of the historical tradition is both essential and quite difficult to acquire by oneself, helping to pass on this tradition with care and respect should always be the first obligation of a professional philosopher. Given all this, it has always struck me as a no-brainer that forcing early and continuous publication in philosophy is, simply, genocidal. Forcing publication at all is not
      necessarily good.

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    • Mark Okrent interview (hat tip Graham Harman)

      Very nice Mark Okrent inteview here, which includes this gem:

      My single most important commitment in this area is that the intentionality of action is fundamental, and the intentionality of cognitive states, including conscious states, is to be understood in relation to this fundamental intentionality of action. Action, as action, always is directed towards some telos. That is, acts are always directed towards something, they are always either in order to bring about some end or for the sake of continuing some process. It is a corollary to this basic commitment that actions don’t in general ‘acquire’ their goals by being caused by mental states that pass on their intentional content to the acts that they cause. (That is, what it is for an act to have a goal cannot be cashed out in terms of the content of the desires that might or might not partially cause the act.) It also follows from this basic commitment that we will never understand what it is for a state or event to be intentional until we can answer two questions: ‘What is it to be an agent who can act? ‘What is it for an agent to act?’ There is an interesting relationship between these two questions, taken together, and Heidegger’s question regarding the meaning of the being of Dasein.

      Great stuff. Joe Bob says to check it (as well as Rational Animals: The Teleological Roots of Intentionality) out.

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: Jair Rodrigues

      Yesterday the great singer Jair Rodrigues passed away at age 75; he was healthy and musically active until the end of his life (performing an average of 15 concerts per month), and died of an acute, violent heart attack. He is one of the lesser-known but very talented singers to have emerged in the 1960s, known for his samba interpretations, but in fact very versatile as a singer. In the 1960s, he hosted a very popular weekly show on TV with Elis Regina, in which many memorable duets with both were recorded.

      I’m posting here the song that Jair Rodrigues is perhaps best known for, the classic ‘Deixa isso pra lá’ (1964) (a surprisingly modern proto-rap), and one of his medley duos with Elis Regina – this one with lots of Bossa Nova classics. He will be missed.

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    • Smoking and Two Strands of Biopolitics

      Biopolitics – even when understood in its narrow sense of life itself being a political issue – comes in at least two different strands.  The first, which historically precedes the second, was concerned with what Foucault called a “politics of public health.”  In so doing, it takes on standard biopolitical issues of population optimization, public health and so forth as mass issues.   The resulting policies included mass vaccination campaigns, the installation of proper municipal sewage systems, and so forth.  These programs resulted in demonstrable and substantial gains in typical measures of public health, such as life expectancy.

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