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    • Is there a recieved view about Evans’ argument against ontic vagueness?

      My co-writer* Joshua Heller is currently working on a project connections between vagueness literature, literature on semantic underdetermination, and new work on metaphysical indeterminacy.**

      One thing we're both interested in exploring the next few weeks is the extent to which Evans' argument against ontic vagueness applies to either semantic underdetermination or metaphysical indeterminacy. But I'm about ten years out of date on the vagueness literature. The last time I dipped my toe in this, it seemed like everyone was trying to save supervaulationism from Williamson's criticisms about wide and narrow entailment and from the charge that it has no advantages over three valued systems with respect to modelling higher order vagueness. I didn't think there was any consensus on Evans' argument
      then.

      Is there now anything approaching a consensus among people working on vagueness about Evans' argument? If so, what should I read? Have any of the new people working on metaphysical indeterminacy or semantic underdetermination said anything interesting about Evans' argument?

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    • Gary Becker (1930-2014)

      Gary Becker, the Nobel laureate economist at the University of Chicago, has died.

      Becker is perhaps best known for "human capital" theory, which talks about how one might, for example, come to think of education as an investment in one's future earnings.  As the absolute normalcy of a statement like this would suggest, I think it's probably hard to overstate how influential Becker has been on the development of the neoliberal world we all inhabit.  Foucault's analysis in Birth of Biopolitics is essential, as are the exchanges (here and here) between Becker, Bernard Harcourt (whose Illusion of Free Markets ought to be required reading), and the Foucauldian Francois Ewald.

      As readers of this blog will know, I'm no fan of neoliberalism.  But, as I tell my students, if you don't see neoliberalism at least as a temptation, you didn't get it.

      Here is the U. of Chicago notice; here is Leiter.

    • Sunday School lecture on PC(USA) General Assembly confessional issues

      449px-Allan_Boesak_(1986)Today I'm lecturing on issues relating to the adoption of a new translation of the Heidelberg Catechism and the possible adoption of the Belhar Confession into the PC(USA)'s Book of Confessions.

      In preparing for them I had to study a fair amoung of neo-Calvanist Kuyperian Apartheid theology (which, if Belhar is correct, is heretical) as well as scholarship on what the Christian Bible does or doesn't say about homosexuality (the new translation of Heidelberg removes a denunciation of gay people that was not in the original German). It's pretty interesting stuff, albeit very dispiriting at times. It's astonishing to me that defenders of Kuyperian "pluralism" at least on the web never seem to take into account its horrific legacy in South Africa.

      Anyhow, the full lecture is here.

      Given the connection between Dutch Calvanism and Apartheid, it is a wonderful sign of reconciliation that the two biggest American Calvinist denominations (RCA and CRCNA) have added it to the traditional three Confessions accepted by Calvinists (though the more conservative CRNEA has accorded it lesser standing).

      This being said, along with South African civil rights pioneer and leader of the campaign for Belhar Allan Boeseck, in my heart of hearts I can't help but take the Belhar rejections to apply to injustices committed against GLBT people. So it's a little bit weird to me that both of these denominations accept Belhar yet embrace explicit doctrinal statements decrying homosexual acts as sins (though some member churches of the CRA, which accords Belhar full confessional status, reject this teaching).

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    • Was that a Frampton reference in my store?

      The gypsies had no home. The doors had no bass.

      Nor bass:

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    • Adjunctification (again) and How (not) to Fix It (again)

      There’s a new piece up at The Atlantic by Elizabeth Segran on the adjunct crisis in U.S. Higher Ed and the growing movement to contest the situation. The piece has a number of helpful aspects, including providing a summary of some of the most recent research on the effects of adjunctification on faculty, students, and the overall shape of the institution of U.S. Higher Education. Especially welcome is the recognition that, aside from its obvious economic consequences and its effects on student outcomes, faculty precarity has significantly eroded academic freedom, scholarly production, and done a great deal to compromise the university as an institution of learning and critical thought.  This makes it all the more disappointing that the solutions the author seems most inclined to accept would only improve the economic situation of contingent faculty while doing nothing to make them less precarious or offer more support for research and scholarship.
       
      In what follows, I’ll explain the above in a bit more detail.

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    • Cool Philadelphia Summer School in Continental Philosophy – Topic Continental Philosophy and the New Metaphysics

      Full CFP at Leon Niemoczynski's After Nature blog HERE.

      John Caputo's going to be hosting it. I saw him speak a couple of years ago to a group of philosophers, theologians, ministers, and laypeople and it was dynamite. If I remember right, during the question and answers "the new metaphysics" (not meant as scare quotes) came up, and he had really interesting things to say about his interpretation of Derrida versus Hagglund's.

      The reading list for the Philadelphia Summer School includes Caputo's The Insistence of God and Crocket, Putt, and Robbins' (eds) The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion as well as essays by Meillassoux, Brassier, Latour, and Malibou.

      Although the school begins day after the end of the Pittsburgh Symposium, it's only a 4-5 hour drive from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia.  So it would actually be convenient to attend both.

    • How much do we know about the evolution of language?

      According to some big names in linguistics and evolutionary biology (Hauser, Lewontin, Chomsky, etc.) not very much.

       

      Two things to talk about here:

      1.  The claims of the article, which I find very well argued for, but not (at least to me) very surprising.

      2. Is it surprising to anyone that Mark Hauser is collaborating in a such a prominent piece of research?

    • Botched or Normal? Pathologies of Violence in the Killing State

      Tuesday’s execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma has many people wondering just how far the state is willing to go to kill its own citizens. 

      I think @gideonstrumpet said it best:

      Gideonstrumpet - torture

      It’s tempting to understand the torture of Clayton Lockett as a “botched” execution, an unfortunate exception to the rule.  But it's important to remember that, even before the shortage of standard lethal injection drugs, the appearance of a cruelty-free execution has always been just that: a carefully-crafted appearance.  The clean, quiet execution of a person who falls asleep under the supervision of trained professionals, never to wake again, has remained until quite recently a tightly-controlled performance of legitimate(d) state violence.

      But the visibly gruesome execution of Clayton Lockett and, three months before him, of Dennis McGuire, should move us to reflect not only on the present and future of state killing in the US, but also on its past.  How many of the over 1300 apparently normal and legitimate executions in the post-Furman era might have counted as “botched” and torturous if not for the injection of a paralytic drug to prevent any visible signs of suffering?

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    • towards an etiquette primer for philosophers at non-philosophy conferences

      This morning I was rereading this string, where we discussed things not to do at conferences, and I noticed a comment by Neal Hebert:

      Although I can't speak for Jon on this, I do think this is a good place to point out that some of the above are next to unthinkable at conferences in other disciplines. When Jon and I jointly presented our paper at the American Society for Theatre Research in Dallas this past November, I can't recall any of the above happening.

      If anything, the bigger problem was that feedback to all papers was TOO positive, and there wasn't much opportunity within the nomoi of the conference to push the speakers into considering new territory.

      In addition to the ASTR conference Neal is mentioning, I've presented at a radical theology*and narratology conferences recently,** and the thing I've noticed is that the difference that Neal writes about creates potential severe incommensurabilities. In particular, other fields don't handle the question and answer session in anything like the way philosophers do. In philosophy it's perfectly licit to just give some reasons why you think the speaker's view is wrong. If you are in a philosophy conference the person will then engage in dialectic with you. But, at least in my experience, this is completely unacceptable in other fields.

      This was very hard for me at the narratology conference. Since so many of the papers engaged with analytic philosophy (including panels on semantics and pragmatics, structuralist theories of narrative, fictionality, and counterfactuals), I wanted to engage with the speakers in the way we do in analytic philosophy.*** The person would be talking about somebody like Lewis, Walton, or Carroll then in the Q&A I'd do the normal philosopher thing of presenting a challenge for the view. But then there would be this long, uncomfortable silence with all of these Northern Europeans stoically grimacing at me. As it stretched out I would begin to feel like my Chihuahua mix probably does right after he defecates on the rug. After ten or so seconds of agony the moderator would just say "Next question please."

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    • Pernicious Truth and Power

      A few days ago, I used the lack of historical figures in its top-20-pernicious list to propose that Leiter’s poll about pernicious philosophers said a lot about the politics of academic philosophy, and not so much about anything else.  “Pernicious,” in other words, is a political designation.  In the comments, Jon Cogburn wonders:

      “You had me up until the historical construct bit. Aren't we in danger of presupposing that something can't both be a political act of boundary policing *and* a statement with a truth value?  I mean I think that it's objectively false that Heidegger is a pernicious philosopher. I also think that calling one's colleagues charlatans in public forums is objectively pernicious. Maybe I [am] trying to police a boundary here, but aren't some boundaries objectively worth policing?”

      This is a fair question; let me try to pursue and answer in three slightly different ways.

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