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    • 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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    • Adam Silver banning Donald Sterling (hat-tips Graham Harman and Rod Dreher)

      Sometimes it really is great to see the hammer of justice descend. Can you imagine what could have happened if Mark Emmert had helped himself to whatever this guy's been eating?

      This being said, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar  here makes a pretty good argument that nobody involved should be doing a victory dance.

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    • Why should we grade final exams?

      Lucky-jimAre students aware that most of their professors can accurately predict their final grades prior to the final exam or paper? Is this just hubris on my part, or do people in the biz long enough get very good at this?

      If it's not hubris, then it raises a genuine practical ethics problem. If I already know what the student is going to make, why do I feel morally obligated to grade the paper? I can't figure this out.

      I'm clearly obligated by prudence to grade the papers as the LSU hair and teeth men* would be very unhappy with me for not doing so. But would they be right to be unhappy?

      Maybe the problem is that if the students knew I wasn't grading their final papers, then they wouldn't do the work. So perhaps not doing the grading would involve deception? This seems pretty weak to me though. I could just not say anything one way or the other, or honestly say that I might** grade the person's exam or paper. Knowing their exams might be graded would motivate them enough.

      A few students want comments on their work and we owe them that, but the overwhelming majority of them don't. So why not just hold onto the papers and grade them later if a student wants comments?

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    • Is the Barwise/Etchemendy system unsound?

      I might be being an idiot here, but I can't for the life of me figure out how the following inference is disallowed in the Barker-Plummer/Barwise/Etchemendy textbook:

      1. Ex(Rax)

      2. ExEx (Rxx)   1, E introduction

      This is clearly invalid, because there are anti-symmetric relations (note that if it were valid one can prove ExEx (Rxx) from ExEy (Rxy), and that ExEx(Rxx) has the same truth conditions as Ex(Rxx)).

      Intuitively, Existential Introduction should be restricted so that one cannot replace a name or eigenvariable with a variable that is already bound in the sentence. But I can't find this restriction in Barker-Plummer/Barwise/Etchemendy. My friend couldn't find it in the old red Mates book either, so we think it's not unlikely that we're both missing something obvious.

      I turned to the soundness proof in Barker-Plummer/Barwise/Etchemendy and they leave the case of Existential Introduction as an excercise to the reader. It has a little star next to it showing that it is a difficult problem. I'm wondering if it's impossible. But, again, it's more likely that I'm missing something, so if anyone who teaches from the book could take a look my introductory logic students would appreciate it.

    • If fighting climate change denial is like fighting creationism, how do we do it?

      Helen De Cruz has some excellent suggestions for how to talk to creationists given that neither debate nor denouncement are likely to be productive.  She describes the way in which a religious person who is not a creationist can speak to another religious person who is a creationist, e.g., by pointing out that Biblical literalism is a recently emerged approach, one that may be impossible to apply consistently, and for that reason among others it may not be thoroughly used by anyone.

      This article by Dan Kahan suggests that disbelief in human-caused climate change is like belief in creationism in this respect: What people "believe" about each doesn't reflect what they know, but rather expresses who they are.  This supports the thesis that providing evidence for creationism isn't likely to change minds and that providing evidence for climate change isn't likely to change minds, either.

      But what is the climate change equivalent, where we speak to people from their own perspective as Helen proposes that we do for religious people who are creationists?

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    • On Pernicious Philosophers

      There’s a discussion going on over at Leiter about the results of his latest poll: which modern philosopher had the “most pernicious influence” on philosophy?  Heidegger was the strong #1, both in terms of the number of people who hated him, and the intensity of their hatred.  This doesn’t seem that surprising, given that Leiter’s readers, um, lean analytic and since Leiter took their Derrida option off the table.

      Much more interesting, it seems to me, is the historical skew of the results.  Most of the figures in the top 20 are 20th century philosophers, and all but three (Descartes, Berkeley, and Kant) are 19th or 20th century (and it wouldn’t be conceptually wrong to put Kant in with the 19c).  Does this reflect poor historical training?  Do influential but controversial positions get absorbed into the ‘mainstream?’

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Palco’

      This week I am posting ‘Palco’, a 1981 song by Gilberto Gil. The other day I was reminded of this song and then showed it to my daughters; they now love it, especially the part at the beginning that goes ‘my soul smells like talcum power, like a baby’s buttocks’ (‘minha alma cheira a talco, como bumbum de bebê'). It’s a great song, even if betrays its 1980s-ness in the instrumental overproduction. But it’s upbeat and lively, so perfect to put ya’ll in the mood for the weekend.

      (BMoF will be on recess next week.)

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    • Commenting on the Blog

      Should be working again!  Thanks for everyone's patience while we've been having problems with Typepad.