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    • SB 1391 and the Criminalization of Pregnancy in Tennessee

      A petition is circulating online asking Gov. Bill Haslam to veto SB 1391.  The bill would modify the Tennessee criminal code to allow for criminal assault charges to be brought against women who use illegal narcotics while pregnant, should their drug use lead to harm or death for the fetus or child.  These charges carry a penalty of up to 15 years in prison.  But the bill is so badly written, it could affect all pregnant women in Tennessee, whether or not they use drugs, should something go wrong during their pregnancy.  In effect, SB 1391 threatens to criminalize pregnancy in Tennessee. 

      Policy analysts and political commentators across the world have voiced their concerns with SB 1391, arguing that it could have far-reaching consequences (Reality Check, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and NPR).  Even some pro-life groups recognize that SB 1391 could incentivize abortions for women who use drugs, since women risk up to 15 years in prison by continuing their pregnancy, especially if they are unable to access drug treatment programs (All Our Lives).  

      If we really want to support the flourishing of children in Tennessee, then we need to move beyond the pro-life/pro-choice framework to seek reproductive justice for everyone, based on “the right to have children, not have children, and to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments” (SisterSong).  For example, rather than punishing women who use illegal drugs while pregnant, we should be extending the Safe Harbor Act to support women who use either prescription drugs or non-prescription drugs to get the treatment they need, and to stay clean for the sake of their families and themselves. 

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    • Talk like Shakespeare day

      Mark, 'tis 'Talk Liketh Shakespeare Day!' Then come, good fellows, and let us dream of dragons and finless fish, take but a moment and speak of clip-winged griffins and a ramping cat. The youth of England are on fire, and though men may sleep, some have knives with edges. Such words as his delight the eyes and fill the mind as the secret parts of fortune come to a handsome gentleman, as a stratagem to its quarter returns an ill-shaped fish with magnanimity! If you disagree, you are a stuffed cloak-bag of guts, a bolting-hutch of beastliness!  (h/t David Hoyt)

       

    • Things not to do at conferences

      Have you done any of the following or had them done to you?

      1. Changing your paper after receiving written versions of the comments, so that the comments no longer make sense (Eric Schliesser on this HERE).
      2. If you are a senior European philosopher, instead of asking a question during the Q&A, just telling the junior speaker that only a fool would believe their premises.*
      3. Not turning your comments in ahead of time, so the speaker cannot prepare a response, and then in your comments trying to eviscerate the speaker's paper (hypothetical imperative- if you are not going to turn your comments in on time, then either show interesting things that follow from the speaker's claims, or show that something interesting is left of the speaker's claims after your criticism, or opt out and don't deliver them).
      4. Only attend your talk (this one and the next three are courtesy of Melissa Ridley Elmes, hat-tip Daily Nous).
      5. Attend other talks but grandstand during the Q&As in a way that is not as bad as the senior-European-philosopher malfeseance, but still manifestly unhelpful to the presenter (see PrawfBlawg for good Q&A guidelines).
      6. Go overtime on your paper so that other speakers are shorted.
      7. Act radically different towards other scholars, depending upon where they currently are in the academic hierarchy.

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    • Radical Philosophy and the Free Alabama Movement

      Last summer, thousands of prisoners in California launched a 60-day hunger strike to protest and transform oppressive policies in the California Department of Corrections.  One member of the organizing team called their strike action a “multi-racial, multi–regional Human Rights Movement to challenge torture.”

      This weekend, another prisoner-led human rights movement is gaining momentum in Alabama.  The Free Alabama Movement (FAM) seeks to analyze, resist, and transform prison slavery from within the Prison Industrial Complex. 

      Both of these movements challenge us, as philosophers and as people, to interrogate the meaning of slavery, torture, human rights, and political action.  What does it mean to struggle for one’s human rights as an “offender” in the world’s first prison society?  What can philosophers and political theorists learn from the example of incarcerated intellectuals and political actors whose everyday lives are situated at the dangerous intersection of racism, economic exploitation, sexual violence, and civil death?  What would it mean to respect the specificity of the Free Alabama Movement, and at the same time to recognize that even the freedom of non-incarcerated philosophers may be bound up with the freedom of Alabama?  What is freedom, after all?  What – and where – and who – is Alabama?

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    • First earth-sized exoplanet found in habitable zone.

      Astronomers have found the first  Earth-sized planet located in the habitable zone of a star — the right distance away to host liquid water and possibly life.  Story here.  The system is only about 500 light years away.

       

      This of course raises the issue of the Fermi paradox:  if there is even a tiny chance of intelligent life arising on such a planet, and many of the stars around which we would expect to find such planets are billions of years older than the sun, then why hasn't some intelligent species already colonized our galaxy in such a way that we would have observed it?

      To my mind, there are only a few premises one can plausibly deny that give rise to the paradox.    

      One is that there is any substantial chance  at all of life arising at all on a planet with conditions more or less like ours.   I admit that it is possible for this premise to be false, but I don't begin to see how that could be.  Given the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone, let alone our local cluster, the needed probability here would be so tiny.

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    • Deleuze on Learning and Skill

      Johann_sebastian_bach_at_organWhen it comes to learning, Deleuze argues that “it is so difficult to say how someone learns.” (DR 23). More dramatically, Deleuze adds, there “is something amorous – but also something fatal – about all education.” (DR 23). In learning to drive a stick shift car, for example, it is not sufficient simply to be told by the instructor to “do as I do,” or to follow the rule as they have stated and/or exemplified it in their actions. Learning is not a matter of following a rule or of doing what someone else does; to the contrary, what one encounters in learning to drive a stick shift car is the task of connecting various elements – namely, the hand, foot, clutch, accelerator, slope of the road, etc.—and of connecting them systematically so that the foot releases from the clutch right when the accelerator is being pressed, etc. Similarly in learning to swim it is a matter of establishing connections between the various parts and motions of one’s body with the resistance, currents, and buoyancy of the water. As Deleuze puts it, “To learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the Objective Idea in order to form a problematic field.” (DR 165)

      In clarifying what Deleuze means by conjugating the distinctive points “in order to form a problematic field” will offer, I argue, what I take to be a helpful perspective from which to understand Merleau-Ponty’s example of the expert organist as well as Jason Stanley’s recent work on skill.

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Wave’

      I’m in San Diego at the moment for the Pacific APA. Naturally, California rhymes with sea and sun, and in the absence of a California-themed Brazilian song worth posting (of course, there’s this silly one by Lulu Santos), I had to think of the classic ‘Wave’, composed by Tom Jobim and perhaps best known in the João Gilberto version. But I’m also posting it in the original instrumental version, by Jobim himself, and a live version with Jobim and Herbie Hancock. In other words, plenty of choice for picky ears…

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    • The Gourmet Ranking and Gender: How Can It Improve?

      I noted in another post the apparent difference in impact of the Philosophical Gourmet ranking of one's PhD granting institution on tenure-track placement according to gender, following up on posts elsewhere (here, here, and here). In this post I want to follow up on a speculation that I made in comments that the apparent difference in impact is due not to a difference in the way prestige impacts women and men on the job market, but due to a difference in the way that the Philosophical Gourmet tracks prestige for areas that have a higher proportion of men versus areas that have a higher proportion of women. 

      You may already be familiar with work by Kieren Healy that shows that the Philosophical Gourmet ranking especially favors particular specialties: "It's clear that not all specialty areas count equally for overall reputation… Amongst the top twenty departments in 2006, MIT and the ANU had the narrowest range, relatively speaking, but their strength was concentrated in areas that are very strongly associated with overall reputation—in particular, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Language, and Philosophy of Mind."

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    • On evolutionary biology and giving religion a “pass”

      Last week, Jerry Coyne gave a talk at my university, UC Davis.  Coyne is one of the "new atheists," people who believe that "religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises" (Simon Hooper).  In his talk, he argued that science and religion were incompatible, focusing on evolution and religion in particular.  When pressed afterward, however, he seemed to grant that not all forms of supernatural-believing religions are incompatible with science; deism, for example, is not incompatible with science.  However, he then wanted to know why those of us who were pressing him – people who think that the theory of evolution is well-supported and are not ourselves religious – were giving religion a "pass."  We would not, he suggested, give a similar pass to beliefs in UFOs or fairies or tarot cards.  And that is probably true.  So is there a difference?

      Now, admittedly, part of my reasons are pragmatic.  I happen to think that religious believers who accept the theory of evolution are our best allies in the fight to keep good science education in public schools.  That's because they show people that they don't have to give up their deeply held beliefs in order to accept views about common descent and evolutionary processes like natural selection and random drift.  They don't force a choice, a choice that religion would most likely win most of the time.

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    • News about PhilPapers

      PhilPapers will be moving to a partial subscription model.   Access to their resources from computers on campuses of institutions will be limited unless the institution pays for a subscription.   The features that go behind the paywall will be phased in over time.     Access to individuals from home will remain free.

      Details can be found here