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    • reflections on beautiful souls, hypocrites, undecidability results, and the structure of normativity

      In much of the philosophy of language and mind coming out of the late Wittgenstein and/or early Heidegger, a distinction is made between merely following a norm versus also being able to correctly assess whether others are following that norm. Note that the Brandom of "Dasein, the Being that Thematizes" (in Tales of the Mighty Dead) and the Mark Okrent of "On Layer Cakes" both mark this distinction, though they disagree on whether the latter ability requires language. Okrent (whose objects that Brandom's view entails that human aphaisics and non-linguistic deaf adults have no minds) writes:

      Because all tool use is embedded in a context of instrumental rationality, there is more to using a hammer correctly than using it as others do. Sometimes it is possible to use a hammer better than the others do, even if no one else has ever done it in that way, and no one else recognizes that one is doing so, because the norm that defines this use as ‘better’ is independent of what is actually recognized within the community. That norm is the norm of instrumental rationality: it is good to do that which would achieve one’s ends most completely and most efficiently, were anyone to do it in that way. For the same reason, it is sometimes possible for a member of a society to improve a hammer, or repair it, by giving it a structure that no hammer has previously had in that society.

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    • Pittsburgh Summer Symposium in Contemporary Philosophy

      Announcement at the SPEP's blog here.

      I went to last year's symposium on Schelling and it was one of the most fun, productive conferences I've been to. They have a participant's conference for the first two days, so you get to see papers by all of the students and faculty who are attending. It's really awesome because then you kind of know each other going into the actual Symposium. The invited speakers (last year was Iain Hamilton Grant and Jason Wirth) each had about fifteen hours of lecture allotted over the week, which gave us plenty of time to talk over their new book projects with them. I learned a tremendous amount of philosophy and met a lot of great people who are rocking out in various ways.

      This year the theme is "Formalism and the Real: Ontology, Politics, and the Subject," and the invited speakers are Prof. Bruno Bosteels (Cornell University), Prof. Tom Eyers (Duquesne University), Prof. Paul Livingston (University of New Mexico). We did an e-Symposium on Livingston on Derrida at newapps last year.

      Anyhow, the application deadline is April 25th, so Joe Bob says check it out soon.*

      [*And kudos to Jim Bahoh, Dave Mesing, Martin Krahn, and Jacob Greenstine for organizing such a cool thing for a second year now.]

    • some thoughts on panic, our profession, and gender

      I wanted to write a post in response to Moontime Warrior's blog post (here) which begins with the following:

      Last term, I confided in a professor that I was struggling with anxiety attacks and depression. She seemed understanding.

      A few weeks after the class ended, I learned that she had brought the issue up at an informal departmental gathering, telling grad students and professors that anxiety is often an “excuse” used by students who want an easy ride.

      If you read through the post, it becomes pretty crystal clear how out of touch Moontime Warrior's professor is. I also don't think the professor knows much about the lives of the people we teach.

      I do.

      Ever since high school I've loved reading biographies of philosophers. And they are a pretty weird bunch. Consider: Schopenhauer's and Kant's neurotic aversions, the latter's bizarre rituals, Russell's penchant for telling people how to structure their lives even as his kept falling apart, Goedel's fears and Einstein's dedication to him, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche's euphorias, despair, and further neuroses, etc. etc. etc. 

      This is not schadenfreude, nor is it the cult of genius which holds that suffering is somehow ennobling. Nietzsche was wrong about what doesn't kill you. Lots of things paralyze.

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    • Some general reasons to get outside of your comfort zone

      I sometimes get asked why one should bother attending to continental metaphysics.*

      It's an impossible question to answer in generality, because different people asking it usually have such contradictory presuppositions. If the person is anti-metaphysical, any answer has to be directed to the neo-Kantian presumption that proper philosophy is some form of transcendental epistemology. If the person is anti-continental then you have to try to demonstrate that there are resources relevant to their projects. Sometimes this is possible.** Often it is not, especially if your interlocutor has decided a priori that large swaths of contemporary French and German philosophy is "crap philosophy."

      I was thus very happy to read this interview with Graham Priest (who himself has wonderful chapters on Heidegger, Hegel, and Derrida in Beyond the Limits of Thought and also delves deeply into the continental tradition in his new book One).

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    • On Sudden Death

      “Rehearse this thought every day, that you may be able to depart from life contentedly; for many men clutch and cling to life, in the same way that those who are carried down a rushing stream clutch and cling to briars and sharp rocks.” – Seneca, Letter 4

       “A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.” – Spinoza, Ethics 4P67

       “One would require a position outside of life, and yet have to know it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be permitted even to touch the problem of the value of life; reasons enough to comprehend that this problem is for us an unapproachable problem.” –Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

      It’s been more than ten years, but the memory is very much alive of the night my stepmother called to tell me that my father had died, suddenly, while on a run the day before he was to race in the L.A marathon. Of the many overwhelming thoughts and emotions that came upon me that night, one of the first was the realization that everything had suddenly and irreversibly changed; things, I realized, will no longer be the same. This thought was much more than an intellectual grasp and insight; it felt much more real than that. Within 24 hours I was on a plane and back home in Laguna Beach. Walking in town that beautiful March night I couldn’t help but think of how, despite the fact that my father was no longer walking the streets of Laguna, the moon and stars that lit up the night sky were the same as the night before and will continue to be the same long after I succumb to the same fate as my father, the night sky being implacable and unaffected by the changes that affect our lives. It is no wonder the Ancients referred to the night sky as the heavenly sphere, the eternal realm distinct from the earthly sphere of changing human affairs.

      I know that my thoughts and feelings regarding my father’s death are not unusual – it is from what I can tell a very common reaction to the loss of a significant person in one’s life. My reaction is also probably not unique to sudden deaths either. I had a similar reaction to my stepfather’s death from colon cancer. Although we knew his death was coming, the actual event of his death left me with a similar feeling of the transformative nature of what had happened. But there is something about sudden deaths that accentuates, or brings to an extreme, an important truth about our relation to death.

      It is this truth about our relation to death that motivates, I would argue, the claims made in the quotes that lead off this post.

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Lamento Sertanejo’

      The episode of this week in the web-series Dominguinhos+ has an unbelievably beautiful version of ‘Lamento Sertanejo’, one of Dominguinhos’ classics (also famous in the Gilberto Gil version). It is an amazing collaboration between singer Mayra Andrade, mandolinist Hamilton de Holanda, and guitarist Yamandu Costa, two of the most talented musicians currently in activity in Brazil. Dominguinhos’ accordion itself is not heard here, but the virtuosity of the two musicians combined with Mayra Andrade’s limpid voice is an absolute killer.

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    • interesting article on the numinous by Jeffrey Kripal

      At the Chronicle here.*

      Kripal argues that we don't have more empirical evidence for extra-sensory kinds of perception, because such perceptions usually involve trauma, often the death of a loved one. And of course we can't replicate these things in a laboratory. Two of his examples are Mark Twain and Swedenborg, the first involving a kind of mental telepathy where Twain vividly dreamed about his brother's death a week before it happened, in his dream getting a lot of odd details correct. Interestingly, Kant made fun of Swedenborg in his published works, but in a private letter to a friend, actually accepted one of the stories of his clairvoyance.

      Even though nearly every philosopher I know is too naturalistically minded to take these things very seriously, I don't find Kripal's claims implausible. As he notes, for just about any interesting physical property we have to do a lot of violence to matter to be able to figure out what's going on.

      One of the best books I've read recently is Rod Dreher's The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, which recounts his sister's dying from lung cancer and his decision to move back home to Saint Francisville, LA in the wake of her death. He describes a few numinous moments of the sort Twain worried about, and their depiction is both moving and plausible.

      [*You have to hurridly scroll down to get past their irritating little box with job adds that constantly scroll in and out before it drives you nuts, or you can fight the good fight and nuke it with a firefox add-on like this.]

    • Philosophy has no future

      With a provocative title such as this, it is easy to imagine how the rest of the story will go. Philosophy, one will read, no longer has an effective role to play in society. One could perhaps draw on the authority of Stephen Hawking and argue, as Hawking does, that philosophy is dead and serves no purpose for it is now physics that best provides the answers to the questions that were once the focus of philosophers. The title may also lead one to anticipate the economic argument where philosophy is portrayed as being one of the most useless of the humanities degrees with the subsequent encouragement that one pursue, for the sake of their professional future, a more economically viable degree.

      If either of these arguments are what the “philosophy has no future” title intends, then there are counter-arguments at the ready. With respect to the first, there is plenty of room to argue, as many have (see Laurie Paul’s essay for example), that the physics Hawking encourages presupposes a metaphysics that leaves plenty of opportunity for traditional philosophical questions to gain traction and in turn foster cooperative engagement between philosophy and science (Roberta’s excellent post along with Eric’s post on dark matter are cases in point of just such cooperation). There is also plenty of evidence to challenge the common assumption that philosophy is not a good degree to pursue in order to get a lucrative job upon graduation. Far from being a hindrance to future economic success, philosophy majors on the whole earn more than graduates with other degrees (see this story [h/t Catarina]). Philosophy majors also outperform students from other majors when it comes to standardized tests – e.g., LSAT, GRE (see this).

      These counter-arguments are persuasive and as far as I’m concerned definitively undermine the two assumptions that may appear to motivate the title of this post. These assumptions, however, are not what motivated the title. What motivated it instead is not the notion that philosophy has no future because it has been displaced by competing forces that have now taken over the future that philosophy could once claim, but rather that the very attitude that philosophy ought to have such a future is itself derivative of a philosophy that has no future.

      I would propose defending, to state the thesis more directly, a contemporary reworking of Camus’ philosophy of the absurd.

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    • A Bechdel test for philosophy papers

      I have been thinking about an analogy to the Bechdel test for philosophy papers – this in the light of recent observations that women get fewer citations even if they publish in the "top" general philosophy journals (see also here). To briefly recall: a movie passes the Bechdel test if (1) there are at least 2 women in it, (2) they talk to each other, (3) about something other than a man. 

      A paper passes the philosophy Bechdel test if

      1.  It cites at least two female authors
      2.  At least one of these citations engages seriously with a female author's work (not just "but see" [followed by a long list of citations])
      3. At least one of the female authors is not cited because she discusses a man (thanks to David Chalmers for suggesting #3). 

      The usual cautionary notes about the Bechdel test apply here too. A paper that doesn't meet these standards is not necessarily deliberately overlooking women's work (it could be ultra-short, it might be on a highly specialized topic that has no female authors in the field – is this common?), but on the whole, it seems like a good rule of thumb to make sure women authors in one's field are not implicitly overlooked when citing. 

    • Thinking about the technological singularity

      Next Saturday, the University of Leuven is hosting an outreach event called Philosophy Festival ("Feest van de Filosofie"). This year's theme is people & technology ("mens & techniek"). I was asked to join a panel discussion on the technological singularity. The introduction will be given by a computer engineer (Philip Dutré, Leuven). There will be a philosopher of technology (Peter-Paul Verbeek, Twente) and a philosopher of probability (me, Groningen); and the moderator is a philosopher, too (Filip Mattens, Leuven). So far, I have not worked on this topic, although it does combine a number of my interests: materials science, philosophy of science, and science fiction.

      The idea of a technological singularity (often associated with Ray Kurzweil) originates from the observation that the rate of technological innovations seems to be speeding up. Extrapolating these past and current trends suggests that there may be a point in the future at which systems that have been built by humans (software, robots, …) will become more intelligent than humans. This is called the technological singularity. Moreover, once there are systems that are able to develop systems that are more intelligent than systems of the previous generation, there may be an intelligence explosion. The possibilities of later generations of such systems are inconceivable to humans. (This theme has been explored in many science fiction stories, including the robot stories by Isaac Asimov (1950's and later), the television series "Battlestar Galactica" (2004-2009), and the movie "Her" (2013).)

      Skynet.

      Even this brief introduction gives us plenty of opportunity for reflection on concepts (What is intelligence?) and consequences (What will happen to humans in a post-singularity world?). I am planning to analyze a very basic assumption, by raising the following question: When are we justified to pick a particular trend that has been observed in the past (e.g., Moore's observation of an exponential increase in the number of transistors on commercial chips) and extrapolate it into the future? Viewed in this way, the current topic is an example of the general problem of induction.

      The hypothesis "The observed trend will continue to hold" is only one among many. Let me offer two alternative hypotheses:

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