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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

    • Ancient Rome Open City to Refugees: Antique Republics and Inclusive Citizenship

      A story in the Britsh press about archaeological investigations in Rome that suggest the city is about 150 years oldler than its legendary foundation in 753 BCE reminds me of the apparent characteristic quality of early Rome, its openness to refugees, vagrants, and everyone in search of a new home.  At least this is the impression we get from Livy's History of Rome, and it makes sense given that Rome did keep getting bigger as as a city and greater in the reach of its power through alliances ansd aborption. We can also think of how the foundational mythology, we see in Virgil's Aeneid, represents Rome as the product of refugees from Troy.

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    • The *Apparent* Impact of Gourmet Rank on Women and Men Seeking Tenure-Track Jobs

      Marcus Arvan at the Philosophers' Cocoon posted sample data from the new appointments site at PhilJobs, which is discussed in a great post by Helen de Cruz here at New APPS. In comments at de Cruz's post and in a new post Arvan discusses the impact of Gourmet ranking on women and men seeking tenure-track jobs. I wanted to follow up on Arvan's post by looking at the full set of data currently available at PhilJobs. I did this in part because I knew that the sample Arvan collected was skewed on gender, due to an earlier analysis on gender I performed for a comment on a post at the Philosophy Smoker. With that convoluted introduction aside, here is a summary of the findings, in keeping with the findings by Arvan: the gourmet rank of one's PhD granting institution appears to have a greater impact on men seeking tenure-track jobs than on women seeking tenure-track jobs. Although I cannot yet speak to the source of this discrepancy, I (like Arvan) find the difference troubling. I welcome comments on the source of the difference below, although any comments will be subject to moderation. Let's look more closely at the data (Note: the linked spreadsheet was updated on May 14th):

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    • What Kelp Remembers

      Weird Tales, one of the best and oldest horror and dark fantasy magazines, has just launched a new series of ultra-short flash fiction (under 500 words), Flashes of Weirdness. To inaugurate the series, they’ve chosen a piece of mine — which is now my second publication in speculative fiction.

      My philosophical aim in the story — What Kelp Remembers — is to suggest that on a creationist or simulationist cosmology, the world might serve a very different purpose than we’re normally inclined to think.

      At some point, I want to think more about the merit of science fiction as a means of exploring metaphysical and cosmological issues of this sort. I suspect that fiction has some advantages over standard expository prose as a philosophical tool in this area, but I’m not satisfied that I really understand why.

      [Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind.]

    • A good year for the Hobbesians among us

      Two new books argue that pre-agricultural societies were far more Hobbesian than Rousseauean.

      Read the Spectator review of Ian Morris’ War: What is it Good For? The Role of Conflict in Civilisation, from Primates to Robots here, which includes this:

      If sometime around 7a.m. on 1 July 1916, as you waited to go over the top somewhere along the Somme, you had been tapped on the shoulder and told that you’d never had it so good, you might well have been mildly surprised at the news, but you would have been wrong to be. It would seem from the growing evidence of graves that Stone Age man had something like a 10–20 per cent chance of meeting a violent death, and if you factor in the anthropological evidence of surviving 20th-century Stone Age societies, then, as Morris puts it, Stone Age life was ‘10–20 times as violent as the tumultuous world of medieval  Europe and 300–600 times as bad as mid-20th-century Europe.’

      If I understand right, Morris is building off of Stephen Pinker's earlier research. Napolean Chagnon has just released his book about the Yanomamo that provides some more contemporary evidence.

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    • Hiring, academic pedigree, and exclusion: Is going for pedigree racist and classist?

      On the basis of this year’s partial hiring data, Marcus Arvan notes that the majority of tenure track hires (a whopping 88%) are from people of Leiter-ranked programs. Only 12% of hires are from people of unranked programs. Also, 37% of all tenure track hires come from just 5 schools, the Leiter top 5 list – this is amazing if one ponders it, and one may wonder at the direction philosophy is going to, if most of its future tenured workforce comes from just a few select programs.

      This has caused a lot of debate: why would people go to grad school in unranked programs at all? Why attend an unranked program if you can’t get into a highly ranked one? But what is often overlooked are the many factors, such as class and ethnic background, may contribute to someone not getting (or, as I will examine in more detail below), even applying to get into top programs. In fact, going for pedigree may be a particularly effective way to screen out people who come from poorer backgrounds and of different ethnicities.

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