I came across this gem today, Nirvana covering Terry Jacks in Brazil:
I think they had to trade instruments to keep just a smidgeon of ironic distance from the schmaltzyness of the original. This kind of necessity is the curse of my generation.
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Really fine review of the movie (filmed on the LSU campus) at Psychology Today here, with a number of comparisons between the film and that one Rocky film where Stallone wins the Cold War, including this:
If you recall, the Russian boxer Drago trains in a state of the art scientific facility, where they measure the impact of his punches, train him on machines and try to figure out how to make him a better fighter. Meanwhile Rocky runs out in the snow and lifts logs. God’s not Dead is very similar. The reiteration of Hawking’s statement that philosophy is dead was not accidental. It is something that the conservative evangelicals who made this movie desperately want to be true. In the real world, Hawking’s statement was met with condemnation from both scientists and philosophers,* and philosophy is so alive and well today that the Christian right-wing feels they need a movie to demonize it. But this is a part of a larger anti-intellectual movement in evangelical Christianity that distrusts what academics say on everything from American history to evolution.
The end of Johnston's piece is a little bit unfortunate.
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There are a number of, er, hairy stories over at the Daily Mousse worth checking out today.
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Given the recent guest post on this issue, some of us thought it appropriate to post a link to this statement, written by three APA members with disabilities, on the APA’s practices with regard to members with disabilities. I (and the other bloggers I have communicated with) take no stand on this, and merely pass it along.
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The much anticipated appointments page at PhilJobs is now live (see this announcement from the APA). To encourage the use of this service, we will be suspending the hiring thread on NewAPPS. I want to commend this effort by the APA, David Bourget, and David Chalmers, which will certainly be a helpful addition to the profession.
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Following an excellent post on cochlear implants by Teresa Blankmeyer Burke over at Feminist Philosophers is a comment pointing the reader to this interview, which may be of interest to NewAPPS readers. Of particular interest is William Mager's attempt to describe his experience of sound with the new implants. Here are a few key passages:
“It’s not sound. It’s beeping. But It doesn’t feel like sound. It feels like some kind of electronic trigger is going on in your brain.” (at around 4:27)
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The interview is online at Edinburgh University Press here.* There are lots of juicy tidbits, for example this from Ohm:The latter half of the 20th century bequeathed the Anglophone world a very one-sided picture of “French Theory.” The soixante-huitards were like our noble savages. Many important voices were silenced, due perhaps to institutional and sociological pressures, as well as individal and collective decisions about what works to translate. In many ways this Romantic image of French philosophy continues today.Mark's one of the most consistently interesting interlocutors I've ever had the pleasure to work with.** Some of the background is in the interview. As an undergraduate he initially worked in South Asian Studies, and as part of that lived in Nepal during a civil war. Then while finishing his degree at Madison he got interested in the French Theory presupposed by many of the people he was working on. So he went to France and studied there, a process which gave him an interesting distance from some of the canonical American receptions of French thought. Now he's at LSU getting a Ph.D in French and an MA in Philosophy.***
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Many philosophers of science are understandably excited about Neil deGrasse Tyson's reinvorgoration of the TV show Cosmos. After all, most of us are pretty excited about science and anything that improves the public's scientific literacy. Thus, it is extremely disappointing to hear him articulate the comments that he does at about 1:02:46 of this video.* He says that a "philosopher is a would-be scientist without a laboratory" and that we have been "rendered essentially obsolete." He later suggests that there is much positive work that a philosophers can do (in ethics, for example), but doesn't seem to think that there can be any good philosophy of science. (Richard Dawkins, who is also shown in the video, seems to take a slightly more positive view of the field).
This morning, I saw two things that shook the cobwebs: 1) Eric Winsberg's intriguing post about dark matter, and, more to the point at hand, the fact that he was at an event that involved astronmers and philosophers, and 2) with the web announcement for a “Genomics and Philosophy of Race” Conference that I am a part of, involving both biologists and philosophers (not to mention historians and sociologists). These two events are only two of the many, many productive collaborations between scientists and philosophers of science. We need to do a better job telling people about them, and about telling the general public what philosophers of science do.
* H/T to Lucas Matthews, graduate stuent at the University of Utah, for the pointer to the video and NdGT's attitude toward philosophy of science
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In philosophy of religion, realist theism is the dominant outlook: belief in God is similar to belief in other real things (or supposedly real things) like quarks or oxygen. There is a rather triumphalist narrative about the resurgence of realist theism since the demise of logical positivism (see for instance, Plantinga's advice to Christian philosophers) when logical positivism and its verifiability criterion held sway, philosophers were dissuaded from talking about God in realist terms: religious beliefs were not just false, but meaningless. With the demise of logical positivism, however, theists could again defend realist positions, using a variety of sophisticated arguments.
Nevertheless, the question is whether theists in philosophers of religion are not conceding too much to atheists by talking about theism mainly in terms of beliefs. To ignore practice is to ignore a large part of the religious experience, and what makes it meaningful to the theist. Such an exclusive focus can indeed be alienating, as it seems to suggest that theists believe a whole bunch of ideas that are wildly implausible, e.g., that a man resurrected from the dead, or was born of a virgin. This picture of religious life as believing in a set of strange propositions is, as Kvanvig memorably put it, a view that most theists will not recognize themselves in:
I hardly recognize this picture of religious faith and religious life, except in the sense that one can cease to be surprised or shocked by the neighbor who jumps naked on his trampoline after having seen it for years.
That is not to say that many theists do believe these things, even in a literal sense, but without looking at the larger picture of practices that help to maintain and instil these beliefs, our epistemology of religion remains woefully incomplete.
It is therefore refreshing to read philosopher Howard Wettstein's recent interview in The Stone, who, coming from a Jewish background, emphasizes the practice-based aspects of a religious lifestyle. He argues that "existence" is the wrong idea for God, following Maimonides, and instead argues that "the real question is one's relation to God, the role God plays in one’s life, the character of one’s spiritual life."
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No. No. Not THAT controversy. I just got back from a meeting at the insanely cool Carnegie Observatory in Pasadena, California (Hubble's old digs) with Wendy Parker, Paul Humphreys, James Ladyman, and many extremely interesting and engaging astronomers. (Barry Madore and Wendy Freedman were our hosts, and Stacy McGaugh, Bill Saslaw, Alar Toomre (who did an insanely cool computer simulation of galaxy collision back in 1972!), Frank van den Bosch, and James Bullock were in attendance.) Among the many interesting things I learned is that the whole issue of Dark Matter is much more complicated than I ever imagined. I used to think that Dark Matter was simply sprinkled liberally around the universe in exactly the right quantities to get the accelerations of galaxies and clusters right. I thought, in other words, that it was a simple and straightforward Duhem problem. Then, a few years ago, the images of the Bullet supercluster collision came out, and it was widely reputed to offer direct evidence of dark matter. This made it seem like a standard "independant confirmation" of a Duhumian auxilliary hypothesis. But of course, the situation is MUCH more complicated. There are in fact at least 16 different moving parts in the Dark Matter controversy, and superclusters are just one of them. And in fact, long before the Bullet cluster was observed, opponents of the standard model of "cold dark matter" (who advocate a modified theory of gravity) had admitted that superclusters probably had missing mass. But the rub is this: there is plenty of known missing BARYONIC mass (the kind that the Big Bang neucleosynthesis model predicts the expected quantity of) to account for the missing mass in superclusters. In fact, that would only take about 3% of the baryonic mass out there, and as much as 30% is known to be missing. So, the "dark matter" in the Bullet supercluster could easily be brown dwarfs, black holes, or other "normal" stuff. So, the debate is much more intricate, and it involves trying to figure out how the dark matter halos of the universe would have evolved from the tiny fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background and then predicting what velocity curves for galaxies those would produce. The contest is then to see who can predict velocity curves better: the people with modified theories of gravity, or the people who simulate the dark matter and then see what it does. From what I can tell, the modified gravity people seem to have the edge in that, and they do with fewer free parameters. All very fascinating stuff.
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