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    • interesting debate between Peter Gratton and Graham Harman

      Nice audio of a recent presentation by Gratton here.

      Harman responds here.

      Gratton responds to Harman's response here.

      Given all the blogospheric animus (peaking about five years ago) that accompanied Quentin Meillassoux's critique of correlationism, it's extraordinarily cool that the "turn to metaphysics" in recent continental philosophy* has reached a point where you get this level of constructive criticism and dialogue. It will be really cool to read Gratton's forthcoming book. I think everyone who was lucky enough to see his talk on Meillassoux at SPEP this year is excited about it too.

      [*Which as three interlocking moments: (1) the new understanding of Deleuze as a speculative metaphysician, (2) Speculative Realism broadly construed (enough to include Badiou, Zizek, and Lacan in the conversation), and (3) a renaissance in the study of German Idealism. I think a fourth moment is a re-examination of the other great soixante-huitards: especially Mailbou, Haaglund, and Goldgaber on Derrida but also Brad Elliot Stone's audacious rereading of the whole tradition in Strawsonian terms (check out the first paper on his academia page).]

    • The night Twitter went down

      … in Turkey. I suppose no one should be surprised by what Recep Tayyip Erdogan is capable of by now, but this is definitely a new low. Below is a short BBC video narrating the chronology of events,  and here is a piece in the Guardian from the point of view of those fighting back against the suppression of internet freedom in Turkey (H/T Lucas Thorpe for both).

      I invite well informed readers to offer further elements on the situation in comments below.

    • Coming Attraction

      Starting this Monday, and probably going all next week, Amy Ferrer, the executive director of the APA, will be doing a series of guest posts here on NewAPPS.   She will be talking about the site visit program, about the new APA journal, and about the APA's diversity funding efforts.  She will also try to respond to questions from readers.  So, you won't want to miss this!

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Desafinado’

      This week we had the pleasure of welcoming Jerrold Levinson for a workshop in Groningen. I had never met Jerry in person before, but I had anticipated great conversations on music, given his influential work on the aesthetics of music. Well, as it turns out, it was even better than expected (and would have been better only if we had had more time to talk). It involved in particular some brief duets at restaurants in a variety of languages (English, Portuguese, French, even a bit of Spanish). 

      One of these songs was the bossa nova classic ‘Desafinado’: me in Portuguese, Jerry in English. And so the choice of what to post here at BMoF this week was pretty obvious: here is ‘Desafinado’, in the classic version from the Getz/Gilberto album, and the English version, ‘Slightly out of tune’ with the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald (live at a TV show). Incidentally, I find that the English lyrics, and Ella’s interpretation, give the song an ‘upbeat-ness’ that is extraneous to it, as it is basically a melancholic song about somebody who is accused of singing out of tune by his lover (and this causes him ‘immense pain’). Still, perhaps the way to think about it is of  ‘Slightly out of tune’ as almost like a different song altogether, and a great one at that.

      (And here is to hoping for more such duets involving Jerry and me in the future.)

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    • Introductions to three new Speculative Realism books put on-line by Edinburgh University Press

      Eup-coversEdinburgh University Press has posted the introductions to three books:

      1. Tristan Garcia's Form and Object (here),
      2. Adrian Johnston's Adventures in Transcendental Materialism (here), and
      3. Levi Bryant's Onto-Cartography (here).

      They are all pretty interesting.

      I helped Mark Ohm translate Garcia's book,* and our translator's introduction (included in the material EUP posted) is substantive.

      One of the really exciting things about Garcia is that he has single-handedly revived the tradition the French novelist/philosopher. La meilleure part des hommes (recently out in English as Hate: A Romance) won the Prix de Flore. It's an amazing novel.

      [*Unless you've done this, you have no idea how much work it is. But you learn so much about the philosophy in question (and about language itself) that it's an awesome experience.]

    • “But Quiet, Be Quiet A Minute”: On the Death of Rev. Fred Phelps

      The news has just been released that Rev. Fred Phelps, founder and lifelong shepherd of the Westboro Baptist Church (in Topeka, Kansas) has died at the age of 84.  I find it difficult, I confess, to summon the normal human compassion that usually accompanies news of another's death in this case, largely because Phelps dedicated his life to broadcasting his rejection of– not to mention enlisting others, including children, to stage carnival-like circuses around his rejection of– what most people would consider even the most minimally-decent exhibitions of human compassion.  Fred Phelps was one of the most infamous, outrageous, dishonorable and genuinely despicable hatemongers of my generation.  And, what is more, Fred Phelps' hate was as ferocious and vicious as it was blind.  Through the prism of his delusional and evangelical abhorrence, the Westboro congregants en masse considered themselves justified in casting an unjustifiably wide net of Judgment.  Caught in that net were many: ranging from bona fide innocents against whom no reasonable person could or ought cast aspersions, like Matthew Shepard, to a whole host of other "collateral-damage" victims of Phelps' quasi-political positions who found themselves the inadvertent and inauspicious targets of his his flock's detestation.

      I say again: I find it very, very difficult to summon the normal human compassion that ought to accompany the news of Fred Phelps' passing.

      Nevertheless, these are the moments when our inclination toward Schadenfreude, however deeply affirming and deeply satisfactory indulging that sentiment may feel, ought to be on principle squelched. 

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    • The Bait-and-Switch Blurring of Moral and Prudential in the World of Chutes and Ladders

      Chutes01Chutes and Ladders, if you didn’t know, isn’t just a game of chance. It’s a game of virtue. At the bottom of each ladder a virtuous action is depicted, and at the top we see its reward. Above each chute is a vice, at the bottom natural punishment. The world of Chutes and Ladders is the world of perfect immanent justice! Virtue always pays and vice is always punished, and always through natural mechanisms rather than by the action of any outside authority, much less divine authority.

      To the side you see a picture of my board at home.

      One striking thing: What 21st-century Anglophone philosophers would normally call “prudential” virtues and what 21st-century Anglophone philosophers would normally call “moral” virtues are treated exactly on par, as though they were entirely the same sort of thing.

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    • Philosophy, its Color Line, and its Culture of Justification

      Over at Times Higher Education, Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman has written an important piece calling the discipline on the carpet for its overall failure to critically engage its own whiteness.*

      There is a lot of remarkable stuff in the piece, which is organized around the paired questions of "who 'gets to do' philosophy?" and "who 'gets done' in philosophy?." It should be read in its entirety. As a teaser, however, let me just reproduce the following paragraph, which I'll discuss a bit below:  

      In a 2012 blog posting titled “What could leave philosophy?”, Brian Weatherson, professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, argues that “[f]or a few areas [of philosophy], it is easy to imagine them being in other departments, because they already overlap so substantially with work done in other departments”. Thus, instead of seeing overlap as an opportunity to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries, Weatherson sees overlap as an opportunity to police, enforce and constrict the boundary around philosophy. This narrow-mindedness is an example of what Kristie Dotson, assistant professor of philosophy at Michigan State University, has called philosophy’s “culture of justification” – not the legitimate demand that one justify the conclusion of one’s arguments, no, but the illegitimate demand that one justify that what one is doing counts as “philosophy”.

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    • Cultural Influences on Attention

      For my graduate seminar on attention last night we read papers outside my usual range of expertise, on the intersection of attention and culture. We read Nisbett et al.’s Culture and Systems of Thought and Hedden et al.’s Cultural Influences on the Neural Substrates of Attentional Control. Both are fascinating and worth a read. But the Nisbett et al. article, in particular, is full of ideas that may be interesting to readers of New APPS. Here are some of what I found to be salient points:

      • The article maintains that different cultural groups have different, opposed styles of argument. Specifically, “Westerners” are committed to avoiding the appearance of contradiction as part of an analytic style of argumentation, but “East Asians” embrace contradiction as part of “naive dialecticism.” They give an example of one study that tests this claim:

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    • Mind the Gap: Hume meets Spinoza

      As I concluded the previous post, I argued that the Deleuzian extension of Hume’s project entailed both the affirmation of monism (Spinoza) and multiplicity (Hume). This point is made crystal clear in A Thousand Plateaus when Deleuze and Guattari announce that “pluralism = monism” (ATP, p. 20; see this earlier post where I discuss this theme in the context of William James’ radical empiricism). This effort to bring Hume and Spinoza together, however, is fraught with difficulty, or at least apparently so, in a philosophical landscape that has been forever altered by Kant’s project.

      But it is just this bringing together of Hume and Spinoza that a Deleuzian metaphysics accomplishes.

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