New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly 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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    • My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection

      There's an interesting debate at slate about whether Sara O Holla's tumblr "MyHusband's Stupid Record Collection" is inadvertently sexist because it confirms the stereotype of only men being music nerds.*

      In our culture we do tend to associate men with the nerdly characteristic of getting overly enthusiastic about some narrow area and then trying to become frighteningly completist with respect to it. If we didn't have that association we wouldn't have the locution "nerd girl" (for more info, see the funny tumblr "Nerd Girl Problems") If you just call a guy a nerd you don't have to say "nerd boy."

      I think that these stereotypes might have a little bit to do with why women are underrepresetned in philosophy. There's not much difference between a music nerd reclassifying his sixteen boxes of LPs and someone organizing the dialectical space around everything anyone has ever said about Fitch's Paradox.

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    • Why we watch sports (other than professional wrestling)

      My threadjacking attempt to play the Vonnegutian Martian anthropologist fell flat yesterday,* so I want to atone for the sin by seriously raising the question of why we watch sports.

      There are three kinds of answers to the question I can think of: (1) a Witggensteinian deconstruction of the question, (2) a phenomenological/aesthetic answer, and (3) a moral answer. I'm sure there are more than I can think of, and also that these can be extended in interesting ways. So comments are welcome.

      (1) Wittgensteinian (possibly MacIntyrian) Answer-

      If construed broadly enough, the question is infelicitous. Since part of what it is to be human is to delight in playing and watching games, the question amounts to asking why one should be human. And this makes no sense. First, it's not a choice. Second, "Why?" questions are only felicitous with respect to a normative/teleological background shared by the asker and answerer. If the claim that games are an essential part of human nature strikes you as untrue, go read Bernard Suits The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, a book Simon Blackburn rightly called a masterpiece (brief review by Mark Silcox here). Note that if Suits is correct that "game" can be defined as “a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” then the "Why?" question is even more pointless.

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    • The end of college sports as we know it?

      So this claims.   I have no insight into whether he is exaggerating the importance of the recent decision, but its an interesting claim.   I, for one, would probably welcome the outcome–though the consquences of these things are hard to predict.

    • [punkrockmonday #27] Gillian Welch – Look at Miss Ohio; Iris Dement – Easy’s Gettin’ Harder Every Day; Fiona Apple – Oh Sailor

      There's probably some language that has a word denoting the kind of emotion Gillian Welch summons in "Look at Miss Ohio." Maybe English does. I don't know.

      It has something to do with dashed expectations. The subject of this song has a convertible and maybe has a kind of Auntie Mame devil-may-care type charisma. But the narrator's tone is weirdly critical, even while nostalgic. And then the subject admits that there's some problem lurking under the pretense:

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    • Quick thoughts on pluralism in philosophy of biology

      Philosophy of biology is pluralistic, or so my friends tell me.  Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that many philosophers of biology believe that biology is pluralistic.  One friend recently used the phrase "irreducibly pluralistic."  But I am not so sure.

      There seem to be at least two sources of this pluralism.  One is John Beatty's excellent essay, "The Evolutionary Contingency Thesis." Beatty points out that all generalizations in biology are the outcomes of evolution, and as such, are subject to exceptions (either in the present or the future), and could be otherwise (due to the chance order of mutations and the possibility of solving the same selective challenge in different ways).  And if there are no universal generalizations necessitated by nature in biology (i.e., no laws), then we should expect pluralism.  Beatty highlights pluralism of theories in particular, such as between neutralist and selectionist theories in evolution, or alternative theories about the origin of sex.

      Another source of pluralistic thinking in philosophy of biology surely results from decades of debate over species concepts.  Many philosophers of biology think that different areas of biology reasonably use different species concepts, e.g., one might rely on a morphological definition of species while another might rely on an interbreeding one.  As Marc Ereshefsky so elegantly argues in "Eliminative Pluralism," this is due to the multiplicity of evolutionary processes that divide up the natural world in multiple ways. 

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    • Fundamental weirdness in nearly everything written on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism

      The weirdest thing about all of the hoopla surrounding revelations of Heidegger's Nazism is that both defenders and detractors accept that "Heidegger wrote that P" is factive when P concerns the interpretation of Heidegger's own texts. You don't have to go along with Foucault's "Death of the Author" or agree with Wimsatt and Beardsley that there is an "intentional fallacy" to find this extraordinary odd.

      Consider a representative passage from Rebecca Schuman's recent slate piece:

      It’s not that history lacked all evidence before. Heidegger assumed rectorship of the University of Freiburg after Adolf Hitler came to power; he joined the Nazi party and remained in it throughout the entirety of World War II.* But only the Black Notebooks contain actual references to “world Jewry” or “a collusion of ‘rootless’ Jews in both international capitalism and communism,” references that, Trawny insists, tie Heidegger’s anti-Semitism directly to his philosophy. Unprecedented indeed.

      What can this possibly mean? As so often happens, the italics obscure more than they clarify. I think I've read every article that Shuman links to, and I can't understand it at all. Even if the Black Notebooks contained a detailed interpretation of Being and Time as a recipe for mass murder, what would that show about the book? I just don't get this, but as far as I can see the Black Notebooks could only even possibly be a "smoking gun" if you a priori assume that Heidegger gets the last word on interpreting his own works. Many of his detractors and French defenders seem to me to be making just this assumption. But it's a frankly bizarre thing for anyone to believe, especially so for anyone who is sympathetic to Heidegger's history of philosophy, which almost systematically posits that philosophers don't really understand the meaning of their own works. Why would Heidegger himself be an exception? I'm missing something here.

    • Big news in Cosmology

      For those of you who don't follow these sorts of things, there was a major announcement today in Physics/Cosmology.   The "BICEP2" group claims to have found (signs of) gravitational waves in the cosmic background microwave radiation.   This could give us a window into what happened in the very ealiest moments after the big bang.     Sean Carroll, (occasional lurker at this blog, I believe), has two great posts on his own blog explaining what this is all about:  a general background post and a post covering some of the specifics of the data reported.

    • Martin Luther King’s Hegelianism

      After the jump is a lecture I gave a few weeks ago as part of our Adult Sunday School course on Martin Luther King's theology (even though I don't give a citation, to readers of this blog it might be pretty clear I was thinking about this post by Helen De Cruz at the time).

      Presenting on King was a little bit humbling since one of the organizers of the Baton Rouge bus boycott is a member of Baton Rouge's University Presbyterian Church and was in the class audience.

      King himself actually took a two semester course on Hegel taught by Edgar Brightman and Peter A. Bertocci. John Ansbro (author of Martin Luther King: The Making of a Mind) discusses King's debt to Hegel here.

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