Henceforth, we will have a new commeting policy here at New APPS. The default setting for the blog will now be that comments will have to be approved by the author of the blog post before they appear on the blog. In other words, the author of each individual post will be responsible for pre-moderating the comments that follow her or his post. It is likely, moreover, that each individual author will adopt their own individual standards with respect to how loosely or tightly to moderate the comments that follow their own posts. We all hope that that this new policy will lead to better and more fruitful discussions on the blog.
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I haven't posted in quite a while, but it seems like it might be time for another continental connections post (this is also cross-posted at my own blog).
One of my favorite passages from Hume actually occurs twice – in the Treatise and the Enquiry. This is the passage where Hume offers up the example of the man with normally functioning faculties who is suddenly placed into a strange, unfamiliar environment. Here is the passage from the Treatise:
For ‘tis evident, that if a person full-grown, and of the same nature with ourselves, were on a sudden transported into our world, he wou’d be very much embarrass’d with every object, and would not readily find what degree of love or hatred, pride or humility, or any other passion he ought to attribute to it. The passions are often vary’d by very inconsiderable principles; and these do not always play with a perfect regularity, especially on the first trial. But as custom and practice have brought to light all these principles, and have settled the just value of every thing; this must certainly contribute to the easy production of the passions, and guide us, by means of general establish’d maxims, in the proportions we ought to observe in preferring one object to another. (T 2.1.6, 293-4)
In the Enquiry Hume slightly modifies the example:
Suppose a person, though endowed with the strongest faculties of reason and reflection, to be brought on a sudden into this world; he would, indeed, immediately observe a continual succession of objects, and one event following another, but he would not be able to discover any thing farther. He would not, at first, by any reasoning, be able to reach the idea of cause and effect; since the particular powers, by which all natural operations are performed, never appear to the senses; nor is it reasonable to conclude, merely because one event, in one instance, precedes another, that therefore the one is the cause, the other the effect. Their conjunction may be arbitrary and casual. There may be no reason to infer the existence of one from the appearance of the other. And in a word, such a person, without more experience, could never employ his conjecture or reasoning concerning any matter of fact, or be assured of any thing beyond what was immediately present to his memory and senses. (EHU 36).
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I am currently supervising a student writing a paper on Wittgenstein’s notion of therapy as a metaphilosophical concept. The paper relies centrally on a very useful distinction discussed in N. Rescher’s 1985 book The Strife of Systems (though I do not know whether it was introduced there for the first time), namely the distinction between prescriptive vs. descriptive metaphilosophy (the topic of chap. 14 of the book).
The descriptive issue of how philosophy has been done is one of factual inquiry largely to be handled in terms of the history of the field. But the normative issue of how philosophy should be done – or significant questions, adequate solutions, and good arguments – is something very different. (Rescher 1985, 261)
Rescher goes on to argue that descriptive metaphilosophy is not part of philosophy at all; it is a branch of factual inquiry, namely the history of philosophy and perhaps its sociology. Prescriptive metaphilosophy, by contrast, is real philosophy: methodological claims on how philosophy should be done are themselves philosophical claims. (Full disclosure: I haven’t read the whole chapter, only what google books allows me to see…) Rescher’s position as described here seems to be quite widespread, encapsulating the ‘disdain’ with which not only descriptive metaphilosophy, but also the history of philosophy in general, is often viewed by ‘real philosophers’. And yet, this position seems to me to be fundamentally wrong (and this is also the claim that my student is defending in his paper).
(Notice that to discuss the status of descriptive metaphilosophy as philosophy, we need to go meta-metaphilosophical! It’s turtles all the way up, or down, depending on how you look at it.)
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Dominguinhos was one of the greatest Brazilian accordionists of all times, and musical heir of Luiz Gonzaga – second only to Gonzaga in the pantheon of Brazilian northeastern music. Sadly, he passed away last year in July. In the year before his death, a documentary on his life and oeuvre was filmed and is now completed. The documentary itself will be released in May (though it will be competing in a number of film festivals the coming months), but as a prelude to the documentary a webseries of 8 short episodes is being posted online, a new episode every Wednesday. Each episode focuses on musical encounters of Dominguinhos with other musicians: the first episode is with Gilberto Gil, second with João Donato, and third with Djavan, among other illustrious guests. I’ve been enjoying each of them tremendously, and look forward to the remaining 5 – and of course, to the documentary!
I’m posting here ‘Abri a porta’, with Gilberto Gil; ‘Minha saudade’, with legendary jazz pianist João Donato; 'Retrato da vida' with Djavan and Mayra Andrade . In all tracks, the magical accordion of Dominguinhos shines. (You can follow the next episodes on Facebook or the Youtube channel.) Brazilian music lovers are unbelievably lucky that all this wonderful material was recorded just before Dominguinhos' death, as this means there is more of him still around for us to enjoy.
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The review, in BioScience, is available here. I highly recommend it for its cool, judicious treatment, as well as for the glimpse into Evan's own approach, near the end of the review:
Nagel neglects another important body of work closely connected to theoretical and experimental models of the origins of life. This work concerns complex or self-organizing systems and comprises theoretical biology, dynamical systems theory, and philosophy. A number of theorists have argued that certain types of self-organizing systems exhibit a kind of natural teleology in the sense of a directedness arising from being self-producing and self-maintaining (Juarrero 1999, Thompson E 2007, Deacon 2012). This kind of directedness does not involve teleological laws beyond or outside of the laws of physics, unlike the natural teleology that Nagel proposes but does not develop fully. Moreover, such self-producing and self-maintaining systems arguably exhibit protomental characteristics and thereby provide a bridge from the physical order to the orders of life and the mind. Nagel's book falls short in not taking this work into account.
Finally, Nagel never stops to consider that his concepts of consciousness and the physical body may be part of the problem. For Nagel, consciousness is private, first-person experience, and the physical body is a complex mechanism. A different approach argues that consciousness, most fundamentally, is the feeling of being alive—a feeling that is necessarily bodily and that is also necessary for certain kinds of life-regulation processes of the body (Thompson E 2007). According to this view, there is no way to pry apart consciousness, life, and the physical body in the way that Nagel presupposes.
Treatments of these two books, from other angles, appeared at New APPS by Eric and Mohan.
Eric's pieces on Nagel are here and here and here. Mohan's are here and here.
And something by Mohan on Fodor/Piatelli-Palmarini is here.
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I have nothing particularly interesting to say on the topic, but this account of recent science on the migration of people to the Americas is fascinating. What is most cool is the way that three distinct scientific routes – genetics, archeology, and linguistics – are converging on an account.
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Genuine Realists about modality typically understand propositional content to be a function of the set of worlds where that proposition is true (the set of worlds might include impossible ones). Actualist Realists take the dependence to go in the other direction, taking a world to be a function of the set of propositions true at that world. Since this function is almost always identity,* let's treat it as such in what follows.
Kaplan established a cardinality paradox against Genuine Realism analogous to an earlier paradox about the set of all propositions put forward by Russell. Russell's paradox** is now taken analogically to present a problem for Actual Realists.
Here's how Kaplan's paradox goes. Assume the set of all possible worlds has the cardinality K. Then, by Cantor's Theorem, the powerset of the set of possible worlds has a greater cardinality. But if a proposition is a set of worlds, then the cardinality of the set of propositions is greater than the cardinality of the set of worlds. O.K. so far. But let's consider for each proposition a world where one being is thinking that proposition.**** But then the set of worlds has at least the cardinality as that of the set of propositions. Contradiction.
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We got the following request at comment 102 on the other thread. It seems worthwhile, so we're opening this for narrowly focused discussion of the substantive — as opposed to illustrative — points of the "Please do NOT revise your tone" post:
As someone who might have something to say about Leigh and Edward's post, it might be useful to have a kind of reboot thread more narrowly focused on their ideas and suggestions. I signed the petition for a code of ethics so I'm thinking as carefully as I can about what [they] took such time and care to craft. If I think I can contribute usefully to that, I guess I'd prefer it to be a different thread than this discussion, as lively and productive as it may be.
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This is just to note that the links for reporting tenure-track, postdoctoral, and VAP hires from 2013-2014 have been placed in the upper-right sidebar of this blog. This should facilitate the reporting and monitoring of this information. Further, both Daily Nous and ProPhilosophy have plans to integrate the information into their sites in an easier to view format. Thank you to all of the commenters at the original posting and to all those who have already stepped up to help with this effort.
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[Leigh M. Johnson and Edward Kazarian]
We trust it won’t come as a surprise to NewAPPS readers that the reputation of professional Philosophy has been taking a well-deserved beating in the public sphere. The really bad press started two years ago with the Vincent Hendricks scandal, gained momentum a year later with the Colin McGinn scandal, and has unleashed its full fury this year with the triplet of scandals at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Northwestern University and Oxford University. Given the severity—and, in some cases, alleged criminality—of the behaviors reported in these scandals, what IS surprising to us is the turn that recent intra-disciplinary conversations about them has taken. As two non-tenured professional philosophers, we’re particularly concerned with the new enthusiasm for policing “collegiality” that seems to be emerging in and from these conversations, which in almost every case promotes a norm that we fear only serves to make the vulnerable among us even more vulnerable.
An exemplary instance of how “collegiality” standards can backfire is found in Brian Leiter’s quasi-authoritative “please revise your tone” comment (and more general attitudinal disposition) in this discussion on the Feminist Philosophers blog, followed by his longer a fortiori post (which he removed from his blog within hours, but which has been preserved here) on the “increasingly ugly cyber-dynamics” of conversations about sexual harassment in the profession. (For the record, we want to note that the sexual harassment problems in our profession are far uglier than the conversational cyber-dynamics in our profession, though it’s really a lose-lose in that determination.) It is important to take note of the dynamics on display in these threads, which demonstrate more than a little bit of our "climate" problem. Leiter invoked “tone” in reprimanding critics of his position on the issues under discussion and he directed his opprobrium at, among others, a graduate student speaking to the vulnerability she and many of her colleagues feel in a profession with an increasingly well-documented hostile climate for women. Many of the other commenters in the thread, including the post’s author, argued explicitly against attempts to police matters of tone (see comments 10 and 16).
To be precise, we're troubled that insistences on a certain set of normative standards for “collegiality” are regularly being forwarded on behalf of people like us—i.e., colleagues from underrepresented groups in the profession, those with provisional employment, and/or those whose status as stakeholders in the profession is undervalued—presumably in the interest of making the space of professional (philosophical) disagreement friendlier and “safer” for us. What seems to go largely unacknowledged, if not intentionally ignored, is the manner in which the right to police norms of professional collegiality is a privilege that attends only those for whom running afoul of those standards has no real consequences. And so, to those attempting to police these standards of collgiality, we want to say: Thanks, but no thanks.
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