New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

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    • “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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    • 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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