Jon Cogburn's Blog

Finally a balanced review of recent Heidegger/Nazi brouhaha

Great review of Faye's Heidegger:The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy by SpIked's Tim Black HERE.

LSU Grad. Student Conference Call For Papers (Submissions Open to Undergraduates Too)

Call for Papers

We are pleased to announce:

The 2nd Annual LSU ‘Mardi Gras’ Philosophy Conference:

Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
February 19-20th, 2010

Keynote Speakers:

Dr. Edward Casey, SUNY Stony Brook
“A Matter of Edge: Border vs. Boundary at La Frontera.”

Dr. David Wood, Vanderbilt University
“Can Art Save the Earth?”

This conference is open to all undergraduates and graduates. However, we will be looking for graduate-level work and only the best papers will be selected for presentation. This conference is open to any topic, but creative philosophical work in encouraged.

Please submit papers intended for 30 minutes of presentation/questions (do not exceed 15 pages). Send papers as an attachment in Word, but remove your name to facilitate blind review. Include name, paper title, university affiliation, level of education and contact information (phone and email) in your email. Please email papers to ajoh147@tigers.lsu.edu by December 15th.

This conference was funded by PSIF and the LSU Philosophy Department. It is organized by the graduate students in the Philosophy Department at LSU.

Please contact the Graduate Advisory Committee with any questions:
Andrew Johnson ajoh147@tigers.lsu.edu; Megan Lann meganlann@gmail.com;
or Gary Williams orestesmantra@gmail.com.

nice article

On the philosophy through video games blog we are going to start a discussion of a recent article by Lara Parker for gamespot on ethics in video games. Our discussion is HERE. Please read Parker's piece (linked to at the top of the discussion) and then contribute over there.

[Full disclosure: Silcox and I are quoted in Parker's piece.]

Phillip Larkin

Half life is over now,
And I meet full face on dark mornings
The bestial visor, bent in
By the blows of what happened to happen.
What does it prove? Sod all.
In this way I spent youth,
Tracing the trite untransferable
Truss-advertisement, truth.

Progressive levels of tenured academic philosopher fail

The good news is that everyone you know will fail in some way, so there is no reason to be envious. However, like hell, there are levels of failure.

1. Your work will fail to become a canonical part of anybody's construal of the dialectic.

2. 200 years from now no students will be reading anything by you in philosophy classes anywhere (not even in some crank's classroom who is convinced that you are unfairly neglected).

3. 200 years from now students will not be reading anything that mentions your name in a footnote.

4. Today your papers are not being read in other people's graduate seminars.

5. Brian Leiter does not mention you as a goodmaking feature of your department.

6. Nobody had discussed any of your arguments in published work.

7.Brian Leiter does not mention your department.

8. Nobody has footnoted any of your work.

9. Brian Leiter mentions you, your department, or the place you got your Ph.D pejoratively (props to anyone who doesn't regard this as a fail).

10. You put letters to your local newspaper under the "publications" section of your vita.

11.You end up in administration (with apologies to Etchemendy, whose other successes and kindness more than balance out this fail).

12. You don't end up in administration, but nonetheless do as little research as people who do. Despite the success what any reasonable person should regard as a scam (you are being paid to research after all), you still take very little joy in life.

13. [hat tip Mark Silcox] You cease reading books altogether.

14. You don't end up in administration, but nonetheless get very active on committees charged with implementing and running parts of your campus' insultingly useless and soul deadening "assessment" endeavors, which Stockholm Syndrome has convinced you is something other than time destroying violations of academic freedom dreamed up by a very stupid educational-industrial complex. You have no idea what your colleagues say about you behind your back.

Any other levels of failure? Please suggest some and provide the appropriate number. For example if you propose one that is between what is now five and six, just number it 5.5 and I'll incoporporate it with a citation later.

Stupid Design - I wish I'd had this when I taught Hume this semester

update to Mitchell and Cogburn's notes for Sunday School class ("How Do We Read This Thing?")

Pastor Mitchell added an awesome piece with an overview of the history of Biblical Interpretation. The updated full document is HERE.

Devil In My Pocket - Hometown Blues

This is the first one I've done with photos. I think these are all in the public domain. If any of them are not let me know and I'll get it off youtube in a New York second, or (if you want) put in a photography credit with a link to your stuff in the notes.

All the videos for Devil in My Pocket songs that I've made thus far are HERE. Lots more songs are at the band webpage HERE. With fatherhood the music has slowed down a lot. My new thing is to allow myself to make a video every time I get a paper accepted somewhere (Mark and I got one in American Philosophical Quarterly recently). When I've finished making videos for all the songs that deserve them (there are some really bad songs in the "leftover songs" part of the web page), I'll let myself record one song when a paper gets accepted. It's nice to have little rewards like that.

I think if Emily and I were more committed to playing straight ahead Horror Punk we'd be a better band, but it's not our day job so we just play whatever we feel like.

perverse egalitarianism thread

Mikhail started a thread with one of my comments (on his earlier somewhat grumpy post) and it's spawned another interesting thread HERE.

interesting leiterreports thread on gender imbalances in academic philosophy

The thread is HERE.

Iggy Pop - Five Foot One

final version of sunday school lecture notes for now

Posting has been light. I've been really digging into no-luck epistemologies, in particular Keith DeRose's fantastic work. But all my thoughts are going into academic papers with Jeff Roland, and I almost never blog arguments that I'm putting into papers.

One other cool thing- Me and University Presbyterian Church Associate Pastor Clint Mitchell's notes on biblical interpretation and authority are finalized for the remainder of this semester's class and on-line HERE. A few conclusions:

1. Naive inerrancy (I assume some folks at Baylor have a more sophisticated version than the kind my evangelical students imbibe) is really daft. Independent of the clear contradictions, historical falsehoods, lack of surviving original texts, and also what we know about how the material got included- One of the great things about the Bible is how it is first and foremost a long chronicle of human failings. Why think that the same fallible humans who, for example, worshipped a golden calf after being freed from slavery and receiving miraculous food every morning, or who killed Jesus for that matter (and we all had a hand in that) would be competent enough to pen an innerrant text? This tension is actually I think one of the fundamental contradictions in much of the protestant tradition. The reformed tradition that started the doctrine of innerancy (at Princeton seminary) has kept the emphasis on human fallibility and rejected the dogma that scripture is inerrant, but the newer evangelicals have done the opposite
2. The "rule of love" by which a non-loving interpretation of Bible is wrong, is both historically and philosophically defensible. Historically, because the Jesus Seminar type tests for what Jesus actually might have said (involving research into the Q gospel) trace back to sayings about love trumping everything. This actually ties to innerancy- i.e. the written Law being neither sufficient (e.g. it's not good enough just to not committ adultery, or to follow the commandments) nor necessary (e.g. it's O.K. to heal on the sabbath). Philosophically, because Euthyphro dilemma type worries lead to a mystical identification of God with love.
3. After this study I'm even more glad I picked Presbyterianism when I rejoined a Christian spiritual community. The official church documents on authority and interpretation (linked to in Mitchell and me's document) are really very sensible, stressing the reformed traditions' emphasis on human fallibility, showing how PC(USA)  has moved away from inerrancy, as well as stressing the necessity of taking seriously academic research into the Bible.

navel gazing after friends' reports from tour

For all my kind of pseudo-punk rock wingeing, I'm forced to conclude that U2 is one of the handful of big acts who actually are keeping the banner of rock waiving.

Whose it going to be next? Billy Joel? Abba?

Wait a minute, I already decided those guys wrote some pretty good songs.

At least: (1) I still don't like progressive rock (though, disturbingly, two friends whose other aesthetic judgments I put a great deal of creedence in are big fans of the form), and (2) I'm irrationally exuberant about the fact that James Williamson and Iggy Pop have made peace and the former is resuming his rightful place with "Iggy and the Stooges" (to be differentiated from "The Stooges," for whom Ron Asheton, R.I.P., played lead guitar).

New York Dolls - Looking for a Kiss

fun with animals

I wish I'd felt well enough to go to this petting zoo pumpkin sale thingy in Hammond Louisiana with Emily and Thomas yesterday.

Nobody make any jokes about Of Mice and Men or the old cartoon that copied it. This being said, you really do have to teach two year olds not to just grab at animals. Thomas is learning pretty well.

When I was a kid some of our friends in the country had a turkey that was really foul tempered and who liked to chase kids up into the back of a pick-up truck. I don't know if this turkey will have such a lucky fate. According to Emily, he found Thomas as interesting as Thomas found him.

This is why I'm really bummed I could not go. There's really nothing happier then when your kid is excited, full of innocent joy, and interested in the world.

Emily said his second favorite thing was watching piglets eat. It made him jump up and down and laugh uproariously.

To quote Emily's facebook (where I got these photos from) caption for this picture, "But his absolute favorite was the cow. He banged on it, laid down on it, and petted it. The cow didn't seem to notice."

He got a pumpkin at the end which is just big enough for him to lug around and place on different chairs. He's so hyped about the pumpkin that he brought it to bed last night, but he didnt' try to bring to church this morning.