Jon Cogburn's Blog

one more reason to be envious of friends teaching at Franklin and Marshall

Lancaster, Penn. currently ranks highest on the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index of any American city. Richard Florida spiel HERE.

It's a great school too.

possibly the first time I've been actually proud of being an analytic philosopher

Tremendous article HERE about high school students learning philosophy in Brazil. I realize that reporters can get a lot of this stuff wrong, but even if the thing is only half correct, then the picture of the influence of some French thought on dominant strains of academic philosophy in Brazil seems absolutely vile to me.

The influence:

According to the narrative I hear time and again, philosophy started in Brazil in the 1930s, when French scholars founded the philosophy department at the University of São Paulo. They put an end to the “dilettante period” characterized by the oratory of lawyers and the scholasticism of priests that had dominated Brazilian philosophy until then. Among the French scholars were Martial Guéroult and Victor Goldschmidt, who taught that doing philosophy is no longer possible, only history of philosophy: reconstructing systems of thought through a painstaking analysis of their immanent structure. Since then, studying the history of Western philosophy has been the paradigm of serious philosophy in Brazil.

O.K. Let's be honest. Bad SPEP philosophy tends towards just this kind of prison. You learn the classics with at least more depth than the average analytic dude, then when you put on your first pair of big boy pants you write hagiography about Parisian 68er or maybe one of their students. And in the United States at least, the next level of Hell (going from big boy pants to a ruined version of Bradbury's vanilla white suit) is when you get enough institutional pull to graduate from hagiographic exposition to actually yourself aping the style (English language translations) of Heidegger and the worst writers among the aforementioned Soixante Huitards (cf. Michael Marder for sad evidence that, for all our once vaunted ability to see through the outright cons foisted upon us by the Boomers, many gen ex SPEPers did not see through this one). . . good work if you can get it I guess, though see Jesus on what happens when you win the world.* 

But, according to the article at least, some prominent Brazilian academic continental philosophers** with political connections have been using this very kind of fetishism to do everything possible to undermine the ability of Brazilian students to learn and do philosophy!

salon dot com fails Web Design 1001

Obviously there is no going back to the glory days before these things had to be profitable, when salon dot com had about as much content as the daily beast does now, and (moreover) when they had both Camille Paglia and Greil Marcus writing tremendously entertaining weekly articles.

But the worst thing is that when you go to the articles now, more often than not there is an add with moving images that continue to move the whole time you are there. It's tremendously distracting.

At about the time HTML 4 was invented, and you could do these animated GIF files, all of the books on how to design web sites contained the commandment not to include graphics that continuously move, because they were subconsciously irritating at best. I think this was really good advice.

If salon has an article I want to read I always cut and paste the text into a word document and also try to notice whatever the obnoxious moving add is and remember not to purchase that.

In addition to defending endless apartheid in Israel, The New Republic sins by having the scroll through of their top stories constantly on the move. Again, the Daily Beast is way better, you can pause the damned thing on their site.

The War Against Immappancy Begins with This

Courtesy of Reginald Bassey.

Slate interview with Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia)

I went to graduate school with Larry. He's a pretty singular personality. While finishing his dissertation he taught himself fiddle and started jamming every week with the Columbus bluegrass and Irish fiddle scene. In a short time he got good enough to teach lessons. He also ran a web page on Y2K related stuff that ended up getting cited in several books. And he and Ty Lightner (of Yvonne Craig fan site fame; one of the first such sites on the internet, one that he started half as a lark, but that ended up getting him face time with much of the cast of the original Batman; Ty is now a computer programmer and one of the top Netflix reviewers in the world) and I used to go to the great performances put on as part of the choreography MFA degree at OSU sometimes once a week.

His dissertation was on epistemic circularity. It's really interesting how that work played a role in the way Wikipedia was initially set up and then with Larry leaving it. Here are some of the many money quotes (whole interview HERE):

Yeah, I can imagine that the social dynamics get pretty ugly. But my understanding is that you left Wikipedia over deeper philosophical schisms.

I had lots of deep philosophical schisms with Wikipedia in the end, although also some agreements.  The first problem was what we were just talking about: reigning in all the bad actors, doing something to reduce the number of trolls and the amount of time we spent dealing with them.

The other problem was that there needed to be some sort of mechanism—it didn't have to be anything like editorships or review before publishing or anything like that—but some sort of low-key role for experts in the system.

Why did you feel so strongly about involving experts?

Because of the complete disregard for expert opinion among a group of amateurs working on a subject, and in particular because of their tendency to openly express contempt for experts. There was this attitude that experts should be disqualified [from participating] by the very fact that they had published on the subject—that because they had published, they were therefore biased. That frustrated me very much, to see that happening over and over again: experts essentially being driven away by people who didn't have any respect for those who make it their lives' work to know things.

Where do you think that contempt for expertise comes from? It's seems odd to be committed to a project that's all about sharing knowledge, yet dismiss those who've worked so hard to acquire it.

There's a whole worldview that's shared by many programmers—although not all of them, of course—and by many young intellectuals that I characterize as "epistemic egalitarianism." They're greatly offended by the idea that anyone might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else. They feel that for everything to be as fair as possible and equal as possible, the only thing that ought to matter is the content [of a claim] itself, not its source.

My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean

After Katrina and Gustav, pictures like the one below always provoke anxiety. Though this one still seems like it will not get very strong (Baton Rouge can handle a Category 1 or 2; anything stronger is nightmarish). However all that oil, chemical dispersant, and methane gas sitting in Bonnie's way certainly won't help anything. At the very least, things look bad for Bayous Lafourche and Teche and Lake Maurepas. Shudder.

I'm going to return to posting happy things, maybe some videos with funny cats?

James Lileks is an underappreciated national resource

James Lileks, brilliant writer of some of my favorite books (i.e. The Gallery of Regrettable Food, Gastroanomolies: Questionable Culinary Inventions from the Golden Age of American Cookery, Mommy Knows Worst: Highlights from the Golden Age of Bad Parenting Advice, and Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible 70's) and host of one of my favorite blogs (The Bleat, linked to in the Daily Read section at the right), has posted a set of vignettes from a cruise he just took with his family. As usual, they are insightful and hilarious.

PART I

PART II

PART III

PART IV

PART V

There ought to be a category for the kind of popular anthropology at which Lileks excels. He's a national treasure. His website is one of the best things on the interwebs, containing:

	Matchbook Museum. Lovely examples of commercial art in its smallest, most portable form.
	Comic Covers. Unusual or risable examples of old comic book cover art. Part of Comic Sins.
	100 Mysteries. Chewing through a big box of public-domain Hollywood mystery movies, one at a time.
	StarTribune. Column on Friday and Sunday.
	Black & White World An ongoing look at movies that decided color was just so obvious.
	The 30s. Devoted to the detritus of a misunderstood decade.
	Comic Ads. Delightful examples of comic book ads. Part of Comic Sins.
	Miscellany. For those things that go nowhere else.

Vice Guide to North Korea (fascinating documentary)

part 1part 2

part 3

part 4

part 5

part 6

part 7

part 8

part 9

part 10

part 11

part 12

part 13

part 14