Jon Cogburn's Blog

last Sunday school class in series

Tomorrow is the last adult Sunday school class in the Clint Mitchell and my series on Biblical authority and interpretation at University Presbyterian Church. I added one last handout on the Presbyterian guidelines (with two pretty serious criticisms of those guidelines, which I now think are in need of further Reforming). Anyhow, the whole thing is HERE.

It's 54 single spaced pages. I think if Pastor Mitchell and I do this kind of thing again in the next few years, we'll have enough MS for the beginning of a book project.

I like it quite a lot actually. I like philosophy with a lot of practical friction that nonetheless brings you right to the heart of fundamental and abstract matters. The video game stuff and computability theory does that. The D& D stuff and Priestian problems of expressing the inexpressible does that too. From these handouts, I think it's becoming clear that issue of biblical authority is becoming another instance of that for me.

updated c.v. and abstracts of all published work

Today I updated: (1) my official LSU-Policy-Statement-Number-36 vita, and (2) the set of abstracts of my published work.

The LSU vita is pretty ugly and it's clear I'm not on the market from the fact that I've decided to stop updating my aesthetically pleasing vita. Not having to do that is one of the many gifts of tenure.

I used to have abstracts of stuff that was under review, but decided to stop doing that too. It's pretty depressing when something stays on there for years at a time. Weirdly, it's always my best stuff (imho) that I have the hardest time getting published. I think that's because: (1) the less trivial a piece is, the easier it is for a blind reviewer to trash it, (2) some of my best stuff is too much logic for first tier generalist journals but too little logic for first and second tier logic journals.

I don't think there's a better system though. The things I have gotten published are much better for being rewritten as part of this process.

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.]

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

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.

Denis Dutton on dead sharks jumping the shark

Absolutely fantastic piece by Denis Dutton on conceptual art in today's NYT available HERE (Dutton's book HERE). Interesting fact:

The earliest stone tools are choppers and blades found in Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, from 2.5 million years ago. These unadorned tools remained unchanged for thousands of centuries, until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo ergaster, Homo erectus and other human ancestral groups started doing something new and remarkable. They began shaping single, thin stone blades, sometimes rounded ovals, but often in what to our eyes are arresting symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop forms. Acheulian hand axes (after St.-Acheul in France, a site of 19th-century finds) have been unearthed in their thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa, wherever Homo erectus roamed.

The sheer numbers of hand axes indicate a rate of manufacture beyond needs for butchering animals. Even more curious, unlike other prehistoric stone tools, hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their delicate blade edges, and some are in any case too big for practical use. They are occasionally hewn from colorful stone materials (even with decoratively embedded fossils). Their symmetry, materials and above all meticulous workmanship makes them quite simply beautiful to our eyes. What were these ancient yet somehow familiar artifacts for?

The best available explanation is that they are literally the earliest known works of art — practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and virtuoso craftsmanship.

Clincher:

However, one trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the pleasure we take in admiring skilled performances. From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall — where now and again the Homo erectus hairs stand up on the backs of our necks — human beings have a permanent, innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts.

We ought, then, to stop kidding ourselves that painstakingly developed artistic technique is passé, a value left over from our grandparents’ culture. Evidence is all around us. Even when we have lost contact with the social or religious ideas behind the arts of bygone civilizations, we are still able, as with the great bronzes or temples of Greece or ancient China, to respond directly to craftsmanship. The direct response to skill is what makes it possible to find beauty in many tribal arts even though we often know nothing about the beliefs of the people who created them. There is no place on earth where superlative technique in music and dance is not regarded as beautiful.

The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. That’s why looking through the history of conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes about Cadillac tailfins and early fax machines were once amusing, and the same can be said of conceptual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 declaration that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a definition of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s medicine cabinets. Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.

But that doesn’t mean we need to worry about the future of art. There are plenty of prodigious artists at work in every medium, ready to wow us with surprising skills. And yes, now and again I walk past a jewelry shop window and stop, transfixed by a sparkling, teardrop-shaped precious stone. Our distant ancestors loved that shape, and found beauty in the skill needed to make it — even before they could put their love into words.

hypothesis for why analytic blogosophere is less dysfunctionally vituperative

I think I've figured out why debates in the continental philosophy blogosphere are so much more likely to become vituperative than debates in the analytic blogosophere.

The tenure model in analytic philosophy is overwhelmingly based on number of articles published in a set of journals that generally have from three to fifteen percent acceptance rates (these are actually among the lowest acceptance rates of all academic journals). Say you are perfectly average for a published analytical philosopher. Then you'd have to submit over ten times for every one published article. So nine times out of ten you have to deal with blank rejections or referee reports justifying to an editor why your paper should not be published. And the chance of getting a tenure track job and then tenure depends upon this, so it's a huge emotional issue.

If that is your reality, then people disagreeing with you on the internet is just not that big a deal. You are already used to getting punched down and getting right back up over and over again in the one thing that most determines whether you will be able to follow your bliss. If you don't develop very thick skin the process is too traumatic and you can't do it. But then, as a result, analytic philosophers in blogs can even be fairly dismissive or challenging and it rarely escalates into ever increasing vituperativeness, personal attacks, weird defensiveness, and people being banned.

Of course these are just tendencies, and I would not have a basis for making them if I did not find a lot of the continental blogosophere to be philosophically valuable (check the links to the right).

forthcoming book edited by Levi Bryant that I'm really excited about

HERE is the table of contents.

This is exactly what is needed. With the exception of on-line reading groups, and the occasional post here and there, I'm somewhat disenchanted with the blogosphere as an avenue for development of systematic philosophical theories (as opposed to considering arguments more briefly). The biggest problem is that there is no analog to blind review, and a subsidiary problem is that a whole host of all-too-human psychological dysfunctions (that every human being suffers from) seem to be called forward by the medium itself.

In any case, the book will be an excellent chance for everyone to slow down a bit and reflect on things.

Given the set of authors and the inclusion of author-meets-critic type discussions, I think it will work fantastically well as a Part II to Lee Braver's A Thing of This World. I don't know if I would be able to convince my friends at Perverse Egalitarianism to do a reading group on it next summer though. Actually, I don't even know if that would be a good idea. . . 

My first genuinely philosophical thoughts about food and other distressing artforms

One of the anonymous posters (729) at Philosophers Anonymous notes that in gastronomy, the locution "deconstruct" refers to a chef's separating out taste components of a classic dish into distinct components, and then putting the separated ingredients together in a visually stunning way that recovers the flavor of the original dish. This is one of the basic tropes of molecular gastronomy following Ferran Adria's el Bulli (in the U.S. most famed with Grant Achez at Alinea in Chicago).

So here's one question. What makes a deconstructed dish different from the original dish. Certainly they look radically different. And the textures can be quite different too. But another difference is that when you are eating a deconstructed dish you more vividly simultaneously taste the separated components as well as the flavor of their combination (the original dish). The deconstructed dish ends up being something like a meta-commentary on the way distinct flavors achieve aesthetic balance in traditional gastronomy.

This is a really interesting case for the metaphysics of emergence in a lot of ways. I think haute cuisine has always had this norm of creating emergent flavors out of flavors that the discerning palate can differentiate. It's sort of a game to be able to guess what the ingredients are, but a major part of the gastronomic thrill is experiencing the new properties that are created by their skillful combination.
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Since I've been reading Noel Carroll's excellent The Philosophy of Horror, this has particular salience. Carroll's final view is that the paradox of horror is solved in a "co-existentialist" way, where the pleasure qualia (innate fascination with the repulsive and metaphysically peculiar, the play of curiosity from plotting devices) and pain qualia (unpleasant emotions) are distinct and added up so that the pleasure outweighs the pain. He notes that in some instances one might want to think of the paradox being solved in an "integrationist" way, where the kind of pain is part of the pleasure, but the only example he comes up with are teenage boys who watch particularly gory horror for the meta-pleasure of finding themselves to be able to take it without being scared or sickened.

But if you look at the phenomena of the delicacy, you often see the repulsive and the pleasant combined in ways that I think can only be accounted for in an integrationist manner. Take the humble Durian fruit, whose custard-like interior is both deliciously sweet and smells nauseatingly like decaying dead mammal. I don't think there is an innate fascination with tasting road kill. So you don't get the analog to our innate fascination with viewing the repulsive. But at the same time, if you could separate out the custardy sweetness and get rid of the repulsive aspect, it would no longer be a delicacy and epicures would not be interested in it. The same holds for stinky cheese, such as Epoisses [And one can't say that Epoisses just seems stinky to Americans because we weren't acculturated (maybe the repulsiveness of fermented bean curd to Americans can be accounted for this way?). In France you are absolutely not supposed to carry this cheese on the train because the smell is so awful.]

Somehow the repulsive and non-repulsive combine in many delicacies to give rise to emergent taste profiles in a thoroughly integrationist manner.

Two questions- (1) Are delicacies analogous enough to horror films to undermine Carroll's co-extistentialist response to the paradox of horror? I do think it's clear that the paradox of repulsive delicacies requires an integrationist response. (2) Why don't skilled chef's ever deconstruct these kinds of delicacies? Clearly people couldn't eat them if you managed to separate out the flavors. Imagine a little piece of delicious custard with a tiny piece of a vomitously smelly part of a rotted dead animal in the middle, set out in a visually beautiful way. No chef does this. Somehow repulsive delicacies are the limit of deconstructed cuisine. I think this is because if they were deconstructed we would immediately go into co-existentialist mode and the pain qualia would win out. Part of the aesthetic appeal of such dishes then is I think just this tension. The integrationist mode wins out. Again, I wonder if horror movies and other kinds of distressing art are analogous. If they are, then Carroll's theory needs to be expanded significantly.

more navel gazing and great cover of Daniel Johnston song

I also find that I have much less to say when I'm reading something that I really agree with, especially if it's non-trivial. This semester I'm teaching three of Noel Carroll's books and I find myself writing things like "Yes!" and "Cool!" in the margins with distressing frequency.

You can also be silenced in a far more paralyzing manner by something that seems so wrong to you that there's no place to start.

I guess the sweet spot is where you find something that you think worthy of improvement. . . Maybe this is why philosophy professors can be such unpleasant people. If you think your vocation is to constantly improve other people's beliefs then your sense of self-worth can end up completely out of whack with reality.

Anyhow, here's punkrock super group Osaka Popstar (John Cafiero – Lead Vocals, Jerry Only (The Misfits) – Bass, Dez Cadena (Black Flag, The Misfits) – Lead Guitar, Ivan Julian (The Voidoids) – Rhythm Guitar, Marky Ramone (Ramones, The Voidoids, Dust) – Drums) with a great cover of Daniel Johnston's "Wicked World."

discussion on Bogost paper

Please contribute to the discussion HERE after reading Bogost's paper (which is linked to in the original post).

Hebert, you have an interesting background from getting both analytic and continental philosophy and being in a performance studies field now. So I'd be interested to see what you think not just about the brouhaha, but also about Bogost's paper.

revised version of sunday school notes

I've uploaded a revised version of the Sunday School notes from me and UPC associate pastor Clint Mitchell HERE. I'm learning a huge amount of cool stuff by doing this, and I think the notes have really good resources for anyone interested in issues of biblical interpretation and authority. Joe Bob says check them out.

verbatim from http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/

He was one of the greatest minds of modern time, a founding father of computer science, and his legendary breaking of the Enigma Code may have been a tipping point in the struggle against Nazism. Few men have contributed so much to human learning or to his country's survival. But Turing was persecuted into suicide by the homophobia of his time and barred from entering the US because he was a homosexual (now America reserves that distinction to homosexuals with HIV). Here is the story of his death:

In January 1952 Turing picked up the 19-year-old Arnold Murray outside a cinema in Manchester. After a lunch date, Turing invited Murray to spend the weekend with him at his house, an invitation which Murray accepted although he did not show up. The pair met again in Manchester the following Monday, when Murray agreed to accompany Turing to the latter's house. A few weeks later Murray visited Turing's house again, and apparently spent the night there.

After Murray helped an accomplice to break into his house, Turing reported the crime to the police. During the investigation Turing acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray. Homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom at that time, and so both were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, the same crime that Oscar Wilde had been convicted of more than fifty years earlier.

Turing was given a choice between imprisonment or probation conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido. He accepted chemical castration via oestrogen hormone injections which lasted for a year. One of the known side effects of these hormone injections was the development of breasts, known as gynecomastia, something which plagued Turing for the rest of his life. Turing's conviction led to the removal of his security clearance, and barred him from continuing with his cryptographic consultancy for GCHQ.

Every now and again, we should remember how brutal the persecution of homosexuals was for so long, how counter-productive, how many lives were ruined, and how a great man like Turing could be reduced to suicide by the oppression he lived with on a daily basis. And so it is a good thing that Britain has now offered a formal apology to Turing - if fifty years too late. Here are prime minister Brown's words.

This is How You Generate Heat

C.M. Punk is a genius. The Jeff Hardy hagiography at the beginning brilliantly sets up Punk's prank on the entire audience beginning at the 3:00 minute mark. The crowd really believes it's Jeff Hardy coming out at first. Since in story line he is supposed to be banned from wrestling for the time being, they are ecstatic about being able to see him. What Punk is able to then do with the prank is amazing.

Iggy Pop is fond of saying that anytime you try to do something you really believe in, any time you really follow a dream all the way, someone is going to call you a punk. True punk rock responds to this with, "and your point is?"

One of the weird things about professional wrestling is that rooting for the performer is in principle distinct for rooting for the character. Of course they end up overlapping, and then weird things happen when a performer plays the heel role so incredibly. I think C.M. Punk might end up in a few years being one of those legendary heels that morphs into quasi-face status just because people root for the performer. He's very carefully restraining the portrayal of anger/righteous fury right now in his promos because when he does this it pulls the crowd in in the same way Stone Cold Steve Austin pulled the crowd in.

Neal Hebert said that when Ric Flair was wrestling Ricky Steamboat 20% of the audience was cheering for Flair, even though Steamboat was so beloved as to be sainted and Flair was all out playing the heel card.

At some point in the next two years Hebert and I are going to write a paper on the way the suspension of the suspension of disbelief works in professional wrestling, which among other things will shed light on the way information out of storyline relating to the emotional involvement in the performer can end up being presupposed in more sophisticated storylines concerning the characters.

Recurrence Schmecurrence!!!

A post authored by me is in the 3quarksdaily competition for best philosophy post of last year. Please go HERE and vote for "Perverse Egalitarianism: Early Heidegger: Fundamental Ontology" (the list of all nominees with links is HERE).

As I type this we are losing by three votes to a post about Nietzsche (pictured left). The folks that blog are reputed to be bragging that they hadn't only beat us once, but (by Nietzsche's own thesis of the "eternal recurrence of the same") had actually already beaten my Lee Braver/Heidegger post an infinite number of times. If that's correct then it also follows that I will lose an infinite number of times in the future. Please don't do this to me! Vote for Perverse Egalitarianism.

Fellow Nietzschean Brian Leiter weighed in HERE and does not include our post among the four he recommends (Blog & ~Blog: Graham Priest's Theory of Change, Der Wille Zur Macht und Sprachspiele: Nietzsche's Causal Essentialism, Object-Oriented Philosophy: English Stylists and Related Matters, PEA Soup: Scanlon on Moral Responsibility and Blame, and The Edge of the American West: Part 2, The Best of All Possible Worlds). And to add insult to injury, one can (given his books) also gather that Leiter believes that he's already done that an infinite number of times, and in doing so now he commits to going on to not recommend our post a for another infinite amount of times in the future!

Here's what Leiter did not count on. It follows from the law of excluded middle that I should win. Proof: Assume that the Nietzscheans are correct about this recurrence business. But then if you were to count all past votes it follows that every entry that received any votes has actually received a denumerable infinity of votes. So if you think Nietzsche is right, then don't bother voting because it's going to be a tie no matter what you do. On the other hand, assuming Nietzsche is wrong, then one should vote against him by voting for me.  So one should either not vote or vote for me. Q.E.D.

So why am I losing right now?

vote early, don't vote often

3quarksdaily has a list of 63 philosophy posts (mostly self-)nominated for a prize. Mine is called "Perverse Egalitarianism: Early Heidegger: Fundamental Ontology." Check out the competition (the list of all nominees with links is HERE) and if you like it you can vote on it HERE.

The post was part of the Perverse Egalitarianism reading group on Lee Braver's "A Thing of This World" which you can get to by clicking the book cover to the right.

Right now I've got three votes, which places me behind Another Heidegger Blog, and tied with Hyper Tiling, Justin Erik Halldór Smith, Strange Doctrines, and Underverse.

Please don't vote more than once!

They'll take the top 20 vote getters and then have them judged by a committee that includes Daniel Dennett.

For eliminativism about presupposition

I know there's an old Boer and Lycan paper about this very topic that I haven't read yet, so nothing I say here may be new.

I don't think that the linguistic phenomena of 'presupposition' really exists, but that in all cases what we're calling presupposition is really a mixture of semantic entailment, implicature, and possibly related discourse phenomena (such as the procedural knowledge that indefinites usually refer to things not introduced into the discourse yet).

First, the standard definition of presupposition doesn't work. Everybody holds that a sentence's presupposition is whatever information needs to been in the common ground in order for an assertion to be felicitous. So if I say, "Mary stopped smoking" it would only be a felicitous assertion if we both already know that Mary did smoke. 

Except when it's not. In every single case of presupposition one can imagine cases where the sentence is felicitously asserted without the "presupposed' information being in the common ground. Typically, pragmatics folks say that in such cases the hearer "accommodates" the information by adding it into the common ground. But this is nothing more than an admission that the definition does not work. Since there is no generative theory of accommodation, all it does is function as a place to throw recalcitrant counterexamples. It's as though Newtonians had said that Mercury was accommodating the sun and that light accomodated different inertial frames and left it at that.

Second, the biggest reason one needs a different theory of presupposition is because of "presupposition holes," where people can reliably infer material that is provably not entailed. So, in most cases, if "Mary stopped smoking" is the antecedent of a material or subjunctive conditional, we can still infer that she used to smoke, even though nothing is entailed by the antecedent of a conditional.

But I think this is purely a case of conversational implicature (at least with stop/start and definites; I need to look at other constructions). Asserting a material conditional implicates that you don't know if the antecedent is true. Asserting a counterfactual conditional implicates that the antecedent is false.

To see how this removes the need for presupposition, consider definite descriptions. Assume that the Russellian analysis holds. Then, inote that negation has a strong tendency to narrowly scope (and Michael and Ann Hegarty have a very good explanation involving discourse effects of why this is the case). Then the implicature of a counterfactual conditional with the antecedent that "The present king of France is bald" is that there is a present king of France and he is not bald. So there is an implicature that there is a present king of France! Likewise if the information that we don't know narrowly scopes. Then the implicature for a material conditional with the antecedent that the present king of France is bald is that there is a present king of France and we don't know if he's bald. Moreover, the way these implicatures cancel I think explains the cases that linguists call "acccomodation." This clearly works with "stop/start" type presupposition because in a rich enough lexical decomposition you will get exactly analogous places for wide and narrow scope negation.

We'd need to look at the way "presupposition" works with relative clauses, and also see if the account can handle "filters" where a presupposition is blocked. These are canonically conjunctions where the second conjunct asserts (or directly entails?) the presupposition of the first conjunct. I know in some of these cases the second conjunct is providing information about scope, i.e. "The present king of France is not bald, and there is a present King of France." This works fine if uttered in a context (Sherlock Holmes type induction scenarios) where the person might have thought you meant the first conjunct to have wide scope negation. My prediction is that in other cases the second conjunct is in a quasi meta-linguistic way working to tell us something about what implicatures the hearer should be drawing, and that the entailment still goes through anyhow (see the nice discussion in the last chapter on presupposition in Kadmon's book about this). That may be completely wrong though.