Jon Cogburn's Blog

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.

some connections between Schopenhauer and Heidegger

Somebody has to have remarked on this before, but a lot of the famous Heideggerian moves are prefigured pretty strongly in Schopenhauer.

Schophenhauer takes the realm of representation to be governed by the principle of sufficient reason, and to be inherently relational. We can however abstract from this to the realm of Ideas/Forms, but when we do so our subjectivity is completely absorbed into that realm.

Heidegger takes the realm of Zuhandenheit (readiness to hand, tool-being) to be inherently relational. We can however abstract from this to get to the realm of Vorhandenheit (objective presence) to the realm of things that persist self-identically over time. I would bet a decent sum of cash that Heidegger presents Plato's theory of the forms (I need to ask some friends if this is right) as being a paradigm instance of this kind of abstraction. If so, then Heidegger's innovative reading of the history of philosophy is just a part of Schopenhauer's philosophy. In this light the early Heidegger's genius might have just been: (1) characterizing the relational realm as also modal and valuative (I don't know to what extent Schopenhauer does this), and (2) seeing all traditional ontology, in particularly the Cartesian metaphysical physics, as an instance of the Schopenhauerian reading of Plato.

There may also be some similarities with the late Heidegger's subsumption of the self and Schopenhauer's two modes of subsumption (artistic genius and aescetic renunciation). At the very least these are worth comparing, given the other similarities.

I remember somewhere Heidegger saying contemptuous things about Schophenhauer, but it would be too easy to conclude too much from that. (1) He said contemptuous things about Husserl, and some have argued that this is the narcissism of small differences (also see this book by Burt Hopkins). (2) The neo-Kantian genesis of Heidegger's thought is something people are taking into account much more these days; but I think we still too easily forget that the "back to Kant" movement (first with the Marburg School of Cohen et. al., then with the Southwest School of Heidegger's teachers) was in part the result of Schopenhauer winning the argument against Hegel. For example, it was Schopenhauer who convinced publishers to re-print the first edition of Kant's First Critique. So while this is really speculative, I think Heidegger's anti-Schopenhauer comments could also be the anxiety of influence.

Finally, it would be interesting to compare Schopenhauer's arguments for Platonism with Graham Harman's neo-Heideggerian arguments for substance. Both are motivated by a critique of the idea that we have relations all the way down. Schopenhauer thought that scientific understanding was intrinsically relational and dispositional all the way down (which is still a respected position in metaphysics), which is in part why he brings in the forms as something non-relational. This may tie nicely to Harman's critique of scientism too.

[Addendum: Oops, I see that Dale Jacquette raised this issue in an intersting way in his 2005 Schopenhauer book. Google books has the relevant passage HERE.]

four fantastic interviews

Paul Ennis, with Another Heidegger Blog, has four great interviews up:

1. Lee Braver,
2. Graham Harman
3. Levi Bryant
4. Adrian Ivakhiv

They're all really interesting and philosophically helpful.

Ian Boghost is coming up next. In Spring I'm going to read his three books and start to relate them to the kinds of thing Mark and I have been doing with respect to games. I feel like a jerk for not having been able to do so thus far. I would be doing it this Fall, but I'm committed to teaching a bunch of Noel Carrol books that I haven't read yet and that's going to fill up the aesthetics cue of my brain completely for a bit.

Pope Benedict

The new encyclical "charity in truth" is HERE. There's a lot of interesting philosophy in the whole document.

For me it's weird to read this given that I teach, work with, and am related to a number of American "conservative" Catholics. Here Pope Benedict unambiguously supports labor unions and social welfare in a way clearly inconsistent with the entire thrust of the Republican party since Reagan:

From the social point of view, systems of protection and welfare, already present in many countries in Paul VI's day, are finding it hard and could find it even harder in the future to pursue their goals of true social justice in today's profoundly changed environment. The global market has stimulated first and foremost, on the part of rich countries, a search for areas in which to outsource production at low cost with a view to reducing the prices of many goods, increasing purchasing power and thus accelerating the rate of development in terms of greater availability of consumer goods for the domestic market. Consequently, the market has prompted new forms of competition between States as they seek to attract foreign businesses to set up production centres, by means of a variety of instruments, including favourable fiscal regimes and deregulation of the labour market. These processes have led to a downsizing of social security systems as the price to be paid for seeking greater competitive advantage in the global market, with consequent grave danger for the rights of workers, for fundamental human rights and for the solidarity associated with the traditional forms of the social State. Systems of social security can lose the capacity to carry out their task, both in emerging countries and in those that were among the earliest to develop, as well as in poor countries. Here budgetary policies, with cuts in social spending often made under pressure from international financial institutions, can leave citizens powerless in the face of old and new risks; such powerlessness is increased by the lack of effective protection on the part of workers' associations. Through the combination of social and economic change, trade union organizations experience greater difficulty in carrying out their task of representing the interests of workers, partly because Governments, for reasons of economic utility, often limit the freedom or the negotiating capacity of labour unions. Hence traditional networks of solidarity have more and more obstacles to overcome. The repeated calls issued within the Church's social doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum[60], for the promotion of workers' associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honoured today even more than in the past, as a prompt and far-sighted response to the urgent need for new forms of cooperation at the international level, as well as the local level.

There's a lot more along these lines, including the importance of having access to local agriculture, which is interesting in light of what has happened in rural America (prisons, methamphetamine, lower life expectancy, etc. etc.) as a result of conservative policies that have fostered monopolization of food production and distribution.

Pointing this out is not to do justice to the broader philosophical context of the document, but it is there and does need to be pointed out. And no amount of sophistry by the Wall Street Journal editorial board (today's utilizes both the strawman fallacy and false dichotomy to mislead the reader about the content of the encyclical) or the good folks at National Review can change the clear, unambiguous contents of the encyclical.

In this regard, note that what Pope Benedict describes above is exactly what the American South did in instituting "right to work" laws. Note that, contra the Wall Street Journal and National Review, Pope Benedict is neither stupid nor uninformed. When he writes that governments "often limit the freedom or the negotiating capacity of labour unions" THAT'S WHAT HE'S TALKING ABOUT. Contra the entire thrust of the Republican Party since Reagen, he's criticizing "right to work" laws. The encyclical entails defending, among other things, the Employee Free Choice Act.

I am morally certain that my home state of Louisiana, one of the most Roman Catholic in the country, is not going to revoke its anti-union laws, even though those very laws have led to the outmigration of skilled labor and increase relative wealth inequality and poverty. Even though Pope Benedict says they are inconsistent with Roman Catholic teaching. This being said, Louisiana will spend millions each year losing lawsuits defending unconstitutional laws regarding evolution, school prayer, and abortion that are yearly passed as a sop to supposed Christians.

first thread on Sicart reading group

A thread on the Introduction to Sicart's The Ethics of Computer Games is started HERE.

Kant (Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals)

Nor could one given poorer counsel to morality than to attempt to derive it from examples. For each example of morality which is exhibited must itself have been previously judged according to principles of morality to see whether it was worthy to serve as an original example or model. By no means could it authoritatively furnish the concept of morality. Even the Holy One of the Gospel must be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before He is recognized as such; even He says of Himself, "Why call ye Me (Whom you see) good? None is good (the archetype of the good) except God only (Whom you do not see)." But whence do we have the concept of God as the highest good? Solely from the Idea of moral perfection which reason formulates a priori and which it inseparably connects with the concept of a free will.

interesting thread

Urizenus Sklar (aka Peter Ludlow) has started an interesting thread at the Philosophy of Video Games blog HERE.

The movies made by players of the game EVE are really stunning. I need to dig out my Aarseth to try to reacquaint myself with the ludologist's original gripe about narrative. Right now we're reading Miguel Sicart's The Ethics of Computer Games; maybe the next book will have bearing on the ludology/narratology brouhaha.

Proposed Addition to the Philosophical Bestiary (Introducing the Mole while Instantiating the Moaning Myrtle)

Since these overlap, they are best read in the order presented below.

Troll: (a) k punk's initial post, (b) Harman's addendum, (c) further clarification from Harman.

Grey Vampire: (a) k punk's initial post, (b) ,Harman's addendum, (c) k punk's clarification

Minotaur: post by Levi Bryant

1. The Troll is constituted by the "sneer from nowhere," (k punk) the person who does not defend any particular claim, but rather attacks the claims of others. "The Troll is someone who enters into dialogue solely with the gesture of putting the other person on the defensive, while tacitly pretending that they have no need ever to play defense themselves." (Harman)

2. The Grey Vampire is like the troll in that they take no stance, except without the sneer. They "disguise their moth-greyness in iridescent brightness, all the colours of attractive sociability. Like moths, they are drawn by the light of energetic commitment, but unable to themselves commit. Unlike the Troll, the Grey Vampire's mode is not aggressive, at least not actively so; the Grey Vampire is a moth-like only on the inside. On the outside, they are bright, humorous, positive - everyone likes them. But they are possessed by a a deep, implacable sadness. They feed on the energy of those who are devoted, but they cannot devote themselves to anything." (k punk)

Some wisdom from k punk on the two:

The dominant modes of subjectivity at the end of history/ web 2.0 are those of the Troll and the Grey Vampire, the two faces of the Last Man. This isn't to say that most people are not fans; they are, but many work hard to conceal this about themselves, for it makes them vulnerable to attacks from Trolls or Grey Vampires, or the Trolls or Grey Vampires in themselves. They are subordinated to The Fear and its demand that we be irreverent, that we constitute ourselves as ironically self-deflating subjects (I'm the sort of person who....). The postmodern academic, complicit with the system that immiserates them, reflexively impotent, is required to oscilate between being Troll and Grey Vampire, between hyper-critical scholarliness and convivial sociality, kept locked into the system by just the right level of prestige and self-loathing. That's why most of the interesting work done in institutions is achieved by people who have infiltrated the academy after periods of (intellectual and subjective) destitution.

So I will admit it: I am a fan, and this holds for my philosophical, as much as my cultural, investments. The two are in any case interchangeable - there is a philosophy implicit in any cultural product worth its salt.

I think this is really important wisdom. Finding stuff to get really excited and obsessed about is a big part of what justifies spending more time on this wretched planet. If you don't let yourself be a fan you are really getting something wrong about life. Likewise with not passionately committing yourself to sustained projects.

3. The Minotaur "converts every philosophical opposition into a misinterpretation. The text(s) guarded by the Minotaur thus become a Labyrinth from which there is no escape." (Bryant)

I would add to the bestiary.

4. The Mole is the person who reads philosophy only with the interest in finding out what the philosopher in question said, with no regard for how this reading will contribute to a broader philosophical project whose goal is to discern the truth. Honest Moles just like burrowing around in texts and have no interest in surfacing into the sunlight. Some of them are good historians of philosophy, even though they have no philosophical passion (as opposed to a passion for burrowing and fights with other Moles). Unfortunately, in a process not well understood by extant science, Moles often metamorphose into full blown Minotaurs.

Internet anonymity works on some people like the full moon does on lycanthropes, giving us the Weretroll, and Wereminotaur (many Moles are Wereminotaurs), who can cover over their awful affliction by day (when people know who they are). 

I'm sure there are more. Please share (with reference to a beast of course).

[P.S. From the discussion in the comments:

5. The Moaning Myrtle (also known as the Termagant, also known as the Konaki-Jijii) is the philosopher whose ghostly internet presence repeatedly takes every criticism personally and cries about it to the whole world, often by way of unearthly shrouding of such "arguments" as she can muster in long winded supra-referential posts/comments (such as getting sublimated revenge on the people that she is whingeing about by adding to a supposed-to-be-humorous typology).]