Jon Cogburn's Blog

worries about teaching upper level intro to metaphysics

I'm teaching a metaphysics seminar this coming semester. I research a lot of metaphysics, but I find some of the methodology in core analytic metaphysics to be sophistical. Many metaphysicians kind of do pretend linguistics. The game is to try to get as many inferences covered in a logic whose quantifiers don't range over the stuff to which you don't want to be committed. Through the early 70's this actually produced some workable linguistic data and suggestions, but since then I'm not so sure. (1) The central Quinean conceit is really stupid, as if modal logics that use necessity operators are metaphysically fine (assuming one can adequately translate natural language modal claims into such logic) because they don't explicitly quantify over modals. So why base the major debate in the philosophy of time (or that part that doesn't get it's hands dirty paying attention to the relevant physics) about this issue. For that matter, how many analytic metaphysicians working on modality (or philosophers of language working on implication for that matter) have actually read Kratzer's analysis in terms of generalized quantification, or who would understand it in the context of the history of generalized quantificational accounts starting with Montague? (Kratzer co-authored a book with the chair of the MIT Linguistics department for God's sake; she's not some crank I just discovered.) (2) O.K. lets pretend that natural language semantics done correctly will end up suggesting a metaphysics. Why think that such a metaphysics is likely to be true? Our natural inferences concerning momentum presuppose that it works in ways that are demonstrably false (for example if you are spinning a heavy object on a string and cut the string mid-spin, the object does not go out in widening circles).

In addition (with perhaps the exception of the issue of modality) the issues that excite me the most are more towards the periphery of contemporary analytic metaphysics. I'm really interested in the philosophy of time, but because I'm interested in the contrast between becoming and being in Platonism and Indian Philosophy and how this contrasts with process theological approaches to Christianity. All the hot debates about "presentism" aren't going to help me much here. Likewise, I'm interested in appearance versus reality but again because mostly I'm torn between a Schopenhaurian/Vedantic/Yogic view of liberation compared to a process theological view. As with the being/becoming issue, I hope the two views can be reconciled in some way, but (with the exception of debates about Heideggerian direct perception versus representationalism in the philosophy of perception) not much in contemporary analytic metaphysics seems that helpful. To the extent that I'm interested in modality I am interested in the plausibility of a broadly Kantian account of it. I hope there is some good contemporary stuff (in addition to Thomas Friedman's work on the a priori) that relates to this. I really liked John Divers book on possible worlds, and intend to teach it again, but the fact that the only form of anti-realism he considered was non-cognitivism made it pretty unhelpful in this regard.

I don't know if it is a mark against contemporary metaphysics that it has so little to say about the metaphysical issues that got most of us into philosophy in the first place. . . . Part of the problem is that there is no royal road to metaphysics, no clear method that is guaranteed to produce understanding. When you begin to learn from the very few great metaphysicians that currently exist this conclusion is inescapable. Part of the problem is that metaphysics needs friction; to do anything other than say the trivial in non-trivial sounding ways it has to deeply involve other discourses. Mark Wilson's discussion of just about anything and the tradition of classical physics and applied mathematics, Ian Hacking's discussion of mental illness, and Stephen Stich's cognitively informed work on reference are the three great exemplars of this. But they are giants, and it's not so easy to teach Wilson's work.

I'm going to teach M Loux's anthology and intro text. From my current perspective (in the week and a half since surgery I get very mopey and depressed from the afternoon on; I hear this gets better) the articles look pretty frictionless, involving pretend linguistics and self contained thought experiments. I hope teaching it helps my research. I hope I can sell it as worthwhile to the students. . . .

why confessions? at what price anonymity?

I was talking with my friend Neal Hebert last night about Richard Russo's hilarious academic novel, Straight Man.

From a newspaper perspective (Hebert is the opinion editor of the LSU Daily Reveille) it is interesting in the novel that the main character has an anonymous newspaper column called "Lucky Him" (and if you don't know what that is homage to, go to amazon now and order the rightly honored book here) where he reveals the dark, absurd heart of academia. There are a couple of interesting things in the novel concerning this. The first is that everybody knows that it's really his column, so it's not really anonymous. The second is that the novel has excerpts from the column, and the stuff he's writing in first person in the novel is much more acidic about the ironies and idiocies of the ivory tower.

The conversation got me thinking about a couple of things. First, confessional culture is huge in the United States right now. Every other month somebody'ss true life memoirs are shown to be substantially falsified so as to make for betterr reading. This raises a few questions. Why do people want to confess? This is a common thing in human history: including Roman Catholicism's confessions to a priest, the sorry end of show trials in the Soviet Union, and the self-confessions that were part and parcel of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. And now with weblogging everybody can be their own band of raving cultural revolutionaries as well as victim. Why this pervasive desire? Does any real absolution come from this? And doesn't dignity demand that we hold some things back?

Second, anonymity is a strange thing. Neal said that you would have a very difficult time keeping the identity of the writer of a "Faculty Confidential" column secret. He also said that there were scads of ethical issues concerning anonymous sourcing.

In academia the biggest role for anonymity is in the blind refereeing process (see my post here). But you also now have extremely funny (and alternately depressing) blogs (Philosophy Job Market Blog and Rate Your Students) where people complain about facets of the academy.

But Brian Leiter is well known now for his complaints about the way anonymity works on the Philosophy Job Market Blog. If I understand him correctly, he is not complaining about the bitch-and-moan-over-a-beer aspect of the blog. Rather, he is complaining about people with jobs anonymously dispensing very bad advice to job seekers. But why should anonymity lead to worse advice in this context?

I think it's that as a matter of human nature people pervasively try to rationalize their own decisions, and anonymity somehow makes this much, much worse. The big example in the Philosophy Job Market Blog concerned the issue of whether you should go on the market every year even after you have a tenure track job. The tenured and tenure-track people saying this is a bad idea (it's a recipe for unhappiness for most people, if you are good enough then people will come after you, trying to get out instead of investing in the place hurts your tenure chances in all sorts of ways, you can go on the market after getting tenure anyhow, etc.) all posted using their own names, and the tenure and tenure-track people defending the practice all posted anonymously. So what does it say that they were rationally defending something, but unwilling to put their name under the defense? At the very least it undermined the claim that it does not hurt your reputation to be seen as the kind of person who always goes un the market. But I think there is a deeper connection between the amount of unreasonable rationalization people will engage in when being anonymous. I can't exactly discern why this is the case though. If anyone has any ideas, I'd be interested (Neal?)

difference between Victorian versus Puritanical attitudes

I've Amazon wishlisted Denfeld's "The New Victorians." Denfeld, Camille Paglia (who is my favorite public intellectual), etcetera are sometimes called "post-feminists" but that's really misapplying a term from Faludi's first book. "Post-feminism" was initially the idea that since feminism was successful we don't need to worry about all of this stuff any more. But Denfeld, Paglia are concerned with "first wave" feminist issues such as equality with men, child care, job opportunities, and reproductive rights. So now some people are calling this stuff, "third wave" feminism. I think this is also unfortunate, because it conceals similarities between paradigmatic thinkers from all three waves and suppresses very important difference between them. To lump together Germaine Greer and Elaine Showalter as "second wave feminists" is goofy. And to lump together Camille Paglia, Rene Denfeld with people who take Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigary seriously and attempt to "apply" Derrida's ideas (the very concept of which Derrida regarded as (oxy)moronic) is equally awful. Likewise, recent work on psycho-somatic illness by Showalter has more in common with Paglia than any paradigmatic "second wave" stuff, even though Showalter is one of the most celebrated second wave thinkers.

Anyhow, the Denfeldian critique has made me think about what differentiates Victorian attitudes about sex and gender from Puritanical attitudes. Both tend to lead to what I take are indefensible restrictions of liberty, for example people's freedom to make and watch pornography or engage in prostitution. But the reasoning and motivations are importantly different.

Victorianism as a sexual world-view essentially involves: (1) reinforcing a class distinction between new, educated middle classes and the poor, (2) imagining women such that lack of meaningful labor is proper. Ironically in societies where there is more social mobility than previously, those recently raised need to distinguish themselves more.

In Victorian England the need to reinforce class distinctions led to a spate of very bad grammar books that purported to teach new middle class people how to speak correctly, that is unlike poor people. Unfortunately those who wrote the grammar books just knew Latin, so they said that things you couldn't do in Latin (split an infinitive) should not be done in English. But the books sold like crazy. I think the same thing happened with sexual mores in the Victorian period. According to the ideology poor people behaved like animals. At the height of the ideology a women who enjoyed sex was seen as brutish and animalistic. Neo-Victorian opponents of pornography are the same today. In spite of the fact that 40% of pornographic DVDs are purchased by women (as are nearly all of the 150 MILLION romance novels sold each year in the United States alone, most of which are mildly to very pornographic), and that much of it couples oriented, academic discussions of porn assume that only men enjoy it. When confronted with the fact that so many women purchase it, the typical line is that they are in a state of ideological corruption due to their poverty and ignorance. Which is another way of saying that we educated middle class academics know better than the kind of people who go on Jerry Springer.

The second point legitimizes our horrible war against prostitution, which ends up being a war against prostitutes. In countries where prostitution is illegal, prostitues (especially street-prostitutes, as opposed to dancers, escorts, and masseuses) are subject to routine awful violence both from police, johns, the prison system, and their pimps.

Proper Victorian women were delicate flowers much given to fainting fits and all forms of psychosomatic illness (somehow this ideology co-existed with all of the maids, washerwomen, etc. who still had to work).  On this view, the proper place of women is to be essentially passive. But then women are always thought of as victims. Again, most contemporary academic discussion of prostitution is deranged precisely in this way (for a discussion of a recent book that actually uses empirical methods to expose the massive distortions and lies of the current moral panic over "trafficking" see here). According to the view of women that legitimizes their being taken out of the work force, it is apriori that no woman would rationally decide to be a stripper or prostitute, therefore they are all victims just in virtue of being sex-workers.

I would like to say we are moving past neo-Victorian mores in this country as a result of the liberatory power of the world wide web or some march towards greater sophistiation, but I think it's mostly the result of the United States becoming less socially mobile over the last 35 years. Victorianism only succeeds as a governing social philosophy when you have a growing middle class with enough money where the wives don't have to work. This has imploded in the United States, and continues to implode as we experience great economic growth with no growth in real median income.

On the other hand I think that Gary Kamiya's thesis (argued for here) that Puritanical sexual mores have declined in part because of the web is pretty plausible. While Victorian sexual mores and gender roles come from upward social mobility, Puritanism is something for the lower classes. I think it is characterized by two dynamics: (1) trying to sublimate oneself towards very difficult labor demands, and (2) the apartheid dynamic where one group (poor men) can be oppressed but not mind so much because they get to crap on someone else (women). The apartheid dynamic is why Puritanism is usually pushed on the poor by their economic betters. With Puritanism, the woman may still have to work, but she is still to be subservient to the husband at home. They sublimation dynamic explains why Puritanism is (unlike Victorian mores) anti-alcohol in addition to being anti-sex.

I know that contemporary neo-Victorian feminists actually offer arguments for all the stuff about "objectification" of women. Unfortunately the empirical data goes against much of this. (1) Countries where women are publicly "objectified" in the ways offensive to academic feminists and countries where prostitution are legal are the very countries where women have the most autonomy and parity with men, and the contrapositive correlation holds as well (radical muslims defend burkas on exactly the same grounds that neo-Victorians critique the cult of beauty in American popular culture). (2) There is very strong evidence that the bases for physical attraction are innate and cross cultural. Barbie has nothing to do with it. Yes. Yes. In high school and college the guys whose bodies approximated the ideal of the He Man action figures got a lot more attention from the high school girls than my ugly and skinny self did. But it would be absurd to blame He Man or Brad Pitt or whoever for that.
 

studying ethics is bad for the soul

I have a pet theory that a necessary condition for being an academic philosopher is also being a profound failure. Philosophers of science and metaphysicians are failed scientists. Epistemologists are failed psychologists and lawyers. Philosophers of language are failed linguistics. Aestheticians are failed painters/musicians/filmmakers/etc. Philosophers of math and logicians are failed mathematicians. Philosophers of logic are failed reasoners. And ethicists are failed human beings.

This raises an important question. Does the study of ethics make one a worse human being?

By some conceptions of  ethics this is clearly false. Anyone would do better to learn from the kind of metaphysically informed self-help books produced by Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, as well as from anything that David Hume had to say (about ethics or anything else). This tradition of metaphysically informed self-help is still alive in the writings of many prominent Buddhist thinkers today (e.g. Thich Naht Hahn).

The kind of ethics that submits itself to "publish or perish" is a very different beast though. By this conception an ethical theory is sort of a machine that spits out our moral obligations and permissibilities. Then we can test these theories by seeing if they accord with our considered moral intuitions and by the extent to which they uphold the kind of theoretical virtues important for science and engineering (though most philosophers have an extraordinarily simplistic view of these virtues). So for example, you can respond to the fact that Kant's deontological ethics entails that one should tell the truth to Nazis by biting the bullet (going against the intuition), by rejecting the deontological approach, or by trying to change Kant's theory a little bit so that it gets the intuition correct. Likewise with Mill's Utilitarian view entailing that in some circumstances it is correct to execute innocent people.

Typical intro classes in ethics are rooted in these two theories (and usually social contract theory as well, and maybe some virtue theory and meta-ethical concerns and moral epistemology thrown in if there is time).

I think that this way of teaching ethics is usually pretty bad. The first problem is that the possible situations that are put forward to counterexemplify the theories are so preposterous. For example, if a train is headed towards ten people and you could switch the track so that it just kills one person should you do it? WTF? Unfortunately, given our epistemic limitations, this kind of preposterousness productively leads to the justification of great evil. It is at the center of people who currently defend state sanctioned torture (and if you think "stress positions" combined with sleep deprivation through constant ear splitting music and blinding light is not torture, then you need to be subject to it for a week or so). What if there is a "ticking bomb" situation where lives can be saved only if the information is gotten within a short time frame, and only by torturing somebody to get the information? Would it not be justified in that case?

Well what if someone put a miniature bomb in a baby such that the only way to defuse the bomb was to eviscerate the baby? Israeli studies on "ticking bomb" justifications for torture (their supreme court ruled abuse of detainees, even in such circumstances, to be illegal) showed that the baby scenario is about as likely. But it could happen. Shouldn't we then give Bush et. al. legal permission to eviscerate babies on the suspicion that there might be a bomb inside of them?

The point is, these outlandish possible worlds systematically allow people to justify courses of action that should not be justified. We can't know if we really are in a ticking bomb scenario (and there is no evidence that there ever has been such a case, even in countries like Israel subject to a tremendous amount of terrorism), so once you use that rational you start torturing every time you think you might be in such a case. Given the nature of administrative evil, the slippery slope gets slid down.

In addition, the incessant focus on extreme kinds of badness (i.e. the Nazis) makes us less self aware about all of the ways we could be better people. But then the systematic study of ethics is making you less self-aware and a worse person.

The second way these ethics classes are destructive is much more widespread among students.To understand this we need to take note of how "practical ethics" (as a colleague of mine once wrote, an oxymoron) classes get taught. In these classes you spend less time on the ethical theories and more time on applying them to controversial political issues like abortion and the death penalty. You typically present very good prima facie arguments pro and con each position and present very good refutations of everyone's arguments.

I think students get out of such classes with their puerile skepticism and relativism increased. They reason that if such smart people of good will can't agree about anything, there must not be a fact of the matter.

This is the all too predictable result of focusing on the very few very complicated issues that informed people of good will can disagree about. But the whole "ethics is a theory that can be tested" paradigm forces that to be the case.

Third, wisdom counsels that it is very dangerous to set yourself up as the moral arbiter of the universe. Pride goes before a fall and a haughty spirit before a destruction. But isn't it then a little bit sick to present ethicists as the masters of the moral theory that can determine for any arbitrary action whether it is obligatory or permissible? Thus even people who don't come out further entrenched in puerile relativism can come out of the study of ethics even less self critical and aware, because they have abrogated for themselves the role of God's judges. My personal experience is that (with some notable exceptions, usually involving Stoics of Buddhists) people who study ethics a long time learn not to lose sleep about any of their professional decisions. This is really bad because so many professional decisions are made under such conditions of heuristic uncertainty. For example, you can't really know 100% that you are hiring the best person or that your view on the essay you are reviewing is optimal. This should lead to humility and an attempt to increase shared humanity and compassion as much as possible. But the study of ethics can rend the soul such that just the opposite occurs. I guess that being an ethicist means never having to say you are sorry. No thanks.

Fourth, and finally, ethics makes it much easier to rationalize any possible action. You just pick a moral theory whose weird counterfactual results can be made to seem similar to whatever you are contemplating doing. Again, I've seen professional ethicists do this with aplomb when it comes to professional scenarios. It makes me really worry about what our business students are getting out of their "professional ethics" classes.

One further topic needs to be addressed. While the aesthetician is almost always a failed artist prior to becoming an aesthetician, we need to ask if the ethicist is a failed human being prior to becoming an ethicist, or if the study of ethics ruins them as a human being. Surely a judgmental prick who wants to justify all of his own crappy ways of treating people would be exactly the kind of person drawn to the kind of ethics predominant in philosophy departments in the first place. But I think there is still some causation in the other direction, which we can examine by examining what our students (many whom take the classes because they are required) get out of these courses.

As a footnote, one might object that all the above concerns "analytical ethics." Well and good, but when a pedant like Leonard Lawlor gets a full professorship at Penn State, I don't think "continental ethics" is any better. Of course this is to ignore all the great work coming out of the Nietzsche/Marx/Foucault materialist tradition (as opposed to the Derridean and Levinasian rehashed Sartrean neo-Kantianism expressed so badly by writers such as Lawlor) by American continental thinkers. And to be fair, with my focus on the "reflective equilibrium" brand of analytical ethics I'm leaving out incredibly important developments as well (virtue theorists, anti-theorists, and people working in moral psychology in particular).

As a final footnote, I'm not trying to put Kant or Mill down here. My own view is that Kant expressed as well as possible many of the moral obligations we have that arise out of sapience and Mill expressed as well as possible many the moral obligations we have that arise out of sentience and the social contract theorists express as well as possible many of the moral obligations that arise out of the fact that we are sapient social creatures. I am a moral dialetheist, so I think when these contradict you just often just have systematic tragic choice scenarios. This way does not lead to skepticism or relativism because the judgments they agree on are objectively true. -All this being said, some caveats- (1) There is a lot more to the world than sentience, sapience, and community, so these ethical theories are limited, and not particularly helpful for the more important quest of being a better person (I'd read Hume or the Greek or Roman Stoics any day before Kant or Mill in these regards), (2) I don't think Moral Obligations are linguaform entities, and any linguistic theory such as normative ethics is going to be misleading in important ways because of that (this is a long story), and (3) even if everyone were to embrace my moral dialetheism (and non-reaction to the one paper I've managed to get published where I suggest this (in the Priest anthology) shows that this is not going to happen), I still worry that the idea that there could be "ethicists," good at judgments in general but expert in nothing in particular, is morally damaging the ways listed above. It is of a piece with the post World War II culture of "management" that is so damaging to our country. I hope (and hopefully with John Protevi) to write a book about this phenomena of experts with no expertise one day. I'll post on that and the history of cognitive science in my next philosophy post, because I'm interested in what anyone thinks.

thoughts on Emelianov/Lawlor brouhaha

Check out Mikhail Emelianov's extraordinarily entertaining take-down of Leonard Lawlor in these four posts.

(1) The Sacrifice of Intellectual Self-Discipline: The Case of Leonard Lawlor
(2) On the Surface of Things: The Case of Leonard Lawlor II
(3) Acknowledging Acknowledgements (Acknowledgingly?)
(4) Leonard Lawlor: A Philosopher, A Thinker, (A Poet Perhaps)

Make sure and read through to the final one, which has the most detailed discussion of Lawlor's lazy prose as well as suggested translations. It's hilarious and depressing.

If I understand it, Lawlor did basically competent workmanlike exegesis until he decided it was time to put on his big boy pants and be a big P philosopher, at which point he embarked upon a life of doing his best to instantiate as many irritating Derridean and Heideggerian prose tropes as he could get away with.

Part of my great animus against Derrida (and the other part is that he was a bad man) is that a lot of people have done this. It's the John Sallis Mafia career path, one I almost set out upon years ago. You begin by writing hagiographic yet reasonably clear things about what some philosopher unjustly neglected by the analytic tradition would think about X, but then increasingly experiment with imitating Derrida's and to a lesser extent Heidegger's writing style (this is to be separated from Luc Ferry and Alain Renault's widely accepted (in France) claim that Derrida is nothing more than Heidegger plus Derrida's writing style, and hence really nothing more than Derrida's writing style). If you can get away with it, it makes you feel pretty good. If you strike the right poses and network well, some of Sallis' capos will write inflated blurbs on your books. Nobody will read said books, but the group of you will persist in the delusion that the uninitiated cannot see the bottom because the water of your prose is deep, as opposed to unbelievably shallow yet muddy. And in any case, you are now higher up in the Mafia than all those graduate students and teachers from branch campuses and community colleges who have to suffer your prose in all of the cultural-revolution-like presentations you get to inflict on others now at academic conferences. Those lesser beings must be forever satisfied with the patina of celebrity passing from Heidegger and Derrida to Sallis, to his capos, to you, and then finally down to them.

And through all this you learn that it feels really good to get to crap on others, even if the price is being crapped on yourself.

As a brief aside, let me say that this issue is going to be gone when the last Baby Boomer retires. Their overwhelming penchant for playing Derrida or Heidegger dress-up was always somewhat hampered by the fact that they didn't buy each other's books. As a result, for the last twenty years, derivative Derrideana constituted the hardest genre of academic publications to sell, and as a result it has been increasingly difficult for younger scholars who even remotely engage in it to publish enough for tenure. Note that this has all been reported exhaustively in the Chronicle of Higher Education's train of articles about the lit crit "theory" wars, and it explains in large part why English professors are writing much more accessible prose now. [And incidentally, it also explains why the cover blurb encomiums that members of the Sallis Mafia grace one another with have become so unhinged, full of more and more implausibly third-tier-movie-critics-who-get-free-stuff-from-the-studios claims such as "the best book written on X!" One cannot but help to think of a set of life-long grifters who at some level knows that the gig is about to be up.]

Before anyone reading this starts planning a jazz funeral for Lawloresque prose, some some perspective is in order. Well over 99% of published philosophy will disappear from history, so it is not on the grounds that what they are producing is incidental that I am here beating up on those who get off on playing Derrida/Heidegger dress-up. Nor would I argue that I've written anything remotely less incidental; counterexamples to views that are antecedently wildly implausible do not count for much in the history of thought. That's fine; almost all published philosophy is incidental. Education in philosophy would be improved if professors didn't pretend otherwise.

No, I'm in no position to mock anybody for instantiating historic levels of badness. Rather, the specific kind of bad philosophical prose style on display in Sallis, Lawlor, etc. disturbs me because it so strongly reminds me of all the people I've known who become possessed by a celebrity's forceful persona. For example, tons of people read "No One Here Gets Out Alive," or see "The Doors Movie," and then start slouching around like Jim Morrison half the time. Or consider all the people so profoundly moved by Bukowski's "Bar Fly" that they start to ape the behavior of the fictitious Henry Chinanski whenever they get drunk. Or just go to any rural town that still has a big enough population to support teenagers and watch the poor kids try to act like the celebutards MTV shoves down their collective maw. People get a weird psychic jolt and illusory feeling of coolness out of pretending to be somebody who has the right kind of glamor. And when I see people with Ph.Ds organize themselves around doing the functional equivalent vis a vis academic celebrities I just have no hope whatsoever for humanity.

THINGS THAT I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO EXPLAIN, BUT DO-

(I.) The philosophical prose stylings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Deleuze and Guatarri were sui generis and part of those thinkers' genius. The job of the mediocre rest of us is to explain, apply, critically assess, expand, evolve, and when necessary reject the ideas of these thinkers. The claim that Heidegger wrote that way is about as irrelevant as the prisoner who notes that Jesus too was a prisoner. In the words of Bob Dylan, "Yeah, but you're not him."

(II.) None of the above is against Continental Philosophy: (1) I rate Heidegger, Foucault, and the members of the Frankfurt School as vastly more important than any living philosopher, (2) my favorite philosopher is Schopenhauer, (3) one of the heroes of the book I'm writing on video games is Michael Wheeler, (4) I don't share Ferry and Renault's judgement about Derrida as a philosopher and am in fact deeply ambivalent about him, and (5) of the philosophers of my (or perhaps my older brother's) generation, I've learned the most from John Protevi (and the fact that he is one of Sallis' students and himself has a really nice philosophical prose style shows how little I know anything; take everything written above except for the empirical claims about the relative unsaleability of certain genres of publications with a grain of salt). Oh crap, I'm doing the acknowledgment thing that Emelianov skewers.

(III.) Please don't send me humorlous e-mails berating me as a horrible person because I've publicly said negative things about someone who is supposedly "a nice guy." I am really tired of that. (a) Maybe being a "nice guy" is consistent with unprofessional, atrocious bullying of people who have less power than you but the gall to disagree on minor points. Maybe one can be "a nice guy" and use one's celebrity to have sex with groupies who in the academia all happen to be people over whom the celebrity has professional power such as students and teachers at lower tiered institutions (and I'm not making this accusation about anybody mentioned here; but the fact is that we all know "nice guy" academic celebrities from the Baby Boomer "love" generation who did this and with Viagra I assume still do). But if this is so, so much the worse for niceness. Moral worth is not measured by how polite people are to sycophants and those who can help them get them ahead. (b) The claim of nicecenss is irrelevant. (c) It's false in any case. It is not nice to sin against the Muse and Lady Philosophy by crapping on your readers through willfully obscure prose. It's not nice (I guess because one is "rethinking") to willfully neglect to discuss or even cite any of the relevant arguments put forward by other  (analytic and continental) philosophers. In both cases it's a scam to try to get people to treat you like an important philosopher who merits lots of interpretive work, and I'm sorry. Ever since that great John Cusack/Angelica Houston movie we all know that there's nothing nice about being on the grift.

cool new stuff on computation and emergence

I just discovered John Symons' stuff on computation and emergence, which is going to be really helpful for Chapter 3 of me and Mark Silcox's Routledge book.

One of the things I'd like to do in the second book with Mark is to compare the Dynamic Systems Theory people's (e.g. Evan Thomson) Merleau-Pontian account of emergence (start with the people posting here), Bob Batterman's theory of emergence stemming from work on the way reducibility in a (and at a) limit actually works in the sciences (book can be ordered  here), and views of emergence coming out of reflection on computability theory (Symons' stuff is here; Mark and I have papers on limitation results in computability theory and emergence in Minds and Machines and the British Journal of Aesthetics).

Theory Critics and Theory-Theory Critics

Though recent controversial book Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (which you can order here) contains a wealth of very interesting critiques from writers all over the world, there really was one important lacunae.

One of the central debates in recent analytical philosophy concerns the extent to which people utilize tacitly known theories in interpreting one another.  Defenders of the "theory-theory" argue that we do.  On this view, when I understand a person's action I do so by subconsciously deriving predictions from an internalized theory about the way environmental factors, beliefs, and desires interact for humans.  The "simulation theory" denies this and holds that when interpreting others we put ourselves in the others' place and see what we would do.  Traditionally, the theory-theory's biggest weakness is the way it is implicated in the old school cognitivist belief that thought is essentially linguaform (for important critiques of this see, Dreyfus' What Computers Still Can't Do, and Varela, Thompson, and Rosch's The Embodied Mind).  [Note: the essay on this in Steven Stich's otherwise excellent (and sadly neglected by philosophers of language) Deconstructing the Mind is really unfortunate because he presents himself as defending a version of the theory-theory that does not have the reasoning processes be linguaform.  Since that is precisely what is most at issue between the two approaches, it is not really clear what he is defending.]

(1) Here is an interesting performative contradiction.  If the theory-theory is false about normal human interpretation, then it seems less likely that literary interpretation needs the kind of overarching theoretical foundation that Paul De Man and Stanley Fish convinced a generation of non-philosophy department humanities professors that it did.  The interesting thing here is that the theories encouraged by De Man and Fish came from French thinkers of the 1968 revolt, all of whom (according to Renault and Ferry's French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Anti-Humanism) were Heideggerians (and many English Department anti-theorists are not anti-theory per se, but rather just against the literary importance of this kind of theory, something articulated by the director of the literature program at the Sorbonne, in his essay).  Here is the strange phenomena; The best critiques of cognitivism (see above) also come out of the Heideggerian tradition, albeit one that completely bypasses Derrida and leads through Merleau-Ponty to Dreyfus and Varela.  So I think the theory debate in English Departments might be better cast as a debate between two Heideggers. 

(2)  Once I was in a conversation with a Lacanian, and he asked me if I was an "analyst."  First I thought he was asking if I did Freudian Therapy, a perfectly normal question for a Lacanian.  But it quickly became clear that he called everyone working in the tradition of "analytical philosophy" an analyst.  When I told him that my undergraduate training was in continental philosophy (mostly the Frankfurt School and Italian Marxism from Douglas Kellner and Harry Cleaver, but a fair share of other stuff too from Louis Mackie and Bob Solomon), but that with the exception of aesthetics, my graduate work was on analytical figures, the Lacanian jerk just said "you're an analyst."  When I said I didn't think there was any way the distinction could be made correctly, he just walked away (at least he didn't force me to have dozens of shock treatments like the real Lacan did to the hapless Antonin Artaud).

Here is something that is very interesting to me- as explicit, substantive theoretical commitments, nobody is a phenomenologist and nobody is an analytical philosopher. Ever since J.L. Austin, nobody has believed the original shibboleths of analytical philosophy, and ever since Heidegger (I'm not an expert, my take on this is almost entirely Dermot Moran's presentation of Heidegger's critique of Husserl) no one really accepts the original shibboleths of phenomenology (I can blog on both of these things if necessary, just go with me on this).

This suggests an anti-theory-theory take on the importance of theory.  There is no contentful recipe or algorithm for good interpretation, and any meta-philosophical attempts to devise them end up being ludicrously wrong.  From the standpoint of justifying one's interpretations they don't work because they are false and grossly simplify human (and literary and philosophical) interpretation into something linguaform, which it is not (incidentally, I think there is enough textual evidence to argue that Derrida was moved by this very point in his repeated unheeded injunction that deconstructionism was not a technique).  However, from the standpoint of discovering an interesting interpretation they can still be pragmatically useful. 

So analyticly trained philosophers in the U.S. learn really well to look at the world the way Bertrand Russell did, and develop the ability to use logic and learn to play really well Plato's definitions game.  Continentally trained philosophers learn really well to look at the world the way Husserl did, learning how to do close readings as Husserlians should.  Both learn very early on that the respective philosophers were wrong, and that the way they were wrong shows that since their key doctrines are false, they do not justify the kind of interpretation being engaged in.  Nonetheless, in both cases being forced to think like those philosophers can be an extremely important part of philosophical development.  (1) Russell and Husserl's greatness in part consists in the fact that the way they were wrong opens up lots of new vistas for thought (they serve the role of Descartes' evil demon in this respect), (2) maybe spending a time thinking like them makes one philosophically stronger in some sense, (3) since most philosophy just isn't that good (we share a discipline with Kant for God's sake), maybe inculcating false meta-philosophical justifications allows those of us who are not going to shake the world, but who still need to teach undergraduates, to still do something marginally useful (i.e. great philosophy is sui generis, certainly lacking an algorithm for discovery or justification, but the mediocre philosophy that characterizes 98% of analytic and continental professors' writings may actually be made more worthwhile by those mediocre philosophers inculcating false meta-philosophy).

This is very interesting to me because a lot of our video game book is explaining how  video games show Bertrand Russell to be mistaken about so many things.  The way out of that morass lies with good philosophy of science, language, and mind exemplified by Mark Wilson and cognitive science in Merleau-Ponty's tradition (Alvin Noe and Herbert Dreyfus figuring very prominently, and Evan Thomson figures prominently in the next book we will right).  So to do a good job with the books, I find myself finally integrating the analytic and continental training I've had, and learning a lot more of continental philosophy in the process.  I know in the case of the writers I love (both analytic and continental) inculcating overarching meta-philosophical theories (that they explicitly reject!) are part of making them who they are in the sense of a context of discovering interpretation. But at the end of the day, I think the relevant theories can be justified or critiqued without reference to meta-philospohical theory.

Unfortunately, I left my copy of  Theory's Empire in Baton Rouge.  I'd really like to see to what extent the authors are arguing that exclusive focus on French philosophers of the 60's is pragmatically bad, rather than arguing that such philosophies are false.  If I'm right it might be beside the point for the purpose of many of these debates.  However in philosophy, learning the the history of the refutation of the linguistic doctrines supporting analysis is an essential part of being an analytical philosopher today.  And from Moran I gather that learning the history critiques of Husserl is an essential part of continental training.  Philosophers need to embody programmatic meta-philosophies at a point in their career, but then need to spend the rest of their career learning how to interpret given the falsity of these meta-philosophies.  I don't know if literary interpretation is analogous.

(3)  One more thing that this suggests for cognitive science.  The theory-theory is for some reason very psychologically plausible to people.  I think that there are probably evolutionary reasons why people are likely to construe their own cognitive processes in overly precise, linguaform ways.  So maybe the theory-theory correctly maps a bit of ideology humans tend to believe about the way they interpret, while also being a false description of they way they actually interpret.  This seems exactly analogous to schools of philosophy.  What we really do is in some deep sense non-linguaform and non-algorithmic, but maybe to do this non-theoretical interpreting we need to have a false theory about what we are doing.

Any thoughts?  Chris? Neal? John?

Friends of Philosophy awards

I think it would be cool if the American Philosophical Association funded an annual Friends of Philosophy (FOP?) ceremony.  Award winners would be people in the modern age who have both served Lady Philosophy and lack academic appointments.

Below are a few ideas for early inductees into the FoP Hall of Fame.  Please add your own or dispute these.

Mark Twain for: (1) portraying the ethical dilemma that Huck faces when he truly believes he'll go to Hell (and believes that he deserves to do so) for not turning Jim into the authorities, yet nonetheless still does not turn Jim in, and (2) his postumously unearthed very funny critiques of organized religion.

Christopher Hitchens for weird, often hilarious, and always thought provoking critiques of Kissenger, Mother Theresa, God, and the current anti-war movement.

Pope John Paul for his writings concerning the relationship between faith and reason.

Michael Moore for his entertaining and nuanced (watch them again, they are far more nuanced than you noticed on the first go through) documentaries on outsourcing, guns, the Iraq war, and medicine, as well as the practical jokes from his short-lived T.V. series.

Kahneman and Taversky for their groundbreaking work on how in certain situations people reliably commit statistical and deductive fallacies.

Camille Paglia for her entertaining and deep interpretation of popular culture, her take-no-prisoners approach to all B.S. and for showing how somebody deeply informed by history can "read" culture so much better than English department theorists.

Albert Einstein for  the pioneering work in Special Relativity, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics.

Gene Roddenberry for portraying so many ethical dilemmas in the original Star Trek.

Rod Sterling for raising so many ethical and metaphysical issues in the original Twilight Zone.

Nietzschean thoughts concerning art imitating life imitating art (and vice versa)

I can't think of any great artistic portrayals of how life imitates art.  This is extraordinarily strange because imitating art is such a big part of life. 

When kids shop in stores with really loud music they are imitating music videos.  These pathetic poor people in pimped up automobiles dancing around to rap music as they drive are imitating music videos as well.  When groups of men do stupid things they are often imitating buddy movies.  What passes for witty banter among many people is often a bad copy of a bad sitcom.  Some artistic persona are particularly viral in this way.  I've known two people who started talking like Jim Morrison after the Doors movie came out, and I've known three people who started walking and talking like Charles Bukowski after watching "Barfly."  For a while after "Fight Club" came out, some of my otherwise sensible male students started acting slightly thuggish.

Art imitating life imitating art is recursive at best, and circular at worst, which I guess makes it hard to render in a compelling fashion.

A few years ago lots of people wrote about so-called "memes" which are ideas that are Darwinistically selected for.  I think this kind of mistake.  The non-genetic stuff that gets selected for are usually particular ways to move your body that convey confidence and control, and that are easily copied.  Adolescents are suckers for this because most of them are profoundly uncomfortable with their body. 

One of the great things about teaching at a place like L.S.U. is that many of my students are in the process of creating themselves, rejecting the ways of being/moving that are sold to us as cool, and instead becoming something unique and worthwhile.

cool page on Deleuze/Guattari

Check out John Protevi's awesome set of lectures on Deleuze/Guattari here.   

I don't think there is any greater honor for a philosopher than to have such students.  Some day I'd like to do something similar with the philosophers I love.