I mean, say what you want about the Uniqueness Thesis, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.
Walter Sobchak (paraphrased)
Last Spring, in one post and another, I hit upon Nihilism as a third way in the opposition between Evidential Uniqueness and Permissivism. That grew into a paper, Evidential Nihilism, which is forthcoming in Analysis.
In a recent blog post, Les Green draws a distinction between research and scholarship. The former he characterizes as “[finding] out something [you] didn’t know, but which was there to be known”; the latter involves keeping up with the literature and making novel arguments. He distinguishes both of those from another thing philosophers do which he calls curating. He characterizes it this way:
A curator attempts to care for knowledge and culture we already have. Not by freezing it or ensuring no others can touch it, but by conserving it while placing it in a new context, or displaying it from a new angle, or in the company of new ideas, so as to make it intelligible and perhaps useful to those who follow us.
This captures an important feature of philosophy which is absent from (e.g) physics.1
Continue reading “Curation”Over at The Splintered Mind, Eric Schwitzgebel identifies what he calls the inflate-and-explode maneuver. Abstractly, the move is this: “Assume that things of Type X must have Property A, and then argue that nothing has Property A.”
Schwitzgebel is especially interested in the case of consciousness. On many accounts, one is supposed to have infallible access to the contents of one’s consciousness. However, one doesn’t have infallible access to anything. Having thus inflated consciousness with the pompous swell of infallibility, one blows it up— there is no such thing as consciousness!
Continue reading “Inflate and explode, analyze or explicate”I wondered this morning what the possibility of human chimeras does for bioethical concerns about identity. I figured there must be literature on this, but my internet search only turned up the odd fact that Mary Ann Chimera is president of Democrats for Life of Ohio. So here is some half-baked musing.
Continue reading “And its tail is a snake”For many years now, the graduate students in my department have hosted an annual graduate conference. This year’s topic is philosophy of biology.
I’ve gotten a lot out of attending over the years. There’s a specified topic, so all the papers are at least peripherally related. There’s only one track, so every speaker gets the attention of all the attendees.
If you are a grad student working in philbio, consider submitting an abstract. If you know a grad student working in philbio, consider nudging them to submit.
Here’s the official call:
The University at Albany Philosophical Association will hold its 13th Annual Graduate Conference on April 4th, 2020. Our topic is Philosophy of Biology, and our Keynote Speaker is Justin Garson (Hunter College, CUNY). The deadline is January 5th.2 We would greatly appreciate it if you would circulate the following call for papers amongst the graduate students in your Department.
The last meeting of my Scientific Revolutions course was Monday. Following my usual last-day schtick, I put them in groups to reflect on what the course had been about. To give some context, here’s the blurb for the course:
Thomas Kuhn introduced the notion of a “paradigm shift,” something that has become part of our general vocabulary, and his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions marked a shift in the way that people think about science. This course begins with the state of science studies before Kuhn: the way that historians, sociologists, and philosophers thought about science. Then it takes a close look at Kuhn’s landmark book. Finally, it explores some of the reactions and consequences that Kuhn’s work had for science studies.3
Their discussions start out with long, careful sentences. After enough of that, just for fun, I ask them to distill it down to a slogan or bumpersticker. Suggestions included “Elaborate yet absurd philosophical ideas” and “Philosophers; they have ideas about science”.
Continue reading “The end of revolutions”Reading an interview with Mark Johnston, I learned a fact that I can’t believe I didn’t know before: As a student, Immanuel Kant made money as a pool shark. Johnston gives this extended quote from one of Kant’s university friends:
Continue reading “Kantian hustle”Kant’s only recreation was playing billiards… [He] had nearly perfected [his] game, and rarely returned home without some winnings. As a consequence, persons refused to play with [him], and [he] abandoned this source of income, and chose instead L’Hombre, which he played well.
My paper with Dan Hicks and Jessey Wright, Inductive Risk, Science, and Values: a reply to MacGillivray, has been accepted at the journal Risk Analysis. It went from social media musing to accepted publication in just a few months.
Back in July, Dan wrote a tweet that concluded “Anyone want to write a little response with me?” Jessey and I replied that we’d be game for it. E-mails followed. We each wrote a snippet of prose. The snippets got worked together into one document, and that document went through a bunch of revisions. We used a google doc, which highlighted changes and allowed us to make comments back and forth in the document itself. Other than a few e-mails, that’s how we interacted. No realtime conversations, even via skype.
I still use LaTeX for my own writing, but the collaborative workflow of the google doc worked really well for this project.
The Open Culture blog notes the 25th anniversary of Comic Sans. I’ve long felt that if there were a philosophy of typography, then Comic Sans would be an interesting case.
There are aesthetic objections to Comic Sans, some well-motivated and some driven by hipsterism. Back in the early 2000s, I thought about writing a short paper about it. The typeface was ubiquitous for a while. I remember seeing an advertisement on the side of a bus in Hungary written in Comic Sans letters two feet high. It does OK as a comic lettering font, but all its blemishes and imperfections come to the fore when its used for headlines and billboards.
That’s a matter of taste, though. The point I wanted to make was something else. As it happens, I already blogged about it back in 2015. Here’s what I wrote then:
Comic Sans reflected a kind of alienation. People use a standard font like Times or Helvetica when they want to be serious and official. When they use a handwriting font or something else non-standard, they mean to inject levity and personality into the thing they’re typing up. But Comic Sans, precisely because it’s ubiquitous, is not personal or expressive at all.
I remember searching out exotic true type fonts back in the 90s. This was before the internet, and I’d get font archives on CD-ROM. I browsed them, saved some, and used them selectively as the title fonts for papers. The fonts I chose, even if they were ugly or nigh-illegible, reflected aesthetic judgments I’d made.
The strangeness of Comic Sans is that people would select it when they wanted to be quirky individuals. Since it was a standard font on every Mac and Windows computer, though, it was everyones’ expression of individuality.
I’ve got nothing against handwriting fonts in general. I’ve even made several. Those are my own handwriting, so my using them is literally a reflection of how I write. If somebody else uses Ninjascript, they’re using my handwriting— but it’s still a reflection of them because they picked that font especially. They didn’t just end up with it because it was the most grotesque among the handful of fonts that came with their computer.
Now default installations have gotten more varied. The perverse monopoly of Comic Sans is over. Someone reaching for a quirky handwriting font might end up with Marker Felt instead. So now, 25 years on, someone selecting Comic Sans has made a deliberate and personal choice.
Continue reading “The mysterious island”Deep within these grooves of Academe,
Edith Eliot4
In quiet cubicles, white and bare,
Hunched homunculi strain and labor
(Like monks of old in cloistered cells
Balancing angels on needles’ points)
At tasks bizarre with tools outrageous
Through days and nights of anguish unrelenting.
