Archive for category Web Detritus
Open Culture Goodness
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on January 2, 2012
If you don’t subscribe to this blog, this roundup should convince you to do so:
The Best of OpenCulture, 2011.
Heaps of online lectures, video, and other stuff, with the occasional post from me if I actually make time to submit one. (Neil Gaiman apparently retweeted the post I wrote on him.)
-Mark Linsenmayer
A Short Story to Kick Off Your New Year
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on January 1, 2012
I submit for your consideration this story I wrote a couple years back: “World #6“, that’s all about reconceptualizing as you age and the rewards that brings. Enjoy your New Year.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Corey Anton on the Phenomenology of the Senses
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on December 29, 2011
There’s a guy on youtube named Corey Anton, who is a Professor of Communication Studies at Grand Valley State University. He’s posted a ton of videos on a broad range of subjects, many philosophical. He’s one of those that comes up when you search on the usual suspect terms and I’ve had occasion to watch him from time to time. I find the videos hit or miss based on my mood and the topic, but he’s got over 12k subscribers, so he’s clearly speaking to an established audience.
I just checked out his one titled “Phenomenology of the Senses”: (video quality is a bit choppy)
Brian Leiter’s New Philosophical Categories
Posted by Daniel Horne in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts, Web Detritus on December 24, 2011
A really good interview with Nietzsche scholar and opinionator Brian Leiter appears in 3:AM Magazine, where he drops pithy quotes on Obama, Nietzsche, Marx, and Foucault.
But he also appears to have a new argument to sell. Leiter advocates a new way to divide the philosophical canon, not into “contintentals” or “analytics,” but rather into “naturalists” and “anti-naturalists”. You can also listen to Leiter’s argument on the latest Philosophy Bites episode, where Nigel Warburton thankfully pushed back a bit.
It seems to me that Leiter focuses too much on outlier examples to deny the boundaries of the “continental” and “analytic” camps. Sure, perhaps Marx wouldn’t have thought much of Derrida (though who can say, and what kind of an argument is that, really?). But that doesn’t mean they weren’t both united as students of Hegel, and therefore assignable to a certain intellectual camp. I mean, Heidegger didn’t think much of Sartre, either, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t more similar than different when compared to Frege and Russell. Not all Republicans agree on all points with their fellow Republicans, but they can still sense when a Democrat has entered the room; there’s a reason these camps evolved in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »
Dreyfus on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Artificial Intelligence
Posted by Brad Younger in PEL's Notes, Web Detritus on December 19, 2011
[Brad is a frequent contributor to our Facebook page, so we invited him to post on the blog - welcome him!]
I found this to be an interesting video which relates to both the Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty episodes. In the video, Hubert Dreyfus discusses Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and the philosophical implications for artificial intelligence. Dreyfus has long been a critic of AI and has often cited Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as offering important phenomenological insights into AI’s philosophical underpinnings.
Dreyfus discusses how human expertise depends primarily on practical coping skills and a basic engagement with the world, not on some internalization of rules. I think he’s spot on. Practical knowledge, as more fundamental than that of the theoretical, need not even rise to the level of consciousness.
Merleau-Ponty is mentioned as being significant for calling out that the body plays an essential role for our being-in-the-world. Whereas the philosophical tradition has always taken the body to be something which gets in the way of reason and the intellect, Merleau-Ponty takes it to be crucial. Dreyfus goes on to talk about his book, the internet, and how the past failures of AI were based on mistaken philosophical presuppositions. [The video is in two parts, if you don't get a youtube link at the end to part II, you can find it here.]
-Brad Younger
In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens
Posted by Daniel Horne in Things to Watch, Web Detritus on December 16, 2011
Christopher Hitchens died on Thursday after a punishing bout with cancer, and I’d like to take the liberty of inserting a brief memoriam. I do this in a philosophy blog partially because PEL recently discussed one of his books. But mostly I do it because I would hate to think anyone remembers Hitchens as nothing more than a “New Atheist” icon.
I first stumbled across Hitchens’ work in law school, after picking up discarded issues of The Nation left lying around student offices and library carrels. I soon came to seek out ever more trashed copies of an otherwise predictable opinion paper, simply for the chance to cheer on or get pissed off by his unpredictable stances. A reliable aspect of Mr. Hitchens’ writing over the years has been his willingness to pugnaciously defend unpopular views, whether on political figures,
To get a sense of the younger but no less feisty “Hitch”, check out the clip above. He punches in fine form around the 6:45 mark.
Memory, Body, and Truth
Posted by Dylan Casey in Web Detritus on December 16, 2011
Both the Sartre and the Merleau-Ponty episodes have me thinking about memory, body, and truth lately. Our memories are indispensable for forming our identities and are the causal path for experience itself and its effect on our identities. So, there’s a piece to this that we can get to by thinking about memory (and the act of remembering) itself and a piece that we can get to by examining our bodies and the effect that expectation and memory have on it. This weekend, just by coincidence (really!), I heard an essay on the radio about memory and a read another about the effects of the mind on the body.
Saturday’s episode of the Wisconsin-based radio show “To the Best of Our Knowledge” concerned the literature of memory and has a particularly interesting interview with Julian Barnes, author of The Sense of Ending,
Another piece of this ego/memory/identity puzzle lies is how our thoughts, ideas, and expectations are held in our bodies. This is something of concern for Sartre and even moreso for Merleau-Ponty. In this past week’s New Yorker magazine, Michael Specter gets at it through an article about a new institute created at Harvard University to study the placebo effect called the Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter. A big chunk of the article is getting to know Ted Kaptchuk, the director of this new institute. For me Kaptchuk shows us how data-driven questioning (i.e., science) helps clarify deeply multifaceted mind-body issues without simplistically turning the human being into a clockwork. Additionally, for a philosopher, the placebo effect is a ripe example of the contingency of our thoughts on our bodies and our bodies on our thoughts.
-Dylan Casey
Sartre Speaks on Intellectuals (via Open Culture)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on December 13, 2011
Hey, check out my post on openculture.com: I found a video of Sartre speaking (in French with subtitles) during the Vietnam War about bad faith among intellectuals.
Since I wrote the post, I got to talk up our episode as well. As I point out there, we’ve had quite a surge in downloads of late, as we’ve been featured on the front podcast page of iTunes: nearly 9500 downloads yesterday alone (our one-day record prior to being featured last week was around 3000).
So welcome, new readers! I invite you to flip back through some of the recent posts here and do some searches in our archives to see what we’ve posted on your favorite philosophers.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Bob Solomon on Existentialism and Being and Nothingness
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch, Web Detritus on December 7, 2011
We’ve often name-dropped our former U. of Texas professor Bob Solomon, perhaps best known for his great original work The Passions
One of his central philosophical concerns was Sartre’s view of freedom and responsibility, and his take on existentialism always seemed to climax at that point. Here he is introducing the major themes of existentialism.
Watch on YouTube.
Daniel Coffeen on Bergson’s Matter and Memory
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts, Web Detritus on December 6, 2011
One of the name-drops on the Sartre episode is Henri Bergson, a philosopher who was in vogue in France at the time Sartre wrote, famous among other things for promoting and anti-atomic epistemology. Kant, for instance, thought that we get our idea of number out of time, meaning that time is essentially something we can count. For Bergson, time is a flow: if we break it up for analysis, that’s an abstraction; it’s epistemically subsequent to the primal flow. This goes well with Sartre’s (and moreso Mereleau-Ponty’s) excitement about gestalt psychology as part of the phenomenologist’s project of taking experience as it comes without falsifying it with some theory, like Hume’s empiricism, imposed upon the data.
With a little research I found this podcast/lecture on Bergson by Daniel Coffeen, focusing on Bergson’s book Matter and Memory.
Being Old in a Democracy: Peter Lawler on Plato and Us
Posted by Tom McDonald in Web Detritus on November 28, 2011
Why is oldness found so repulsive in our culture today? Why do old people feel so compelled to make themselves look like worse versions of young people through plastic surgery? The easy answer is ‘it’s natural’, i.e., youth gives a competitive Darwinian advantage, so if we have the bio-technology available to keep ourselves younger we gotta go for it! However, one of the most important reasons for studying historical philosophy is for how it can help free us from the groupthink of the present age. Does our democratic culture’s focus on fulfilling individual possibilities make us death-denying and therefore age-denying?
As Dylan noted in PEL Episode 40 on Plato’s Republic, Socrates’ criticism of democracy is often emphasized in classrooms for its ability to give us critical perspective on the democratic values we normally do not question. Thus Peter Lawler turns to Plato’s dialog for its analysis of how the political regime, democracy in particular, shapes the soul and its attitude (perhaps the soul just is an attitude) toward life, aging, and death.
Hannah Arendt on Scientism
Posted by Tom McDonald in Web Detritus on November 26, 2011
The question of the “pernicious influence” of scientism on modern life and philosophy gets raised fairly often here at PEL. I get the sense that Wes and Seth think the influence ‘quite pernicious’ while Mark thinks ‘not so pernicious’. (Correct me if I’m wrong guys). So I thought it would be helpful to clarify what is implied by the term, so that we might open the way for some good discussion of the issue. In my view, when we explicate the problem and put it in the right light, we should see that it is the essential problem of modern philosophy.
I recently came across the following article by Hannah Arendt, written late in her life during the 1960s. I felt that she gives here a good expression of the issue. It would not be mere political correctness to say of Hannah Arendt that she is a philosopher of the first rank, and a better critic of the modern age, our science and politics, than Heidegger was. She recognized the import of Heidegger’s diagnosis of the ills of modern existence (as one of his students) while not falling prey to the naive neglect of politics in his philosophy and the terrible choices wound up making in that arena.
Tom McDonald on Reason and Intelligent Design
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on November 23, 2011
You’ll likely remember Tom from our Hegel podcasts and his several posts on this blog. His blog has switched names now to Owl of Minerva.org, and one of his interests is how the conception of reason by Hegel and the phenomenologists differs from the one prevalent in our culture, i.e. thinking clearly in the context of scientific naturalism (that’s my formulation, not Tom’s). This latter conception of reason is what leads directly to the sentiment that anyone religious is being irrational.
In his post on Intelligent Design theory, he gives a brief defense of “transcendental reason,” which he defines as “deciphering the ultimate purpose behind the patterns of things we observe.” In Aristotle’s terminology, this means looking for final causes. Using a slightly different but I think equally secular tack as Thomas Nagel (as discussed at the outset of our quantum physics epsiode), Tom suggests that since naturalism is ultimately unsatisfying–incomplete (Nagel’s rationale for this is clearer in light of his take on philosophy of mind), there’s a future for this transcendental conception of reason. I quote:
But natural science does not give us and cannot give us an empirical explanation of itself, of its own character as a rational social institution, appearing over time, historically. It cannot explain its own rationality as a result of natural mechanisms.
I grant that the transcendental conception of reason with which the cruder proponents of Intelligent Design theory operate may be more flawed and less plausible today than naturalistic instrumentalism at explaining human life, but neither is the instrumental sense of reason adequate to this task. Naturalistic thinkers would be foolish to assume that Intelligent Design theory is simply Biblical Creationism in disguise, denying the possibility that it could draw wider public support among intelligent persons. It can do this by appealing to many such persons across the political spectrum who are frustrated with the dominance of instrumental reason in science, business, and technology, with its reductive understanding of culture, humanistic knowledge, and public institutions.
Read Tom’s post at owlofminerva.org.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Find a Philosophy Event with PhilEvents
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on November 21, 2011
Via The Leiter Report, David Chalmers has provide details about PhilEvents.org, where you can browse and search for conferences. I know the intended audience is for people looking to present their work, but even if you’re just a tourist, you can usually get into these things to hear the speakers without a problem, and if you don’t live near the event, they might well issue papers or even videos of the presentations that you can collect if it’s in an area that interests you. What to know what philosophers are up to today? Here’s a good place to look.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Skepoet Responds to PEL on Euthyphro
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on November 21, 2011
Here’s a response to our recent episode from C Derick Varn, aka Skepoet: Read his “partially informed review.”
So, yes, other blogs that take the time to talk about us coherently will probably get a link-back, if you’ve not noticed that before. You may have to send the link directly to me, though, as my narcissistic Googling of our own podcast name has become much less constant of late. Come on, religion bloggers! Give us your take on the dilemma!
-Mark Linsenmayer
The Problem of Determining Free Will
Posted by Dylan Casey in Web Detritus on November 18, 2011
Free will is always a sticky wicket. On the one hand, we make decisions every day that point to our having a say in what we do. Accountability, in general, relies on this notion. On the other hand, whatever our will is, it is clearly constrained: we can’t will away gravity.
Free will is a hot topic in neuroscience these days, especially with experiments leveraging new fMRI imaging techniques in which we can “watch” the brain do its thing. One of those the neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga, interviewed briefly in Scientific American to “explain the new science behind an ancient philosophical question.” Though he wants to claim “the demise of free-will,” he does seem less carelessly strident than some, characterizing the study of free-will as the study of “the nature of action.”
Philosophers, of course, continue to be in on this conversation. Recently in NYTimes’ The Stone, Eddy Nahmias asks, “Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?” The article does a nice job of pointing out common oversimplifications of the problem of free-will, particularly as a dichotomy with determinism.
Many philosophers, including me, understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling actions in the face of competing desires. We act of our own free will to the extent that we have the opportunity to exercise these capacities, without unreasonable external or internal pressure. We are responsible for our actions roughly to the extent that we possess these capacities and we have opportunities to exercise them.
Not too surprisingly, the way out of this all-or-nothing style free-will/determinism discussion relies on being in the messy middle where we have constraints that don’t determine. (Emergence anyone?)
-Dylan
Can we be philosophical realists?
Posted by Tom McDonald in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on November 16, 2011
Reality is like a thief in the night (from Owl of Minerva.org)
The analytic philosophy of logical positivism or logical empiricism, which dominated 20th-century Anglo-American scientific thinking, leaves philosophy with a complex and problematic legacy that must be addressed and overcome if we are to have any hope of a renewed, meaningful, philosophically rational realism.
On the one hand, the positivist view of philosophy is deflationary, diminishing and even de-legitimizing the very notion of philosophy. The idea that philosophy was to become ‘underlaborer to science’, following Lockean empiricism, proved quite popular with scientists and science enthusiasts, and to this day informs the common belief that philosophy can be wholly displaced by empirical investigation on pretty much any question. On the other hand, following the linguistic turn and Thomas Kuhn’s historicist account of science, many disillusioned analytical philosophers have become convinced that their discipline cannot really provide any affirmative, unchanging, principal foundations to scientific thinking. For example, the principles of method and observational verification sounded great until one realized that the principles themselves couldn’t be reached by method nor verified by an empirical observation.
Kelly Oliver (via The Stone/NY Times) on Pet Lovers
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on October 31, 2011
Though we’ve not had a link to an article in The Stone for a while, I encourage you all to keep a look out there, as it’s a steady source of interesting articles.
I can’t resist throwing up a link to this article by Kelly Oliver: “Pet Lovers, Pathologized,” as it hooks into both our moral sense and feminism episodes.
Our inconsistent treatment of animals is one of the key signs that something is wrong with our cultural values. I’ve got a new puppy in the house now, and like any responsible pet owner, I acknowledge a real moral responsibility toward her. It’s very much like having a toddler in the house, and if I really just considered her property or a toy or something, I wouldn’t put up with any of it. But the issue is not just our hypocritical “I love my pets, but they have no moral standing” stance. As Ms. Oliver points out:
The animal rights and animal welfare debates continue to be dominated by discussions of whether and how animals have minds or intentions like we do. This discourse continues to measure animals against human standards in order to judge whether or not they deserve legal rights.
Victor Stenger on the Fine Tuning Argument
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch, Web Detritus on October 19, 2011
We were left at an impasse on the episode regarding the part of the argument from design referring to the fine-tuning of the universe to support life. Dawkins didn’t give enough detail about this for us really to understand, much less critique it, yet it seemed like a lot of what we were concerned about hinged on this argument. You can read about it on Wikipedia.
Prominent in the Wiki article is one of the lesser known among the new atheists, Victor Stenger. The video below shows him talking about this issue. The fine-tuning discussion starts runs from around minutes 16-38. Before getting into the technical details of what fine-tuning amounts to, he first makes the point that if the universe was designed for life, we should expect to see a lot more life in it (less lifeless space and time without intelligent life). We’d also expect more accessible planets to be conducive to life than just Earth (the point being that most of them sure aren’t, and even if there are any, we couldn’t get to them in a lifetime of travel). Neal Degreasse Tyson makes the same point more energetically here.
The values that allegedly, if different, would prevent life include the speed of light, Planck’s constant, the ratio of electrons to protons, ratio of electromagnetic force to gravity, expansion rate of the universe, mass density of the universe, and the cosmological constant). I’ll let you watch the video for the details of Stenger’s response, but the upshot is that the most important of these constants are self-regulating, meaning they’d approach that rate regardless of where they started. According to Stenger, everything looks exactly as it would if the universe came from nothing.
Personally, I don’t feel comfortable enough with the physics either before or after this lecture either to actually see that there’s a problem and to see that Stenger has solved this for us. I don’t have a sense of the scientific consensus, and Stenger says that some of what he’s saying is still a matter of debate among physicists. In conclusion, I sympathize with Dawkins’s seeming inability to thoroughly describe this problem or what’s wrong with it.
-Mark Linsenmayer
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The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
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