Leiter on Romano on Heidegger; And the Philosopher Who Lives Philosophy

Leiter weighs in, in his usual acerbic fashion. He adds little to the discussion, but as usual, his vitriol makes his efforts amusing.

The discussion that has resulted from Romano's article reminded me of something Nietzsche once wrote in "Schopenhauer as Educator" (Dan Brezeale's translation; emphasis mine):

I profit from a philosopher only insofar as he can be an example. That he is capable of drawing whole nations after him through his example is beyond doubt; the history of Indian, which is almost the history of Indian philosophy, proves it. But this example must be supplied by his outward life and not merely in his books--in the way, that is, in which the philosophers of Greece taught, through their bearing, what they wore and ate, and their morals, rather than by what they said, let alone what they wrote. how completely this courageous visibility of the philosophical life is lacking in Germany!

Writing this in an essay on Schopenhauer seems appropriate, since, as a rabid misogynist, he had no problem throwing his landlady down the stairs. When she died, and he no longer had to pay her restitution, he famously wrote in his account book, "Obit anus, abit onus," the pretentious 19th century equivalent of saying, "The bitch is dead, the I don't have to pay anymore" (literally more like, "The asshole is dead, the burden departed"). So he was certainly living that aspect of his philosophy.

More to the point, this sentiment seems somewhat strange in 2009, when the vast majority of professional philosophers are working on issues that would be difficult to reflect in their outward lives--in the way that they carry themselves, in what they wear, eat, etc. How, for example, might one wear clothes reflective of one's position on whether the denotation of a predicate is its extension or its intension? What should predicate dualists or eliminative materialists eat? In a time when philosophy has become an increasingly specialized discipline, and increasingly removed from life, it has become increasingly difficult to know what living a philosophy would entail, to say nothing of actually doing so.

Still, I think there's something important in the sentiment that a philosopher should live his or her philosophy, to the extent that a philosopher's philosophy is relevant to living. If nothing else, a philosopher living in a way that is not only consistent with, but actually reflects his or her philosophy shows that he or she takes it quite seriously, and suggests that we, as their readers, should take it seriously as well.

One can apply this maxim to much of systematic philosophy, and to much of the generally asystematic Continental tradition. Heidegger's philosophy, which both systematic and as part of that tradition, is certainly is relevant to living, and thus it's not inappropriate to ask whether he lived in a way that reflected it. We might, for example, explore how well Heidegger's life reflected one of the central ideas in his philosophy, the concept of authenticity (eigentlich), and one of its primary components, "resoluteness" (Entschlossenheit), in his siding with the Nazi's largely for reasons of personal and professional gain, his efforts to get us to ignore this episode in his life while refusing to apologize for it, his treatment of his friends Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuese, and Karl Jaspers (during the Nazi years, treating them rather poorly, even insulting them, but afterward, when his reputation was in need of repair, calling on them to come to his aid), etc.

Heidegger wrote in Being and Time that resoluteness, again part of authenticity, is "letting oneself be called forth to one’s ownmost Being-guilty." He had in mind a sort of existential guilt (not unlike original sin, I suppose), in this part of Being and Time, but sees this existential guilt as the ground for all feelings of responsibility and guilt. Yet Heidegger refused to admit responsibility, or show any form of guilt, when it came to his Nazism and other blatantly immoral personal and professional behavior. His refusal to apologize to the very people he'd most directly harmed, his friends and students like Arendt, Jaspers, and Marcuse, shows this quite clearly. Is this Heidegger failing to live his philosophy, or at least an important aspect of it? It's difficult to draw any other conclusion.

How much, then, can we profit from him as a philosopher? How seriously should we take his philosophy in light of the fact that he so blatantly failed to live in accordance with it? I assume we could forgive small indiscretions. Philosophers are no more perfect than any other human beings. But Heidegger's indiscretions were anything but small. At this point, the fact that Heidegger's thought has been so influential probably renders his living of it irrelevant from a historical perspective. We can profit greatly from it in understanding the work of those who came after him. But I am interested in philosophy first and foremost from an individual perspective: what does it tell me about the world, myself, and life in general that I can use in my own life? There is no doubt in my mind that I can take bits and pieces from Heidegger to inform my own thinking (I frequently use his lectures on the Principle of Sufficient Reason in my own thinking on science and ontology, e.g.), but Heidegger's own failure to live his philosophy makes me skeptical of his project as a whole. I don't think his personal failures constitute sufficient grounds for rejecting his philosophy, of course, but it is certainly one rather large quarrel in the critic's quiver.

What do you think?

Added (Slightly) Later: The example I gave is not meant to be the only one in which Heidegger's life is relevant to his philosophy. Nor is "seriousness" meant to be the only reason why living a philosophy is relevant to what we take away from it. Nietzsche himself gives us more reasons in Beyond Good and Evil when he talks of the prejudices of philosophers. A philosophers personality will inevitably be reflected in his or her philosophy, but sometimes indirectly: a philosophy, for example, may be designed to make a philosopher seem like an extremely moral, erudite, or principled person, when in fact he or she is an unprincipled, immoral jerk. In Heidegger's case, his borrowing of terminology from the Nazis (mentioned in the Romano comment thread) show quite clearly how his life affected his books, and therefore how his life is relevant to how we read them, and how much we will profit from them.

A Little Rant About Racism in Austin

I grew up in a small town in the Old South in the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s. During my early, formative years, open, public racism abounded. It was not uncommon to hear the n-word spoken in public, or to hear horribly racist jokes told loudly in a restaurant. Many of the white people in town (about 60% of the town's population) genuinely considered black people (most of the other 40%) to be inferior, and would tell this to anyone who'd listen. Their children sopped up their racism, of course, and when I was in elementary school it was not uncommon for their to be fights caused by racism. The Confederate battle flag was everywhere, and I mean everywhere. My schools mascot, from middle school on, was a Rebel, and in both my junior high and high school gyms (where I played on the basketball teams), rebel flags were painted on the walls. By the time I got to high school, though, things had changed dramatically. GM's Saturn plant had opened nearby, resulting in an influx of new residents mostly from northern states, who were less tolerant of explicit racism. Even before that, a change in attitude had been slowly occurring, and by 11th grade in high school, a petition circulated, and was ultimately signed by about 2/3s of the students, the change the mascot (the school's administration, and then the school board, ultimately rejected the change, and the school's mascot is still a Rebel). There was a bit of a countermovement -- my senior year, a group of white students produced "senior" shirts that displayed the rebel flag with a message about being proud of our southern heritage -- but for the most part, by the mid-90s, explicit racism was no longer tolerated. It has been years since I heard the sorts of things I used to hear regularly in the 80s.

Now I live in Austin, TX, an ostensibly liberal city that certainly isn't known for its racism. It should be, because institutional racism is a big problem here, but it isn't. To see this one need only look at the police shootings of the last several years, Austin's nearly complete racial segregation, or the fact that the police presence is fairly small at the mostly white SxSW music and film festival, while the police presence is mind-bogglingly large during the mostly black Texas Relays, which is considerably smaller than SxSW, that takes place a week or two after SxSW. This year, several businesses even chose to close their doors during the Relays, including a reggae club (saying that, in essence, black people don't like reggae) and an entire friggin' mall, citing security concerns, despite the fact that statistically the SxSW crowd produces much more crime than the Relays crowd. But Austin's racism is 21st century racism: it's acted on, often very subtly, but it's rarely if ever openly voiced, and therefore if you're not paying attention, you might miss it.

Today, however, I ran into one man who proudly wears his racism, on his jacket. He was riding the 1L bus from South Park Meadows (in the far south of Austin) wearing a jacket on which he and, if I were guessing, his friends had penned several symbols and phrases, including "White Warriors," "Aryan Knight," and the SS lightning bolt symbol (in several places), along with several anarchy symbols (because nothing is more compatible with the most fervently loyal military wing, the SS, of one of history's worst authoritarian regimes, the Nazis, than anarchy!). I honestly hadn't seen anything like this in years. I had seen KKK and skinheads at rallies, but not just walking around in public, proudly displaying their racism. I found it both disturbing and incredibly offensive. It's upsetting that in 2009, more than 50 years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It's just mind-boggling.


The picture was taken without his permission, but fuck the racist bastard, I don't care. I know it's kind of hard to read, because my camera phone sucks, but the word after "White" is "Warriors," and underneath that it says, "King of Kings," and then, "Aryan Knight." The "A" in "Aryan" has been turned into the anarchy symbol. Just above the word "knight" is one of several SS lightning bolt symbols. If you're in Austin, and ride the 1L, be sure to let this guy know what you think of his white supremacist views if you see him.

A friend of mine told me that she prefers that racists be open, because at least then you know what you're getting. But I had always thought the fact that racism had become so shameful that the vast majority of racists were afraid to show their, shall we say, true colors in public, was a good thing. But this guy shows that not everyone has gotten that message, and thus reminds me of just how far we have to go in this country before we can say we're living in a "post-racial" society. Ugh. And I'm afraid that this is the sort of thing that Austin's city government, police force, and many of its businesses, encourage when they tacitly approve of racism through their actions and inaction.

Interesting Comment From a Mormon Opponent of Intelligent Design

From a post (via) on Michael Behe's talk at BYU:

So called, Intelligent Design is not just the idea that there is a Creator. I think Mormons look at the label “Intelligent Design” created by the evangelical Discovery Institute and think, “Hey we think God was Intelligent! We must believe in Intelligent Design too!!” No. Their intelligent designer has nothing to do with the glory and beauty of our conception of God. Thiers is a bit of a hack who couldn’t get creation right the first time and has to keep dabbling with the process to get it right.

I've never heard that take on Intelligent Design before. Definitely an interesting way to look at it.

Two Kinds of Books on Nietzsche

Do you seek warmth of me? Come not too close, I counsel, or your hands may burn. For look! My ardor exceeds the limit, and I barely restrain the flames from leaping from my body!

I've spent a lot of time reading the secondary literature on Nietzsche, and I keep coming away with the impression that there are two types of books on Nietzsche. I write that sentence with trepidation, because when someone begins a statement with, "There are two types of..." you can be fairly certain that whatever follows is false. So I don't really mean that there are only two types of books on Nietzsche, just that I tend to classify books on his work into two types.

OK, even that's not true. There are at least three types: really, really bad books on Nietzsche, and OK to good books on Nietzsche that can be classified into two types. The really, really bad books on Nietzsche are the most common type. For example, I just finished reading Prophets of Extremity by Allan Megill. It's an interesting book in its own way, I suppose, but as a book on Nietzsche (or a book with chapters on Nietzsche), it's awful. It's one of those frequent attempts to "postmodernize" Nietzsche, by focusing entirely on his immature aestheticism, and to make that aestheticism into some strange ontology that seems wholly alien both to Nietzsche and to anyone else writing before 1970. For anyone who's actually read Nietzsche, this sort of book is frustratingly bad. Then there's Heidegger's multi-volume series on Nietzsche, which again tries to turn him into a metaphysician, but this time relying almost exclusively on a book that Nietzsche didn't even publish (or write, even) himself: The Will to Power. For Heidegger, this Will to Power is the core of Nietzsche's metaphysics (volume III of the series is even titled "The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics"). When you make a concept that appears only rarely in a thinker's published writings the central component of his or her philosophy, you've If you read all four volumes, you will come away asking yourself, "Did Heidegger and I read the same Nietzsche, or was he reading some Bizarro Nietzsche who'd never written The Gay Science or Beyond Good and Evil?"

So when I say that there are two types of books on Nietzsche, I mean there are two types of books on Nietzsche that have some redeeming value as Nietzsche scholarship or independent philosophy. The first type is exemplified by Walter Kauffmann's dry, plodding, and conservative, but excellent and indespensible Nietzsche: Philosophy, Psychologist, Antichrist. This was the first book on Nietzsche that I read, and I've gone back to it repeatedly over the years. It is thorough, it is accurate if at times controversial, and it provides an excellent companion to Nietzsche's own writings, as well as providing excellent pieces of biographical information. This category thus includes books that are fairly straightforward attempts to interpret and situate Nietzsche as a philosopher (or a psychologist, or an Antichrist). They can be relatively dull, particularly when compared to Nietzsche's writings, but they're informative, and reading them can help you a great deal in making your way through an incredibly complex thinker's writings. In this category I would also include most of the more recent books by English-speaking philosophers, like Brian Leiter's book on Nietzsche and morality, the Richardson and Leiter edited volume on Nietzsche, Rudiger Safranski's "philosophical biography," and Danto's Nietzsche as Philosopher (I'd include Nehemas' book, but it's a sort of tweener).

The second category has fewer members, but I tend to enjoy them much, much more. These books generally don't get all, or even most of the details about Nietzsche right, or they focus exclusively on one aspect of his writing and therefore provide a highly incomplete picture. So they shouldn't be read in order to understand the content of Nietzsche's thought. What these books do, instead, is capture the spirit of Nietzsche, the spirit of the "gay science," of the eternal return, Nietzsche as Antichrist, of giving birth to a dancing star. The book I place most firmly in this category is Georges Bataille's On Nietzsche (which begins with the quote above, from Nietzsche's unpublished notes). In the preface, Bataille openly admits that his book is not an attempt at formal exegesis, but an attempt "to draw out consequences of a lucid doctrine impelling and attracting me to it as if to the light." It is written in his own blood, he says, as Nietzsche's works were. It is not merely a critical reading of Nietzsche, but an "experiencing" of Nietzsche, in an effort to work out what Nietzsche has wrought inside Bataille, and which is driving him to insanity. And it is absolutely wonderful to read. I discovered it in a library, years ago. I started reading it early in the afternoon, and became so engrossed that I read it from start to finish, leaving late in the evening. The next day, I went out and bought a copy of my own, which I go back to as often as I go back to Kauffmann.

Another book that I would place firmly in this category is Graham Parkes' Composing the Soul which, while fairly accurate in its description of Nietzsche's writings, is also extremely limited in that description. It focuses entirely on the psychological dimension in Nietzsche, arguing, to some extent accurately and to some extent futilely, that this is the fundamental dimension of his work. But more than an attempt at exegesis, it is a wonderful exploration of both Nietzsche's mind and the mind in general, and a joy to read. It is even moving, at times, as when it discusses Nietzsche's post-insanity letters. You wouldn't recommend this book to anyone starting out with Nietzsche, because it would certainly steer them in the wrong direction, but for those who like to read, and who are very familiar with Nietzsche, it's a must read. Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy is another example of this type of book, though Deleuze is hardly the writer that Battaile was or Parkes is. Reading Deleuze is a usually struggle (Difference and Repetition has to be the most frustrating book I've ever read), and this book is no exception, but it's still inspiring, if not entirely accurate.

Object-Oriented Philosophy

I have been trying to write a post about object-oriented philosophy (OOP) and speculative realism (SR), but have found it difficult to do so, in part because I keep coming off somewhat mean, and in part because I keep writing way, way too much for a blog post. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the aims of OOP and SR, if only because I'm very sympathetic to speculative philosophy, and I have a soft spot for new ideas (even if they aren't yet so radically new). Plus, I consider myself a realist, though of an somewhat different sort, I think I (I'm a direct realist). But I'm firmly wedded to my anthropocentrism, and I'm not totally averse to what speculative realists call "correlationalism" (see the link above for their definition of this term), so my sympathy only goes so far. Whatever my level of sympathy, I did really enjoy at least the first part^* of Graham Harman's essay on Husserl and Lovecraft (scroll down to page 332), which I definitely recommend reading. Like I said, I dig speculative philosophy.

But what I find truly fascinating of OOP, regardless of what I think of it as a philosophy, is the role that the internet has played in its development. So before I say anything about OOP as a philosophy, I point you to this summary of that role. Definitely worth reading if you're interested in the possibilities that the blogosphere has to offer to serious scholarship.

*Towards the end, he starts criticizing Husserl for not being enough of a realist, which is where my interest started to wane. I recall Camus saying just the opposite: that Husserl was too much of a realist. Damned if he did, damned if he didn't, eh?

Does Martin Heidegger's Nazism Mean We Should Exclude Him From Philosophy?

This is a question I pose to the couple of people who seem to be repeat visitors, and to anyone who happens by via Google: Does Heidegger's enthusiasm Nazism mean he shouldn't be considered a philosopher? This is the position taken by a recent article by Carlin Romano in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and in a book by Emmanuel Faye on Heidegger's Nazism. From the article:

"We must acknowledge," Faye says in one fierce conclusion, "that an author who has espoused the foundations of Nazism cannot be considered a philosopher." Finally, he reiterates his opposition to the Heidegger Industry: "If his writings continue to proliferate without our being able to stop this intrusion of Nazism into human education, how can we not expect them to lead to yet another translation into facts and acts, from which this time humanity might not be able to recover?"

To me, this seems like an dangerous position to take. I have no patience with those, including Heidegger himself, who would attempt to explain away or dismiss his Nazism of the 1930s. It is simply inexcusable, and to ignore it is to act as though it has already been excused. What's more, to ignore it is to fail to fully engage some of his most important philosophical works, including Being and Time and his Introduction to Metaphysics. One can be influenced by Heidegger without being influenced by his Nazism, but one can't read Heidegger without reading his Nazism. To do so would be the like reading only the pages of Heart of Darkness that have beautiful descriptions of nature, because all that stuff about the psychology of evil is too depressing. You couldn't then say, "I've read Heart of Darkness," because you haven't.

That said, when Faye writes, "If his writings continue to proliferate... how can we not expect them to lead to yet another translation into facts and acts, from which this time humanity might not be able to recover?", he is being either obtuse or absurd, or both. I'm quite sure Faye's aware that Heidegger's writings played little or no role in the actual rise of Nazism. Heidegger was, if anything, following on the heels of that rise in a blatantly self-serving manor. It's despicable, and shows Heidegger to be a horrible human being, but it doesn't make him responsible for Nazism. Yet when Faye states that we can expect, if his writings are allowed to be read, "yet another translation into facts and acts," the words "yet another translation" seems to imply that the first instance was also a translation of Heidegger's writings into facts and acts.

There's also something disturbing about his suggestion that we should hide Heidegger away, because he wrote about Nazism in the 1930s, as though we're not strong enough to read those passages and not immediately, or at least over time, gravitate towards National Socialism. But it is not the job philosophers, or librarians, or even publishers, to hide away ideas that we don't like, even if those ideas celebrate obvious evils. Those are the ideas in most need of engagement, and refutation. Hiding them away is more of an invitation for someone to develop them again than reading and openly criticizing them ever will be.

The history of philosophy is replete with justifications and endorsements of evil: Plato advocated infanticide in the Republic, Hume was openly racist (see here for a good discussion), and Schopenhauer wrote the mindbogglingly misogynist essay "On Women" (and he pushed his landlady down the stairs!), yet few would advocate that we should stop reading Plato, Hume, or Schopenhauer because they thought infanticide was a good idea, were racists, or were misogynists, and only slightly more would advocate that they are bad philosophers for these reasons. These things shouldn't be ignored, and should certainly figure into an evaluation of their work, but they shouldn't be the only factors considered. Yet because of his celebration of Nazism, Romano and Faye believe not simply that Heidegger should be considered a bad philosopher, but that he shouldn't be considered a philosopher at all.

I can't close out this post without noting one thing. If you're going to label someone a bad philosopher, you should probably have at least a rudimentary understanding of their core ideas and concepts. Ramono apparently doesn't believe this, as in his article, while discussing the various ways in which Heidegger's philosophy has been praised, he writes:

Another cites his helpful boost to phenomenology by directing our focus to that well-known entity, Dasein, or "Human Being." (For a reified phenomenon, "Human Being," like the Yeti, has managed to elude all on-camera confirmation.)

Anyone who's ever read Being and Time, or even the Cliff Notes, will know that "Dasein" does not mean "Human Being." "Dasein" literally means "being there." It's true that "Dasein" refers to the exclusively human mode of being, but referring to human being as Dasein, and describing it as such, is what people are praising in Heidegger's thought, because they see it as opening up new philosophical avenues in the study of being in general and human being in particular. You might think it's not a very productive way of talking about the being of human beings, but simply dismissing it as a fancy way of saying "human being" is no way to address even a bad philosophy.

Sports Prescience

Sports predicting is notoriously difficult, and baseball is probably the most difficult sport to predict. That's what makes what Seattle Mariners' announcer Mike Blowers did in the pregame show for a game between the Mariners and the Toronto Blue Jays on September 27 of this year so amazing. He predicted that the Mariners' rookie third baseman Matt Tuiasosopo would get his first Major League home run in the game. He didn't stop there, though. He predicted in what at bat he would get it (his second), on what count (3-1, or 1-3 for you Koreans), on what kind of pitch (fastball), and where the home run would go (left field, maybe the second deck).

When Tuiasosopo came up to bat for the second time, in the 5th inning, he took the count to 3-1, and Blowers' co-announcer Dave Niehaus began joking about the prediction. Then Tuiasosopo hit the ball hard to left field, and Niehaus went crazy, yelling "I don't believe it. I see the light!" The ball ended up just short of the second deck.

You can listen to the audio of both the pregame show and the 5th inning at bat here.

There Is Nothing Here Which Is Not Zeus

Here's another translation of that final passage from Women of Trachis, by Michael Jameson, and this time in verse (and I like it much better that way), which I found in an article (JSTOR) on "The Euthyphro Dilemma":

You see how little compassion the Gods
have shown in all that's happened; they
who are called our fathers, who begot us,
can look upon such suffering.
No one can foresee what is to come.
What is here now is pitiful for us
and shameful for the Gods;
but of all men it is hardest for him
who is the victim of this disaster.
Maiden, come from the house with us.
You have seen a terrible death
and agonies, many and strange, and there is
nothing here wish is not Zeus.

What I've learned between writing the previous post yesterday and writing this one today is that there has been a great deal of discussion for some time (like, centuries worth) about whether these last lines (spoken by Heracles' son Hyllus) are meant as an indictment of the gods, or whether Hyllus (and Sophocles) believed that Heracles deserved his fate, and that the gods were acting justly in punishing him so harshly. Since I don't read Greek, I'm hesitant to say which side I fall on. The differences in the two translations show how difficult it is for someone who doesn't read Greek to determine how this passage should be interpreted. One calls the gods' actions "shameful," the other refers to their "cruelty." "Shameful" certainly implies that the gods weren't acting justly; "cruelty" is more ambiguous, though it certainly implies a displeasure with what the gods have done, possibly because it's unjust, or maybe just because it's happening to Hyllus' own family. But these translations are themselves interpretations of Sophocles, so you can't put too much stock in them when trying to figure out what Sophocles himself was trying to say.

Even so, these lines in English, and the play itself, are still interesting in light of the Problem of Evil, and, as the article in which I found this translation suggests, may have contained just the sort of "conception of the divine" that Plato/Socrates was considering in the Euthyphro, from which the Euthyphro Dilemma (which is, it should be noted, not entirely true to the dialogue itself) is taken. What's more, since the Euthyphro Dilemma and the Problem of Evil are not entirely unrelated, Sophocles' play might serve as a useful stimulant for thought on the issues they raise.

Yea, For Thou Art Breaking the Slumber of My Plague

Women of Trachis (The Trachiniae) is by no means Sophocles' most famous tragedy today (Antigone and the two Oedipus plays, particularly Oedipus Rex, are much more widely read), but it's my favorite for some reason. And not just because Ezra Pound published a, shall we say "creative" translation of it, and I happen to be a Pound fan. It really is an amazing play, full of great lines like the one I used for the title of the post. But at the end of the post I'll get to something I'd never really thought about the play until now. First, a short summary.

The story is pretty simple. Heracles (Hercules, to the Romans) is always out fighting and conquering people, and his wife Deïanira isn't happy about it. One day, while Heracles is still out doing his fighting thing, one of his servants brings home several women as slaves that Heracles had captured in his last conquest. One of the women, Iole, is strikingly beautiful, and is "conspicuous among" the others. Deïanira soon learns that the whole reason Heracles had conquered the women's land was to obtain Iole. This of course makes Deïanira jealous, and she decides to use a love spell that had been given to her by a centaur who had, as she was going to marry Heracles, captured her. Heracles heard her cry when the centaur grabbed her, and killed the centaur with an arrow. The centaur then said:

If thou gatherest with thy hands the blood clotted round my wound, at the place where the Hydra, Lerna's monstrous growth, hath tinged the arrow with black gall,- this shall be to thee a charm for the soul of Heracles, so that he shall never look upon any woman to love her more than thee.

He tells her exactly what she has to do, and so when she finds out about Iole, she makes a robe from the blood, and then sends it to Heracles with the instructions that the robe shouldn't be in sunlight, and only Heracles can wear it.

Soon after sending the robe, Deïanira starts to feel guilty, and throws the remaining centaur blood away, out into the sun, where it immediately begins to boil. She realizes the centaur tricked her, but it's too late, Heracles put the robe on, and was badly burned. Deïanira kills herself out of guilt, and Heracles' suffering is so great that he ends up having himself burned to death. Not a happy ending, but then again, it is a tragedy.

I told you all of that, to tell you this. The last lines of Women of Trachis seems like an ancient Greek version of the "Problem of Evil." Here are the lines (from R.C. Jebb's prose translation, which you can read here, and from which I took the above quote as well; emphasis is mine):

Lift him, followers! And grant me full forgiveness for this; but mark the great cruelty of the gods in the deeds that are being done. They beget children, they are hailed as fathers, and yet they can look upon such sufferings. No man foresees the future; but the present is fraught with mourning for us, and with shame for the powers above, and verily with anguish beyond compare for him who endures this doom.

Maidens, come ye also, nor linger at the house; ye who have lately seen a dread death, with sorrows manifold and strange: and in all this there is nought but Zeus.

Apparently even the Greeks were in need of theodicy.

And the Most Despicable Person On the Planet Is...

Bill Donohue. Apparently, if you're not zealously anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-creativity, anti-Democratic Party, anti-religious freedom, and anti-diversity, you hate America, its culture, Christians, and most importantly, Catholics. I hope most Catholics feel nothing but contempt for this man who wants us to believe he speaks for them.

If you read that article, you're going to feel very dirty, so in order to make you feel better, I give you this man, who is Donohue's opposite, and his better, in every way:

Ye are many—they are few

From Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.

I've always loved that stanza, and the whole poem. My favorite part of the poem, though, is the last two stanzas:

'And these words shall then become
Like Oppression's thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again—again—again—

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.'

A 21st Century Investigation of the Conditions of All Possible Experience?

I remember reading some research on creativity a several years ago, a topic I'm interested in and fascinated by for a variety of reasons, and being struck by one of the claims. Repeatedly, researchers discussed and empirically studied the representations of aliens and mythical creatures by writers and artists in a variety of genres (science fiction, fantasy, comic books, etc.). They concluded that these representations shared several features, one of which was bilateral symmetry, and argued that this is because our creativity is limited by our experience.

After spending some time with the creativity literature and feeling like I had a good grasp of it, I brought it up at a party attended by several biologists. A couple overheard what I was saying, and took issue with it. Specifically, when I brought up the point about bilateral symmetry, they both began to vehemently disagree with me.. They went on and on about how what I was describing wasn't a limit of creativity, it was a limit of biology, and provided me with a laundry list of reasons why extraterrestrial creatures were likely to exhibit bilateral symmetry. At the time I thought they had simply missed the point, but I'm no longer so sure.

In my perhaps warped mind, this discussion got me thinking about Kant. Ever since I had taken a course on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, I had been skeptical of Kant's stated goal of providing the necessary conditions for all possible experience. I, influenced heavily by the professor of course, had interpreted this to mean not simply human experience, but the experience of any experiencing being, which would include extraterrestrial beings. How could it be possible, I thought, to make an argument which, though transcendental, must be based on at least introspective evaluations of human (or a human's) experience, and have it apply to all possible experiencing beings? This seemed to me patently absurd.

My skepticism of Kant's project was bolstered by my affinity with the ecological psychology of J.J. Gibson and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Both thinkers were Kantians of sorts, as is just about anyone who studies the mind in the 20th or 21st century, but where they differed from Kant, or at least, where I saw them differing from Kant, was in the role that our own concerns, needs, or goals, and bodies played in determining the nature of our experience, or our experience of nature. For them, as well as the psychologists and philosophers who were influenced by them (and many of their predecessors as well), we are embodied, situated creatures, and the conditions of our experience are necessarily wrapped up in that embodiment and situatedness.

To me, this seemed like a direct challenge to the Kantian project. If our experience is embodied and situated, how can we possibly extract anything universal from it? Wouldn't the conditions of possible experience for differently embodied and situated creatures necessarily be different? The two exceptions, of course, would be embodiment and situatedness. In a way, these are the Gibsonian and Merleau-Pontyan universal conditions for all experience. But any transcendental argument about the conditions of all possible experience beyond that would be impossible, right?

This is where my myopia took me, until that conversation with the two biologists. After that conversation, I realized that something like the Kantian project might be possible if nature limits the possibilities of embodiment and situatedness. That is, with a firm grasp of the ways in which the facts of the physical universe limit our embodiment (e.g., biasing our body plans towards bilateral symmetry, particularly as organisms become more complex), we might be able to suss out a basic set of necessary conditions for possible experience that would apply to all possible experiencing beings in the physical universe.

At the very least, this seems like an interesting line of research, and one that, in true Merleau-Pontyan fashion, would have to rely heavily on philosophical reasoning and empirical science. What would be needed would be a Kantian transcendental argument for the 21st century, utilizing biology, physics, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This would, of course, be a massive undertaking, a sort of science (in the old sense of Wissenschaft) in and of itself, rather than the grand system-making of one person, but it seems possible. Or does it? What do you think?

Did You Mean Intolerant Atheists?

Someone arrived at this blog earlier from Google, using the search terms "tolerant atheists." So I figured I'd try the search myself, and when I did, something both funny and sad happened. Here's a screen shot:


Don't believe me? Try the search yourself. Clearly atheists have a public perception problem, or at least a Google perception problem.

Leiter on Limbaugh on Swine Flu

Is it just me, or is a post like this disturbing? Brian Leiter in full:

I realize eugenics is politically and morally incorrect, but I can not say that I am upset that followers of Rush Limbaugh will not get the swine flu vaccine.

At least he acknowledges that it is, in fact, "morally incorrect," which is a pleasant way of saying immoral. I prefer immorality when it's fully self-conscious. Still, even though Leiter was probably making a really, really tasteless joke, I feel like pointing out that if Limbaugh's listeners don't get vaccines, and get swine flu, then others who, say, can't afford the vaccines or otherwise don't have access or knowledge of them, and who are exposed to Limbaugh's listeners might also get swine flu. I know that H1N1 isn't as deadly as was at first believed (I had it 2 weeks ago, and survived, and I have to say it was the worst bout of flu I've ever had, and I'm still weak as a result of it), but joking about anyone getting a highly communicable and potentially deadly disease because you disagree with their politics is just plain tasteless. It's Limbaughian, even.

On Dawkins, Myers, Philosophy, Science, Theories, Facts, etc.

I just finished reading this post by Mike Flynn (via Siris), cleverly titled "The Imperial March." The post, inspired by the PZ Myers post I linked earlier, takes Myers and Richard Dawkins to task for their ignorance of philosophy (something I've also noted before). My favorite part of Flynn's post:

Consider Dawkins' comment in the first quote: Questions about the existence of the supernatural are actually scientific questions. And then we can ask by what scientific principle this is known? Perhaps the philosopher running beside the locomotive can tell the engineer who, by all appearances has never given this question a moment's thought. No body of knowledge has within itself the competency to examine its own foundations -- although only Mathematics has a rigorous proof that this is so. Physics, which in the original meaning was any knowledge (scientia) of physical bodies, and so includes biology and all the rest, is grounded in metaphysics, which simply means "behind the physics." And that is right where The Metaphysics appears in compilations of Aristotle's works, right after The Physics. It deals with those ontological and epitemological preconditions.

Science as we know it measures things. Some folks think that because they can measure Stuff really really accurately that they are therefore Experts on Everything from theology to barbeque sauce or even in other branches of science. But to measure is to quantify, and quantification belongs to matter (rather than to form, agency, or finality). Therefore, if you focus exclusively on that-which-can-be-measured, you focus exclusively on that which is matter. Like anyone whose only tool is a hammer, after a while everything starts to look like a nail. But in what way does Dawkins suppose that the "supernatural" (whatever he means by that) is a measurable, material body? Heck. Forget about the existence of the supernatural. The existence of an empirical universe is not a scientific question. It is an a priori assumption necessary if one is to do science in the first place. Even the existence of natural laws is not a scientific question, but an assumption scientists must make before they will look for them.

This is a point I've often tried to make to the Dawkinsians I know in person (Dawkins, when he comes here, spends a good deal of time with people I know, because they're kindreds or something). Dawkins wants science to replace religion, because he believes that all religious questions are scientific questions, and science has shown itself to be better at answering scientific questions than religion. The latter part of that statement is obviously true: science is better at what it does than any other institution or system we humans have previously invented. That's why we've been able to go to the moon, wipe small pox off the face of the Earth, and talk to each other on the internet, or in our darker hours, flatten Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the first part of the statement, that all religious questions are scientific questions, is where Dawkins goes wrong in big way. Science isn't built to answer metaphysical questions. That's not what science does. One of the worst (intellectual) things a scientist (or anyone for that matter) can do with science is conclude that it proves the truth of materialism. That's equivalent to saying that linguistics proves that all there is to existence is language, because all linguistics studies is language. There's no way to avoid the circularity of this argument, and it's one that Dawkins and his fans make all of the time.

Now, I don't think anything Flynn says in his post suggests that philosophy of science itself is important to science. Where Dawkins, Myers, and others go wrong is not in their science, to the extent that any of these self-appointed spokespeople for atheism are doing actual science anymore. They go wrong when they try to do philosophy based on what they know about science. It is undoubtedly true that in 2009, science is much more relevant to the doing of philosophy than philosophy is to the doing of science, but science can only answer certain kinds of questions, and can only inform philosophy on those types of questions. Where science leaves off, philosophy is often the best vehicle for continuing on.

I do have to say that I think Flynn is wrong in saying that evolution is not a fact, and thus that Dawkins and Myers are right when they say that it is (even if they don't know why it is, as Myers' quoting of Gould seems to suggest). "Evolution," in its barest biological sense, refers to a set of observable events. Now, I haven't read The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory since I took a philosophy of science course in grad school (and from what I understand, there's a fairly large literature, with which I'm not at all familiar, on how to interpret his philosophy of science anyway), but I'm pretty sure that for Duhem there were different kinds of facts (concrete facts, theoretical facts, practical facts, maybe some others¹). It seems reasonable to consider evolution a concrete fact in the Duhemian sense. But Duhem was talking about physics, as the title of the book suggests, so maybe that's not the case. However, in say, a Wittgensteinian sense, evolution is, as a set of observable events, a fact of the world. Theories of evolution are not facts; natural selection is not a fact. These are explanations of facts. Evolution itself, that is the physical, and more specifically genetic, change of organisms and their offspring over time is the set of facts being explained. At the very least, I think this is an arguable position, and it therefore behooves philosophers not to dismiss it out of hand simply because Dawkins is so ignorant of philosophy in general.

1 If I remember correctly, this distinction, specifically the one between theoretical (which are mathematical) facts and practical facts, is very important in his overall discussion of theories and what they do in physics. For example, I'm pretty sure I remember him arguing that there are always a whole bunch of theoretical facts that correspond to a single practical fact, which would have all sorts of implications for how you test theories.

Caused Will?

From an interesting post by the social psychologist John Bargh, on the subject of free will:

So what, then, if one's will is not ‘free' of internal causation? It is still your will and my will and each is unique: a confluence of genetic heritage, early absorption of local cultural norms and values, and particular individual life experiences. After all, one can claim personal ownership of one's will just as much as one claims ownership of one's name, eye color, and birthday, and be as proud of one's will and its products as one is proud of the exploits of great-great-Grandma the pioneer, even though one's ‘free will' played no role in any of these.

Bargh, and many other social psychologists, believe that free will is a "positive illusion" our minds create, in support of "human striving." In reality, Bargh and others argue (relying on some interesting, though I would say hardly conclusive, empirical data), what we perceive as "free will" is actually the result of many unconscious processes that we have little or no conscious control over.

The linked post has links to some interesting discussion and alternative points of view.

"Schrödinger’s Rapist"

I just read an excellent post with that title by Phaedra Starling (via). The post's subtitle is, "a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced." An excerpt:

Now, you want to become acquainted with a woman you see in public. The first thing you need to understand is that women are dealing with a set of challenges and concerns that are strange to you, a man. To begin with, we would rather not be killed or otherwise violently assaulted.

“But wait! I don’t want that, either!”

Well, no. But do you think about it all the time? Is preventing violent assault or murder part of your daily routine, rather than merely something you do when you venture into war zones? Because, for women, it is.

I am continually shocked and horrified by what women go through on a daily, and more often, nightly basis simply to navigate the world without being raped, abducted, or otherwise assaulted simply because they're women. Most of my friends are female, and I've had countless phone conversations during which, as a friend walked down some street at night, was sitting at a bus stop, or was just sitting in a cafe reading a book, she was approached either on foot or by a man in a car and asked if she wants a ride, where she lives (seriously, do they expect someone, male or female, to just tell a strange man where they live?), what her name is, if she lives alone(!), if she wants to go out on a date (usually meaning right then), or if she wants to have sex. Then there are the times when I get calls late at night because a friend is being followed by a strange man, or a strange man won't leave her alone as she walks by herself. One time, I was on the phone with a friend as she walked through a grocery store parking lot when a man walked up to her and asked, "Do you like to get freaky?" I mean, what the hell? Does this ever work for guys? Does a woman ever say to them, "Yes, I would like to have freaky, funky sex with you right now. I live right over here, by myself. Let's go there and get it on?" I can't imagine that ever happens. Or that women ever say yes when a man in a van pulls up to them on a dark street and asks them if they want a ride.

But then, I don't think these men are really looking for women to say yes to any of those queries. More often than not, I suspect, they're scoping out the woman and the situation, looking for vulnerabilities and opportunities for sexual assault and rape. The "yes" is irrelevant.

We will not live in a truly free society until women feel as safe walking down the street alone at night as I do. This would require men learning not only to respect women as human beings, but also understanding the unique difficulties and dangers that women face because so many men are likely to treat them as mere objects. And honestly, I don't have a lot of hope that this will happen anytime soon.

UPDATE: From the comments to the original ""Schrödinger’s Rapist" post:

Interestingly, I’ve been getting more and more comments from men about how these threads prove that if women just talked back and were confident more, instead of being “polite”, the problem would go away.

While I'm not a woman, and therefore can't speak for them, my second hand experience is consistent with this. One of my friends always responds to men who approach her in the ways I described above with a very forceful, "Get out of my fucking face!" or something to that effect. And the men seem to respond to this, usually leaving her space post haste. Sure, they'll occasionally mutter "bitch" under their breath, but better to be called a bitch than to be physically assaulted, right? She does the same thing with men who follow her. She will stop, look at them so that they know that she knows they're there, and if they continue to follow her, she will say something like, "What's your fucking problem?" or "What the hell do you want?" In almost every case they stop following her after that.

My theory is, this wakes the men up to the fact that she is a person, and not simply a moving object, and while I don't think this causes them to respect her in any meaningful sense of the word, it does cause them to respect the fact that she's capable of doing them harm too, with either a swift kick or by letting everyone in the general vicinity know what they're up to. In fact, I've seen her do this in person, and she does it so loudly that everyone within ear shot turns around to see what all the fuss is about. The men often become visibly embarrassed, which seems to disarm them.

My Favorite New Blog

OK, it's not a new blog at all, but I just discovered it, so it's new to me: Old Picture of the Day by PJM. Each day there's a new old picture, as the blog's title suggests. The photos are from the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, and PJM posts pictures from his own collection as well as those that his readers send in. He also has name the mystery person contests, which look fun.

The only negative I've seen is the PJM's and many of his commenters' insistence on calling themselves "southern sympathizers," meaning that they were sympathetic to the "states' rights" cause of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. This pops up in the discussion of many of the Civil War photographs posted on the blog (the post linked in the image above is one example of this). Being from the south, I've met many "southern sympathizers" in my day. They're the sort who insist that slavery was just an unfortunate, small part of the case for southern secession, though it's difficult to tell whether they think it's unfortunate because slavery was morally evil or because it made the Confederacy look like the bad guy of the Civil War. Of course, slavery was the cause of secession. Without slavery, there would have been no Confederate States of America, and no American Civil War. Historical research is pretty much unequivocal on this issue. And as a result of the role of slavery in the Civil War, "states' rights" has become a sort of code word for racism in the south. I don't mean to imply that the blog's author or its commenters are racist, as I know nothing about them personally. I do want to note, however, that they're trading in historical revisionism, and that by calling themselves southern sympathizers, they are associating themselves with the worst sort of southern racists, both in history and today.

Retail Graveyard and the Road From Nowhere

At least twice a month, I take a bus from downtown Austin to Kyle, about 20 miles south of downtown. The bus drops me off at a taqueria with some of the best breakfast tacos I've ever had. I then have to walk about 2 miles to my ultimate destination. I could walk along the frontage road of IH35, but I'm not suicidal, so I cross the interstate and then walk down a hill next to a Dairy Queen and then walk through what can only be described as a retail graveyard. It was once a large shopping center, but all of the stores closed at least a decade ago, and the buildings were torn down. The area is now completely overgrown, except for the streets that went through the shopping center, and is home to all manner of wildlife. In the last three months, I've spotted at least 10 different species of song birds, buzzards, red tailed hawks and another raptor that I don't recognize, mice, feral cats, a rat snake, and one fat western diamondback rattle snake. Here's a picture of a part of the retail graveyard (looking southeast):

In the spring, that entire area was filled with small bushes, each with dozens of little yellow flowers. It was striking.

There's one feature of the graveyard that strikes me as downright surreal. At the south end is a road that appears, seemingly ex nihilo, out of the woods. It is a road from nowhere:


Here is an aerial view, so that you can see that the street really does come from nowhere (the building just south of the bridge is the Dairy Queen). My favorite part is the left turn only lane, which will be useful to the cars that materialize out of the woods and drive down this street. If you can't tell, this second picture (taken looking east) was taken in winter. The woods at the far end are now quite green. I like to walk back there, down a small hill at the end of the road, and sit under the trees while reading. I just have to remember to brush the ants, rollie pollies, and wolf spiders off my legs now and then.

Philosophy of Science, Who Needs It?

This post at Siris, and the post it links to at Pharyngula, reminded me of my first methods course, lo these many years ago. The first week or two of the course were spent on the "philosophy of science" and the "scientific method," including a lot of definitions of important concepts like "fact," "theory," "law," "hypothesis," and "model." After those first two weeks, the only concept we actually used in discussing research methods was "hypothesis," and we used that concept in both a very loose and very specific sense: what you start with when designing an experiment. A hypothesis, which in the beginning of the course had a very exact meaning in relation to those other concepts of the scientific method, suddenly became just a position statement of one sort or another, of some level of exactness, that you then tested with whatever study you were conducting.

Later, when I took a philosophy of science course, we spent a lot of time talking about falsification. This was a word I had heard often in the methods courses I had taken (by this time, I'd taken 2 or 3). First, I learned all about Popper's concept of falsification, and then I learned that falsification had some serious theoretical problems, as the Quine-Duhem thesis had shown. Apparently individual hypotheses couldn't be falsified. This would seemingly pose a problem for all those scientists using the methods I'd learned in my methods course, because those methods were all about falsifying individual hypotheses. That's what those methods do. This was disconcerting to say the least.

Finally, I started working in a lab as an undergraduate research assistant, and talking to the researchers, grad students and faculty, about all of this confusing stuff I had been learning in my methods and philosophy of science courses. From them I learned that actual practicing scientists, by and large, don't know much about philosophy of science (several had never heard of the Quine-Duhem thesis, though they all knew who Popper was). It was at this point that I had an epiphany: scientists just care about doing science, and since it turns out that doing science doesn't require knowing much, if anything, about the philosophy of science, most scientists don't really care about philosophy of science. "So you say we can't falsify individual hypotheses?" a scientist might ask, and when the philosopher of science replies affirmatively, the scientist will say, "Well, acting as though we're trying to falsify individual hypotheses has gotten us pretty far, scientifically, so phooey on you!" The scientist will then conduct his or her next experiment designed to falsify an individual hypothesis.

Which brings me to the question, who needs philosophy of science? Now, I will admit having read some very interesting papers on the philosophy and history of science. They've often helped me to place certain scientific ideas and findings in their historical and theoretical context, particularly when those ideas and findings are in sciences far removed from my own knowledge base (e.g., physics or microbiology). What's more, I've read some interesting papers by philosophers attempting to apply approaches from one science to another. For example, a couple years back I read a paper about the role of causation in physics, and the implications for the role of causation in the social sciences. It was really interesting stuff. I've yet to hear of anyone applying it, in any way whatsoever, to their work in the social sciences, but it was still a fascinating read. But finding something interesting, or learning something about another science (that I probably could have learned by reading a book about that science, but I'm lazy), isn't quite the same as actually being relevant to science or scientists and their work. So I wonder, aside from a few exceptions (Popper's falsification being the obvious one), to what extent does the vast majority of philosophy of science matter to the doing of science? I doubt it matters very much. And if it doesn't really matter to scientists, to whom does it matter?

Austin's Other Bats

Austin is famous for its "Bat Bridge," the Congress Street Bridge over Lady Bird Lake that houses the largest urban bat colony in the world. On any given evening in the summer, you can find hundreds, even thousands of people standing on and around the bridge to watch the nearly 1 million Mexican free-tailed bats leave their roost in a great bat cloud. It's an impressive sight.

But few people are aware that downtown Austin is home to several other, smaller bat colonies. I recently discovered one by complete accident. I was walking at dusk, west on 15th Street between Trinity and San Jacinto (we were coming from Waterloo Park), on the south side of 15th along the 1401 San Jacinto parking garage, when I noticed a bat flying surprisingly low along the side of the garage. Then I saw another bat, and another, both flying really low (I'm 5'10", and they were at about my head level). I took a few more steps, when I suddenly realized that there was a steady stream of bats coming from the parking garage, all flying directly at my head and only swerving away at the last moment. This was initially disorienting, as everywhere I turned I saw another bat or group of bats flying right towards or around my head. So it took me a few seconds to realize that I was standing next to a small bat colony, housed in a one-inch gap between the parking garage's main wall and its façade. The bats had begun leaving for the evening at the very moment I was walking by, and I was just feet away from their exit. After a minute or two I got up the courage to run through the now steady stream of bats, and then watched them flow out for a few more minutes before continuing on.

I've now passed that spot several times just before dusk, and each time I've stopped to listen to the bats chirping. If you look closely, you can even see a few of the bats hanging behind the façade. It's really pretty cool. And in hindsight, I should have known that there were bats living in that spot. I had walked past it dozens of times during the winter (when the bats are in Mexico), and either earlier or later in the day during the summer (when they're sleeping, so I should have noticed the bat guano covering the parking garage's wall, or the smell of guano, familiar to most Austinites, that permeates the entire block.

So if you live in Austin, or are visiting, and you want to see bats up close, head on over to 15th St between Trinity and San Jacinton, on the south side of the street. Below is a picture of the guano covering the wall (you can also see the small gap where the bats exit). If you see this, you'll know you're in the right spot.

Photographic Appeals to Emotion

If you've spent any time around the University of Texas at Austin campus over the last several years, chances are you've seen 18-foot tall photos of aborted fetuses on more than one occasion. These photos are part of an exhibit by anti-abortion groups that periodically pops up at various spots on campus (sometimes off the East Mall, sometimes near the Student Union). It's a very effective exhibit, too. Not in convincing anyone, though it may do that, but in disturbing people. Disgust and horror is often visible on the faces of many of the passers by.

This tactic -- disgusting people with images -- is the purest form of manipulation. Any first year philosophy student taking a logic course will recognize it as an example of the informal fallacy "appeal to emotion," with the argument going something like this: abortion is disgusting, therefore abortion is morally wrong. The fallaciousness of this argument should be obvious, but if it's not, take another example from medicine: open heart surgery is disgusting, therefore open heart surgery is morally wrong.

I bring this up because I find this tactic even more disturbing when people who should know better use it. Anyone who does use photographic appeals to emotion to strengthen their argument should be ashamed of themselves. And they might want to take a closer look at the position they're taking, as well. If you feel the need to resort to manipulation to make your case, chances are you couldn't make it very well without it.

What Sokal Didn't Do

From a comment by James Hanley at Positive Liberty:

But let me ask this question, which I do not mean snarkily. How are we to tell when someone is engaged in reasonable exegesis rather than “house of card” building? I hae in mind the great Sokal hoax, in which he clearly demonstrated that post-modernists were engaged in house of cards building.

I hear this quite a lot: that Sokal's hoax demonstrated that "postmodernism," a vague word in itself, is bunk. This is clearly absurd. What Sokal's hoax showed, if anything, is that the editors of Social Text weren't very good at distinguishing good scholarship from "house of cards building." Or at least that the editors of Social Text are not physicists, and are easily duped on the subject of physics. Which isn't at all surprising.

Sokal published an article in one journal. This proves nothing about an incredibly heterogeneous collection of scholars and scholarship. Could the Bogdanov Affair show that all physics is mere "house of cards building?" Of course not. If you wanted to demonstrate that postmodernists were, as a group, engaged in house of cards building, you'd have to do much more than Sokal did.

Another Episode of "Sentences You Never Thought You'd Read"

So I'm reading the news from back home, when I noticed a story about the reinterment of the body of a Civil War soldier, probably a Union soldier, whose body was discovered at a construction site last May. The body is lying in state starting tomorrow, and then re-enactors are going to perform a "period" funeral service on Saturday. That's interesting and all, but what really got me was this part of the story (emphasis mine):

The city of Franklin has organized a memorial service for a Civil War soldier whose remains were discovered over the summer at a construction site. The sons of two Civil War veterans will speak at the service Saturday.

What?! The sons of two Civil War veterans? Hold on a moment, let me check my calendar. Yup, it's 2009, a full 144 years after the end of the Civil War. What the hell are sons of Civil War veterans doing alive? The article's explanation:

It’s something of a fluke for any child of a Civil War veteran to be alive. Brown was born in 1912 when his father, who had remarried a much younger woman, was 71.

"A fluke" might be putting it mildly.

Perhaps the coolest part is that the father of one of the two veterans actually fought in the battle that took place in the town where the body was discovered, in 1864. And the other one's father was at Gettysburg and Appomattox.

I'm tempted to start digging Europe around for sons of Franco-Prussian War veterans.

The Conservative Bible

Conservapedia has invented a new Biblical hermeneutics, the Conservative Bible Project. From the site:

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle".
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots"; using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word "Lord" rather than "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" or "Lord God."

This is genius. I know that interpreting religious texts tendentiously is a long-standing tradition in Christianity and pretty much any other religion organized around a set of canonical texts, but I don't think I've ever seen an example of someone doing so this explicitly. Usually readers would just go into the text and come out saying, "Look, we've found that the Bible supports our political theory!" But Conservapedia is asking its readers to go in and change the Bible so that it supports their political theory. That is awesome!

Simone de Beauvoir on Negativity, Freedom, and the Possibility of Evil

From The Ethics of Ambiguity:

Only, unlike Kant, we do not see man as being essentially a positive will. On the contrary, he is first defined as a negativity. He is first at a distance from himself. He can coincide with himself only by agreeing never to rejoin himself. There is within him a perpetual playing with the negative, and he thereby escapes himself, he escapes his freedom. And it is precisely because an evil will is here possible that the words "to will oneself free" have a meaning. Therefore, not only do we assert that the existentialist doctrine permits the elaboration of an ethics, but it even appears- to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place. For, in a metaphysics of transcendence, in the classical sense of the term, evil is reduced to error; and in humanistic philosophies it is impossible to account for it, man being defined as complete in a complete world. Existentialism alone gives - like religions - a real role to evil, and it is this, perhaps, which make its judgments so gloomy. Men do not like to feel themselves in danger. Yet, it is because there are real dangers, real failures and real earthly damnation that words like victory, wisdom, or joy have meaning. Nothing is decided in advance, and it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win.

Therefore, in the very condition of man there enters the possibility of not fulfilling this condition. In order to fulfill it he must assume himself as a being who "makes himself a lack of being so that there might be being." But the trick of dishonesty permits stopping at any moment whatsoever. One may hesitate to make oneself a lack of being, one may withdraw before existence, or one may falsely assert oneself as being, or assert oneself as nothing.. ness. One may realize his freedom only as an abstract independence, or, on the contrary, reject with despair the distance which separates us from being. All errors are possible since man is a negativity, and they are motivated by the anguish he feels in the face of his freedom. Concretely, men slide incoherently from one attitude to another.

When I was an undergraduate, studying philosophy, I took several courses on existentialism, and we covered mostly the same thinkers: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka, Miguel de Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Buber, Marcel, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, with a few others thrown in here and there for good measure (Kleist and Berdyaev come to mind). Do you see a pattern with these folks (listed roughly chronologically)? They're all dudes! But the first time I read The Ethics of Ambiguity (I'd already read The Second Sex in a course unrelated to existentialism), right after reading The Myth of Sisyphus, I was absolutely blown away. This woman seemed to have hit on something all of the men had missed, or at least misplaced: a necessary corollary to the absurd, which figures so centrally in existentialism, is the ambiguous. Without the latter, the former leaves us with little of life to live, no matter how strongly Camus believes we should just keep rolling the rock back up the hill. What's more, placing the ambiguous alongside the absurd makes possible a bunch of interesting answers to long-standing philosophical questions, about ethics for example, which de Beauvoir explores at length. I thought then, as I do now, "If only I had read this philosopher earlier, a lot of things would have been clearer to me." Oh well. In a lot of ways, philosophy is still just an old boys club.

A Little Bit of a Regression to Childhood

But after all, why not?

A little Monday music. Be sure to watch the interview after the performance.

We Are Austin Too, Part I

The local CBS affiliate here in Austin, KEYE 42, adopted the slogan "We Are Austin" a few years back, and it's been so successful that they've made weareaustin.com their main website's URL. They frequently air "We are Austin" ads that involve their news anchors and reporters, along with residents of Austin, all saying "We are Austin!" with great verve and enthusiasm. Each of the Austin residents is attractive, well-dressed (and likely well-to-do), most of them are white, and UT students figure prominently in the ads, even though UT students are only Austin part of the year, and only for a few years. This makes certain advertising sense, of course, but it's not really very reflective of the way Austin's population really looks. After all, white people make up less than half of the Austin population. Also, a solid 14% of the population lives below the poverty line, there's a huge (and generally under-counted) homeless population, and panhandlers are everywhere. So I thought I'd make my own ads with the aim that, when combined with KEYE's, they might present a more accurate image of the city. Here's my first:

Tolerant and Activist Atheists

The labels used to describe the positions in the abortion debate aren't really helpful. There's "pro-life," a position dominated by people who are in favor of the death penalty (except the Catholic pro-lifers, of course), and "pro-choice," which basically says, "people who like not being forced to do things they don't want to do." In other words, the labels are either inaccurate or overly broad; they're not exactly overflowing with information about those to whom they're applied.

And as far as I can tell, this is pretty much how labels work in our society. At first, there may be some value to framing a debate in a certain way by force-feeding your audience the labels you've chosen. Thus, for a very short time, "pro-life" might have implied that your opponents were "anti-life," and "pro-choice" might have implied that your opponents like slavery or something, but these days, unless you're a true believer already, it's unlikely the labels have such connotations for you. You just use them the same way you use the word "tiger" to refer to those big, striped cats in the zoo: you don't really pay attention to the origins of the label or its potential meanings, you just point at the thing and say, "tiger."

Which makes PZ Myers' obvious chagrin at the use of the term "tolerant atheist" somewhat amusing. The "tolerant atheist" label comes from this post by some Australian dude who has the temerity, nay, the gall! to give a positive label to an atheist temperament with which Dr. Myers disagrees. In essence, the Australian dude argues that atheists should promote more tolerant religion. This view he labels "tolerant atheism." Like a true adult, PZ goes all I'm-rubber-your-glue on dude's ass, and calls the Australian dude's atheism "do-nothing atheism." Because, you see, if that kind of atheism is "tolerant atheism," then any other form of atheism must be "intolerant atheism," just like anyone who's not "pro-life" is "anti-life," and any cat that's not a "tiger" is "anti-tiger" (oh, it just got all Hegelian up in this hizzy!). No one who knows Myers deep in his soul has ever accused him of being intolerant, so why is Australian dude so mean to damn him by implication? But wait, he may not be intolerant, but PZ does do stuff (or say stuff, at least). So PZ gives us a "snap, snap, oh no he didn't!" then lectures us on the active and the passive (channeling his inner Nietzsche), and replaces "tolerant" with "do-nothing," and "intolerant" with "activist." In your face Australian dude! That's how we do serious intellectual discussions in the United States of Friggin' America!

It is, of course, irrelevant at this point that the Australian dude was arguing for a position that involved doing something, namely promoting tolerant religion (it's doubly irrelevant that the Australian guy never called any other atheists intolerant). This is, in fact, asking atheists to do quite a lot, because intolerant religion seems to be gaining a bigger and bigger foothold in many parts of the world, including the U.S. (I don't know about Australia). But like I said, that's irrelevant, because the labels aren't really going to mean anything to anybody but the choir, should they stick. They won't stick, because they're stupid, but if they did, no one would think that PZ was an "intolerant atheist" because he wasn't a "tolerant atheist," and no one would think that Australian dude was a "do-nothing atheist" because he wasn't an "activist atheist." That's just not the way these things work.

By the way, more accurate labels for the two might be "adolescent atheists," which anyone who reads PZ's post will agree is an accurate description of his brand, and "tilting at windmills atheists," because that's pretty much what trying to have a conversation with adolescent atheists is like. But since labels end up being meaningless, better that they not start out as accurate anyway, right?