On Academic Tricks

“An editorial in the latest issue of the Journal of Management Studies (JMS) focused on the growing problem of unethical behaviour in academic publishing, particularly in light of some recent retractions in the field... But what the JMS editorial overlooks is a range of research practices that do not fall under the quasi-juridical category of ‘academic misconduct,’ but which pose just as much of a threat to standards of scholarship. We are talking here, of all those ‘tricks of the trade’ that scholars use to artificially increase their chances of publication in premier journals. These tricks include writing papers with senior academics, even though they may do little more than put their name on the byline. Some academics may prominently cite the work of senior editors in a submission to the journal they edit. Others establish multi-authorship cartels, whereby a group of scholars write one paper each but list the others as co-authors in order to double, treble or quadruple one’s output. Some academics steer the work of doctoral students towards their own research area to cultivate future collaborators who will be willing to share their data and do the lion’s share of the work.”

"The Dark Arts of Academica - And Why Journals Must Do More to Tackle the Problem" - http://theconversation.com/the-dark-arts-of-academia-and-why-journals-must-do-more-to-tackle-the-problem-35796. 

On Truth

“Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the philosophy of truth. Pontius Pilate famously asked: what is truth? In the twentieth century, the nature of truth became a subject of particular interest to philosophers, but they preferred to ask a slightly different question: what does it mean to say of any particular statement that it is true? What is the difference between these two questions, and how useful is the second of them?”

BBC Radio 4, In Our Time - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04v59gz

On Banking

“I venture to claim that no one understands the accounting of the Deutsche Bank. There’s an auditing company that’s familiar with the accounting system. But no single person can understand how those numbers are generated. It’s too complex. That’s why it’s like I’m demanding transparency about something that I can’t demand transparency about. It’s like the question about the existence of the God particle. I don’t know if it exists. Nor do I know how every last branch of this industry works. Nobody does. ”

- Rainer Voss, in Master of the Universe, a documentary directed by Marc Bauder, 2014

On the Enlightenment

“There’s a wonderful democratic republican pamphlet by Camille Desmoulins which was published at the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 where he discusses this very point. He says the real issue, if you’re talking about revolution and turning everything upside down, what really counts in the 18th century, is not atheism as such, but the rejection of divine providence and religious authority. That’s what we’re really talking about. If there is no divine providence guiding the course of history, if there is no divine direction in the way things happen, this means that the existing social order – for instance the fact that most of the properties are owned by the aristocracy – can’t be part of the divine plan, or can’t be sanctioned by religious authority. Religious authority doesn’t have that kind of connection with divine providence that it claims to have, and therefore it doesn’t have the legitimacy that many people imagine that it does. This is deeply subversive, and is the connection between being revolutionary in religious matters and being revolutionary in social and political matters. That is one of the most important things to grasp about the Enlightenment...

I think Sorkin is absolutely right to say that we haven’t gone far enough in demonstrating that the religious Enlightenment was not just Protestant but also Catholic and Jewish. Going back to my theme of Five Books that cover all the major dimensions of the Enlightenment, this is really the first one to look at the transformation in religious thought and practice and of thinking about religion’s role in politics, philosophy and society. In that respect it’s a very interesting and important book and a very useful survey. No one else before Sorkin makes this claim, but I think he’s right. He shows that all the religions produce a very strong Enlightened tendency. At the same time he also demonstrates that there was a great deal of resistance to these changes within the churches, whether Catholic, Protestant or Jewish.”

"Jonathan Israel on the Enlightenment" - http://fivebooks.com/interviews/jonathan-israel-on-enlightenment 

On Kafka

BBC Radio 4's In Our Time podcast discussed Kafka's The Trial, this past week. Kafka turns out to be essential reading for bureaucratic life in universities these days, although it is interesting to hear discussed the religious themes in Kafka's work as well. The discussion of Aesop was very good the week before, and this week it is a discussion of Zen: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/iot/all.

On Bad Parchment

“While the velvety softness of perfect skin can be quite appealing to handle, getting to know imperfect parchment is ultimately more interesting and rewarding. Damage is telling, as this post shows, and it may shed light on such things as the attitude of scribes (who did not necessarily mind holes on the page), the manner in which a book was stored by its owner (with a missing clasp or in a wet environment), and even the state of mind of those looking at it (‘Must cut out golden letters!’). As a book historian it feels good to work with bad skin.”

"The Skinny on Bad Parchment" - http://medievalbooks.nl/2014/10/24/feeling-good-about-bad-skin/

Spiritual Materialism

Interesting London based artist working on the intersection between materiality and spirituality: 

“‘“Spiritual Materialism” is a collection of artifacts from the spaces in-between,’ Lauder explains, ‘reflections on the human hunger for profundity and although at the same time influenced by a number of cultures, pointing the finger in the direction of our common human heritage.’ Drawing on both religious and spiritual iconography, Lauder’s illustration work is complemented by his woodworking prowess... Despite heading to Bali to surf and escape the British summer (i.e. slightly warmer rainy season), Lauder found himself in a familiar location: the studio. ‘It was pretty tough finding a balance between enjoying the island life and making work for the exhibition,’ he says. ‘I basically shut myself away for six weeks in the studio and then when the [work] was done tried to cram in as much time in the water as possible.’”

http://www.coolhunting.com/culture/spiritual-materialism-satta-deus
The exhibition's crafted and material focus is quite interesting to me. It strikes me that the artist is touching on an old nerve related to the making of religious books, which drew upon a similar sense of the spirituality of things.

On Outsourcing

“Recent conversations about online higher education have revolved around how colleges can and should blast their courses out into the wider world. But for institutions that sell an intimate, localized experience, a more-pressing question might be how they can and should integrate courses from elsewhere.”

"At Liberal-Arts Colleges, Debate about Online Courses is Really about Outsourcing" The Chronicle http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=55151

Eichmann's Lies

“As head of the Jewish Department within the Nazi SS, Adolf Eichmann held operational responsibility for the extermination of European Jewry through crucial years of World War II. To his chosen work of murder, Eichmann brought a zeal and commitment that he sustained even through 15 years of exile after the war. At his trial in Jerusalem in 1960, the Nazi leader attempted to present himself as a self-effacing servant of the German state, dutifully following orders from a higher command. The image of Eichmann as a technocratic bureaucrat has endured even as subsequently discovered testimony in his own handwriting and voice have revealed a man ferociously devoted to Nazi racial ideology—and utterly unrepentant for his vast crimes.

Bettina Stangneth, a German philosopher and historian, undertook the daunting task of mastering the Eichmann archive, including his postwar writings and hours of tape-recorded discussions with fellow Nazi exiles in Argentina. Her work was published in Germany in 2011 and released this year in English as Eichmann Before Jerusalem, a title that invites comparison with the classic work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt that did so much to fix and perpetuate the false image of Eichmann as a passionless bureaucrat.”

"The Lies of Adolf Eichmann" The Atlantic - http://theatln.tc/1AqdbOD

A Decade since Derrida

“Any fool can undo things. As he made clear in his last interview, Derrida loved the great cultural and artistic achievements of the past as much as anyone did, but he had the burden of writing about them under the conditions that we regard as postmodern. He positioned himself in his work like the Jewish God, never to be spelled out or pinned down. He played a unique writerly game in the hope that no one could fashion an image of what he meant and so everyone could learn from his lessons of evasion. Nevertheless, deconstruction became in its turn a graven image. Meaning no more than “undo” in today’s mediaspeak, deconstruction has become a banal technical exercise, its historical context for- gotten. Its spirituality has been so utterly displaced that no common user of the term could begin to imagine what it is, or was. The man whom, as he said, we may re-create by reading him after his death remains a plurality of possibilities. There were and there remain many, many Derridas.”

Leslie Chamberlain, "The Sad Rider: A Decade Since Derrida," Common Knowledge vol 20 no 3: pp. 393-401 - http://commonknowledge.dukejournals.org/content/20/3/391.abstract