Notes about researching and teaching philosophy…
On Rousseau
“Rousseau transformed our understanding of many aspects of life. Three or four year ago the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur produced a special edition on Rousseau and on the front cover it made the following claims for Rousseau: he invented the child, nature, equality, democracy, and the cult of the self. Those are big claims for Rousseau, but they’re not entirely crazy. He made a difference to how we think about all of those things: about our own subjectivity, about politics, about equality. For the range of contribution and impact on Western intellectual culture, Rousseau is a big figure. He’s still a big figure, more than 300 years after his birth.”
"Chris Bertram Recommends the Best Books on Rousseau," - http://fivebooks.com/interview/christopher-bertram-jean-jacques-rousseau/
On an Infinite Book
“But there is a check on all of this anxiety about information collection and Borgesian libraries. The threat that human knowledge will be lost—either through destruction, or by dilution due to sheer scale—is still the dominant cultural narrative about libraries, real and imagined. The Library of Alexandria, often described as a physical embodiment of the heart and mind of the ancient world, is so famous today in part because it was destroyed. In The Book of Sand, Borges describes an infinite book that nearly drives the narrator mad before he resolves to get rid of it. ‘I thought of fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book might likewise prove infinite and suffocate the planet with smoke,’ he writes. Instead, he opts to ‘hide a leaf in the forest’ and sets off for the Argentine National Library with the bizarre volume.”
"The Human Fear of total Knowledge" - http://theatln.tc/1UnzLfu
On Hail Caesar!
“-Hollywood Fixer: “Now Hail Caesar! is a prestige picture, our biggest release of the year and we’re devoting huge resources to its production in order to make it first-class in every respect. Gentlemen, given its enormous expense, we don’t want to send it to market except in the certainty that it will not offend any reasonable American regardless of faith or creed. Now that’s where you come in. You’ve read the script. We want to know if the theological elements of the story are up to snuff.... I’m not sure I follow, Padre.
-Rabbi: Young man, you don’t follow for a very simple reason. These men are screwballs. God has children? What, and a dog? A collie maybe? God doesn’t have children. He’s a bachelor. And very angry.
-Catholic Clergyman: No, no. He used to be angry!
-Rabbi: What, he got over it?
-Protestant Clergyman: You worship the God of another age!
-Catholic Clergyman: Who has no love!
-Rabbi: Not true! He likes Jews.
-Protestant Clergyman: God loves everyone!
-Catholic Clergyman: God is love.
-Orthodox Clergyman: God is who is.
-Rabbi: This is special? Who isn’t who is?
-Catholic Clergyman: But how should God be rendered in a motion picture?
-Rabbi: God isn’t in the motion picture!”
Throughout the film the Coen's deftly juxtapose Hollywood's economic ideologies with the religious concern for idolatry. This scene provides a brief joke on religious aesthetics and metaphysics.
On Belief in Free Will
“Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side... Philosophers and theologians are used to talking about free will as if it is either on or off; as if our consciousness floats, like a ghost, entirely above the causal chain, or as if we roll through life like a rock down a hill. But there might be another way of looking at human agency. Some scholars argue that we should think about freedom of choice in terms of our very real and sophisticated abilities to map out multiple potential responses to a particular situation. One of these is Bruce Waller, a philosophy professor at Youngstown State University. In his new book, Restorative Free Will, he writes that we should focus on our ability, in any given setting, to generate a wide range of options for ourselves, and to decide among them without external constraint.”
Stephen Cave, "There's No Such Thing as Free Will: But We're Better of Believing In It Anyway" - http://theatln.tc/1soYWYZ
On Deliberative Systems
“In the quest for a workable ideal of democracy, the systems approach has recently shifted its perspective on deliberative democratic theory. Instead of enquiring how institutionalized decision-making might mirror an ‘ideal deliberative procedure’, it asks how democracy might be construed as a ‘deliberative system’... This article argues that a deliberative system without a parliamentary legislature is tantamount to deliberation without democracy and that an elected parliamentary legislature is constitutive of democracy as a deliberative system – national or transnational. To substantiate this claim, the article suggests looking at Habermas’ discourse theory in a new light, as a sociological-reconstructive approach that aims to explicate the cognitive dimension of modern democratic decision-making.”
Daniel Gaus, Discourse Theory’s Sociological Claim: Reconstructing the Epistemic Meaning of Democracy as a Deliberative System," Philosophy and Social Criticism - http://m.psc.sagepub.com/content/42/6/503.abstract?rss=1. Interesting article on deliberative democratic practices, especially in light of the rise of decisionistic politics today.
On Quantifying Introspection
“And with this, we could analyze the history of introspection in the ancient Greek tradition, for which we have the best available written record. So what we did is we took all the books — we just ordered them by time — for each book we take the words and we project them to the space, and then we ask for each word how close it is to introspection, and we just average that. And then we ask whether, as time goes on and on, these books get closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection. And this is exactly what happens in the ancient Greek tradition. So you can see that for the oldest books in the Homeric tradition, there is a small increase with books getting closer to introspection. But about four centuries before Christ, this starts ramping up very rapidly to an almost five-fold increase of books getting closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection. And one of the nice things about this is that now we can ask whether this is also true in a different, independent tradition.”
Mariano Sigman, "Your Words May Predict Your Future Mental Health," Ted Talks - http://bit.ly/1OVoyXv. This is an interesting application of digital techniques to ancient texts, and with startling implications for contemporary life.
On Incentives
“Today’s philosophers are used to dancing to the tune of the Research Excellence Framework (Ref). They have to publish their articles in reputable journals and their books with university presses. They have to generate impact and contribute to their research environment. But how would the great philosophers of the past have fared under this system? Surely if they were truly great then they would have done well? Not necessarily... Ultimately, then, we can say that Leibniz probably would have thrived if the Ref had existed in his day, and in fact would have been a Ref superstar. But the irony, of course, is that he (and all of the other great philosophers) managed to achieve all that he did without the incentive provided by the Ref.”
"Which Philosopher Would Fare Best in a Present-day University," The Guardian - http://bit.ly/24Yzbwz
On Predictability
“Customisation means having the world adapting to what we need, want, expect, fear, desire, hope, or wish. It is nice and enticing to receive the right discount, at the right time, for the right goods we are planning to buy anyway. And recommendations based on our interests are better than random ones, based on anyone’s taste. The risk, however, is that our digital technologies may easily become defining technologies rather than mere identifying ones... No wonder we become predictable: we have been made predictable. Nor do our technologies have any interest in our developments and transformations: quite the opposite. They would like to see a customer who likes something to keep liking that something and anything else that is similar to that something. Cats lovers turning at most into kittens lovers, not dogs lovers. Amazon’s recommendation system can only reinforce choices and tastes and make them more stable, and more predictable. So do the ‘smart’ algorithms behind the newsfeeds of Facebook and Instagram. Our malleability is used to give ourselves a permanent shape not to enable us to change shape.”
Luciano Floridi, "The Self-Fulfilling Prophesy" - http://www.schirn.de/en/magazine/context/the_self_fulfilling_prophesy/
On Aristotle and Trolling
“What the troll is, and in what way he trolls and for what, has now been said. And it is clear from this that there can be trolling outside the internet. For every community of speakers holds certain goods in common, and with them the conversation [dialegesthai] as an end in itself; and the troll is one who seeks to damage it from within. So a questioner can troll a political meeting, and academics troll each other in committees when they are bored; and a newspaper columnist may be a profit-troll towards a whole city. But blogs and boards and forums and comments sections are where the troll dwells primarily and for the most part. For these are weak communities, and anyone may be part of them: and so their good is easily destroyed. Hence the saying, ‘Trollsnot to be fed’. But though everyone knows this, everyone does it; for the desire to be right on the internet is natural and present to all.”
Rachel Barney, "[Aristotle] On Trolling," Journal of the American Philosophical Association - http://bit.ly/1TMuXA4
On Thinking Animals
“As de waal recognizes, a better way to think about other creatures would be to ask ourselves how different species have developed different kinds of minds to solve different adaptive problems. Surely the important question is not whether an octopus or a crow can do the same things a human can, but how those animals solve the cognitive problems they face, like how to imitate the sea floor or make a tool with their beak. Children and chimps and crows and octopuses are ultimately so interesting not because they are mini-mes, but because they are aliens—not because they are smart like us, but because they are smart in ways we haven’t even considered. ”
"How Animals Think" - http://theatln.tc/23D8MSv