I've always said Maria Farrell was more interesting than her brother: she describes the world—her world—of experience, but it's not enough.

I was recently in Stansted Airport, queueing in a low-ceilinged, quasi-temporary structure to enter the departure area for a Ryanair flight. There were two queues; the ‘priority queue’ which passengers had paid extra to join, and the ordinary one, but just one airport employee covering both, toggling stressfully between two irritated groups. Each time she switched, she left a line of people to wait. As I neared the front of the ordinary queue, she told a man with a wheelie case that he’d have to pay extra as his bag was too big. He objected and put it into the measuring frame. It fit easily, but the check-in woman refused to accept this, and demanded an extra £40. The man objected again and asked why the rules weren’t being followed, but ultimately paid up as he had no choice. He was clearly upset, but never raised his voice, used insulting or abusive language or made threatening gestures. He simply didn’t supply the meekness the very stressed out airport employee desired. As he moved into the boarding area, she called after him that she could have him taken off the plane, but it was very full and noisy, and he either ignored this or didn’t hear it and took a seat near the door. Both lines were now even longer, and she was dealing with the 200-odd passengers alone.

While dealing with the next passenger, and then me and the two women behind me, she began to cry. She carried on working but must have pressed a button for help, because a few minutes later, several security guards arrived. Within minutes, five or six security men arrived. The woman pointed to the passenger who had upset her, but there were too many people in between for her to directly identify him. Later still, another employee arrived to relieve her and check the rest of the passengers through. The two women and I who had witnessed the incident all sat on a window sill near the check-through desk the security guards were now clustered at, as we were worried the man would be wrongly denied boarding. When we heard the guards say they would go and find the man, we approached them to say we had seen the incident from the front of the queue and that it may have been different from what they’d been told.

We were all white and middle-aged, and while we’d been quite voluble amongst ourselves, we were each careful to speak in soft, unthreatening and really quite feminised ways to the young rent-a-cops who now outnumbered the passport and ticket-checker by a ratio of five or six to one. The main guard thanked us but didn’t ask any follow-up questions, and we stayed nearby, implicitly ready to intervene. In the noisy disarray of the boarding area, the passenger managed to be one of the first onto the plane. As we boarded, a couple more security guards had joined the initial cluster and moved onto the tarmac, so there were now seven or eight. Walking past, we heard them say the man was already on the plane. They seemed to have decided it wasn’t worth the effort to have him taken off. As I climbed the steps of the plane, it was striking just how many security guards were now milling aimlessly around, compared to the lone and stressed out employee who’d summoned them in the first place.

Schiesser's response, playing her brother's role this time, relating description of experience to a  speculative fiction. The world of ideas is utopian by definition.

[I] He was clearly upset, but never raised his voice, used insulting or abusive language or made threatening gestures. He simply didn’t supply the meekness the very stressed out airport employee desired….

[II] We were all white and middle-aged, and while we’d been quite voluble amongst ourselves, we were each careful to speak in soft, unthreatening and really quite feminised ways to the young rent-a-cops

In both passages, Farrell shows us how much emotional self-regulation we do in public, and also how gendered these norms are. In our contemporary culture we learn to suppress the expression of emotions especially in contexts of escalation of conflict. (Ecotopia is the polar opposite.) I doubt Farrell was afraid herself of the rent-a-cops (but I am happy to be corrected otherwise), but she clearly knows that being emotionally expressive will reduce her credibility and status in the potentially stressful interaction with them.

As I noted, Callenbach’s Ecotopia is full of vignettes that explore the impact of the absence of such extreme emotional self-regulation of the sort our society requires from its members routinely. That’s compatible with there being very different gendered and racial sanctions for violation of such norms in different local and national contexts (with the use alcohol or drugs  being supplementary mechanisms regulating this).

He should read Goffman. He'd find it revelatory . "I doubt Farrell was afraid herself of the rent-a-cops" She was intimidated. But that intimidation is also a function of desire, especially for the conservative model of femininity in which she's been socialized (see above). Farrell is married to a career soldier. Her description of him and their courtship makes him out to fit the model of the perfect gentleman—who knows how he behaved in Afghanistan. She prays every day for the health of the Pope. She's to the manor born, and lived a sheltered life, even as a technocrat.

Her brother is engaged with NATO in the defense of the west.

Schlesser has a tag

continuing, on Srinivasan.

The Right to Sex: What the reviewers say. 

For Srinivasan, the notion that people who are fat or transgender or simply don’t fit the white and blond mould are sexually undesirable is a matter for political contestation and moral analysis ... It is a compelling argument ... The book effectively highlights how sexual desire – who we are and are not attracted to – is political and affected by the prevalent injustices in society and relevant to their elimination ...

Srinivasan 2018, LRB

In the hours between murdering three men in his apartment and driving to Alpha Phi, Rodger went to Starbucks, ordered coffee, and uploaded a video, ‘Elliot Rodger’s Retribution’, to his YouTube channel. He also emailed a 107,000-word memoir-manifesto, ‘My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger’, to a group of people including his parents, his therapist, former schoolteachers and childhood friends. Together these two documents detail the massacre to come and Rodger’s motivation. ‘All I ever wanted was to fit in and live a happy life,’ he explains at the beginning of ‘My Twisted World’, ‘but I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me.’

He goes on to describe his privileged and happy early childhood in England – Rodger was the son of a successful British filmmaker – followed by his privileged and unhappy adolescence in Los Angeles as a short, bad-at-sports, shy, weird, friendless kid, desperate to be cool. He writes of dyeing his hair blond (Rodger was half-white and half-Malaysian; blond people were ‘so much more beautiful’); of finding ‘sanctuary’ in Halo and World of Warcraft; being shoved by a pretty girl at summer camp (‘That was the first experience of female cruelty I endured, and it traumatised me to no end’); becoming incensed by the sex lives of his peers (‘How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half-white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves’); dropping out of successive schools and then community college; and fantasising about a political order in which he ruled the world and sex was outlawed (‘All women must be quarantined like the plague they are’). The necessary result of all this, Rodger said, was his ‘War on Women’, in the course of which he would ‘punish all females’ for the crime of depriving him of sex. He would target the Alpha Phi sorority, ‘the hottest sorority of UCSB’, because it contained ‘the very girls who represent everything I hate in the female gender ... hot, beautiful blonde girls ... spoiled, heartless, wicked bitches’. He would show everyone that he was ‘the superior one, the true alpha male’.

Late in 2017, the online discussion forum Reddit closed down its 40,000-member ‘Incel’ support group, for ‘people who lack romantic relationships and sex’. 

repeats

"I've had someone saying they would rather kill me than Hitler," says 24-year-old Jennie*.

"They said they would strangle me with a belt if they were in a room with me and Hitler. That was so bizarrely violent, just because I won't have sex with trans women."

Jennie is a lesbian woman. She says she is only sexually attracted to women who are biologically female and have vaginas. She therefore only has sex and relationships with women who are biologically female.

Jennie doesn't think this should be controversial, but not everyone agrees. She has been described as transphobic, a genital fetishist, a pervert and a "terf" - a trans exclusionary radical feminist.

Male self-hatred and misogyny, non-white self-hatred, self-hating Jewish boys and Shiksa Goddesses. Passing. 

Srinivasan in 2021 in the New Yorker

Today’s trans-exclusionary feminists typically claim that they seek to dismantle a gender system that oppresses girls and women. Yet they tend to reinforce the dominant view that certain bodies must present in particular ways. Although officially on the side of butch lesbians, who are, they say, existentially threatened by “gender ideology,” trans-exclusionary feminists support laws that make such women’s access to public spaces precarious: since the start of the “bathroom wars,” butch lesbians in the U.K. report being increasingly harassed in women’s bathrooms. Meanwhile, trans-exclusionary feminists often criticize trans women for embracing stereotypical femininity. A few years ago, the British philosopher Kathleen Stock tweeted, “I reject regressive gender stereotypes for women, which is partly why I won’t submit to an ideology that insists womanhood is a feeling, then cashes that out in sexist terms straight from 50s.” In a new book, “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism,” Stock rows back from this sentiment: “It seems strange to blame trans women for their attraction to regressive female-associated stereotypes when apparently so many non-trans women are attracted to them too.” Yet the reprieve is partial. Her view is that being trans—immersing oneself in a “fiction” that one is of the “opposite” sex owing to a strong identification with it—is a species of gender-nonconforming behavior that can be morally tolerated, but not in cases where it might pose any risk to non-trans women. For Stock, that bar is so high she is not sure that even using a trans person’s pronouns clears it. A journalist recently told me that she found a high-profile trans woman’s embrace of femininity “grotesque.” When Shon Faye, the author of “The Transgender Issue,” a powerful new call for trans liberation, was asked to host Amnesty International’s Women Making History event in 2018, one feminist tweeted a photo of her with the description “a biologically male person, performing as a blow up doll.”

At the same time, trans-exclusionary feminists often ridicule trans women who fail to “pass” as cis women. In 2009, Germaine Greer wrote of “people who think they are women, have women’s names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow who seem . . . to be a kind of ghastly parody.” And such feminists tend to be dismissive of nonbinary people, who, in their refusal of gender distinction, have a good claim to being the truest vanguard of gender abolition.

repeats

The LA police department (LAPD) announced late on Thursday that it had put out an arrest warrant for Darren Merager, who is now facing five felony counts of indecent exposure at Wi Spa in the Koreatown neighborhood. The charges, filed on Monday, come two months after a viral Instagram video from a woman who filmed herself confronting Wi Spa staff about seeing a “man” naked in front of women and girls in the women’s section of the facility.

Merager has been a registered sex offender since 2006, police said, and has a history of previous indecent exposure charges. Merager was convicted of indecent exposure in LA in 2002 and 2003, and pleaded not guilty to seven counts of indecent exposure in an alleged December 2018 case, according to court records. That case is still open.

Liberal intellectuals admit that orientalism is racism. They're opposed to anti-Semitism. And they're Zionists. And now...

googling, I find Schliesser, linking to Srinivasan chatting it up with Tyler fucking Cowen: 

Zionism, "Europe's stability rest[ing] in the capable hands of Angela Merkel", Libertarian Social Darwinism,  and... 

Cowen: You’ve described yourself as a utopian feminist.

Jesus fucking Christ. What a disaster.

 Leiter 

Against replacing democracy with lotteries or rule by "experts"
Philosopher Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) and a colleague of his in political science there make some good points.

UPDATE: Jason Brennan (Georgetown) replies.

No links. It's just boring, and offensive.
"some good points."

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

A comment that may or may not make it, at Feminist Philosophers. It's sloppy.
The author responded to me by name without posting my comments. I waste too much time.

“But at least those of us with privilege can shut up and listen to it a little more”. And the people shouting to be heard will be in an adversarial relation to you. I’ll repost here what I tried to post elsewhere. We’ll see if it flies:

This entire debate is confused. Heath touts Habermas to the point of parody. “Thus the best arrangement will be one in which lots of different people study these questions, then challenge one another to robust debate, which will tend to correct the various biases.” It reads like a variant of Anatole France: The law, in its majestic equality, allows both rich and poor to engage in communicative action, or debate the importance of John Rawls.

Debate among the educated elite regarding their own beliefs is not enough. That’s why we have lawyers paid to make arguments they have no stake in beyond the urge to win.

Institutionalized adversarialism is the basis of democracy. And even then we know it skews towards the powerful. That’s why the most powerful adversarialism comes from below; social change comes from below. That’s not even debatable, it’s a fact of history. Change begins with the the janitors and the railway porters not college professors.

The model of the academy is collaborative. Heath is a white liberal and his politics is mediocre, but your background is in formalist philosophy which by definition is anti-politcal. If facts and events will always outflank liberalism’s best intentions, you’re living in Cloudcuckooland, with the fantasy politics of mathematicians and engineers.

And you’re all debating amongst yourselves within the academy. Real Politics as Geuss would call it, is outside.

Schliesser is a defender of philosophy as continuous with science, and a staunch defender of Zionism. He does not hear the shouting of Palestinians. Others do and that has led to change. What does that say about our ability to solve problems by reason? You have to be open to experience and allow yourself to be changed; the whole logic of analytic philosophy denies that. The recent “rediscovery” of experience by philosophers is comic. There’s no way to escape the need for others to argue, even to yell to get people finally to pay attention. A problem is that yelling can be self-perpetuating. Righteous anger can become an ideology. The history of oppression is mostly the history of rulers’ indifference to the suffering of others. Sadism is secondary. But sadism is primary to the experience of the oppressed and that leads to a misunderstanding of their own situation. Zionists see themselves as oppressed; they can’t imagine themselves the oppressors.

Heath asks when the anger of the poor becomes the whining of the careerist middle class. But then he falls back on the righteousness of the more serious middle class, by which he means himself. That doesn’t work. And Wallerstein simply elides the history of the relation of philosophy to theology, to the elite, the church and the crown. His response is also useless.

Philosophy can’t solve these problems, certainly no technically minded first-order curiosity, without self-awareness or irony.  “Irony is the glory of slaves." Czeslaw Milosz. Socrates hated poets.

updated etc. It's sloppy. I'll add links. Beginning with Leiter

A comment that may or may not make it, at Feminist Philosophers.
The author responded to one of my earlier comments while refusing to post either of them.
[in the end they were all posted, the first after the fact]. The second, just below it, after the three dashes, was accepted first.

Heath: “So who is best positioned – those who suffer from it, or those who do not? The inevitable conclusion is that neither are particularly well-positioned, since both will be biased in the direction of producing theories that are, at some level, self-serving, or self-exculpatory. Thus the best arrangement will be one in which lots of different people study these questions, then challenge one another to robust debate, which will tend to correct the various biases. This is, unfortunately, not how things usually play out. Instead, the field of study tends to attract, sometimes overwhelmingly, people who suffer from the relevant form of oppression – partly just for the obvious “me” studies reason, that the issue is greater interest to them, because it speaks to their personal ambitions and frustrations. But it can also set in motion a dynamic that can crowd out everyone who does not suffer from that particular form of oppression.”

As if there’s really any sort of equivalence between black working class anger and white college professors. The condescension is grotesque. If only railway porters had studied Hegel… His comments are obscene. But what are yours? You’re university professors in the most powerful state in the history of the planet. You’re playing at radicalism as an idea. I’m not going to listen to you when I can listen to the women of Hamas, or at least those who speak to them. None of you live in a favela. You worry about tenure, not your next meal. You want to pretend feminists were all college professors and not housewives, that Stonewall was led by PhDs and not hustlers and drag queens. “Naming and Necessity” was a product of the Me Decade. Scholastic formalism and academic radicalism are forms of narcissism.

Heath again, quoted approvingly by Leiter: “Over the last twenty years, the political systems of the Western world have become increasingly divided—not between right and left, but between crazy and non-crazy,” Leiter signs off on pedantry and anti-politics. Neoliberalism, “Rubinomics” and “the end of welfare as we know it” can only be described as “non-crazy”. The politics sucks. And in response you offer the feminism of Bloomsbury. Give me the anger of their servants. Give me the anger of the niggers and the wogs.
---
I’ll put my response more simply. Give me adversarialism. The model of the academy is collaborative; you argue only amongst yourselves.

---

My longer comment I referred to was refused.
“But at least those of us with privilege can shut up and listen to it a little more”. And the people shouting to be heard will be in an adversarial relation to you. I’ll repost here what what I tried to post elsewhere. We’ll see if it flies:

This entire debate is confused. Heath touts Habermas to the point of parody. “Thus the best arrangement will be one in which lots of different people study these questions, then challenge one another to robust debate, which will tend to correct the various biases.” It reads like a variant of Anatole France: The law, in its majestic equality, allows both rich and poor to engage in communicative action, or debate the importance of John Rawls.

Debate among the educated elite regarding their own beliefs is not enough. That’s why we have lawyers paid to make arguments they have no stake in beyond the urge to win.

Institutionalized adversarialism is the basis of democracy. And even then we know it skews towards the powerful. That’s why the most powerful adversarialism comes from below; social change comes from below. That’s not even debatable, it’s a fact of history. Change begins with the the janitors and the railway porters not college professors.

The model of the academy is collaborative. Heath is a white liberal and his politics is mediocre, but your background is in formalist philosophy which by definition is anti-politcal. If facts and events will always outflank liberalism’s best intentions, you’re living in Cloudcuckooland, with the fantasy politics of mathematicians and engineers.

And you’re all debating amongst yourselves within the academy. Real Politics as Geuss would call it, is outside.

Schliesser is a defender of philosophy as continuous with science, and a staunch defender of Zionism. He does not hear the shouting of Palestinians. Others do and that has led to change. What does that say about our ability to solve problems by reason? You have to be open to experience and allow yourself to be changed; the whole logic of analytic philosophy denies that. The recent “rediscovery” of experience by philosophers is comic. There’s no way to escape the need for others to argue, even to yell to get people finally to pay attention. A problem is that yelling can be self-perpetuating. Righteous anger can become an ideology. The history of oppression is mostly the history of rulers’ indifference to the suffering of others. Sadism is secondary. But sadism is primary to the experience of the oppressed and that leads to a misunderstanding of their own situation. Zionists see themselves as oppressed; they can’t imagine themselves the oppressors.

Heath asks when the anger of the poor becomes the whining of the careerist middle class. But then he falls back on the righteousness of the more serious middle class, by which he means himself. That doesn’t work. And Wallerstein simply elides the history of the relation of philosophy to theology, to the elite, the church and the crown. His response is also useless.

Philosophy can’t solve these problems, certainly no technically minded first-order curiosity, without self-awareness or irony. 

“Irony is the glory of slaves.” Czeslaw Milosz. 

Socrates hated poets.

Wallerstein's email

In fact, contrary to what Audrey Yap claims, traditional philosophy does not represent the point of view of heterosexual males, because so many famous philosophers were probably gay (if that term has any meaning before the mid 20th century) or did not marry (were they asexual or homosexual?). Philosophy begins with Plato, who seems not to have been heterosexual. 

I don't know what's more absurd, Wallerstein's comments, or the fact that Yap seemed not to know Greek philosophers liked boys.

Leiter posts a letter

They've been very successful at imposing their hegemony on the left, especially in the U.S., so that they are the only "queer" people, so that they are always victims and that of course coincides with the rise of neoliberalism and the bourgeois offensive against the working class. It just suits Wall St. fine that the paradigm of oppression is no longer the guy or woman working for the minimum wage, but a disabled lesbian philosopher who didn't get tenure at an elite university. And most of us, myself included, feel very uncomfortable not being on the side of the victims, but there are victims and there are victims. I don't want to sound cynical, but if I were Wall St., I'd fund all leftwing identity politics groups to distract leftwing attention from class politics, just as the CIA during the cold war funded all groups defending "cultural freedom" behind the Iron Curtain.​

A comment by another professional pedant, Anne Jacobson contra Heath

As I have said here a number of times, I learned from my days in faculty governance that (many/most) white men do believe that those best able to study oppression or marginalization are those without experience of it. I had thought this idea was utterly exploded, but I do see Heath coming very close to endorsing it, at least to the point of not according those with the experience any privilege compared to their non-oppressd, non-marginlized debaters. I think he is in effect eschewing knowledge of the oppressed and marginalized, but you have reminded me that he doesn’t know it.

I am here reminded of a revealing exchange:
Hyper-distinguished English visitor: there is a love-hate relationship between Indians and the British.
Hyper-bright Indian colleague: there is no love.

There's no love, only a language and educational and legal system and system of governance. She's repeating someone's words, not observing the world.

I'll add one more. It won't be published but maybe someone will read it first

@annejjacobson: "I am here reminded of a revealing exchange:
Hyper-distinguished English visitor: there is a love-hate relationship between Indians and the British.
Hyper-bright Indian colleague: there is no love."

You give us an exchange between a condescending Brit and a bitter ex-colonial. The reality exists between and outside them.
The British empire left behind a language, an educational and legal system and a system of governance.
In your desire for simplicity you miss the ambiguities.

And maybe the Brit wasn't condescending and the ex-colonial was too bitter to care. I wasn't there. How would I know?
It would be a great scene to stage. You can play it so many ways.

That's not a defense of the Raj, Health, or Leiter. It's a defense of the moral weight of real politics, and for what it's worth, of real art.
The ambiguities of lived experience are the stuff of novels, and irrelevant to philosophy.

Leiter: Philosophy Metablog retired...

A screenshot from google cache:  "Okay. So, working in a shit department, I have to do my own grading, which is pressing. So here's this week's bad poem:..."

Because I would not stop for SPEP –
It kindly stopped for me –
But ratings have no room for schools –
That think so Frenchily.

One school wants out – though there is doubt
At choosing self-deletion.
That’s self-abuse! – Don’t be obtuse,
That’s withdrawing before completion.

He held his ground – He blogged away
He charlatans disparaged.
Your program’s shit, so please exit
The übermensch’s carriage.

The board’s upset, all broken up
But perhaps he’ll make amends
The co-pilot will dispel all doubts
And serve a healing cleanse.

Read in the context of the full range of events in the world, what is this idiot defending other than the right of a spoiled child to be left alone to his games?

A letter from Leiter, to John McCumber, linked by Jon Cogburn in the original post. Mention of Cogburn here, here and here, (and another I forgot, now reposted just above). McCumber makes an appearance here.

A argument between logical sophists who need to justify their formal rhetoric as science and theologians who need to justify description as prescription and poetry as theology.

The Leiter Events page has been taken down after Leiter threatened a lawsuit. My comment from a month ago appeared finally, tossed in along with everything and now the page is dark. But since I was subscribed to the page, I got the emails.

Leiter responds to commenter naribtrelie:

You write: “It seems worth noting explicitly that, of the seven people targeted by Leiter in recent months (we are including Tom Stern), six of them were women, two of them were junior faculty (one of them very junior), one was a post-doc, and one was a graduate student.” In fact, during the exact same time period, far more men than women have come in for criticism or derision, including Eric Schliesser, Santiago Zabala, Tom Stern, Matt Drabek, Leon Wieseltier, Dirk Johnson, Ben Cohen, Ed Kazarian, Vince Vitale, William Vallicella, and Mark Oppenheimer, among others (I leave out the ‘big names’ like Zizek and Niall Ferguson). This is easily verifiable by a review of my blogs during this time period. 

He writes again:

I have posted corrections several times now over the past three weeks, and those corrections have not been approved and the defamatory factual misstatements not corrected. As a result, I have turned this matter over to my attorney.

The power claimed of philosophy is the power of prescription. As description it’s just another form of literature, and no philosopher will accept what by their own definition would be a drop in status. Philosophers want all the clarity of engineering and the license of poetry. What they end up with is the authoritarianism of the Roman Catholic Church and the metaphysics of hippies.

"Leiter’s authoritarianism is founded in insecurity, and their defense of civility is founded in fluff."

Nima Shirazi on Twitter

Biden's eulogy for Sharon never mentions Palestinians. Not even once. Nothing. All Israelis are assumed to be Jews.

Jason Stanley, and Vesla Weaver, a philosopher and a political scientist, a Jew, maybe two judging from photographs, both married to African Americans, in Stanley's care, first generation.  Weaver is co-author of  “Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America”.  Stanley is from a family of refugees from Nazi Germany

The parallels and relevance to too obvious to ignore, but they did.

Is the United States a ‘Racial Democracy’?

Plato’s “Republic” is the wellspring from which all subsequent Western philosophy flows, and political philosophy is no exception. According to Plato, liberty is democracy’s greatest good; it is that which “in a democratic city you will hear … is the most precious of all possessions.” Subsequently, two notions of liberty emerged in the writings of democratic political philosophers. The dispute about which of these two notions of liberty is most central to human dignity is at the heart of Western philosophy. Both are central to American democracy. Indeed, it is best to think of these as two different aspects of the conception of liberty at the heart of American democracy, rather than distinct concepts.

The standard source of the distinction between two senses of “liberty” is a speech in 1819 by the great political theorist Benjamin Constant. The first, “the liberty of the ancients,” consists in having a voice into the policies and representatives that govern us. The second, “the liberty of the moderns,” is the right to pursue our private interests free from state oversight or control. Though the liberty of moderns is more familiar to Americans, it is in fact the liberty of the ancients that provides the fundamental justification for the central political ideals of the American Democratic tradition. For example, we have the freedom of speech so that we can express our interests and political views in deliberations about policies and choice of representatives.

Given the centrality of liberty to democracy, one way to assess the democratic health of a state is by the fairness of the laws governing its removal. The fairness of a system of justice is measured by the degree to which its laws are fairly and consistently applied across all citizens. In a fair system, a group is singled out for punishment only insofar as its propensity for unjustified violations of the laws demands. What we call a racial democracy is one that unfairly applies the laws governing the removal of liberty primarily to citizens of one race, thereby singling out its members as especially unworthy of liberty, the coin of human dignity. 

"Plato’s “Republic” is the wellspring from which all subsequent Western philosophy flows, and political philosophy is no exception. According to Plato, liberty is democracy’s greatest good"

Never trust a fascist for an honest description of democracy, but Stanley's a philosopher and Weaver's a political scientist, so they begin with what they know, with ideas not the facts, even the facts of democracy. There's no real discussion of the contradictions between the liberty of the "ancients" and "moderns" other than to acknowledge they exist.  I'd written there was no discussion "at all", and it's right there in the quote, but I was so shocked by the authors' blindness of the larger view of events I skipped right over it. The piece itself reads as if it were written in a bubble; what kind of imagination can be simultaneously so rigorous and so oblivious? That's a question Freud would ask, and Stanley's father. But Stanley has always been a proud expert, arguing from the modern definition of liberty; his universalism begins in individualism, the conscience of the individual imagination. The rest is lip service.

See also my argument with Eric Schliesser on the need for Israeli racial democracy, with a link to Jason Stanley's post on living in Germany as the heir of German Jews who fled the Nazis.

Stanley

...my own expected happy homecoming into German society wasn't necessarily working out as planned. One of the teachers at the Gymnasium told me that Heinrich Heine wasn't really a "German" poet, but rather was a "European" poet. My absurdly well-meaning and wonderful hostfather regularly repeated that "Deutschland ist kein Einwanderungsland" (which is, as Schneider points out, a common theme among Germans of a certain generation). Whenever I told people I was of German descent, they would argue with me -- then upon discovering that I was Jewish, would say "Oh, so you're not German, you're Jewish" (strangely, I never heard anyone say to someone, upon discovering that they were Christian, "Oh, so you're not German, you're Christian"). Among my German friends, there was a pervasive sense of the strangeness of other cultures, which alternately manifested itself as either irrational disdain or irrational admiration.

Schliesser

...as a German Jew living in the Netherlands and working in Belgium, I really do not need your lectures on these matters.

---
Stanley again, in The Boston Review 8/14. His ignorance of the history of Jewish self-definition as a people is strange.

See also Republicanism and Liberalism from 10/14

see also 1/15

Schliesser, in July, and now.

In July he removed the passage I quoted (using a pseudonym) from Jason Stanley and and now in another context, he links to him,  blind to the relation. Schliesser and Stanley both continue the modernist cult of reason and the political fantasies of which Israel, Brasilia and North Korea are the last remaining examples.

Schliesser supports Merkel for the same reason he defends the Jewish state. As a European Jew he needs a place to run to if history repeats. He admitted as much in the email telling me he'd deleted my comment: "as a German Jew living in the Netherlands and working in Belgium, I really do not need your lectures on these matters."

Schliesser defends philosophy as science and defends a his own bigotry as a defense against bigotry.

And he defends Stanley's dabblings in arguments against democracy. Stanley has a series of posts, the most recent of which is here.  An earlier one in the series is The Ways of Silencing.

Stanley's blindness to some kinds of pornography proves nothing more than the inevitability of blindness.  But he's a technocrat concerned with policing technocrats, and then policing speech.

Related: John Quiggin has a favorite trope.

What's grotesque in liberalism, seen in Quiggin's use of the terminology of the "Overton Window" is that the term can never be used to refer to the user's own limitations.

Marcus Stanley: "The sociology of modern knowledge production empowers the scholar over the humanist, and the collective/communal enterprise of scholarship over the inspiration of the individual thinker."

Schliesser on July 23rd

"We hereby commit ourselves not to accept invitations to male-only events. We call on others to join us."

on July 19th

"I don't call for an academic boycott of the Feyerabend conference. "

"we should try (i) to get our own academic houses in order (I mention my concern over plagiarism in context) before (ii) we try to use boycotts for other political ends--we end up being way too selective (not to mention futile)"

Nothing more to say. For recent history go here

"I am not a promoter of a 'scientific philosophy,' I inherited it as a tradition (or 'school')"

Mohan Matthen responds:"Let me say that I do NOT support their call. I will NOT decline invitations on this basis." My comment above -quoting Schliesser- appears there.

I wouldn't pay any attention if they were engineers or chemists; I wouldn't expect chemists to have a sophisticated understanding of politics. But that there's no reason either to expect that of philosophy professors is a problem for historians, of philosophy and of the culture at large.

A brilliant one sentence description of a trait that unfortunately he sees only in others, Atrios, on gun nuts blaming the dead: "Heroism isn't generosity to them, just a sense of personal infallibility."

The last few posts: an impressive array of examples of cognitive dissonance.

Myanna Lahsen: Experiences of Modernity in the Greenhouse [PDF]

This paper identifies cultural and historical dimensions that structure US climate science politics. It explores why a key subset of scientists—the physicist founders and leaders of the influential George C. Marshall Institute—chose to lend their scientific authority to this movement which continues to powerfully shape US climate policy. The paper suggests that these physicists joined the environmental backlash to stem changing tides in science and society, and to defend their preferred understandings of science, modernity, and of themselves as a physicist elite—understandings challenged by on-going transformations encapsulated by the widespread concern about human-induced climate change.

You can find a discussion and link to another paper here

repeats: all cognition is cultural

"The irrationalism of others"

Brad DeLong today:

IN MEMORY OF ALEXANDER COCKBURN, AS HE DESERVES TO BE REMEMBERED

Alexander Cockburn, 1980:

"if ever a country deserved rape it's Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too…"

Brad DeLong a few years ago, as I reminded him in a comment that he didn't let through.

R.I.P. JEANE J. KIRKPATRICK

Let me express my condolences to her two surviving sons John Evron and Stuart Alan Kirkpatrick, whom she loved beyond all measure.

She was a good friend to my grandfather Earl. She was an American and a world patriot: her counsel--even at its most boneheaded--was always devoted to advancing the security of the United States and the cause of liberty and prosperity around the world.

The handicrafts Cockburn refers to elsewhere in that famous quote are war rugs. I like them, but they're sad documents.

And he was writing during the time when the US was giving millions to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who threw acid in women's faces. Kirkpatrick bears partial responsibility for the deaths of thousands of people; Cockburn bears responsibility for being an ass.

Kirkpatrick

Authoritarian regimes really typically don't have complete command economies. Authoritarian regimes typically have some kind of traditional economy with some private ownership. The Nazi regime left ownership in private hands, but the state assumed control of the economy. Control was separated from ownership but it was really a command economy because it was controlled by the state. A command economy is an attribute of a totalitarian state

I'd pick Cockburn over Kirkpatrick without having to think about it.

Brian Leiter writes a review in the NDPR.

Of course, most people are just regurgitators of pablum, vectors of ideological and commercial forces at work in the broader culture, so what they "disclose" is only, in their eyes, a mark of their individuality.

For DeLong, Leiter, Waldron, Duncan Black, Schliesser, Shalizi, et al. (a long list) "most people" by definition can refer logically only to people other than themselves.

Neither Leiter nor Waldron understands the logic behind freedom of speech. I doubt any of them do.

Susie Bright: "Andrea Dworkin was a great pornographer"

All of us are most people most of the time.

Schliesser

Sexism in Philosophy, or "The-Everybody-Did-It” (TEDI) Syndrome, or Hiding In The Herd (HITH) mentality

[What follows is based on ongoing conversation with my co-author, Merel Lefevere.--ES]

Institutions (that is, legally or corporately sactioned rules to be followed) can be designed or have been developed for solving particular problems or for particular aims. Yet, in the fullness of time outcomes under these institutions can reveal a pattern of unintended side-consequences. Let's say that one such unintended side-consequence is the fixation of certain (informal) norms or a pattern of exclusion. If some group (the insiders) benefits from this side-consequence they will sooner or later notice it often before the people who do not benefit from these. Human nature being what it is, often the disadvantaged outsiders are the first to speak up about the unintended side-consequence. The outsiders are at a disadvantage when they do so because if the side-consequence is really harmful they are fighting it with relatively slender resources while trying to figure out what the hell is going on. One especially pernicious aspect of the toy-example described here is that all the insiders think they have clean hands. While they actively benefit from an outcome pattern, they can always claim that none of them intended it or actively promoted it. So, when individuals are called out on, say, the informal norms and how these facilitate the pattern of exclusion, the more outspoken of the insider will fall back on variants of what we may call "The-Everybody-Did-It Syndrome" or (TEDI). Many other insiders prefer Hiding In the Herd (HITH) and focus on their work, career, etc.

In the real world we find TEDI annd HITH among bankers defending their bonuses even in the face of tax-funded bailouts as much as among academic philosophers defending a shameful pattern of sexual exclusion. TEDI is indicative of collective negligence and, if noticed, it becomes a collective action problem. Short of abolishing the institutions entirely (i.e., revolution, which is always dangerous for its potentially far worse unintended consequences to all), the best that can be hoped for is a change in the informal norms with which the institutions operate. This can happen when enough of the insiders are convinced that it is in their enlightened self-interest to change systematically how the rules are interpreted/applied or to alter the informal norms. Sometimes change comes from moral clarity, but in practice the insiders decide that it is not worth their energy to keep defending a crappy practice (to their peers, tax-payers, etc). The sad thing is that philosophers are no wiser than bankers in these matters.

wrong said...

I am, however, skeptical of all manner of academic efforts that seem primarily aimed at DE-legitimatizing Israel as a Jewish state. I have no trouble admitting that Israel was founded on historic injustice(s) many of which it continues to perpetuate. But I don't think Israel is particularly special in this regard (sadly), and I have never seen an argument for an academic boycott of Israel that wasn't also part of a wider campaign (including the persistent analogy with South Africa)--again, this is not to deny there are all kinds of second class citizens in Israel."

"One need not be a standpoint theorist to realize that not having Palestinians at the main table impoverishes the discussion." [adapted from Schliesser. The original referred to women]

Either "standpoint" is substantive or it is not. There's no need to get into the debates over degree. As often as not that's led to absurdity.

Eric Schliesser said in reply to wrong...
Why would you think I object to the idea that not having Palestinians at the main table impoverishes the discussion? I would very much welcome more inclusive conferences in Israel.
By the way, you clearly think this is some clever attack on me--but I don't call for an academic boycott of the Feyerabend conference. Rather, I think they should cancel and re-group (or revisit their program if that still can be done).

wrong said in reply to Eric Schliesser...
It's not about academic boycotts it's about perspectives, as theory and fact.
You defend an Israeli table as such, as just. People refer to Israel as "a Jewish and a democratic state" Is that possible?
Majorities either can or cannot be said "justly" to speak for minorities: men for women, heterosexuals for homosexuals, whites for black, Germans for Jews, Jews for Palestinians.
Is representative politics -and that's what this debate is about- justifiable as substance or simply as practical necessity, as epitomeology or obligatory annoyance?

I've always assumed representative government was built to accommodate standpoints as fact but now I'm reminded that "standpoint theory" is a recent development.
I'd forgotten things I learned when I dating a graduate student years ago.

The academy and democracy have always had an uneasy relationship.

Eric Schliesser said in reply to wrong...
Wrong, it would be nice that in your attempt to play *gotcha* with me you kept your facts straight. (Given that you are a fake email address, I will give you the benefit of the doubt this once, but if you keep doing that and in the absence of a verifiable email address, I will remove further comment from the thread.) First, I have not used the rhetoric of "a Jewish and democratic state" (certainly not in the thread to which you refer). Even the quote you highlighted above ought to make it clear that I abhor that kind of rhetoric, and I certainly do not defend an "Israeli table as such" (whatever that means). You are conflating me with some imagined evil-doer. Second, in that thread I try to articulate a very minimal principle: that we should try (i) to get our own academic houses in order (I mention my concern over plagiarism in context) before (ii) we try to use boycotts for other political ends--we end up being way too selective (not to mention futile) in (ii). It's that principle which makes my views on these matter relative consistent. (You may not like the principle, but it is at the principle you should direct your sarcasm.) Third, there is an important dis-anology, I am not trying to discredit universities that hot or the topics discussed at male-only-keynoted workshops. All I am trying to do is try change a norm within academic philosophy. Finally, we agree that the academy and democracy have always had an uneasy relationship--something I have written about on this blog.

wrong [posted with working email address] said...
"Why would you think I object to the idea that not having Palestinians at the main table impoverishes the discussion? "
"I am, however, skeptical of all manner of academic efforts that seem primarily aimed at DE-legitimatizing Israel as a Jewish state. "
State=Table
"But I don't think Israel is particularly special in this regard (sadly)" Maybe you don't consider Israel a democratic state, in which case you're defending it as a non-democratic state under the logic of EDI or HITH.
Peter Beinart: "I'm not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state. I'm actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel's security and for its status as a Jewish state."

My argument is simple: A Jewish State for a Jewish people iff a German state for a German people.
You may disagree, and I would accept that. I'm asking for either a consistent logic, or a defense of casuistry / situational ethics.
I'm hearing an amalgam that works as neither.

Eric Schliesser said in reply to wrong...
The Germans have their state, too.
You should take your disagremeent with Beinart elsewhere.

wrong said...
The Germans changed theirs laws in 2000. As it is, as Jason Stanley noted a few years ago:

...my own expected happy homecoming into German society wasn't necessarily working out as planned. One of the teachers at the Gymnasium told me that Heinrich Heine wasn't really a "German" poet, but rather was a "European" poet. My absurdly well-meaning and wonderful hostfather regularly repeated that "Deutschland ist kein Einwanderungsland" (which is, as Schneider points out, a common theme among Germans of a certain generation). Whenever I told people I was of German descent, they would argue with me -- then upon discovering that I was Jewish, would say "Oh, so you're not German, you're Jewish" (strangely, I never heard anyone say to someone, upon discovering that they were Christian, "Oh, so you're not German, you're Christian"). Among my German friends, there was a pervasive sense of the strangeness of other cultures, which alternately manifested itself as either irrational disdain or irrational admiration.

Stanley either exhibits or makes use of the common confusion regarding Jews as believers in a faith and as an ethnic group. Christians are not "a people". Israel was founded as a secular state and as a homeland for the Jewish people, not the Jewish religion.

"So, when individuals are called out on, say, the informal norms and how these facilitate the pattern of exclusion..." An explicit attack of the logic of Zionism written by a defender of the thing itself. Schliesser and Smilansky.
---
Schliesser removed the last comment but left the earlier ones, explaining his decision in an email. I appreciate that he left the others up, but not the distinction.
---
more above
---
I've quoted the email since so I'll add the relevant part here as well:
"...as a German Jew living in the Netherlands and working in Belgium, I really do not need your lectures on these matters."

Leiter

Unethical prayer?
Saul Smilansky (Haifa) considers some cases.

Ezra Pound replies:

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragment cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales
not too greasy,
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing,
where one needs one's brains all the time.

—update: I haven't read the piece. I'm not going to pay for it or search it out.

The prayers he refers to are forms of special pleading, and I'm not impressed by anyone who claims to have discovered[?] that special pleading and justice as we define it are at odds. The only caveat would be that it offers more evidence of Israelis beginning to come to terms, honestly, with the logic and legacy of Zionism, and the evidence is there even if the author makes no mention of Israel and still claims to be a Zionist. That's how change works.
Some deny that Zionism is racism; no one denies that it's exceptionalism. update 2: see Schliesser above.—

Leiter, again

Alva Noe: Philosopher of Rock 'n' Roll!
Here.

"The Myth of the Particular"
Alva Noë is even more stupid than Colin McGinn.

Generalizations are not the highest form of thought; they're both the ideal and the average. It's much harder to recognize and then communicate specifics.  Musicians, actors, poets, artists and connoisseurs, trial lawyers and medical diagnosticians are specialists in particularity. They're "Particularists". It's Bertram's term; he should be more proud of it, but he doesn't understand how broadly it applies.

Successful pop stars are performers, acting through the tropes and contradictions of their peers. By the logic of academic philosophers, we should all be listening to Emerson Lake and Palmer.

Springsteen's weakness is the weakness of American liberalism: sincerity over seriousness.

Clement Greenberg vs T.S. Eliot and Marie Lloyd

Serious leftists are Burkeans, and David Brooks is not Kevin Phillips.

---

jumping ahead: Emerson Lake and Parfit.

"Serious leftists are Burkeans." They're not positivists, and not futurists. They're anti-utopian. It's my definition of serious.

Eric Schliesser

Now one self-conscious byproduct of this approach is that from (some baseline) progress is possible. As in the sciences, even refutations and lack of confirmation can facilitate progress. Everybody's efforts matter.

Frege's logic would be the tool, but it is Schlick that developed the program of the free play in conceptual invention. Carnap debased the coin a bit by insisting we should be more modest conceptual engineers. But a scientific philosophy requires worker-bees and philosophical queens.

"The Significance of Quine's 'Flux of Experience' for freedom with scientific and formal philosophy"

I am not a promoter of a "scientific philosophy," I inherited it as a tradition (or "school").

"It is always fine to hear economists pretend that financial incentives do not matter."
The New York Times reports that the AEA is considering an ethics code. In the article, Mr. Lucas is reported as saying: “What disciplines economics, like any science, is whether your work can be replicated. It either stands up or it doesn’t. Your motivations and whatnot are secondary.” (Lucas won a Nobel in 1995.)

The future of Europe's stability rests in the capable hands of Angela Merkel.

I am, however, skeptical of all manner of academic efforts that seem primarily aimed at DE-legitimatizing Israel as a Jewish state.

Introducing a post in Elinor Ostrum he mentions that he learned of her death while he was hosting a "Workshop" on sympathy.

There are as many forms of self-interest as there are people.

Philosophy professors who don't understand law shouldn't talk about it.

Eric Schliesser

"...philosophy is different from law (where very bad human beings and acts deserve the very best arguments on their behalf in order to make a potentially moral institution function properly)"

It's called "presumption of innocence".

Eric Schliesser

Weber was too good a student of Nietzsche to fail to realize that "many old gods" always resurface even in secular ages, but in different guises. (iii) The religiosity we experience today is not wholly a reversal (although there may be some of that); today's religiosity is the (bastard?) off-spring of disenchantment (not to mention the disorder that comes from our hybrid financial-military-scientific-pharmaceutical states), in particular, the obsession with authenticity or sincerity.

Eric Schliesser

I am, however, skeptical of all manner of academic efforts that seem primarily aimed at DE-legitimatizing Israel as a Jewish state.

It's too fucking easy.

Schliesser

I am, however, skeptical of all manner of academic efforts that seem primarily aimed at DE-legitimatizing Israel as a Jewish state. I have no trouble admitting that Israel was founded on historic injustice(s) many of which it continues to perpetuate. But I don't think Israel is particularly special in this regard (sadly), and I have never seen an argument for an academic boycott of Israel that wasn't also part of a wider campaign (including the persistent analogy with South Africa)--again, this is not to deny there are all kinds of second class citizens in Israel.

How is it possible that a state built and maintained in the interest of one community (as ES describes and defends it above: "a Jewish state") not relegate its other citizens to secondary status?

But I don't think Israel is particularly special in this regard (sadly)...

He's left defending what he's sad about. At the very best he's no more than an ethnic separatist and he should admit that he wants Arab citizens of Israel to leave. My comments were removed as was Schliesser's response, which included this:

The folk that tend to obsess about Zionism, in particular, tend to have a peculiar focus.

Mondoweiss Every text will have a subtext or a context that's read or seen first by outsiders. Schliesser can't think of himself as a bigot. He refers to his philosophical interest as scientific, but a Palestinian housewife can offer the rebuttal to his logic more powerful than any by those he would consider peers. As always: Recent posts at NewApps include "Increasing the percentage of female full professors"; "Freedom University", about college professors in Georgia organizing to teach illegal immigrants; "Take the pledge! Support UC Davis colleagues! Demand Katehi's resignation!", on the pepper spraying at UC Davis. The post on Israel and the Shalem center is real discussion, something that wouldn't have happened even 5 years ago, but it's not on the same level. Any of the others could just as well have the Palestinians as subjects: "Increasing the percentage of Arab full professors" in Israeli universities, teachers volunteering in refugee camps. The Palestinians are moving into our consciousness but Israelis are our friends: we treat each differently. That will change too, but that will not change the way things change. I don't care about Schliesser's bigotry, only about the intellectual model that says it can't exist. --- update: the debate is heating up --- And now it's over. They can all agree about the rights of women in the American academy. Schliesser's definition of nationalism conflates the nationalism of the French at home and in Algeria. To the Palestinians the Israelis are Pieds-Noir, and an Israeli university the equivalent of a Chinese school in Tibet, or one run by the BJP in Kashmir. The Palestinians are not wrong to think that.

note taking, various. posted elsewhere. sloppy, on the fly, etc. nothing new. One

This post takes us back to the relation of philosophy, the language of concepts, to narrative, and to and art itself, the language of description. To philosophers narrative is parasitic, in a sense even that the theory of narrative is not. This blog is mostly an attempt to theorize the opposition into subservience, like the biographer tries to conquer his subject. Between Chaplin and Deleuze et al., Chaplin wins. Deleuze is the parasite. "For Deleuze Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane is, as he puts it, 'the first great film of a cinema of time' ” All cinema is the cinema of time. Film is the greatest argument against modernism (as distinct from the modernity it describes so well).

JW: [Referring to Delacroix] Violence is only a theme in this kind of art; the art itself isn’t violent. That makes it very different from, even opposed to, the art of the avant-garde, which expresses aggression against the idea of art itself. This aggression is no longer viable. I don’t think its necessary or possible to go beyond the idea of bourgeois art -that is of autonomous art- towards a fusion of art and its context. Or if its possible it isn’t very desirable. We have learned how the aggression against autonomous art was consistent with aspects of totalitarianism, from the Stalinist period for example, and how state violence could benefit from that kind of aesthetic. The concept of art as autonomous, and therefore less amenable to that kind of instrumentalization, is a central concern of the modern, and I’m most sympathetic to that. A-MB/RM: Modernity and avant-garde, to you, are two separate things? JW: We can’t confuse them anymore. "A Democratic, a Bourgeois Tradition of Art: a Conversation with Jeff Wall", in Selected Essays and Interviews

Mannerism describes the aristocratic sensibility in an age of incipient democracy. The baroque is the same model of (describes) conservatism in the age of a fully ascendant democracy: the age of theater. History shows that In art as in democracy (as in all culture whether wise men approve or not) practice precedes theory. --- I wish I'd done a better job in the comment above, but I doubt anyone here would get it even if I had. You're engaged in the attempted reform of the language of concepts, an attempt made in response to larger cultural/historical shifts. The best term to describe your work and of Deleuze etc. in relation to "classical" Modernism is "Mannerism". As Wall reminds us, the arts begin in practice. Attempts to work from theory were catastrophic, for the arts as for society, yet you continue to argue from the primacy of concepts, even the concept of something other than modernism. As much as you might like to pretend, concepts are not discoveries. Rationalism is not empiricism. Conceptualism is no more than reactionary late modernism. The politics of rationalism have proved monstrous. "Modernity and avant-garde, to you, are two separate things?" "We can’t confuse them anymore." Your arguments continue in the manner of the conceptualizing, prescriptive, and failed, avant-garde. That's a little more clear at least. --- "The point, in other words, is precisely to criticize the classical understanding of concepts, which seems to be the understanding of concepts you presuppose." And according to this, what replaces concepts? What forms of action and reflection and description are we left with? "Philosophy is neither film making nor art, nor is it science." I read all the time here and elsewhere that it's closer to science than to anything else. Concepts are objects almost in a material sense and the goal of philosophy is the development and direct use of objective knowledge. philosophy "invents concepts" and "makes futures possible." That's like saying that our greatest literature predicts the future. it hasn't, not even dystopia (yet). Philosophy is a branch of literature that posits itself as superior to all other forms of art. The modernist model of philosophy as logic and of logicians as philosophers is the most extreme version of that superiority but that's gone nowhere. It clings to power with the same tenacity as neoclassical economics as a description of the world. It clings on in the arguments of Eric Schliesser, Alex Rosenberg and others. And if clings on in more general ways other ways. I'll give examples I've used before. "Rationalism and empiricism are not the abstract categories that neatly house philosophers to the exclusion of one another." Empiricism involves observation of the world, of materials and history. If feminism were a branch of objective knowledge, than male and female feminists would be interchangeable. They aren't. Every major change in the moral culture over the past century has been marked first not by concepts but people and actions. American blacks not intellectuals led the civil rights movement. Women not college professors led the feminist movement. Anti-colonialism was powered by the anger of the colonized, not the understanding of the enlightened. In packaging these things after the fact, in conceptualizing them, intellectuals pretend still to have mastered the process of change. They haven't The Palestinians right now are in the position other outsiders have been in the past: they are making themselves heard. Without their own voices there would be no change. The politics of "objective understanding" is void or worse. Intellectuals intellectualize after the fact, not before. The difference between philosophy and art as practice (including Deleuze and Chaplin) is the difference between players in the the inquisitorial and adversarial systems of justice. A philosopher is like an investigating magistrate. The model is of intellectual superman, these days of the sort to claim to be able to "find the other in myself." The attempt to expand or rewrite the notion of concepts ends up in a fantasy of a sort of hypertrophied self. That's why I make fun of the language of the extended mind hypothesis as fitting for neoliberalism and neocolonialism. As an aside I'll add that if you google the "extended self" you'll get mostly discussions of marketing theory and branding. Schliesser's model is different in the sense that his model is reduce philosophy to a something like a "linguistic chemistry", when even mediocre minds can push the great process along in small ways. The tensions between these two models, of superman and petty bureaucrat, make for interesting subtext but they don't resolve any of the problems of philosophy as a practice about or in the world. Art as a model is open ended and descriptive. It's parasitic on language no more or less than the language of a trial lawyer paid to defend a client whether he believes in him or not (lawyers are like actors in that). Literature qua literature is a reflective description of the sensibility of the author in the form of a language shared by writer and audience. It is explicitly a document of its time, in a form that others in a different time and place may be able to recognize things in the form that they may not in the representation itself. To adapt a quote Wilson uses elsewhere the practice of art is to look at the spectacles we're wearing by aid of the spectacles themselves. The model is of intellectual as trial lawyer not as judge. That's a huge difference. Art functions is the explicit and honest description of and from bias. It's either anti-instrumentalist or ironically instrumentalist, as again the irony of the instrumentalism of a lawyer or an actor. Anglo-American philosophers seem to prize sincerity, when its meaningless. The Other is other and the others judge you. No amount of self-aggrandizing can change that. Calling yourself a nice guy is meaningless. That's for others to decide. Descriptive literature as opposed to the conceptual subgenre acknowledges that separation between writer and reader. It's the same separation liberal legal scholars defend in regards to the Constitution. Conservatives collapse that separation, claiming that there's only one text. There have been many, and there will be more, just as there have been many Hegels. That's the nature of language. And as I say again and again, liberal philosophers track conservative legal scholars. The other is other and others judge you. How do you engage others? That's a question for philosophy. It's interesting to learn that mathematicians cannot yet model all the actions of water, but I'm not clear why that should have mattered for philosophy, unless philosophers were under the delusion that philosophical language is capable of modeling the world outside of experience. People can't even agree on the meanings of words, so no, language is not like numbers in it's relation to the world.

"Doing these cases I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying. I was no longer entirely what my professional duties demanded, the old taxi on the rank waiting for the client to open the door and give his instruction, prepared to drive off in any direction, with the disbelief suspended."

Those sentences describe the core of our justice system. They're philosophically as profound as it gets. And yet philosophers seem unable to understand or accept their importance.

Two

Naturalism presupposes only that "the world" is structured in logically consistent mechanisms (though few people are willing to follow that to the logical conclusions.) It says nothing about how we go about modeling those mechanisms. "but doesn’t the Church-Turing thesis affirm successful characterization of rigor in mathematical reasoning?" What is the relation of mathematical reasoning to lived experience? Can your description of the Arab Spring match that of an Egyptian? Can Steven Weinberg's description of Zionism [chapter 15] match that of a Palestinian? Weinberg claims to defend the scientific "spirit", but power corrupts. "Curiosity, honesty, precision, and rigor" But who watches the watchmen? Naturalism must therefore model the world first as political and the model must be one of consultation at every level. That's problematic but less so than "scientific" authoritarianism. --- "and this was actually the subject of Catarina's post from earlier today on system imprisonment. The problem in this case is that formalist systems may generate problems that are only significant relative to the formal system itself and not to the real systems being described and modeled." The central error of Modernism was an assumed (utopian) relation of formalism to representation. The necessity of interpretation implies the plural: interpretations and the multiplicity of "perspectives". The logical consequence of accepting the indeterminacy of translation would seem to be an opening out to a worldly curiosity and an increasing democratization of discourse: a reciprocal, civil, social, "political" world. You're pulling yourselves towards an understanding of this. --- "A better approach for naturalists might be to engage with the arguments of scientifically spirited theists,"

“But the Solar System!” I protested. “What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently: “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.”

Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes quoted by Lewontin in the NYRB, Billions and Billions of Demons

Sagan and I drew different conclusions from our experience. For me the confrontation between creationism and the science of evolution was an example of historical, regional, and class differences in culture that could only be understood in the context of American social history. For Carl it was a struggle between ignorance and knowledge, although it is not clear to me what he made of the unimpeachable scientific credentials of our opponent, except perhaps to see him as an example of the Devil quoting scripture.

Lewontin is a naturalist.

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

8/20- Stuck on this one for a while. I'm beginning a longer piece and this is my practice pad. The last paragraph here [Link from Farrell]

What Lewis doesn’t seem to get is that this trusting attitude isn’t just some ineffable quality of Germanness. It’s built into the structure of German political economy. And I think that’s a better explanation of what happened in Germany than Lewis’ appeal to national stereotypes.

German political economy is an aspect of German culture and the product of German culture over time. Without getting into an argument over Michael Lewis' pop-history, the paragraph above is the shortest clear demonstration of poli-sci aversion to history as subject that I've come across: Science is preferable to non-science/ Historical science is untenable because of all the data we've lost/ We have large amounts of data from the present/ The science of the present is possible. More "science" from NewApps

Philosophy, Physics, Metaphysics (5 posts). Disabled Philosophers Feminism

There's no feminist geology nor will there ever be a black physics, but that says nothing about the need for a feminist philosophy or a philosophy of race, or of "disability" whatever that may mean (and that itself is a question for philosophy). The attempt to universalize individual experience in the language of one author or speaking subject is the universalism of the priesthood: of authorities not individuals. "I contain multitudes" is the lie of Kings and actors. Science can not parse experience without denying it. Unlike mystics and metaphysicians I have no argument with that. Logically there is none. My argument is with those who would make a politics of the "science" of rationalism. A politics of empiricism is the only politics worth defending. It's empiricism that allows me to point out the confusion of those who spend half their time promoting language games as science and the rest celebrating cultural identities. Eric Schliesser

Analytic philosophy was self-consciously founded a) against the great man approach to philosophy [let's call that "the magisterial approach"], and accepting, by contrast, b) the division of intellectual labor, such that c) philosophy is a collective enterprise. The rhetoric that accompanied these moves appealed to success of the sciences. (I have labeled this "Newton's Challenge to philosophy".) Now one self-conscious byproduct of this approach is that from (some baseline) progress is possible. As in the sciences, even refutations and lack of confirmation can facilitate progress. Everybody's efforts matter.

The analogy would work if philosophy were like chemistry, but there's no evidence that it can be. Experience is private and language, by which we communicate experience, is unstable. Schliesser's bureaucratic formalism is useless as a descriptive tool. The desire for progress is not progress. You can progress in the analysis of a formal system, but unless you can demonstrate a stable relation between that system and the world it will fail as a system of representation. Contra Ratzinger, Scalia, Schliesser et al. (a long list), stable systems of representation do not exist in language. Language in use is defined as and by politics. The history of modern philosophy is of the conflation of art and science, each used to justify the other. Formal logic fails as philosophy because there's no stable relation of logic to the world of experience. That failure is why philosophy has returned openly to theology. The relations of formal mathematics to the physical world by comparison are stable.

my comments elsewhere

"All philosophers that enter the public sphere -- Heidegger, Mill, Socrates, Adam Smith, Rousseau, etc -- can expect that people will be interested in more than just their arguments, but also how those arguments relate to their public activity."

By their nature all philosophies enter the public sphere. Quine's politics descend from his philosophy.

Eric Schliesser is a promoter of a "scientific philosophy" that whether he likes it or not tracks attempts at "scientific" economics or "scientific" history. All three are based on faith more than reason and all three will suffer the same fate.

There's no evidence that philosophers "make future(s) possible". None.
Modernists attempts to defeat history have gone from tragedy...

Frege's logic would be the tool, but it is Schlick that developed the program of the free play in conceptual invention. Carnap debased the coin a bit by insisting we should be more modest conceptual engineers. But a scientific philosophy requires worker-bees and philosophical queens.

While I work on historical figures, I am an analytic philosopher

Schliesser again. Reactionary, in so many ways. Hypermodernism; a return to a fantasy of a scientific culture, explicitly anti-democratic this time. Modernism as farce. The discussions on that page and and Leiter's are just sad. As with economics, as with "theory", the primacy of the theoretical is the primacy of an analogy of the ideal. Analogy is a literary device. The archetypical rationalist is a cafe revolutionary, or a man who calls himself a feminist and will brook no argument from women.