note taking. a two-fer (related). posted (be me) elsewhere

The extended mind hypothesis is no more than a fantasy of the hypertrophied self. The fact that we make cues and markers from the world around us, and that we create or build our subjectivity out of our experience of the world is not news. Mnemonic devices are not a recent discovery, or even a recent rediscovery. And then there's Proust. All this is evidenced in science and art. But the notion that the self itself is external to our bodies is no more than religious fantasy. And on top of that the politics are neoliberal and reactionary. If my self extends out into the world than my cell phone and my car and my girlfriend are all aspects of me, and I have to right to speak [equally] on their behalf. If they are objects in the world that I have only partial access through my perceptions, then my obligation is curiosity, and humility, even in relation to inanimate objects.

We construct our internal worlds out of our experience of the external world. Everything in science leads to to say they're tied together. Nothing leads us to say they're identical, even less that our minds encompass the world, That's nothing more than colonialism as cognitive science. I can't speak for my girlfriend, any more than Israel can speak for Palestinians.

I've come to understand recently what professors of philosophy are talking about when they refer to the new relations of Analytic and Continental philosophy: they now share poeticized fantasies of the expanded, [but] empathetic, self, speaking for the other. But we're individuals tied together. Individuality is not individualism. Aestheticized -poeticized- individualism is no more than an ideology, a theological fantasy.

scienceblogs.com/pharyngula

The essay in Synthese is titled "On the Non-Epistemology of Intelligent Design" but professional philosophers are still debating whether or not philosophy is "garbage" and therefore non-epistemology.

At the moment I'm reading arguments, made by respected philosophers (respected even by Brian Leiter) for the "Extended Mind Hypothesis", which argues that "the human mind has never been ‘bound and restricted by the biological skin-bag, … the ancient fortress of skin and skull' " and for "freeing ourselves from mere bio-chauvinistic prejudices."

Bio-chauvinism!!

If philosophers can't tell valid reasoning from garbage they should leave the arguments to scientists, and specifically to scientists who pay less attention to philosophers. Another reason to read Lewontin.

Of course there's no hard and fast rule for valid reasoning about the world. I made that point in a final comment.

Nir Rosen in Al Jazeera
Western media fraud in the Middle East

Nir Rosen (on Facebook) is right: "fucking brilliant!"
[the link is dead. The same piece posted, at Mondoweiss.]
NY Times March 20 1947

Whatever the degree of their superiority complex, however, the Jews are certainly confident of their ability to bring the Arabs to terms - by persuasion if possible, by might if necessary. The program of the largest terrorist group, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, is to evacuate the British forces from Palestine and declare a Zionist state west of the Jordan, and "we will take care of the Arabs."

NY Times May 14 2011

After Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, armies from neighboring Arab states attacked the new nation; during the war that followed, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes by Israeli forces. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were also destroyed. The refugees and their descendants remain a central issue of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Monday/Friday

The show at Tilton is up.

Fabric as Form
Jack Tilton Gallery
8 East 76th St

I'm co-curator: nothing by me in it. But it began for me years ago, so I may as well link to the history.

Or use the tags below.

note taking. posted [by me] elsewhere

I think it should be hard now for anyone to deny the political aspects of what we call "knowledge", given the the things I've read on this page "thick with certain problematic assumptions", given those "stunned by Plantinga's close involvement" or concerned for the "redemptive power of philosophy and one's own religion," given that Noam Chomsky could write "[u]ncontroversially" George W. Bush's crimes "vastly exceed bin Laden’s," and be attacked as irrational, and given that one of the guest editors at Synthese is a board certified 9-11 truther. Chomsky the linguist is a rationalist who discounts empirical data that contradicts his assumptions. And I'm writing this on the anniversary of the Nakba.

The best guard against irrationality isn't reason, its a knowledge of history.

The Synthese Affair
And here

63 years.
Ali Abunimah
Gideon Levy

Quine: "To be is to be the value of a bound variable."
I can't think of a better example of mid-century Mannerism.

Rereading Panofsky's What is Baroque? the passages on Bronzino.

Christ at the Orgy

The "Nakba": 63 years.

Tim Parks

I’m English and live in Italy. During March, within two or three days of each other, I received: from The New York Review, four novels by the Swiss author Peter Stamm; from the Italian newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, in English and Italian; and from a New York publisher, a first novel, Funeral for a Dog, by the young German writer Thomas Pletzinger. The last was accompanied by some promotional puff that begins: “Pletzinger is German, but you wouldn’t know it from his debut, which is both wise and worldly.”

What a wonderful insight this careless moment of blurb-talk gives us into the contemporary American mindset! ...

"Fog in Channel. Europe cut off."
It's too early for summer repeats.

Political scientist Henry Farrell, in comments, links approvingly to a profile of Paul Krugman

A few years ago, Krugman, having decided that he was going to be writing about politics and so he should know more about it, did a very Krugman thing. He didn’t talk to people who worked in Washington. Instead, he started to read the political-science literature. Krugman had never understood the press coverage of politics, which seemed to emphasize its most irrelevant aspects. Why dwell on a presidential candidate’s psychology when the trends in unemployment would tell you who would win an election? But viewed through the prism of political science, politics began to seem much more familiar to him. There was a mathematics to it—you could assemble data, draw correlations, understand what was essential and what was noise. The underlying shape of politics came sweeping into view: If you arranged members of Congress from left to right based on how they voted on welfare-state issues—Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance—it turned out that this left-to-right axis could predict every other vote: On Iraq expenditures, on abortion, whatever. “When you realize the fundamental divide in U.S. politics is just this one- dimensional thing, and that is how you feel about the welfare state,” Krugman says, “that changes things.”

An actual scientist responds...

Even biologists who have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of what the actual genetic changes are in the evolution of species cannot resist the temptation to defend evolution against its know-nothing enemies by appealing to the fact that biologists are always able to provide plausible scenarios for evolution by natural selection. But plausibility is not science. True and sufficient explanations of particular examples of evolution are extremely hard to arrive at because we do not have world enough and time. The cytogeneticist Jakov Krivshenko used to dismiss merely plausible explanations, in a strong Russian accent that lent it greater derisive force, as “idel specoolations.”

Even at the expense of having to say “I don’t know how it evolved” most of the time, biologists should not engage in idle speculations.

twice.

In trying to analyze the natural world, scientists are seldom aware of the degree to which their ideas are influenced both by their way of perceiving the everyday world and by the constraints that our cognitive development puts on our formulations. At every moment of perception of the world around us, we isolate objects as discrete entities with clear boundaries while we relegate the rest to a background in which the objects exist.

I've linked to the first piece by Lewontin before.
Politics is complicated, even in this country.

Trita Parsi at FP

One of the great bluffs in the foreign policy community in the previous decade was that Israel would have no choice but to attack Iran's nuclear facilities unless Washington stepped up and took military action first. With predictable frequency since the mid-1990s, reports emerged claiming that Israel was months, if not weeks, away from bombing Iran. And every time a new dire warning was issued, a new rationale was presented to convince the world that the latest Israeli warning was more serious than the previous one. The Israeli threats, however, were bluffs all along. Israel did not have the capacity to take out Iran's nuclear facilities. But the huffing and puffing ensured that the American military option remained on the table; that Washington would not deviate from the Israeli red line of rejecting uranium enrichment on Iranian soil; and that the Iranian nuclear program was kept at the top of the international community's agenda.

But the persistent bluffing also carried a price. ... [more]

funny

Al Jazeera knew all along that Parvatz left Damascus on May 1 (FLC, here)... As to why Al Jazeera decides to sort of speak truthfully, today, on Parvatz' whereabouts, I figure that as the tempo decreases in Damascus, focus needs to shift elsewhere... [.FLC reported that Parvatz was in Iran and that even her US senator knew that, on May5.]

Rump Modernism:

I read that he [Wael Ghonim] has just signed a deal to write a book for Westerners about the Egyptian "revolution." That is a book I won't read. (I give him credit for donating all proceeds to the families of victims of Mubarak repression). If the Egyptian uprising wants to progress toward a revolution, it has to push aside all lame liberal voices.

I'm not a fan of Ghonim, the man from Google, but AbuKhalil's radical idealism or reactionary authoritarianism -take your pick- is stupid. He's sounding more and more like Brian Leiter, another snobbish intellectual aristocrat (adding a specifically aristocratic/vanguardist argument for violence). Add to that also the anger of the native colonial elite. All dated; and all too fucking predictable.
---
5/11
More stupidity

McClatchy: While Bahrain demolishes mosques, U.S. stays silent.

Laleh Khalili at Jadaliyya: What Churchill Said

"We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic."

The image of Samar, then 5 years old, screaming and splattered in blood after American soldiers opened fire on her family’s car in the northern town of Tal Afar in January 2005, illuminated the horror of civilian casualties and has been one of the few images from this conflict to rise to the pantheon of classic war photography. The picture has gained renewed attention as part of a large body of work by Chris Hondros, the Getty Images photographer recently killed on the front lines in Misurata, Libya.

I've asked this question before about other examples of photojournalistic "art": Could you have taken it?

The paragraphs below were written by an art critic not a style writer, and did not appear in the style section but in the section now named Art & Design.

A hairstylist friend of mine used to place leather bondage gear in her downtown shop window to scare off what she called “the wrong element,” meaning anyone wanting a nice wash and trim. She wanted to be sure that if you sat in her chair, you were ready to accept whatever look she decided on for you, because it would change the way you saw yourself in the world. That was the deal.

“Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a survey of the career of the British fashion designer who died last year, a suicide at 40, is similarly about control and change. The show, or rather what’s in it, is a button-pushing marvel: ethereal and gross, graceful and utterly manipulative, and poised on a line where fashion turns into something else.

40 years ago the explicit collapsing of categories would have been unthinkable. In 1994 when the New Yorker published an issue of articles on the fashion scene its writers were accused of slumming.*


Frank Gehry: "One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini."


Descartes: "History is like foreign travel. It broadens the mind, but it does not deepen it."
Eric Hobsbawm

Why brilliant fashion designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history; and for the historian of culture, one of the most central.

Contra Descartes, as I've said a thousand times, language is change. "The primacy of the theoretical" will become always the primacy of fashion. The dream of a "scientific philosophy" is just that.
____

I saw the show this afternoon.
McQueen wasn't a couturier; he was a costume designer, and that gives both the credit they deserve. But as with almost everything put on by the Costume Institute the installation turns the Met into Madame Tussaud's. It's more vulgar—bought and paid for—than the Guggenheim at its worst.

And I'll say again that the arts that cater only to the tastes of the various pseudo-aristocracies under capitalism lend themselves easily to kitsch. "Live the fantasy" is a tag-line in the fashion world, but whether the fantasy is of beauty and eternal youth or intellectual significance, the basic structure is identical. And again there's something about Americans and the British and their relationship to France. A popular definition of kitsch is to be "more Catholic than the Pope", and McQueen's work—more French than the French—is as desperately overdetermined as an english language discussion of French theory. What's interesting about Gehry, and I've said this before too, is that his interest in Bernini doesn't originate in the academy. He sees the old world with fresh eyes.

Academics tend to forget that invention begins with observation and that erudition is only a tool. The librarian is never the best model for intellectual life.
---

* The issue is now on the web. One article in particular caused a bit of a stir. Below are the last paragraphs of Hilton Als' profile of Andre Leon Talley

“Look, LouLou!” Talley shouted. “The color of this ring is divine, no? Just like the stone you gave me!”

“What?” LouLou de La Falaise asked, barely disguising her boredom.

“This ring, child. Just like the stone you gave me, no?”

LouLou de La Falaise did not respond. She nodded toward Roxanne Lowitt, and Lowitt instructed her to stand behind Maxime de La Falaise and Talley. LouLou de La Falaise said, “I will stand there only if André tries not to look like such a nigger dandy.”

Several people laughed, loudly. None louder than André Leon Talley. But it seemed to me that a couple of things happened before he started laughing: he shuttered his eyes, his grin grew larger, and his back went rigid, as he saw his belief in the durability of glamour and allure shatter before him in a million glistening bits. Talley attempted to pick those pieces up. He sighed, then stood and said, “Come on, children. Let’s see something. Let’s visit the house of Galliano.”

More on McQueen, and Holland Cotter, and Bellini at the Frick.

Ahmadinejad and Mashaei.
Also here.
And last year

Duncan Black

I'm not sure why people are surprised and even upset that some teenagers don't know who the hell bin Laden is.
...The kids are fine. It's our elite overlords that are all screwed up.

American liberals identify with American children as American conservatives identify with those they see as American adults. And this is the result:
NYT

Fewer than half of American eighth graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights on the most recent national civics examination, and only one in 10 demonstrated acceptable knowledge of the checks and balances among the legislative, executive and judicial branches, according to test results released on Wednesday.

At the same time, three-quarters of high school seniors who took the test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, were unable to demonstrate skills like identifying the effect of United States foreign policy on other nations or naming a power granted to Congress by the Constitution.

And again (my comments, continuing from here)

There's nothing Nietzschean about learning from precedent, or pointing out the obvious parallels between the various disastrous attempts to "naturalize" the humanities [or if you want to indulge pop references: to see the relation of the cloistered academic Modernism of Quine to the tortured puritan Modernism of his nephew Robert, the junkie guitarist]. I have to admit when I first heard Law and Economics described as the new Marxism I didn't know enough to get the joke.

The argument that philosophy "invents concepts" and "makes futures possible" is predicated on the assumption that philosophical ideas have no parallel in other forms of culture. The evidence shows otherwise. But in modern philosophy myopia is a given, if not an imperative. It's a form of academic exceptionalism with its own parallels, in the US specifically.

I don't quibble over the representational power of formalist mathematics, but the lie of the representational power of formalist language played a major role in most of the great crimes of the last century. The attack on economic science by defenders of philosophical science is well deserving of mockery.

Zaha Hadid Pavilion installation time lapse

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...

The Patriot Reflex

Tariq Ali

In 2006 on my way back from Lahore I encountered an acquaintance from my youth. Shamefacedly he confessed that he was a senior intelligence officer on his way to a European conference to discuss better ways of combating terrorism. The following conversation (a lengthier version can be found in The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power) ensued:

‘Is OBL still alive?’
He didn’t reply.
‘When you don’t reply,’ I said, ‘I’ll assume the answer is yes.’
I repeated the question. He didn’t reply.
‘Do you know where he is?’
He burst out laughing.
‘I don’t, and even if I did, do you think I’d tell you?’
‘No, but I thought I’d ask anyway. Does anyone else know where he is?’
He shrugged his shoulders.
I insisted: ‘Nothing in our wonderful country is ever a secret. Someone must know.’
‘Three people know. Possibly four. You can guess who they are.’
I could. ‘And Washington?’
‘They don’t want him alive.’
‘And your boys can’t kill him?’
‘Listen friend, why should we kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?’

Now the Americans have killed the goose themselves. What was the bounty promised and to whom? Would that they also now brought to an end the war and occupation that was supposedly fought to take out Osama and that has already led to civilian casualties that are, at the very least, four times higher than the casualties of Twin Towers. Will they? Like hell they will.

Peter Bergen (apparently) on CNN: "Killing bin Laden is the end of the War on Terror. We can just sort of announce that right now."
Not hardly.

Ted Koppel

The Israeli government is so concerned that America's adversaries may miscalculate U.S. intentions that it is privately urging Washington to make it clear that the U.S. would intervene in Saudi Arabia should the survival of that government be threatened.

Watch for the reference to the Shiite "minority" in Bahrain. Obscene. And pathetic. From FLC and AA

I'm co-curator with Jack Tilton of an exhibition on fabric as image and form. Antiquities and old masters to contemporary. Partial list:

Engravings and etchings by Durer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Goya; Ukiyo-e by Torii Kiyomasu and Katsukawa Shuncho (early and late 18th century); Khmer figure in sandstone (6th century); John Chamberlain, Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, David Hammons and Richard Tuttle. We're waiting to hear about Rodin (see below) and Juan Muñoz. Photographs by Imogen Cunningham, André Kertész, Barbara Morgan (of Martha Graham), and James Welling. Two dresses: by Madame Grés (from 1953) and Issey Miyake. Some younger artists; we're still talking with architects. All on very short notice (the gaps are obvious) but it should be a good show. No opening but should be up by the end of next week.

Jack Tilton Gallery 8 East 76th St.

Also Opening Friday May 6th. Thomas Erben 15 Years.
Helena Almeida, Oladélé Bamgboyé, Preston Scott Cohen, Ala Dehghan, Seth Edenbaum, Fang Lijun, Chitra Ganesh, Vincent Geyskens, Barbad Golshiri, Blalla Hallmann, Lyle Ashton Harris, Jutta Koether,Matthias Müller, Yamini Nayar, Dona Nelson, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Adrian Piper, Raha Raissnia, Sarah Rossiter, Hubert Schmalix, Jenny Scobel, Tejal Shah, Shanna Waddell, Tom Wood, Rose Wylie and Haeri Yoo.

The Egypt emerging from the revolution that toppled President Husni Mubarak is more religious and less friendly to the U.S. and Israel, even as support for democracy and human rights is strong, a wide-ranging poll released by the Pew Research Center on Monday found.

QUESTION: Did Tom Donilon raise the Bahrain issue in his discussion with King Abdullah --
MR. TONER: I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the White House.

Courtesy AA

Landis
FLC

The Independent

The British Government saw Iraqi oil as "vital" to the UK's long-term energy security, and the effective privatisation of its oil industry was central to the post-invasion plan for the country, according to previously unseen Whitehall documents.

The UK was already working behind the scenes to ensure British companies did not lose out to competitors in the region, reveal strategy papers that were discussed at the highest level across Whitehall just days after President George W Bush declared "mission accomplished" in May 2003.

Despite Tony Blair and his ministers' public insistence that Iraq's vast oil reserves – then estimated at 112 billion barrels – were a matter for the Iraqis alone, officials warned a meeting of the "inter-departmental Oil Sector Liaison Group (OSLG)" that appearing "gratuitously exploitative" in its policy goals – which included the aim to "maximise benefit to British industry and thus British employment/economy" – could "backfire politically".

Mer-Khamis

Jenin residents claim public opinion turned on director for performing plays that went against Islamic conservative values

I'd wondered about that. The decision to perform Animal Farm unaltered seemed just stupid: liberal self-romance.
Still sad.

The Daumier Register

Landis
FLC
Arabist

Reposted from 2008:

Apropos academic perversity and the absolute bourgeois.
Jeff Wall
Tim Clark, being tried in absentia: [scroll down at bit]
Thomas Struth


Thomas Struth, The Hirose Family, Hiroshima


The Smith Family, Fife, Scotland


Jeff Wall The Flooded Grave, Transparency in lightbox
228.5 x 282 (90" x 111") Details here
Struth's portraits, his best work, aren't perverse at all but humane in expressing an honest conservatism, slightly sad, with no pretense of radicality except in the sense perhaps that honestly is radical. Although he sees behind poses and postures he renders his subjects' humanity, not just their function, and this has the effect of humanizing the status quo. He's as respectful of his subjects as they are of themselves and most often they return that respect; even the arrogant ones express pride partly at being photographed. At the very least they return a gaze. A few show both arrogance and feigned indifference and these works suffer from a lack of cooperation, literally of communication and thus collaboration. The subjects look as if at themselves in a mirror. Most of these are Americans.

There's a control-freak quality to Clark's language and to Wall's photo-constructions; it began to bother me first in Clark. Both claim to represent the world, as we all do in our speech, but there's a hyper-determinism that's not so much conservative as brilliantly reactionary [a few years ago I would never have thought of linking those two words] in the sense that hypocrisy is reactive. But maybe it's just a contradiction heightened to the point of an electric buzz. Struth is less conflicted: he's warmer. I began to feel aware of this, and that I was beginning to tire of pure contradiction as a theme, only in the past few years. I've always hated Borges as an illustrator and a fascist, but I need to read Nabokov. I've read enough of him to recognize crystalline language but in the context of the literary academy it's a form of art. I've always hated conceptualism, but there is such a thing as the poetry of ideas. I'm growing tired of that, just as I've begun to realize that it's always been my major interest.

David Hammons, In the Hood,  Rodin, Monument to Balzac

In a month, maybe. They make a good pair.

---

We had two pieces by Hammons, but we didn't get the Rodin. We were looking for a study, but not enough time. I wanted a year; I got a month.

Flow of African migrants poses dilemma
No state founded on ethnic separatism can claim to be either modern or liberal.

Syria Comment
Various recent posts

"Stop Snitchin'" redux

Letter to President Obama from
Zainab Alkhawaja

Obama replies
I hope that explains things.
---
4/13. Obama writes another letter

Shorter John Quiggin:
"I was thinking about reinventing the wheel, but someone beat me to it."

As'ad AbuKhalil is a bourgeois who styles himself a leftist intellectual, following the model of modernist as revolutionary aristocrat. At his worst he's an arrogant teenage boy who confuses love for himself with love for humanity, oblivious to the possibility of their confusion.

Chaos
Arab regimes (and Iran) often warn against change and revolutions: they try to scare us by warning of the potential for chaos. I say: we should work for the overthrow of all those regimes (Arab regimes and Iran) because chaos is far superior to those regime [sic]. At least, under chaos there is a stronger chance for change and sabotage (sabotage of oppression and injustice and occupation and conspiracies).

By that logic the half thought out invasion of Iraq was better for the future of its people than either a carefully planned and successful one or none at all, and a Pakistan in chaos, with nuclear weapons unaccounted for, is better than a stable dictatorship.

I read AbuKhalil as a reporter of fact, not as an intellectual. As an intellectual he's an ass.

I admire the brave Syrian communists that you struggled with against [sic] the Syrian repressive state, but you can state with a straight face that the struggle was for "democracy"? Is this a retroactive revisionism? Come on. Arab communists fought for social justice, workers' victory, the dictatorship of the proletariat, revolution, and liberation but not for democracy. Of course, no [sic] everyone wants democracy, even the lousy Muslim Brotherhood.

The age of Modernism is done.

Sit-ins

"The first thing we will do is escalate the military resistance activity and reactivate the Mahdi Army in a new statement which will be published later,” Mr. Sadr’s representative, Salah al-Obaidi, told the crowd. “Second is to escalate the peaceful and public resistance through sit-ins.”

Also: Goldstone

Recent posts at Arabist

Stephen Walt

TGIF!

SEC. GATES: We had a very good meeting. We met for about an hour and a half, one-on-one. It was an extremely cordial warm meeting. I think the relationship is in a good place. We talked about developments all over the region. We obviously talked about Iran....
Q. Did you talk about the Saudi troops in Bahrain? Did you raise that as an issue?

SEC. GATES: No.

Dennett on "chmess" [pdf]

Philosophy is an a priori discipline, like mathematics, or at least it has an a priori methodology at its core, and this fact cuts two ways. On the one hand, it excuses philosophers from spending tedious hours in the lab or the field, and from learning data-gathering techniques, statistical methods, geography, history, foreign languages....., empirical science, so they have plenty of time for honing their philosophical skills. On the other hand, as is often noted, you can make philosophy out of just about anything, and this is not always a blessing. The point of this little essay is to alert graduate students entering the field to a way in which the very freedom and abstractness of philosophy can be a weakness.

Consider, as a paradigm of a priori truths, the truths of chess. It is an empirical fact that people play chess, and there are mountains of other empirical facts about chess, about how people have been playing it for centuries, often use handsomely carved pieces on inlaid boards, and so forth. No knowledge of these empirical facts plays an indispensable role in the activity of working out the a priori truths of chess, which also exist in abundance. All you need to know are the rules of the game.

...Some philosophical research projects-or problematics, to speak with the more literary types-are rather like working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed upon rules are presupposed-and seldom discussed-and the implications of those rules are worked out, articulated, debated, refined. So far, so good. But some philosophical research projects are more like working out the truths of chmess. Chmess is just like chess except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not one. I just invented it-though no doubt others have explored it in depth to see if it is worth playing. Probably it isn't.

...One good test to make sure you're not just exploring the higher order truths of chmess is to see if people aside from philosophers actually play the game.
Can anybody outside of academic philosophy be made to care whether you're right about whether Jones's counterexample works against Smith's principle? Another good test is to try to teach the stuff to uninitiated undergraduates. If they don't "get it," you really should consider the hypothesis that you're following a self-supporting community of experts into an artifactual trap.

...Of course some people are quite content to find a congenial group of smart people with whom to share "the fun of discovery, the pleasures of cooperation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement." as John Austin once put it, without worrying about whether the joint task is worth doing. And if enough people do it, it eventually becomes a phenomenon in its own right, worth studying. As Burton Dreben used to say to the graduate students at Harvard, "Philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship." Some garbage is more important than other garbage, however, and it's hard to decide which of it is worthy of scholarship.

The following is adapted from my comment elsewhere

"Philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship."
The original quote, courtesy of Anthony Grafton

Scholem's absolute rigor and integrity--as well as his dedication to the study of magic--inspired Saul Lieberman, an authority on the Talmud, to offer the greatest backhanded tribute in the history of scholarly irony when introducing him at the Jewish Theological Seminary: "You know that I believe that mysticism is nonsense, total and complete nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship. And the man who is about to speak knows more about the history of nonsense than anyone has ever known."

According to Dennett the only difference between chess and chmess is that chess has a history. Chmess is to chess as a cult is to a religion; old whores, like old buildings gain respectability, which explains the failure of Esperanto to win out over French: a lack of richness or depth of reference, or more simply "depth"

"Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth."
Timothy Williamson

Dennett

"Philosophy is an a priori discipline, like mathematics, or at least it has an a priori methodology at its core."

"...Some philosophical research projects-or problematics, to speak with the more literary types-are rather like working out the truths of chess."

If Dennett agrees with the equivalence of philosophy to garbage and of the history to scholarship, how can he defend garbage at the expense of scholarship? Philosophy he says, "excuses philosophers from ...learning data-gathering techniques, statistical methods, geography, history, foreign languages...., empirical science." The study of history is empiricism. Philosophy at its best is like mathematics, chess, literary theory, and Catholic theology. Given the doctrines of the Church, how many angels can fit on the head of a pin? At its worst it's the formal analysis of things no one will care about in the future. Back again to Alex Rosenberg, Quine, and Descartes. History defeats them and Dennett as well.
Baseball is nonsense but the history of baseball is scholarship. Literature is nonsense. Art is nonsense. Law is nonsense. Philosophy is nonsense. Culture is nonsense. We're back to the structure and function of formalized social interaction, to the aporias of preference and the historical study of preference. Scholarship is nonsense as well but a study of the past makes for a more intelligent politics in the present.

I'd never read that piece before yesterday, though I'd heard of it of course. It's an amazing bit of work.
---
update: and I ignored the digs at Austin.

FP Morning Brief

Top story: Following Saudi Arabia's intervention in Bahrain last month, Bahrain's ruling family has cracked down on the nascent protest movement. Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa has instituted emergency laws that give the government's security forces the right to search houses without a warrant, dissolve political parties, and arrest those who participated in the protest movement.

After the government crushed the large-scale demonstrations and the protesters' encampment in Manama's Pearl Square, the opposition has had to adjust its strategy. The protest movement now relies on smaller demonstrations in Bahrain's outlying villages. Nevertheless, human rights activists have reported that 26 people have been killed, 300 have been imprisoned, and at least 35 people are missing in the three weeks since the crackdown began in earnest.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates met with Saudi King Abdullah on Wednesday, in an attempt to repair relations between the two countries that had frayed badly in recent days. Gates told reporters that he declined to raise the issue of Saudi Arabia's intervention in Bahrain with the king.

NATO airstrike hits rebels: A NATO airstrike in eastern Libya mistakenly targeted a group of Libyan rebels, killing 13.

Reuters via FLC

"I'm not sure it can be amended," Rice told a congressional hearing. "What we want to see is for it to disappear and no longer be a subject of discussion and debate in the Human Rights Council or the General Assembly or beyond." .... Rice told lawmakers the United States repudiated the Goldstone report as "deeply flawed" when it first emerged....
1,400 Palestinians were killed ... "

AP

WASHINGTON – South African jurist Richard Goldstone said Tuesday that he did not plan to seek nullification of his highly critical U.N. report on Israel's 2008-2009 offensive in the Gaza Strip and asserted that claims to the contrary by Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai were false.

...Goldstone said, however, that he never discussed the report with Yishai in the telephone conversation. Israeli leaders have called for the report to be retracted since it was issued in 2009.

"There was absolutely no discussion about the Goldstone report on the call," the jurist said in a telephone interview from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

The Freedom Theatre

Ai Weiwei
What I said before

Ai will show you blueprints, sign a contract, take the check, and build something different and cheaper -paying for a wall of glass you’ll get three foot windows- and pocket the difference with his contractor. There are people for more deserving of release from Chinese prisons on grounds of conscience, but not impact. He’s a rock star with fans and acolytes and when he chooses to cause trouble he can do it.

Ai is a trickster capitalist, a Duchampian con man as oligarch. I don’t have to like him to like his work. But I don’t have to approve of it to like it.

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995

Juliano Mer-Khamis

SouthSouth

"...nudges the reader towards the Montaignian attitude of sceptical curiosity about self, others and the world."

Tag = Determinism,
with a capital motherfucking "D"

Link

Andreas Gursky, Bahrain I, 2005 


Willem de Kooning, Untitled, 1984

The decadence of mannerism presents as the self-narrativizing of a concrete idealism, attempting to inoculate itself against increasingly dominant narrative (relativist) culture. Mannerism is the model of aristocratic art in an age of incipient democracy. The baroque is the same model of conservatism in the age of a fully ascendant democracy: the age of theater.
de Kooning in the end was a mannerist, not a modernist.

Quiggin

fn1, The events in Libya have also started a new round of claims about the persistence or otherwise of US hegemony, clearly a related topic. As Phil Arena says here, it’s essentially a Rorschach test, with everyone seeing what they want to see.

Pathological as ever

Gehry

Kuniyasu, Geisha in a Hurry, 1816-18

Utamaro, Lovers in an Upstairs Room, 1788

Issey Miyake

Durer

The differences are huge between Durer and Miyake, but they both offer models that begin in the description of experience. They begin with empiricism.

Neo-Baroque even at its most luxurient is the development of an ethic of description. Working with fabric is about accepting and using the limits of gravity. It's the opposite of imposing an ideal, more the attempt to develop a graceful response to existing conditions. It's about time rather than timelessness, an implicitly narrative sense of physical form. Fabric falls, draping involves slowing or manipulating the fall. But an ethic of response is also the model for historians. Historians describe, theoreticians prescribe.

"You can't steer a wave,  dude"

The technocratic hero analogizes himself in his claims to universal knowledge as a God. Experience is narrative, and a craftsman does no more than try to respond gracefully to imposed limits, to physical forces that are predictable to some degree but over which he has no control, and to an imposed end, an inevitable conclusion: death.

The cerebral and overdetermined intellectualism of the technocrat has its parallel and antithesis in the visceral anti-intellectualism of solo extreme sport.

Josh Landis
jadaliyya

Watch the whole thing.

Clinton said the elements that led to intervention in Libya -- international condemnation, an Arab League call for action, a United Nations Security Council resolution -- are “not going to happen” with Syria, in part because members of the U.S. Congress from both parties say they believe Assad is “a reformer.”...

Each of these situations is unique,” Clinton said, referring to the Middle Eastern countries dealing with change and unrest, a list that now includes Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Syria and Bahrain.

Every act is unique. The purpose of the "rule of law" is to limit debate to one over formal categories. Does act "X" fit into Category "A"? If so does it fit "A1" or "A2"? etc. Discussion of law is one step removed from discussion of morality, less isolated from it than insulated, insulation denoting remove but also seepage. So there is a sense of higher neutral authority applying to all, even if that authority at that moment is merely formal. Law is the application of rules developed in the past in debates over morality that have been settled not as truth but as practicable. Morality is subjective. Law is not morality, it represents morality as defined in previous debates. The point is not to return to those debates again and again, debates that would threaten the survival of the community itself.

Liberals have less and less understanding of the purpose of the rule of law, supporting it in name only. Their faith in their own capacity for reason means they only support it when it's not applied to limit their own actions. So although liberal legal scholars criticize doctrines of original intent when they are applied to the Constitution or the Bible, liberal philosophers treat their own sense of history as absolute. The doctrine of the "living" Constitution is predicated on a living language, and what does that say about analytic and conceptualist doctrines? Stipulating to a definition of mathematics as "dead" what does that say about the relation of language to formal logic and of formal logic to the linguistic and political world?

I can't think of a purely logical distinction between the situation in Libya and the Ivory Coast and yet liberal defenders of intervention refer to principles as if there were. Other opinions are pushed aside not by reason but by passion and assumption. Reason trumps law in the anglophone and anglocentric bubble, and reason becomes unreason. Precedents are set then reinforced. Power corrupts.

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Cracks in the Syrian ruling elite

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Cracks in the Syrian ruling elite: "There are serious cracks in the top echelons of the Syrian ruling group buy I can't go into specifics now. The brutality of the regime is ..."

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Gates realizes that there are only three authorita...

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Gates realizes that there are only three authorita...: "'Gates cited Syria, Libya and Iran as examples of 'authoritarian regimes (that) have suppressed their people and have been willing to use vi..."

SAMO for a better America

Who shot Anthony Shadid in 2002 in Ramallah (II)

A well-known Western correspondent in the Middle East sent me this (he/she permitted me to cite without identifying him/her): "It was the Israelis. Not surprisingly the wording is mealy-mouthed. I had a few drinks with Anthony and his wife in the bar of the American Colony the evening he was shot (it was not a serious wound). He said he clearly saw the shooter was an Israeli soldier, and if I recall correctly he was treated in an Israeli field hospital. There never was any doubt who shot him."
And here is some more intelligence for you: western reporters who covered today's bombing in Jerusalem were attacked (kicked and punched) by Israelis at the scene. Unlike encounters by reporters in Tahrir Square attacked by Mubarak thugs, this has not been mentioned on air, has it?"

On March 9, I received the following invitation:

The Joseph and Alma Gildenhorn Middle East Forum
of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center
present (sic)
A Conversation
with Moshe Yaalon

Vice Premier, Minister of Strategic Affairs and Likud Knesset Member

Moderated by
Aaron David Miller
Public Policy Scholar, Woodrow Wilson Center

In the aftermath of the political change sweeping the Arab world, Minister Yaalon will share his perspective on how those events have shaped Israeli attitudes and policies on security, peacemaking, and relations with its Arab neighbors.

Thursday, March 24, 2011, 10:00 - 11:30 a.m.
6th Floor Flom Auditorium, Woodrow Wilson Center...

I was never able to go to the event. But today, I learned that it is now being described as "off the record". Why?
Possibly because Moshe Ya'alon has been credibly accused of having committed war crimes in Gaza-- most notably during the 2002 assassination of senior Hamas figure Salah Shehadeh-- an act committed when Mr. Shehadeh was eating dinner in his own home and thus in no sense a valid target under the laws of war? (Eight children and six other family members were killed alongside him during that meal.)

There are many countries in the world that Gen. Ya'alon cannt visit right now, because of the criminal charges that have been filed against him in connection with that killing as well as the shelling of the village of Qana in Lebanon in 1996, in which 120 mainly older people who had taken refuge there were killed. Here in the U.S. no such criminal charges have yet been filed, so he comes and goes as he pleases. But really, is there any need for a federally funded institution like the Wilson Center to grace him with an invitation?

Criticism, like history, as a model of intellectual activity, is retrospective not conceptual, and observational before prescriptive.
Farewell to Bill.

I never watched the show. That's not the point.
---

3/23
And again. The same applies. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the critics' specific choices or opinions. My interest is in their relation to their chosen subjects.

A repost from June. It seems an appropriate rejoinder to absurd metaphysical speculations elsewhere; to models of formal integrity, in philosophy, politics, or economics, that in fact model nothing but themselves. The comments below concern the relation of specific formal systems to the world and are speculative, in response to observation. That's the best technique we have. To argue otherwise is to argue that the a priori concept liberal Zionism should be allowed to trump the fact of its illiberal result.

Hans Memling, Tommaso di Folco Portinari,  Maria Portinari
"Probably" from 1470 [as wedding portraits] Oil on Wood, Two panels, each (painted surface) 16 5/8" x 12 1/2". Originally the wings of a triptych.

They hang about 2 feet from one another at the Met. If they are wedding portraits, as people assume, then he's 38 give or take, and she's about 14. They're wonderful paintings but their relation to one another seems slightly comic. He looks blank, or blankly devout, and she looks annoyed. She's a teenager. The curve of her mouth makes me laugh. But that leaves the wrong implication. The richness of the paintings isn't separate from their function as portraits. They're not paintings of poses, stock images beautifully made, but paintings of people posing as stock images recorded as they are, as actors. The Met refers to the two panels as "among the masterpieces of Northern Renaissance art" and that has much to do with the tension they manifest between the political and moral, the exterior and interior, the requirements of ideal form and honest, direct, description of life lived, of experience.

Syrian police seal off city of Daraa

AA: "A reader sent me a desperate plea warning of an impending massacre in Dir`ah in Syria tonight."

Friday Lunch Club: Clinton hails Gulfies for leading the charge: "(Reuters)- ... U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Saturday hailed Gulf Arab nations for leading the charge on Libya, (and their own people!) seeking to bolster ties that are under strain as allies such as Saudi Arabia assess the U.S. stance toward protests shaking the region..."

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.

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Syrian repression and Human Rights Watch

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Syrian repression and Human Rights Watch: "'Nadim Houry, the senior researcher on Syria and Lebanon for Human Rights Watch, said the prominent role for Mrs. Assad was “part of a gener..."

Keep it fucking idiot proof!

Afghan Women’s Rights Advocate Barred from U.S.
Malalai Joya.

So stupid.

Friday every goddamn day

Hossam el-Hamalawy
Arabist

Friday Lunch-Club: "Saudi Arabia criticized Hariri & Jeffrey Feltman for anti-Hezbollah campaign".

Also, saudi troops enter bahrain.

All funny, in a cold sort of way.

Hillary Mann Leverett states the obvious to the incredulous: "What we’re seeing in the Middle East today is a dramatic shift in the regional balance of power—a shift in the relative distribution of power against America and our regional partners in favor of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies."

Newsweek: "Far-right European politicians find love—and common cause—in Israel."

The desire for a Jewish state in the Middle East is the logical equivalent -and of course the direct result- of the desire for a Christian Europe.

Atrios is pathologically anti-intellectual.

Some Days, Internet Pissing Contests Don't Seem To Matter Much

Days like this there's too much of people declaring that Event X Proves Them Fucking Right while lecturing other people not to Draw The Wrong hasty Conclusions From Event X.

Discussion of the benefits and risks of nuclear power or any other policy question is not a pissing contest.

Atrios mocked Obama recently for saying that the leadership of some country or other country "needed" to do something, as if a statement of opinion were the problem, were not in fact part of the politics of government and daily life. The problem is a surfeit of coercive authority, not opinion. Like Eric Schliesser Duncan Black wants to imagine himself above the game.

Atrios and Schliesser both want to be judges more than players; they want the responsibility without the risk. If they're unable to see issue X in binary terms they throw up their hands and walk away. The comment says it all.

Japan has paid more than enough of a price for the nuclear age.

Keith Ellison. Absurd self-pity. Pathetic.

Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte

Listening to the second in a series of mixes by the house DJ at a boutique hotel in Paris and wondering at the first track. Looking it up and realizing both what should have been obvious and how it makes perfect sense.

There I held a trembling hand
Seeking shelter in strange apartments
Til the day they turned her in
Being Judases of nowadays

Doris Days- To Ulrike M.
I think of Fassbinder

[a repeat from October 08]

Obvious, but nice to see it in the Times.
High Fascism

While fashion has moved far beyond the worst of the Vichy years, the role of the stylized, quasi-mythical celebrity-designer remains in the form of figures like Mr. Galliano and Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld; Mr. Galliano has been known to costume himself as a pirate or a Proustian dandy, while Mr. Lagerfeld sticks to a somewhat Goth interpretation of an 18th-century Prussian officer.

At the root of the whole system is the most elusive myth of all: the impossible promise that fashion can vanquish physical inadequacy and aging, conferring the beauty and youth we see on the runways and on every page of Vogue — a cult of physical perfection very much at home in the history of fascism.

And although we insist on the racial diversity of fashion’s current standards of beauty, the fascists’ body ideal has persisted and expanded far beyond Europe. The hallmarks of the Nazi aesthetic — blue eyes, blond hair, athletic fitness and sharp-angled features — are the very elements that define what we call the all-American look, still visible in the mythic advertising landscapes of designers like (the decidedly non-Aryan) Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein.

Which brings us back to Mr. Galliano in the Paris bar. His was not a generic anti-Semitic tirade, but the self-conscious pronouncement of a world-class arbiter of taste (“I am John Galliano!”). Not only did he use ethnic slurs, he accused the woman of being unattractive and unfashionable, associating both with ethnicity, with being Jewish (which she happened not to be).

The link is clear: like a fascist demagogue of yore, he was declaring that she did not belong to the gilded group who wear the right boots, and from this Mr. Galliano slid effortlessly to a condemnation of her very flesh, and a wish for her death

Couture at its most banal is a kitsch memorial to Monarchism. It offers one fantasy of art as life. The model of art or ideology as life, in any form, is at the root of fascism and all reactionary anti-humanism.

Continuing from here. Eric Schliesser again [the boldface is what I quoted in my comment on the site]

On the Leiter report there is a discussion about Sluga's claim that "Attempts to revive [Cassirer's] fortunes are, I am afraid, doomed to failure." See this interesting review of a book by Peter Gordon. Sluga offers three reasons (they are not arguments) for his claim: i) Cassirer lacks "stature" vis a vis Heidegger; ii) Cassirer lacks "radicalism" (but Wittgenstein, Foucault, or Derrida have it!); c) Cassirer lacks the "incisive scientific acumen of a Russell, Quine, or Rawls." The third is manifestly false (Cassirer was extremely knowledgeable of history of physics and then-contemporary mathematics), and suggests Sluga doesn't know what he is talking about. (I have deep respect for Rawls' knowledge of mathematics and economics, by the way.) The first two reasons are very much in the eye of the beholder, and (if I have learned anything at all in my career as a philosophical historian) it is very hard to foretell how posterity judges... Sluga attempts to legislate what he is incapable of having authority over.

This is really sort of amazing. Schliesser seems to be saying that we shouldn't express opinions because only posterity will decide; as if we were not aspects of others' posterity. As I wrote on the site: "Sluga is playing his role as a historical actor, deciding for himself as we all do for ourselves, in the long process of public decision-making. You seem to be putting yourself in the role of observer, outside of the historical process."

Duncan Black

Politics Is Unseemly

While I'm certainly not a fan of the Kochs' political agenda, and obviously we can talk about the whole politics/campaign finance/money issue, it's also the case that actual rich philanthropists should consider spending more time on politics than on charitable giving for many issues. Spending more time on politics doesn't necessarily mean spending money to elect people to federal office, it can simply mean recognizing that some issues are best dealt with by the government. There's nothing wrong with private charity, but it isn't always a substitute for the universality that the state can provide.

Linking to this

"Why would [David Koch] donate $200 million for cancer research when he knows he can give $100k to the Republican National Committee and get Republican congresspersons to increase funding by the same amount?"

While I can can see why the Kochs might also want to spend their own money funding cancer research, I can’t see why, if they’re concerned about funding for cancer research, they wouldn’t just call John Boehner from the VOID, on the Snype, and tell him not to cut the federal science budget.

Where to begin?
It's not about charity it's about power; as with Soros, though Soros is more sophisticated.
Sometimes I'm reminded just how much Atrios is incapable of subtle observation. If he can't perceive it as cut and dried he's lost. He refuses to read subtext in others' actions or his own. He's a child.

A friend's invention.






How to steam wood for bending on a jobsite:
After disconnecting a radiator. 3' length of pipe with a valve at the far end to release a small about of pressure.
We left 1/2" quarter-round in for about an hour. Turned the thermostat to 70F. Tacked the pieces down and let them dry out. Worked perfectly.
---
Of course it helps if it's 30°F outside

note taking posted elsewhere

My comment was directed of course to Eric Schliesser. I'm aware of your professional interests. But since Antonin Scalia, who is required to be a historian of law, is known for stating that "the Constitution as I interpret it is a dead constitution" thereby collapsing the past into the present [and isn't that the definition of anti-historical argument?] I see no reason why I shouldn't be able to make the same observation about you; though you argue from the standpoint of the scientist rather than of someone raised on the political culture of reactionary Catholicism. And as I've mentioned before here I think, it's Panofsky, one of the last great figures of the German "tradition of art historical and literary historical criticism", who reminds us that the unification of the humanities and sciences was a hallmark of the Middle Ages, that their separation was central to the birth of the Renaissance, and that the contemporary urge for reunification (that you describe approvingly) is fundamentally reactionary: "If the anthropocratic civilization of the Renaissance is headed, as it seems to be, for a 'Middle Ages in reverse'..." Scalia's mistakes are yours, and they are serious. The differences between the two arguments are secondary. The relations your observe or create between people and ideas are a source of great pleasure for you. That pleasure is not a function of the people or ideas but of your relationship to them. You find certain things "meaningful". Meaningfulness is extrinsic to objects. As you collapse the past and present, you collapse objects and desires.

working for a living

David Murray Quartet

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: To Nicholas Kristof and other lousy Western libera...

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: To Nicholas Kristof and other lousy Western libera...: "I am getting sick and tired of those lousy Western liberals, like Kristof and other Zionists in NYT and WP, who invoke '22 Arab NGOs' for ..."