Ingrid Robeyns is the female Harry Brighouse: earnest, well-intentioned, myopic to the point of parody, but all boats rise and fall with the tide.

"Epistemic Humility"

My worry is that this category of experiences, differences, practices, and other features of human life that we cannot understand without first-person experience, is much larger than we generally tend to assume.

"We"?

Goliath is being read and well reviewed. Saudi and Israel actions are forcing US Iranian rapprochement. History moves on. If people can be said to drive change, the people driving change on the question of Israel and Palestine are those engaged directly in the process, first the Palestinians themselves, then outside advocates and their opponents.

repeats

QS 06.03.12 at 9:58
You’ve turned sexual harassment into an intellectual game, that is where the “creepiness” originates. How do you moderate that? You don’t. You realize that your ability to treat the issue so dispassionately, playing the game of Find the Universal, probably has something to do with your maleness and position outside this particular terrain. 

Sexual harassment was banned not because we found the Universal Principle Against Harassment but because women and men who believed it to be wrong fought successfully for prohibition. These people were likely motivated by a variety of ideas and experiences. The way we keep the libertarians marginalized is not by abstract philosophical games but by appealing to this concrete history. 

Chris Bertram 06.03.12 at 10:06 am
QS: your latest tells me that you see political philosophy as it is usually practised as involving a profound mistake. You are entitled to that opinion. It is not one that I share.

If the economists who defend their arguments as formal epistemology without predictive value are now mocked, what's there left to say about political theorists?


It's not a question of whether and when to join the march; it's not a purity test.  If you're going to stand on the sidelines you should at least be willing to stand as an observer. The fixation on "creation", of ideas and concepts, or ideal "truths", turning away from observation, is bad science and minor art. It's small beer; it doesn't matter if its domestic or imported, with a fancy label in French.

Martin Luther King was a small town preacher not a theologian; his actions are studied by historians not philosophers. That's not an argument for preferring irrationalism to rationalism, or arrogance to humility. All humility is false humility; it focuses attention on the person who desires it.

Curiosity results in humility; focus on the first and the second takes care of itself. That's a form of indirection technocrats can't fathom.  Equally incomprehensible is the arrogance of the performer: the zeal of the prosecutor or the indignation of the advocate, both paid to play their roles.

"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"
"Lawyers are... the rule of law"

King was an advocate for the cause of his own freedom; lawyers are advocates for their clients.
Two models of engagement in democracy, both founded in first person experience. Robeyns comes from the cultural world of judges, not of participation but authority.

Someday maybe I'll be able to stop repeating this shit.

reinventing the wheel, discovering the obvious.

Nadelhoffer links to Nagel on Joshua Greene's new book, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

Blurb

Our brains were designed for tribal life, for getting along with a select group of others (Us) and for fighting off everyone else (Them). But modern times have forced the world’s tribes into a shared space, resulting in epic clashes of values along with unprecedented opportunities.

The title of the review is "You Can't Learn About Morality from Brain Scans". An update on Nadelhoffer's post wonders if the title smacks of editorial interference by Wieseltier. [repeats]

A discussion of the trolley problem. The difference between pushing a fat man off the bridge and pulling a switch to redirect the train that kills him is described as "mysterious; it seems to call for, but also to defy, explanation." It's neither. [repeats]

Stanley Milgram’s 1963 experiments showed that proximity, of authority to subject and of subject to “learner”, was the main factor in affecting the level of obedience to the command to cause harm. An anthropologist will know why a guillotine is not like an ax and why a governor is not called an executioner even if the man who bears that title is only following orders.

Most people who eat meat would not want to be butchers. Call it the distribution of the sensible.

"And is, then, all which is just pious? or, is that which is pious all just, but that which is just, only in part and not all, pious" [repeats]

Euripides, Shakespeare or James Agee.

ALLNUT: Feller takes a drop too much once in a while. T's only yoomin nyture.

ROSE (remotely): Nature, Mr. Allnutt, is what we are put into this world to rise above.

Nagel

Greene wants to persuade us that moral psychology is more fundamental than moral philosophy. [No Fucking Shit] Most moral philosophies, he maintains, are misguided attempts to interpret our moral intuitions in particular cases as apprehensions of the truth about how we ought to live and what we ought to do, with the aim of discovering the underlying principles that determine that truth.

The history of the arts and of humanistic scholarship is the history of conversations and debates about the relation of loyalty to justice. Wieseltier is a lousy defender of his cause because he can barely remember what the others here were never even taught.

Cops bust down the door of a house. They don't have a warrant or probable cause. They find evidence that shows the owner is a murderer. Under our system the evidence is inadmissible in court. Why?

Literary critics have Montesquieu in their bones and legal philosophers have him only in their mouths.
---
update here 

continuing the past post and a recent one

The Churchlands

For instance, both he and Pat like to speculate about a day when whole chunks of English, especially the bits that constitute folk psychology, are replaced by scientific words that call a thing by its proper name rather than some outworn metaphor. Surely this will happen, they think, and as people learn to speak differently they will learn to experience differently, and sooner or later even their most private introspections will be affected. Already Paul feels pain differently than he used to: when he cuts himself shaving now he feels not “pain” but something more complicated-first the sharp, superficial A-delta-fibre pain, and then, a couple of seconds later, the sickening, deeper feeling of C-fibre pain that lingers.

Quine

A felt need for meant entities may derive from an earlier failure to appreciate that meaning and reference are distinct. Once the theory of meaning is sharply separated from the theory of reference, it is a short step to recognizing as the business of the theory of meaning simply the synonymy of linguistic forms and the analyticity of statements; meanings themselves, as obscure intermediary entities, may well be abandoned

The Churchlands

“Well, given that they’re such a severe danger to the society, we could incarcerate them in some way,” Paul says. “We could put a collar on their ankles and track their whereabouts. We could say, We have to put this subdural thing in your skull which will monitor if you’re having rage in your amygdala, and we can automatically shut you down with a nice shot of Valium. It’s like having somebody who’s got the black plague-we do have the right to quarantine people though it’s not their fault.

“The blood of those who will die if biomedical research is not pursued will be upon the hands of those who don’t do it."

"These relationships [between parents and children] appear inegalitarian in deep ways. The parties to partial relationships may exclude others from the mutual benefits their association yields"

"...religious belief is not required, but at most just that self-evident religio without which there is no desire for knowledge, not even the desire for atheism." [also here]

"The triumph of the fact"

Alex Rosenberg on Shiller and Fama

Imagine the parallel in physics or chemistry or biology—the prize is split between Einstein and Bohr for their disagreement about whether quantum mechanics is complete, or Pauling and Crick for their dispute about whether the gene is a double helix or a triple, or between Gould and Dawkins for their rejection of one another’s views about the units of selection. In these disciplines Nobel Prizes are given to reward a scientist who has established something every one else can bank on. In economics, “Not so much.” This wasn’t the first time they gave the award to an economist who says one thing and another one who asserts its direct denial. Cf. Myrdal and Hayek in 1974. What’s really going on here? Well, Shiller gave the game away in a NY Times interview when he said of Fama, “It’s like having a friend who is a devout believer of another religion.” Actually it’s probably two denominations in the same religion.

repeat ad infinitum. If economics isn't science what's left for Rosenberg's definition of philosophy?
Cartesian dualism is transubstantiation and Rosenberg's arguments for determinism consistently exempt him from its grasp. Awaiting his next book: Bosons, Fermions and Me.

notes. need to make explicit
The only model for intellectual activity qua intellectual activity -as opposed to both technical activities and the arts- is history. No one now defends a science of history, a "historical science", and the present is as hard to grasp as the past: we do no more than interpret gestures and documents; distance in time and distance in space are more similar than not.

Economists and political scientists want to imagine subtext exists only in the words of others. Formalisms, mathematical or linguistic, function in a timelessness that is irrelevant to our lives as lived, if we are to see ourselves as agents and as agents among equals. If we are simply mechanics then all bets are off, including Rosenberg's about himself (cf. the Churchland's theater of will, like the ostentatious propriety of Puritan believers in predestination).

One afternoon recently, Paul says, he was home making dinner when Pat burst in the door, having come straight from a frustrating faculty meeting. “She said, ‘Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute.’ ”

It's not a parody.

Ranciere argues from, through, the lineage of philosophical ideas and ideas about art. His logic means that he is unable to see artistic change as a product of cultural change. He requires the existence of an intellectual philosophical avant-garde in an age of scientific progress. No art historian would be faced with that dilemma. An observer rather than follower of that tradition might tend to argue that the "aesthetic regime" came about after the separation of perception from science that is one of the hallmarks of the modern period, and the development of separate regimes of subjectivity and objectivity.  Ranciere needs intention to be the key, and ironically or not he returns again again to his teachers, masters of western philosophy, explicitly for permission to continue the line of their still eternal authority. And as a critic he begins as a critic of literature, concerned with words and the images they create; when he talks about art he refers to images. He begins with Lascaux, paintings which few people have ever seen except in reproduction. He's a good film critic, but painting is not image it's substance. I wouldn't want to read him on Titian.

The best model of the arts is somewhere between history and law, the sincere irony of lawyers performing the roles representing their clients. Literature is ironic by definition, as philosophy is sincere.  The propositions of a work of fiction are inseparable from the form they take; it's why writers are called writers. Their worlds exist fully only in language.  All art is ironic by definition. We only know the ideal through the illusion of its presence and artists are illusionists, "all liars". Flaubert.

First Ta-Nehisi Coates and now Tressie McMillan Cottom: "Why Do Poor People 'Waste' Money On Luxury Goods?" (I'd seen multiple links to the original post on Facebook and Twitter.)  Mostly it's not about the arguments as such, though it is that too, but the relation of the speakers to the (white) audience they play to. The audience varies. The most self-consciously enlightened segment of it is the worst. But the the relation and the style of performance is still there.

On another level entirely -closer to American race (black-white) relations in the past- I've watched Trita Parsi, also on Facebook and Twitter, and cringed. Not quite as bad as Hussein Ibish. As Billie Holiday said about Louis Armstrong: "He Toms from the heart."  The quote reminds me I'd forgotten about Andrew Young.

Do the Right Thing is the newest entry in the expanding catalog of films inspired by Italian-American family virtues. If it is less engaging than Moonstruck, it can be commended for the earnestness of its effort to convey the suffering and final defeat of a rational man by an irrational world.

The protagonist of these struggles is Sal, proprietor of a pizzeria on a block identified as part of Bedford-Stuyvesant, a section of Brooklyn reserved for persons of color through generations lost in time. Sal is assisted by his two sons, Pino and Vito, and by his Afro-American deliveryman, Mookie, who lives down the block and is paid $250 a week. Sal incarnates the sentimentality that popular drama has accustomed us to associate with the Neapolitan peasantry. He is proud of an establishment whose every light socket he remembers wiring with his own hands, and his heart is balmed in its troubles whenever he reflects that these people “grew up on my food.”

That consolation is a special necessity whenever he feels called upon to reproach the bigoted ravenings of his elder son, who snarls at a point when the fit is especially upon him that these niggers are not to be trusted and that, when the chance comes, Mookie will be the first to throw the spear.

Their debate is resolved by a climax when the neighborhood rises up to sack, pillage, and loot Sal’s Pizzeria, and Mookie opens the assault by throwing a garbage can through its window.

And so it turns out that Sal has been the dreamer and that Pino has been the realist, however repellent his impulses and style of argument. American artists from Mark Twain to Spike Lee have confronted the conflict between white and black for more than a century, and it would not be easy to recall many scenarios that have so heavily and pitilessly loaded the dice against the better side.

Art cannot be art unless its hero has an antagonist worthy of him. Mookie is unfit for the challenge, simply because, if Sal is not without his flaws, Mookie is without anything else. He is not just an inferior specimen of a great race but beneath the decent minimum for humankind itself. He neglects his job, his child, and its mother, and, except for mistaking Sal’s clumsy kindnesses to his own hard-working sister for signs of lust, he shows no trace of feeling for any interest except his own.

Well here's a formal introduction
Something to make you ponder
The situation's ugly, like In Living Color's Wanda (word up!)
Well everybody play dumb, but there's some that succumb
And fall victim, I will overcome any hurdle or obstacle that's in my path
Fast cash should be the last resort so make it last for the risk you took
Trick, you shook your ass for some hundred dollar heels and a designer bag
Now that's ass backwards
All you got in the refrigerator is bratwurst
Your stomach is balled in a knot, you got that phat purse
Pocketbook, stop and look, pockets look void
Destroyed by the need to indulge and enjoy the finer things in life right?

repeats: voting for the nigger.  Class, race, gender. Liberalism and the importance of being earnest.
Farrakhan, Kahane, radical nationalism, radicalism and self-hatred. Politics is a bitch. Dying is easy; comedy is hard.

Repeat

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

[It's David Brooks.]

Atrios

But Why?
No particular interest in picking on Foer, [Jonathan Safran Foer Lists Park Slope Mansion for $14.5M] but I'm mystified by people who own giant houses.

I have about 2100 sq. feet plus a finished basement and a roofdeck and my house is way too big (rowhouses in the urban hellhole are bigger than people think). I don't know what I'd do with a house almost 4x that size. Spend your money on whatever you want, but I just don't get it.

67% white

John Holbo, a political philosopher of liberalism who lives silently, in a country ruled by its opponents, answers my question after deleting my comment.

Per the post: every major ethical theory has several problems. That means, pretty much, that all major ethical theories imply awful, repugnant results – or at least they can plausibly be made out to do so. Welcome to ethical theory!

My question, posted minutes before: "Utility as defined by whom? The Supreme Leader, the elite, or the masses? All have their absurdities."

related and repeat, a comment with a link back to here



The search for ideal authority is the search for a god. The preference for theory is the preference for authority, for the search for authority, with the goal of being its representative.

Universalism's search for singularities manifests in individualism and groupthink. And there is no god; there is no ideal authority; all there is, is animal. The primacy of practice is the primacy of the human, of us, of our experience, debates and decisions. The primacy of theory even at its best, is inhuman.

“The blood of those who will die if biomedical research is not pursued will be upon the hands of those who don’t do it."

Back to Holbo. A commenter makes an obvious point without making the reference: the trolley problem.  Universalism demands the end of intimacy

David Cole on Stop and Frisk quotes Scheindlin

All of the interviews identified by the Second Circuit were conducted under the express condition that I would not comment on the Floyd case. And I did not. Some of the reporters used quotes from written opinions in Floyd that gave the appearance that I had commented on the case. However, a careful reading of each interview will reveal that no such comments were made.

A repeat, and not because I'm in a good mood.

Well now we're respected in society
We don't worry about the things that we used to be
We're talking heroin with the president
Well it's a problem, sir, but it can't be bent
Uh yes!

Well now we're a pillar of society
We don't worry about the things that we used to be
You're a rag-trade girl, you're the queen of porn
You're the easiest lay on the White House lawn
Get out of my life, don't come back
Get out of my life, don't come back

She's so respectable
She's so respectable
She's so delectable
She's so respectable

flickr and Reuters/NSA

Gursky's nihilism, and Alex Rosenberg's determinism; anti-humanism and E.O. Wilson's ants.

Serra at Gagosian.
When the large walk-through pieces go beyond a certain scale, in duration not in height, the weight of the steel becomes secondary to the experience, while still setting the parameters of the design. The result is less ambiguous than indecisive. The pieces should be less fluid to fit the limits of the material or Serra should use lighter materials that allow for details the pieces now seem to lack. [Both doubtful] Brute baroque is hard to pull off.

Whatever fixes are for later.

He's part of the move towards maturity and self-awareness in the European bourgeois anti-bourgeois. He's wrong about a lot of things, but he's better than Deleuze who I can't stand.

The, Ethical, Representative, and Aesthetic Regimes of art, refer to ideas about art, not to art itself. Ideas take precedence over actions only in the minds of people who prefer them. The appearance of the phrase, "rosy-fingered dawn" was an action, an event, the result of a decision or a series of decisions made concerning and in language. The form it exemplifies is a is ubiquitous -a given- and there's no reason to think it hasn't always been the case.

Plato wanted to police what was already a given; Moses in his anger at Aron wanted to police a given. Were those givens the same as idea? in function?  If Ranciere thought less about ideas and more about actions, including the making of artworks and the writing of books, he'd be better at situating them, because he'd have less need for them to be where he wants them to be. He's unwilling to relinquish not control but the desire for control that philosophy requires if it's to maintain the fiction of primacy.  He's still an anti-philosopher; he needs to become a non-philosopher.

His use of the term "image" is frustrating.  "Rosy-fingered dawn" is simultaneously a decision and an image, of/in language. You could call language the beginning of dissensus. In fact consciousness is the beginning of dissensus.

Danto is dead, and so are theories of "art after philosophy". Philosophers are now stumbling towards the question of philosophy after art. Better late than never.

Here, too, the 'politics' of art paradoxically consists in setting aside all economic and social 'explanations' of the existence and destruction of the shanty town to identify a more specifically political element: the confrontation between the power and the impotence of a body, between a life and its possibilities. This way of addressing the 'truly political', however, does not manage to sidestep the incalculable tension between political dissensuality and aesthetic indifference. It cannot sidestep the fact that a film remains a film and a spectator remains a spectator. Film, video art, photography and installation art rework the frame of our perceptions and the dynamism of our affects. As such, they may open up new passages for political subjectivation, but they cannot avoid the aesthetic cut that separates consequences from intentions and prevents their from being any direct passage to an 'other side' of words and images.

His focus on aesthetics as an invention of the last 200 hundred years is absurd. Aesthetics is the reification of poetic form, as modern Politics is the reification of the millennia of political life (as if "political life" were not a redundancy.)  As theories both are products of separation of the perceptual and the intellectual that marks the modern age. The western aesthetic conception of art replaces the moral conception of art: of art as the manifestation of the order or an aspect of the world, according to whatever culture. The original conception lives in in the conception of artists themselves:

And the ethical demand made of the artist is, as always, to produce “good” works, and only the dilettante and the producer of kitsch (whom we meet here for the first time) focus their work on beauty.

The fact that we now see the history of art as the history of the manifestations of culture does not mean that its function changes.  The more you make art, or politics, from how you want to be seen, the more it shows you as you are. And your grandchildren will laugh at you for it, if they're not ashamed for your crimes. Ranciere argues from the intended meanings of words, from original authorial intent. He's a philologist and philosopher of the Church, or in its absence of high purpose.  I wouldn't trust him reading the US Constitution any more than I trust Scalia. He argues from ideas as if ideas change the world. Ideas are no more or less than a response to a change in function of words and forms. Once an "idea" appears, you know damn well the forms it represents have been around for awhile. Ideas are codifications not discoveries. Philosophers did not invent democracy any more than they invented monarchy but they do tend idealize one and to deaden the other.

Greenberg

One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society. Here, however, their connection seems to end. A poem by Eliot and a poem by Eddie Guest—what perspective of culture is large enough to enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to each other? Does the fact that a disparity such as this within the frame of a single cultural tradition, which is and has been taken for granted—does this fact indicate that the disparity is a part of the natural order of things? Or is it something entirely new, and particular to our age?

Eliot

It requires some effort of analysis to understand why one person, among many who do a thing with accomplished skill, should be greater than the others; nor is it always easy to distinguish superiority from great popularity, when the two go together. I am thinking of Marie Lloyd, who has died only a short time before the writing of this letter. Although I have always admired her genius I do not think that I always appreciated its uniqueness; I certainly did not realize that her death would strike me as the most important event which I have had to chronicle in these pages. Marie Lloyd was the greatest music-hall artist in England: she was also the most popular. And popularity in her case was not merely evidence of her accomplishment; it was something more than success. It is evidence of the extent to which she represented and expressed that part of the English nation which has perhaps the greatest vitality and interest.

And Ranciere prefers Vertov to Eisenstein; no wonder the art world loves him. But Eisenstein's politics are in his preference for narrative.  He's a better artist in spite of his role as propagandist not because of it.

Democratic responsibility divides self from self. The proper art of democracy is theater. Ranciere takes us back to Plato, when we want Euripides and Aristophanes. Democracy is the culture of language in use, and he's giving us lessons on democracy as grammar.  We'll always need cops but cops need to be citizens first, with a sense of irony about their role, something Ranciere lacks. Being an anti-philosopher isn't enough. He's defined himself as what he opposes, so it will always overshadow him, like daddy. He's a guilt-ridden pied-noir and guilt is never the best driver of rational thought.

Politics is arguing with your roommate about who does the dishes, and expands out from there. Art is your haircut and the color of your shirt, and expands out from there. Art as "Art" is the expansion, the increasing formalization, description and concomitant ironization of preference. It's the documentation, description, analysis, and celebration of drunkenness made for an audience of the sober, for the purpose of making them not seem to witness drunkenness, in its simulation, but feel it.  It's hard to pull off if you're drunk. It's the manifestation of Gursky's nihilism and the manifestation of the calm of the Buddha, formed in stone. It's not an idea and it's not the invention of the fucking 18th century.

That after reading Ten Theses on Politics, and a couple of reviews of his books. I'll read more and amend it or apologize if necessary.  So far even when he's right he's wrong

I'm not going to write a mash note to Russell Brand. It's not worth it, and it's not the point.


Everything we know through the study of history and anthropology shows language and culture moving from the ground up.  Philosophy, as aristocratic prescription, works in the other direction, through  an analogical relation with an imagined authority. The association of language and mathematics, of language as grammar, not writing/speech (use) is authoritarian. [This is all repeats.] Ranciere's focus on philology and the words and ideas of the old masters is an old trope, and his masters are priests not storytellers, or rather they're storytellers with a claim to a higher calling. And the philosophy of irony is no more irony than the philosophy of biology is biology.  Irony like democracy is defined in its practice. An anti-authoritarian is no better at escaping his past than an anti-philosopher. If Brand (and Zizek) are both fools, there's hope that fools will mature.  Pedants almost by definition don't

2004

Mayor Bloomberg had little sympathy yesterday for New Yorkers who find the new $20 admission to the Museum of Modern Art a bit steep. "Some things people can afford, some things people can't,"

2013:

Mayor Bloomberg grants Metropolitan Museum of Art right to charge mandatory entrance fee.  New York City's outgoing mayor has entered the museum's legal dispute and granted it the right to impose a mandatory entrance fee of $25 or more.

the more things change

repeats of repeats.

Corey Robin now,  and not so long ago.

Again: the two links are to comments by me; and again, the problem is Robin's hollow moralism. Changing times have given him permission to say things in public.  [He admitted this later] The thread itself follows what technocrats would call "low information rationality".

More on Alterman at Mondoweiss.
Lustic, with Blumenthal, on the the Arab bourgeois revolutions.
Blumenthal replies to Alterman

Henry Farrell publishes an essay on the hypocrisy of other people.

Duncan Black

Things Change
In 20 years no one will admit to have ever opposed legal gay marriage. The pace of change amazes me. I do wonder how many people still admit to ever opposing interracial marriage. A majority did, until 1997.

Duncan Black:

"I know and have friends and acquaintances who are African-American..."
"David Duke, president of Americans in Support of Palestinian Freedom." 

Use google.

This has been getting some press.  More old news, but change is change. Laura Rozen told me years ago that State Department staff referred to the changes in Iran as a "lipstick revolution" of no political importance.  She was citing them as experts, not to mock them; mockery was left to Elaine Sciolino [and again]

etc,  etc.

Repeating myself, answering Julian Stallabrass at the LRB blog.

All the arguments are in the paper linked on the right side of this page, or on the this blog. All are obvious.

I just received a polite - four paragraph- rejection letter from the senior editor of a major university press, polite and encouraging but arguing that perhaps I'm a little behind the curve.  In the NYT today Raj Chetty says,  Yes, Economics is a Science, and in referring to those who say otherwise, he points to Kieran Healy,  Safe to say I still think I'm a bit ahead of it as least as arguments go.  But intellectuals qua intellectuals are always behind the curve.  Philosophers and "theorists" will always argue otherwise, but historians don't.  The curve is in decision-making, in actions, not ideas. Intellectualism, distinct from intelligence, is and needs to be retrospective. If someone is an artist and an intellectual, or a lawyer and an intellectual, they're wearing two hats. Philosophers and others who see themselves as intellectual engineers follow the model not of observation but invention; they wear only one hat and look forward. Formal and speculative reason are the most fragile forms of thought, and the most politically suspect.
---

Corey Robin writes again about "disruption" and the moral, philosophical, and esthetic culture of capitalism. I tried somewhere to remind him, without disagreeing, that disruption is a central tenet of modernism.

Unrelated to that I've been told to read Ranciere.

camera test



Black Magic Pocket Cam, Nikkor 50mm 1:14, Metabones Nikon F to MFT Adapter, ProRes, Film setting, minimal post

Bank$y

partial repeats (recent posts)
Three good films, and one lousy one (it's at the bottom). Three honest films, and one dishonest one (same order). more later, maybe.

Context I guess I shouldn't be amazed at the response to the Banksy video. I'd been told that  Karl Sharro and Paul Woodward were sophisticated observers.  My last comment at Woodward's page.

Is it morally responsible to romanticize a civil war as a “revolution” when the most powerful forces on the side you’re defending are clearly far more nihilist than the joker you find so offensive?"

Banksy:


The Mosireen Collective


The Muslim Brotherhood as filmmakers. The final destruction of a MB protest camp by the military. Graphic.


An American adventurer

Benjamin Netanyahu is a fucking idiot
---

etc.

"The far-right Israeli cleric Rabbi Ovadia Yosef has made comments that would be condemned if they came from an Iranian leader."

I thought I'd mentioned Yosef here before. I guess we could compliment him in his timing.
---

repeat, this time the AP

JERUSALEM — Israel’s population registry lists a slew of “nationalities” and ethnicities, among them Jew, Arab, Druse and more. But one word is conspicuously absent from the list: Israeli.

Residents cannot identify themselves as Israelis in the national registry because the move could have far-reaching consequences for the country’s Jewish character, the Israeli Supreme Court wrote in documents obtained Thursday.

The ruling was a response to a demand by 21 Israelis, most of whom are officially registered as Jews, that the court decide whether they can be listed as Israeli in the registry. The group had argued that without a secular Israeli identity, Israeli policies will favor Jews and discriminate against minorities.

In its 26-page ruling, the court explained that doing so would have “weighty implications” on the state of Israel and could pose a danger to Israel’s founding principle: to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people.

change is slow,  until it isn't.

Corey Robin is a fucking idiot

"...Montesquieu pursued no beckoning light."
A beckoning motherfucking light.

Giap's army, known as the Viet Minh, now a formidable guerrilla force, fought both Japanese occupiers and French colonialists during World War II. Giap hoped the United States would support Vietnam's bid for independence and told a crowd in Hanoi in 1946 to regard the United States as a "good friend" because "it is a democracy without territorial ambitions." 

But the war between North Vietnam and France started in earnest that year, and between then and 1954, when France surrendered at Dien Bien Phu—ending 71 years of colonial rule—Washington backed France with $4 billion in military aid.

Democracy and the frailty of reason

Haaretz:

Supreme Court rejects citizens' request to change ethnicity from 'Jewish' to 'Israeli'
Court rules against change in identity card registration, citing that there is no proof of the existence of a uniquely 'Israeli' people.

There is no proof of the existence of a uniquely "American" people.

At this point the contradictions are so obvious even a philosophy professor should see them.
The absurdity of "liberal" pretension, in spades.

John Mikhail @ Balkinization, links to various responses to his book defending a Chomskian, innate, but also Rawlsian, logical and non-conflicted, "moral cognition" and "moral grammar". He links also to his reply,  all hosted by The Jerusalem[!] Review of Legal Studies. 

Two conversations with Mikhail, podcasts, at Philosophy Bites. The first centers on a discussion of the Trolley Problem, in this case using a choice between being asked to switch a train from one track to another or to kill one person and distribute his internal organs to five dying patients.  Mikhail says the reason the first is seen as acceptable by most people and the second not is that in the first the death is seen as a "side effect". 

repeats

The trolley problem has morphed to include many variations, and even its earlier forms included discussion of “the doctrine of double effect” and of intentionality, treating the act of killing to save lives as an unintentional consequence of a moral act. Utilitarianism doesn’t need to nit-pick about intention; it’s simple enough to say “I chose to kill 3 people to save 10”. But the focus on intention denies full moral existence to those who’ve been killed, and I know of no study asking people to imagine themselves as the fat man and asking if they’re able to intuit a moral difference between being pushed by a man’s hand or by a turnstile with someone’s finger on the switch. 

Regarding the changing intuitions of the actor, Stanley Milgram’s 1963 experiments showed that proximity, of authority to subject and of subject to “learner”, was the main factor in affecting the level of obedience to the command to cause harm. An anthropologist will know why a guillotine is not like an ax and why a governor is not called an executioner even if the man who bears that title is only following orders. Again, such data are treated as irrelevant to philosophy, because once the point of view is chosen it can’t be changed. Rather than seeing the inevitability of competing perspectives of the actor and his victim, the moral issue to be faced is defined only through the experience of one of them and not the other. Philosophy searches for truth and perspectivism just doesn’t fit the bill.

The doctrine of double effect goes back to Aquinas, and the Church is an authoritarian institution. Philosophy qua philosophy is always authoritarian. Democracy on the other hand is a means for society to negotiate problems that have no absolute solution.

related: see previous post

Fill (with Jews)

The J Street Conference, 2013
The perversity of the image is as self-evident to an outside observer as it was unimagined by its maker.

The nationalism of the vanquished becomes the barbarity of the conquerer. Israel was founded as a land without irony, but it's inescapable. Garveyism for Jews, Jewish fascism. etc.

repeats here for a discussion of "national self-determination", whatever that means (and no one knows). But it's fairly certain that as far as Joseph Raz and Avishai Margalit are concerned, the 20% of the Israeli population who are not Jewish exist in some sort of limbo, since the "nation" the two of them are concerned with is the nation of Jews, not the nation made up of citizens of Israel.

Quine:

Meaning, let us remember, is not to be identified with naming. Frege's example of 'Evening Star' and 'Morning Star' and Russell's of 'Scott' and 'the author of Waverly', illustrate that terms can name the same thing but differ in meaning. The distinction between meaning and naming is no less important at the level of abstract terms. The terms '9' and 'the number of the planets' name one and the same abstract entity but presumably must be regarded as unlike in meaning; for astronomical observation was needed, and not mere reflection on meanings, to determine the sameness of the entity in question.

...A felt need for meant entities may derive from an earlier failure to appreciate that meaning and reference are distinct. Once the theory of meaning is sharply separated from the theory of reference, it is a short step to recognizing as the business of the theory of meaning simply the synonymy of linguistic forms and the analyticity of statements; meanings themselves, as obscure intermediary entities, may well be abandoned.

I've quoted that enough but never used the most obvious example: 'Evening Star' and 'Morning Star',  'Palestine' and 'Israel'.

repeats: It makes no sense to refer to formal logic as philosophy. no fucking sense at all.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/27/seymour-hersh-obama-nsa-american-media

MOSIREEN

I hadn't realized. Beinart is evolving.
Like M.J. Rosenberg, faced with the choice between adaptation and open fascism he chose to change.

The Palestinian experience has not changed. Zionist, American, and European perception of the Palestinian experience has changed.

Swag Bags from Al Qaeda

ISIS has been visiting hospital patients in Ghouta, #Damascus, handing out ISIS-branded gift bags. #Syria pic.twitter.com/xtzYjkfUcp
— Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) September 26, 2013

Traders may have gotten last week’s Fed news 7 milliseconds early

Somebody placed massive orders for gold futures contracts betting on exactly that outcome within a millisecond or two of 2 p.m. that day -- before the seven milliseconds had passed that would allow the transmission of the information from the Fed's "lock-up" of media organizations who get an early look at the data and the arrival of that information at Chicago's futures markets (that's the time it takes the data to travel at the speed of light. A millisecond is a thousandth of a second). CNBC's Eamon Javers, citing market analysis firm Nanex, estimates that $600 million in assets could have changed hands in that fleeting moment. 

There would seem to be three possibilities: 1) Some trader was extraordinarily lucky, placing a massive bet just before a major announcement that would make that bet highly profitable. 2) There was a leak, either by a media organization with early access to the data or even someone at the Fed. Or 3) The laws of physics have been violated as the information traveled from Washington to Chicago faster than the speed of light. 

You can see why Option 2 looks the most plausible. 

Capital markets exist to serve the real economy: Stock and bond markets exist to allow companies to raise the funds they need and savers to invest for the future. Futures and options markets exist to let companies and individuals hedge against potential losses, smoothing out the risks of fluctuations in currencies, commodity prices, or whatever.

There is a role in these markets for traders whose work is more speculative. Having opportunistic traders in the markets always watching for mispricings can be beneficial to the real companies and individuals looking to save or invest because it means they are more likely to be able to get a fair price and carry out the transaction whenever they want. (The traders ensure, to use the formal terms, liquidity and efficient price discovery). 

But when taken to its logical extremes, such as computers exploiting five millisecond advantages in the transfer of market-moving information, it's much less clear that society gains anything.

repeats

[Y]ou have to either live in the countryside or live in the city and be really rich to say that rubber tomatoes suck. For those humans who live in the city and are not really rich, rubber tomatoes provide a welcome and tasty and affordable simulacrum of the tomato-eating experience.

repeats

In his version of our present dilemmas no one is to blame. "As citizens, we may feel that inequality on this scale cannot possibly be good for a democracy.... But the super-rich are not at fault." 

...Like its nineteenth-century predecessors, this story combines a claim about improvement ("growth is good") with an assumption about inevitability: globalization—or, for Robert Reich, "supercapitalism"—is a natural process, not a product of arbitrary human decisions. 

again "The Good Banker"

The imperative of speed, the conflation of technological and moral progress, of science and morality.

Modern liberalism begins in universalism, treating various people's interests as equal or equivalent. But the global view of individuals as actors has given us an asocial model of morality: 

"If her interests have the same value as his, then my interests must have the same value as yours."

-massive realignment in Syria today.

-minimal coverage of the UN in the US political web
---
update written up

“People who design machines and airplanes, no matter how much they believe that what they do is good, the winds of time eventually turn them into tools of industrial civilization. It's never unscathed. They’re cursed dreams. Animation, too. Today all of humanity's dreams are cursed somehow. Beautiful yet cursed dreams.”

Yet, make no mistake. The goal of Graham, the neocons, Israel and Saudi Arabia is not a negotiated solution permitting a peaceful nuclear program in Iran. The goal is a U.S. war to smash Iran.

Ted Cruz

The elite academic circles that [Ted] Cruz was now traveling in began to rub off. As a law student at Harvard, he refused to study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Says Damon Watson, one of Cruz’s law-school roommates: “He said he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.”

Douthat 2001[now archive.org, but linking to The Crimson] 

Coming to Harvard, I now have a new sense of the power and success that is at our fingertips - I know I will be one of the 25 richest writers of the future.

And again

Now I know that there was a lot of outrage about these comments on various House and organization e-mail lists, and a few of us “lazy” Harvard types even took a break from polishing the family silver to fire off letters to the Daily and Dean Inouye. This is well and good. But if we can set aside our justifiable pique for a moment, we might realize that we’re doing people like Inouye, Amira, and my ever-so-well-educated Legal Seafood waiter a grave disservice. They’re not the real enemy here, my Harvard brethren—and the sooner we recognize it, the better.

No, the real enemy is silent and deadly, a mental disorder so pervasive and persistent that it defies any quick-fix cure. Call it, if you will, the Harvard Syndrome.

This disorder’s symptoms vary widely, needless to say, based on individual constitutions—but fortunately, the symptoms are easily recognizable to the trained (i.e., Harvard-educated) eye. For one thing, the Harvard Syndrome causes otherwise sincere people to lie, with almost pathological zeal, about their motives for not attending Harvard. The lies can range from the banal (“lousy undergrad education,” as my Legal Seafood chum insisted) to the breathtaking and patently unbelievable (“I really liked Yale better”). But however involved and intricate—or charmingly clumsy—the lie may be, the truth is always the same. The Harvard Syndrome sufferer was denied admission to Harvard.

In 2005

The Truth About Harvard
It may be hard to get into Harvard, but it's easy to get out without learning much of enduring value at all. A recent graduate's report.

Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class
Ross Gregory Douthat arrived at Harvard University in the fall of 1998 carrying an idealized vision of Ivy League life. But the Harvard of his dreams, an institution fueled by intellectual curiosity and entrusted with the keys to liberal education, never materialized. Instead, he found himself in a school rife with elitism and moneyed excess, an incubator for the grasping and ambitious, a college seduced by the religion of success.

Ulrich Beck, A God of One's Own

Blurb: "Religion posits one characteristic as an absolute: faith. Compared to faith, all other social distinctions and sources of conflict are insignificant."

Symposium Talking Peace with Gods
Bruno Latour [PDF]

repeat: "The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated, as anthropologists have long known."

Latour, Chalmers, etc.

Lewontin:  "No one in my tradition believes that the words are very important. After all, if I misspeak someone else will say the right thing because we are both talking about the same things and ultimately the gods will speak through us. So words are not the matter."

Beck, Latour et al. are arguing over words not acts. Arguing over ideas.

note taking for myself. remember this shit.
---
update: jumping forward

Pic of French diplomat stopped by Israeli soldiers in Jordan Valley today. Sent by aid worker at scene of incident pic.twitter.com/gZSr2nt4uv

— Hugh Naylor (@HughNaylor) September 20, 2013

Russell Brand
repeats. "A pop star, not a college professor. An actor, not a philosopher."
"comedians"

Maria Farrell, sister of Henry and self-described "army wife" whose husband is deployed in Afghanistan, and who prays every day for the health of the Pope.

Ugh. Some days, no matter how many nice or exciting things happening in my personal and professional life, I just feel that we are all, quite simply, fucked. 

As a mini-reward for getting a small work thing into my outbox by 0900, I read Russell Brand’s take on his recent adventure award-ceremony-land, when he reminded GQ that its main sponsor, Hugo Boss, used to do a nice line in Nazi uniforms.

Bertram comments

It is indeed remarkable how all the places inhabited by the super-rich (Kensington, Mayfair, much of Geneva, the XVI arrondissement …) are really crushingly dull. At least little of real value will be lost when we burn them down.

 Bertram: "I’m sympathetic, I really am"

I’m sympathetic, I really am, to the idea that people should work and consume less and that we should attend more to real life quality. But this doesn’t seem very realistic in my own life for two reasons: first, even if my employer were sympathetic (unlikely) I feel very hard pressed now to produce the level of research output necessary for me to stay competitive with other academics (not just in the UK, but elsewhere)…. Second, it is all very well Juliet Schor telling us to transition to a low hours/lower consumption economy. I’m cool with consuming less. The problem is that I, and just about everyone else, has taken out huge mortgages and bank loans to pay (in part) for the consumption we’ve already had. Hard to reduce the hours unless (or until) the debt goes away. Third, there was distressingly little discussion of the politics of this.

Hell is other people
---

Duncan Black continues his drift away from his own past.

20 years ago a friend loaned me Marshall Berman's All That is Solid Melts Into Air, thinking I'd enjoy it. Shortly after, we had a falling out and it sat on my bookshelf ever since.  Last week, one day before Berman died. I finally picked it up. It's a work of desperate optimism.
Callie Angell committed suicide 3 years ago.

Path dependent rationalism: Brighouse and the primacy of status-seeking

I cannot tell you how many students I have talked to who were deterred from applying to more selective private schools by the sticker price, applied only to Madison because it had low tuition, but who, I know, would be in much less debt than they are if they had applied to and attended the more selective, elite, private schools that they spurned because of the sticker price (which they would not have had to pay).

start here or here
or here

During the afternoon that Sahlberg spent at the Dwight School, a photographer from the New York Times jockeyed for position with Dan Rather's TV crew as Sahlberg participated in a roundtable chat with students. The subsequent article in the Times about the event would focus on Finland as an "intriguing school-reform model." 

Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. "Oh," he mentioned at one point, "and there are no private schools in Finland." 

This notion may seem difficult for an American to digest, but it's true. Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.

 And Brighouse spends his days pondering utopia.

"What is it like to be a bug?"

repeats
ad infinitum

Any creature capable of acting on more than simple reflex is conscious.
Consciousness is definable as the conflict between the twin and equally mechanical processes of reflex/conditioned response and calculation. Absent those conflicting imperatives there is no consciousness.
Animals are indecisive machines: neurotic computers.

so fucking obvious; or it should be, for a materialist.

Leiter: Why Legal Positivism (Again)?
Linking to a paper at SSRN
From the abstract

Why is legal positivism the dominant view among legal philosophers? The address begins with a somewhat lengthy methodological preamble, offering reasons to resist the extravagant metaphysical inflation of the purported theoretical virtues of positivism in some recent jurisprudential writing by Dickson and Shapiro, among others. Artifacts do not have essential attributes, not even functional ones. (Leslie Green's partial resistance to my metaphysical deflation in his recent "The Morality in Law" is shown to depend on some confusions about the status of the claim that law is an artifact.) I then suggest that legal positivism has three theoretical virtues counting in its favor. First, if we take seriously the benchmark for theoretical adequacy that Hart gave for his theory - namely, that it capture what the ordinary educated person familiar with a modern municipal legal system understands by the concept of law - that positivism does the best job of accounting for this ordinary understanding. (Particular attention is drawn to Raz's original arguments for legal positivism of this form, as opposed to his perhaps better-known, if more controversial, argument from the nature of authority.) Second, the positivist account of law is the one deployed fruitfully in all the empirical social sciences. Third, the positivist theory does not involve incredible or controversial metaphysical assumptions. The last two theoretical considerations are acknowledged to presuppose naturalism, but I suggest that doing so is unavoidable.

Following the logic of legal positivism you'd have to think Raz has given Palestinians the out of not being obliged to accept the morality of Israeli law or even of the existence of the state. But then…
Joseph Raz and Avishai Margalit,  "National Self-Determination". find it on the web.

just stupid.

Duncan Black

Olds
Anyone who is younger than 20, that is anyone born after 1993 or so, really doesn't remember the horrible events of September 11, 2001.

It was a big deal, but it was a long time ago.
by Atrios at 17:11
223 Comments

What a fucking idiot.

Who the fuck needs history? 10 years or a thousand, what's the difference?

Deleuze, where analytic philosophy meets conceptual art.

Thoughts have become concepts.
Concepts are called objects.
Writers of financial contracts are called financial engineers.
Contracts are called instruments.
Banking has become an industry.
Politics and economics are called science.
Rationalism has become empiricism.
Metaphysics has become physics.

All that is solid melts into air, and all that is ephemeral becomes material.
Late capitalism as 12th century nonsense, without irony.

I shall make a poem out of [about] nothing at all:
It will not speak of me or others,
Of love or youth, or of anything else,
For it was composed while I was asleep
Riding on horseback.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Grant's memoirs

But I am ultimately self-regarding and thus mostly concerned with my own process. I have lived as someone whose main use for history consisted of establishing a self-confirming identity and pressing collective grievance. At all events, a preening moralism and a need for validation by this longest story has guided me.

...It's all just too much. I am a black man, and God only knows what Grant would have made of me in that time, or in this one. I asked myself that question so many times while reading that I made myself ill. I don't care to ever hear it again. Grant is splendid to me, and I am sick of keeping score.

The above is what earns Coates the faint, condescending, praise of self-styled academic intellectuals. Neither are aware fully what it means that he was obliged to learn alone what earlier generations, Ellison and Baldwin, were raised with: the sad pleasures of self-awareness. Liberal academics lag behind Coates, since they can't see their own condescension for what it is.

repeat

Happy Birthday H.P. Lovecraft. I highly recommend the essay on him by the French reactionary writer (and one of my favorites, to be honest – I don't care about his views on Islam) Michel Houellebecq. 

And this
---

jumping forward

summer repeats. apropos

"Nine years ago today... we saw the innocence of a nation crumble to the ground."

Atrios

Who Runs The World
Two groups think they do.

Consider this debate between Ezra Klein and Mark Leibovich on “the real structure” of Washington, D.C.: is it the policy experts who understand how the country is governed, or is it the press secretaries and professional schmoozers who understand how to manipulate people inside and outside of the Beltway?

It's the basic contrast between Yes, Prime Minister and The Thick of It. The first is a world where the country is basically run by the civil servants. The second is the new modern world in which the country is run by the spinners and the manipulated press. The first is generally preferable, but neither is really the way things are supposed to be.

I'll also add that from my vantage point, the two groups aren't nearly as different as they probably think they are.

Atrios

While people generally think of gentrification as the process wealthier residents displacing poorer ones, it's also about revitalizing retail/commercial corridors that have become a bit, well, hellish. When I first got to the urban hellhole there were only a few locations I would think to direct visitors to, not because the city had nothing else to offer, but because areas were a bit spotty if you didn't have a destination in mind. Now there are many more.

While I think quite often concerns about urban gentrification are a bit misplaced, an exception to that is when the poor get priced out of areas with access to decent mass transit.   

"Kicking the Poors"  

"First they came for the dive bars"

"I'll also add that from my vantage point, the two groups aren't nearly as different as they probably think they are."

What vantage point is that, asshole?
If rank self-interest is a given, does that mean shallow self-absorption is as well?

"I know and have friends and acquaintances who are African-American..."
"David Duke, president of Americans in Support of Palestinian Freedom." 

etc. etc.

Robin's post is now on three sites: Crooked Timber, linked blow, his own site, and Mondoweiss.
The comments at Mondoweiss, a few of them,  are the only ones worth reading. The authors face the issues directly, having grown up with them as experience rather than idea.  No Arabs that I see on any of the pages, and not many Jews that I can tell on pages other than Mondoweiss, though a few of the commenters there are Mizrahim. Read the comments on all three to understand how cultural, linguistic and political change takes place and where it originates: in people with an intimate, empirical awareness of actions and events.
---

Is our children learning?
Call it progress


Corey Robin, 2011, and as always: the links are to my own comments.
He wouldn't have written the post above -he wouldn't have been so public- even one year ago.

The Overton Window has moved.  It only makes sense that the first person at CT to admit to anti-Zionism is a blue-eyed Jew. The rest will follow; he's given them permission. And at some point Quiggin will consider putting Israel before the ICC, and of course will refer to opponents in the language of "Agnotology" [etc.] arguing that his own scientific understanding allowed him to come to the only logical conclusion.  Lets wait for the lies to start. Ain't Enlightenment grand?

Theory follows events; rationalism follows the path formed by lived experience. Robin is still the same asshole he's always been, and just as mediocre. Same for the rest of them.

Adam Shatz in the LRB

Discussion of Syria in the American media, both professional and amateur, is mostly silent on the  details of recent US history. We destroyed a country of 35 million people and continued the destruction of another, but arguments about Syria are over how best to live up to our principles.  Questions of fact are questions regarding our own economics, and Kosovo is brought up like the memory of a winning lottery ticket.  Israel is calling for attack, but that and the possible reasons aren't mentioned. Selective memory beyond the point of pathology.

The stupidest country with the stupidest rulers and the stupidest population on the fucking planet.

The Non-State Militant Landscape in Syria
Aron Lund

Jack Goldsmith: The Administration’s Proposed Syria AUMF Is Very Broad

MSNBC: Congress to amend Obama’s ‘broad’ Syria strike plan

Mondoweiss: Dubious Intelligence and Iran Blackmail: How Israel is driving the US to war in Syria

Chas Freeman:  Don't Just Sit There, Bomb Something

so fucking stupid

Kieran Healy recommends his wife,  L.A. Paul

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher?

L.A. Paul: Strangely, I don’t really know what caused it. I just realized, sometime early on in college, that I wanted to be a philosopher. I basically decided that I wanted to spend my life thinking as deeply and carefully and reflectively as I could about the nature of reality and our human engagement with it, and that taking a philosophical approach was the best way to go about doing this.

...I do think that metaphysical exploration is like scientific exploration, in the sense that philosophers and scientists are both developing models of reality, and furthermore that we all rely to a significant extent on the idea that models which provide elegant, simple and satisfying explanations are more likely to be true. The distinctive contribution that metaphysics makes to our understanding of reality is first that it considers questions about features of reality that the sciences don’t, such as the intrinsic nature of causation or the dynamic character of temporal experience.

...The idea behind the paper “What you can’t expect when you’re expecting” has two dimensions. The first dimension is that there is a paradox at the heart of the modern romantic sense in which prospective parents are supposed to decide whether or not they want to have a child by thinking about what it would be like to have a child.

The idea comes out most clearly when we consider it from a woman’s perspective. If you are female, and conditions are otherwise apt, you are supposed to decide whether you want to become a mother by thinking carefully about whether you really want to have a child of your very own, what it would be like to be a mother, whether this is something you really want and will be happy with, etc. In general, you are supposed to evaluate whether you should have a child largely on the basis of what you think it will be like for you to have a child.

The paradox arises from the fact that, until you’ve had a child, you cannot know what it will be like to have one. And moreover, the experience may change you in ways that you cannot predict or even understand before you have the child. This means that you can’t rationally choose to have a child on the basis of what you think it will be like, because there is no way for you to know what it will be like. Even worse, the same is true if you choose not to have a child: since you can’t know what it would have been like for you to have a child, you can’t know the value of what you are missing. And so there is no way to rationally choose whether or not to become a parent.

"Philosopher" Laurie Paul: You can't predict the future and the effect it will have on you.
No shit.

Is there any better illustration of why when it comes to Syria the best they could come up with is this?: "Bombing Syria Seems Like A Bad Idea" The discussion is just as mediocre. It's almost pathological

repeats. Kieran Healy, and again.

Leiter at least links to "philosophers" who know people who know something. It has to work its way down the chain of prestige, and they're all white, but it's something.

Meanwhile, Bassam Haddad is on MSNBC

Tom Harkin: “I have just attended a classified Congressional briefing on Syria that quite frankly raised more questions than it answered. I found the evidence presented by Administration officials to be circumstantial."
---

Though I added it later, to this post and others before it, I think this was the first post in the series that led me to create the tag for the discovery of experience.