In the new year I hope to learn more about the progress on Chicago's Bloomingdale trail:
http://www.bloomingdaletrail.org/
Rain or shine, it cuts a lovely elevated trampable east-west path across NW Chicago.
31 December 2010
Year's End Reading - Academic Papers Division
This year I've been fortunate to learn & think more critically about epistemic justice; to find some new (for me) articles in the philosophy of religion; and to continue to puzzle over trust. So, here's to the following noteworthy journal pubs:
- Kristie Dotson's exciting and important work on epistemic violence, testimonial quieting, testimonial smothering, and Black feminist philosophy. Among other places, look to her forthcoming paper in Hypatia for more details.
- Elenore Stump's 1979 paper on petitionary prayer. Not terribly new, of course, but new for me, and in trying to expand my intro course on philosophy of religion, this has been an example of the sort of material I hope to find more often.
- Sandy Goldberg's 2006 paper on testimony and evidence, which I really ought to have dug into 3 years ago. But the sophisticated analysis here is challenging me in an especially fruitful way.
- Sarah Stroud on friendship and epistemic partiality.
- Cressida Heyes's "Changing race, changing sex: The ethics of self-transformation," in You've Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity, edited by Laurie Shrage (OUP 2009).
- Kristie Dotson's exciting and important work on epistemic violence, testimonial quieting, testimonial smothering, and Black feminist philosophy. Among other places, look to her forthcoming paper in Hypatia for more details.
- Elenore Stump's 1979 paper on petitionary prayer. Not terribly new, of course, but new for me, and in trying to expand my intro course on philosophy of religion, this has been an example of the sort of material I hope to find more often.
- Sandy Goldberg's 2006 paper on testimony and evidence, which I really ought to have dug into 3 years ago. But the sophisticated analysis here is challenging me in an especially fruitful way.
- Sarah Stroud on friendship and epistemic partiality.
- Cressida Heyes's "Changing race, changing sex: The ethics of self-transformation," in You've Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity, edited by Laurie Shrage (OUP 2009).
Year's End Reading - Bound as Books Edition
On the eve of the new year, some reflection upon good books read in the past year. Please share your own recommendations in the comments!
- No One Would Listen, by Harry Markopolos. This first personal account of a decade-long attempt to expose Bernie Madoff's staggeringly vast Ponzi scheme is readable and well paced. In places the author may seem a bit melodramatic, but then, perhaps his fears of retaliation in trying to bring down a $60 billion fraud were pretty warranted.
- Betraying Spinoza, by Rebecca Goldstein. This is some nice intellectual history, placing Spinoza in his Spanish and Dutch contexts and teasing out the peculiarities of religious tolerance.
- Sciences from Below, by Sandra Harding. The author works to bring neglected work in science and technology studies to those who at least should be receptive to it, and find it valuable, even if they/we have overlooked it to our peril. Harding offers careful critiques of mainstream STS and northern feminist philosophy of science, and illuminates postcolonial feminist STS. This has been a fruitful challenge for my own thinking on science studies methodology.
- Brother West and Race Matters by Cornel West. The first is a new-ish popular memoir by the philosopher and public intellectual, and really worth reading if only for the chapters on his early teenage and colleagiate life. The latter is pretty old now, but its early 1990s focus is for better or worse still quite relevant today.
- Feminist Theory and The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, by bell hooks. Neither of these is especially new, and both have been on my shelf for a few years, but for some reason I found both especially valuable this year as I had not before.
- No One Would Listen, by Harry Markopolos. This first personal account of a decade-long attempt to expose Bernie Madoff's staggeringly vast Ponzi scheme is readable and well paced. In places the author may seem a bit melodramatic, but then, perhaps his fears of retaliation in trying to bring down a $60 billion fraud were pretty warranted.
- Betraying Spinoza, by Rebecca Goldstein. This is some nice intellectual history, placing Spinoza in his Spanish and Dutch contexts and teasing out the peculiarities of religious tolerance.
- Sciences from Below, by Sandra Harding. The author works to bring neglected work in science and technology studies to those who at least should be receptive to it, and find it valuable, even if they/we have overlooked it to our peril. Harding offers careful critiques of mainstream STS and northern feminist philosophy of science, and illuminates postcolonial feminist STS. This has been a fruitful challenge for my own thinking on science studies methodology.
- Brother West and Race Matters by Cornel West. The first is a new-ish popular memoir by the philosopher and public intellectual, and really worth reading if only for the chapters on his early teenage and colleagiate life. The latter is pretty old now, but its early 1990s focus is for better or worse still quite relevant today.
- Feminist Theory and The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, by bell hooks. Neither of these is especially new, and both have been on my shelf for a few years, but for some reason I found both especially valuable this year as I had not before.
14 December 2010
And the leaves that are grue turn to bleen
With apologies to Simon & Garfunkel.
& apologies even greater to loyal readers of The Grass is Grue, whom this blog has neglected for too many months. I promise to post frequently from now on.
In true grue fashion, whether this activity will constitute a change is to be determined in part by observation & in part by your chosen ontology.
& apologies even greater to loyal readers of The Grass is Grue, whom this blog has neglected for too many months. I promise to post frequently from now on.
In true grue fashion, whether this activity will constitute a change is to be determined in part by observation & in part by your chosen ontology.
12 May 2010
25 April 2010
messy morality & relativistic fascism
I'll step out of hibernation for a moment to post (without giving judgment quite yet) a striking assertion from Mussolini on fascism and cultural moral relativism, as I've just encountered it in C.A.J. Coady's recent & slim book Messy Morality. As Coady (2008, p37) quotes Mussolini:
"Everything that I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be the bearers of an objective, immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than fascism."
Now, Mussolini should not get to frame the discussion here, to be sure. But (he says unhelpfully) it does give one pause.
"Everything that I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be the bearers of an objective, immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than fascism."
Now, Mussolini should not get to frame the discussion here, to be sure. But (he says unhelpfully) it does give one pause.
06 April 2010
realist, anti-realist, and NOA wagers
In covering Pascal this week in my philosophy of religion courses, attention soon turns to the many-gods problem. It's a problem tackled in a variety of ways. One interesting suggestion by Lycan & Schlesinger is that one might apply parismony to the issue and infer that the simplest God is the most likely one. Or, to put it a bit differently, that the simplest conception of God is the most likely one. L&S suggest that Anselm's perfect being (the being none greater than which can be conceived) is a good candidate for this simplest & thuse most likely option, which would then tip the scales away from perfectly even distribution of probability among the many possible gods.
There's a lot going on here, to be sure. But what I've been mulling over, on this most recent go round, is the realist / anti-realist / and dare-I-say-NOA attitudes one might take here. Even if one finds simplicity theoretically attractive -- and I'm pretty sympathetic to the view that it's at most theoretically attractive in limited contexts, while not in others -- one still must decide what sort of position to take toward all of this. Will I believe that the simplest theory / simplest God is thereby the one most likely to really be right, to really exist? That would be a realist approach.
What might the anti-realist move look like here? That the simplest God is the one that functions best for my purposes here (in this case, my purposes in wagering as to which God to endorse)?
There's a lot going on here, to be sure. But what I've been mulling over, on this most recent go round, is the realist / anti-realist / and dare-I-say-NOA attitudes one might take here. Even if one finds simplicity theoretically attractive -- and I'm pretty sympathetic to the view that it's at most theoretically attractive in limited contexts, while not in others -- one still must decide what sort of position to take toward all of this. Will I believe that the simplest theory / simplest God is thereby the one most likely to really be right, to really exist? That would be a realist approach.
What might the anti-realist move look like here? That the simplest God is the one that functions best for my purposes here (in this case, my purposes in wagering as to which God to endorse)?
05 April 2010
the sound of sad
It strikes me that sad is considerably more onomatopoetic than happy.
Or so it struck me while biking back from the train on this fine, cool, about to storm spring evening.
Upon reflection, perhaps this is as much a matter of circumstance as anything else. Perhaps the eager puppy connotations of happy may at another time & context seem in fact just right, while the slumped shoulders of sad would then too flimsy. But not for now, at least, and not for me.
Or so it struck me while biking back from the train on this fine, cool, about to storm spring evening.
Upon reflection, perhaps this is as much a matter of circumstance as anything else. Perhaps the eager puppy connotations of happy may at another time & context seem in fact just right, while the slumped shoulders of sad would then too flimsy. But not for now, at least, and not for me.
04 April 2010
on walden pond
In honor of a delicious veggie Easter brunch and visit to Walden Pond, this passage from Thoreau's Walden --
One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.
Greens, greens for everybody (or, more precisely, for those of us who can flourish & thrive on a vegetarian diet) !!!
One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.
Greens, greens for everybody (or, more precisely, for those of us who can flourish & thrive on a vegetarian diet) !!!
03 April 2010
good friday and sizdeh bedar / the morning star is the evening star
Arlington Mass hosts the Partridge family this weekend. Folk have come in from all over, Chicago and Cincinnati contingents arriving on Sizdeh Bedar and Good Friday respectively - which are the same day! The morning star is the evening star!
Enough nuclear family for a rousing kickball game and cheering section for tonight's black light gallery show. And whilst Jesus takes a breather between Good Friday & Easter Sunday, our gang has decorated a mess of eggs. This year's twist is melted birthday candle wax!
Enough nuclear family for a rousing kickball game and cheering section for tonight's black light gallery show. And whilst Jesus takes a breather between Good Friday & Easter Sunday, our gang has decorated a mess of eggs. This year's twist is melted birthday candle wax!
01 April 2010
writing wrongs
I spent this lovely spring day poking around MIT, working a bit in the humanities library and elsewhere on an in-progress paper on plagiarism as a sort of testimonial injustice. Unlike Fricker's lovely approach, where the injustice is perpetrated by listeners against speakers, the idea here is that speakers are perpetrated the injustice against their listening audience. More to come...
31 March 2010
before time t
Tomorrow is April 1st, yesterday I arrived in Boston, and tonight I'll accompany my sister in law to Logan Intl to pick up my brother. She proposes that we dress in his clothes to greet him at the airport. Do understand - I'm all for it. But is this OK? It's still March, after all: we're still short of time t. Before time t the grass is still green and practical jokes are still...not quite fair game.
Do April Fools jokes suffer from a sort of Liar's Paradox?
"This sentence is an April Fools joke."
Do April Fools jokes suffer from a sort of Liar's Paradox?
"This sentence is an April Fools joke."
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