As I was reading Facebook entries on the election, and especially exchanges between supporters of Sanders and people in favor of voting for Hillary Clinton, I began to realize that to some extent they were arguing at cross purposes. In what follows I try to make clear, for myself if for no-one else, what’s going on. Absolute opposition on moral grounds Some people flat-out refuse to entertain the thought of voting for Clinton. I think I understand why. Their opposition to her is morally grounded, and it is absolute. They do not, in other words, merely prefer Sanders to Clinton. On moral grounds, they look upon Clinton as someone for whom they cannot vote, regardless of who else is in the running, whether in the primaries or in the general election. Here’s an analogy. A moral vegetarian doesn’t merely prefer her diet to one that includes meat; she is absolutely opposed to eating meat, and since in general moral grounds override grounds of other sorts, she will—entirely reasonably given the judgment she has made—be wholly unmoved by appeals to practical... Continue reading

Eric Schwitzgebel recently took up the question of whether an infinitely extended life must be boring. The discussion ended (when I looked at it) with Eric’s fruitfully suggesting that we look at various cognitive architectures and their capacities for boredom over the long run. No doubt there are many kinds... Continue reading

An article by Alla Katsnelson in Nature (28 April; doi:10.1038/nature.2014.15106; currently free) reports on new results from Jeffrey Mogil, a well-known pain researcher at McGill. Mogil and his team have shown that olfactory exposure to males (humans, rats, cats, dogs, guinea pigs) dampens pain responses in mice. In a paper published in Nature Methods (doi:10.1038/nmeth.2935), Mogil and his team report that even a T-shirt, or the scent of chemicals from a male armpit, had the same effect. The only exception was male cage-mates of the subjects. Women, on the other hand, had no effect on pain sensitivity. Sensitivity to pain was decreased (by about 40%), it turned out, because male scent increased stress, as indicated by increased levels of cortiosterone. That the presence of an experimenter could alter the responses of animals to pain was long suspected. Mogil says it is “something that people have been whispering about at meetings for years […] But no one had bothered to look at this systematically.” Two take-home results are indicated in the article: “It’s the kind of result a lot of people... Continue reading

An article by Alla Katsnelson in Nature (28 April; doi:10.1038/nature.2014.15106; currently free) reports on new results from Jeffrey Mogil, a well-known pain researcher at McGill. Mogil and his team have shown that olfactory exposure to males (humans, rats, cats, dogs, guinea pigs) dampens pain responses in mice. In a paper... Continue reading

This summer I learned to walk. More precisely, I learned to walk normally. My gait had gotten unsteady, and I was dragging my right foot. Work with an excellent physical therapist helped straighten me out. But balance problems, tremors, and hesitations continued. At the beginning of August I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. I want to describe the phenomenology of my version of it, and begin thinking through its implications for the philosophy of perception and action. But first the disease itself. ▶ For a first-person account of Parkinson’s by a neurologist, see this recent article in Nature. What Parkinson’s is The immediate underlying problem is a deficiency of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Levels at diagnosis are typically 30% to 70% below normal. Dopamine is involved in many neural processes, not only motor activity but decision-making and the regulation of emotion. The symptoms from which Parkinson’s is diagnosed — tremor, bradykinesia, rigidity, and postural instability — will in time be accompanied by others, including loss of smell (mine, however, is rather more sensitive than less), autonomic dysfunction, troubled sleep, and dementia. Source:... Continue reading

This summer I learned to walk. More precisely, I learned to walk normally. My gait had gotten unsteady, and I was dragging my right foot. Work with an excellent physical therapist helped straighten me out. But balance problems, tremors, and hesitations continued. At the beginning of August I was diagnosed... Continue reading

[See Mohan Matthen, “Why do movie effects get dated?” at NewAPPS.] Consider two famous stop-motion sequences by Ray Harryhausen: the Cyclops sequence from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and the skeletons sequence from Jason and the Argonauts. In the fiction of Sinbad, there is nothing to indicate that the Cyclops moves otherwise than like a large humanoid animal. Its motions should appear smooth like those of humans. But they don’t. The difference is apparent especially when human actors and the Cyclops are presented in the same frame. Harryhausen may have intended that the motions should be realistically depicted, but his technique falls short, especially now that computer animation sets the standard. The skeletons’ motion as depicted has the slight jerkiness and excessive clarity of stop-motion animation. But skeletons, after all, if they could move, might very well move in an uncanny manner. One can see the sequence as depicting realistically the uncanny motions of skeletons brought to life. Or one can see it as not-quite-realistically depicting ordinary, smooth, physically correct motions. Which option predominates will depend on conventions of depiction.... Continue reading

Catarina Dutilh Novaes’ item on literature and on what, thanks to her and to Helen de Cruz, I now know to call “moral self-licensing” brought to mind some sleuthing I did two months ago. This was in connection with teaching a bit of the “moral uplift through art” literature that Catarina and her commenters discuss. (The review article cited by Catarina, by the way, is available for free here. See also the abstracts at p81 of the program for 2011 meeting of the Association for Consumer Research — one area in which the theory will soon find application…) The trail begins with William James, who in his Briefer Course on Psychology (1915) writes: All Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day world; but woe to him who can only recognize them when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form! The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death... Continue reading

Inspired by some comments of Jennifer Saul on Rebecca Kukla’s remarks concerning the “aggressive, argumentative” style in philosophy, Eric Schliesser and Catarina Dutilh Novaes here at NewAPPS have taken up the question of what I would call the character of philosophy. Does it consist in contests in which adversaries, having occupied positions, not only defend them vigorously but also attack those positions which, being contrary to their own, they take to be opposed to their own? Readers of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors we live by will recognize here a familiar conceit: argument is war. How warlike should philosophy be? Consider an ideal type: the (pure) adversary intends that his or her position should prevail. To be an adversary is, by presumption, to be engaged in a contest, that is, in a collective endeavor in which it makes sense to occupy a position. It is clear from the discussion that no-one really thinks that philosophers should be pure adversaries. We don’t intend that our position should prevail come what may, but that our position should prevail, given that it is (as... Continue reading

Inspired by some comments of Jennifer Saul on Rebecca Kukla’s remarks concerning the “aggressive, argumentative” style in philosophy, Eric Schliesser and Catarina Dutilh Novaes here at NewAPPS have taken up the question of what I would call the character of philosophy. Does it consist in contests in which adversaries, having... Continue reading

Source: Jan Comenius, Orbis pictus (Syracuse, NY: C. W. Bardeen, 1887). The illustration above is from Jan Comenius’ celebrated, oft-reprinted school-book. The Orbis sensualium pictus presents, in words and in pictures, “all the fundamental things in the world and all the acts of life”. In pictures because, after all, “in... Continue reading

Source: Jan Comenius, Orbis pictus (Syracuse, NY: C. W. Bardeen, 1887). The illustration above is from Jan Comenius’ celebrated, oft-reprinted school-book. The Orbis sensualium pictus presents, in words and in pictures, “all the fundamental things in the world and all the acts of life”. In pictures (an expensive novelty at the time) because, after all, “in Intellectu autem nihil est, nisi priùs fuerit in Sensu” (a famous Aristotelian slogan), and so one must exercise the senses, perceiving by their means the differences of things, so as to lay the foundations of wisdom and right action. Source: Jan Comenius, Orbis sensualium pictus bilinguis. (Coronæ: Petrus Pfannenschmiedius, 1675). One could hardly find a better example of what philosophers often ridicule in “folk” conceptions of the soul: the soul presented in ghostly outline, as something that, being visible, could only be corporeal; and if it is corporeal, then to conceive it as spiritual is of course a mistake. Source: Jan Comenius, Orbis sensualium picti pars prima. (Noribergae: Martinus Endter, 1664). Comenius, or rather the illustrator of his text, has set himself the task... Continue reading

In grade school we learn how to divide one whole number by another. Sometimes nothing is left over, but often the division leaves a “remainder”. One learns to say “Eleven divided by five is two remainder one”. Numbers that always leave a remainder when divided by another number other than themselves or 1 are called prime. All other numbers are called composite (except 1, which is neither prime nor composite). ▶ If you want to get to the new mathematics immediately, click here. If you want to take a more leisurely route, keep reading. The fascination of primes, as Emily Riehl notes, often draws people into mathematics. Oliver Sacks describes a pair of twins who, though quite incapable of calculating, could produce, and recognize, very large prime numbers. Sacks, when he understood that the numbers they murmured to each other were primes, joined in, contributing eight- and ten-digit primes. The twins, pleased at his comprehension, and delighted to find even larger primes to contemplate than their own six-figure numbers, soon were “swapping twenty-figure primes” (The Man who Mistook his Wife... Continue reading

In grade school we learn how to divide one whole number by another. Sometimes nothing is left over, but often the division leaves a “remainder”. One learns to say things like “Eleven divided by five is two remainder one”. Numbers that always leave a remainder when divided by another number... Continue reading

As some of you may know, Niall Ferguson engaged in a bit of gay-bashing yesterday (links below), holding that Keynes wouldn’t have cared about future generations because he was gay (the point is apparently taken from Gertrude Himmelfarb: see the Delong item referred to below). Now he has apologized. In... Continue reading

I received a new shoulder-bag for my birthday. Here are the permanent residents of my old bag awaiting transfer to the new. And yes, every single one of these items (with the exception of the mysterious paper) has proved useful on at least one occasion in the last ten years… Row 1 a :iPad to monitor adaptor b :lip balm c :wallet-sized Fresnel magnifier d :Altoids tin (contains 1 Ricola lozenge) e :Staedtler eraser f :weathered wood from the coast of BC Row 2 a :Cheshire Cat button b :fountain pen cartridges c :binder clip d :paper clip (“owl” style) e :tweezers f :mysterious paper wrapped in plastic g :AAA batteries, 3 rechargeable, 2 not Row 3: a :second pair of reading glasses b :magnifier with light c :paper for notes, bookmarks, etc. d :colored pens, mechanical pencils e :comb (freebie from Thai Airways) Row 4: a :45° triangle b :bag for sunglasses c :hand-knit cloth (for cleaning glasses) d :Ministaff colored pencil kit e :rotary lead pointer Row 5: a :pill box b :eyedrops c :miniature portfolio d :notebook with strap Row 6: a :hairbrush (fine) b :hairbrush (coarse) c :shoehorn d :magnifier e :notebook f :notebook Continue reading

Job-talk season will soon be upon us, and before that the formidable Eastern APA. Well-appointed philosophers now come equipped with sleek slide-shows in which years of toil have been reduced to bullet points and fuzzy photos of colleagues in their offices. Although the Dark Ages of Powerpoint have passed, some... Continue reading

Our New Neighbor to the South! A petition at whitehouse.gov urging that Texas should secede from the United States has gathered over 100,000 signatures. Following the iron logic of secession, El Paso and Austin have filed petitions to secede from Texas should it secede from the US, and no doubt certain neighborhoods of those cities will file petitions to secede from the secession from the secession. Texans should really think twice about this. The United States has a tendency to turn the governments of small- to medium-sized oil-rich countries into unstable dictatorships, and then, when it tires of its new playthings, it bombs them. Texas, or rather Texans, would, of course, save a significant amount of money if they no longer paid Federal income tax. But even $389 million doesn’t go very far when one stealth bomber costs a billion. Continue reading

Our New Neighbor to the South! A petition at whitehouse.gov urging that Texas should secede from the United States has gathered over 100,000 signatures. Following the iron logic of secession, El Paso and Austin have filed petitions to secede from Texas should it secede from the US, and no doubt... Continue reading

(In remembrance of, among others, Captain Beefheart.) It may well be that the conception of well-marked generations got its impetus from the world wars, now usually called One and Two. The first, once simply The Great War, was the war of my grandparents; the second, that of my parents. That... Continue reading

(In remembrance of, among others, Captain Beefheart.) It may well be that the conception of well-marked generations got its impetus from the world wars, now usually called One and Two. The first, once simply The Great War, was the war of my grandparents; the second, that of my parents. That distinction was clear, easy to remember, soundly based in events. Edward Lutyens, Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme (1932). Credit: calotype46 at Flickr (license). The first war seems not to have touched my family much. Both my grandfathers were too old to be conscripted, and my Swedish grandfather lived in a neutral country. The second war, on the other hand, touched everyone. All my uncles served; all my aunts contributed on the home front. My father, after receiving a BME courtesy of the Army, travelled to Japan just in time to see Macarthur accept the surrender of the Japanese at Tokyo Bay. Of his experiences he, like many veterans, said very little. It was not for them to speak of “the greatest generation”. That was someone else’s invention.... Continue reading