Rolling Philosophy

bitter old racists on twitter, why even engage

.@RichardDawkins "Continental Breakfast". What kind of a Breakfast is region-specific? Continental Bacon? Continental Eggs? What nonsense!

Love the fact that most of the replies turn into a discussion on Ayn Rand. Of course.

.@RichardDawkins "Continental Breakfast". What kind of a Breakfast is region-specific? Continental Bacon? Continental Eggs? What nonsense!

― emil.y, Friday, May 17, 2013 1:03 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is amazing

generally his disdain for any kind of question that can have more than one answer

I've been reading the new Isaiah Berlin collection Against the Current which is also awesome on the same subject. I have a lot of triumphalist Sam Harris-loving scientist acquaintances so while reading I'm constantly smiling smugly to myself all like "yeah, take that!" Which is not really productive but.

ban scientists

philosopher-scientists like georg lichtenberg are the best

perhaps alan sokal is the most sympathetic example of this pious rationalist strain, but he's still lacking in generosity

i find Sokal pretty far from sympathetic tbh

yeah that's not saying much. hated what i read of 'beyond the hoax', some awful stuff on kuhn.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc3/970550_627836968047_1532407780_n.jpg

"wright"

ouch.

i have to admit i've written a few letters like that (or emails). whenever i read an obscure or out-of-print book that i really love and if the author isn't well known i try to let them know that someone out there read it and liked it. i've gotten some really nice responses.

Is there a good intro text for philosophy of mind, with particular attention to language if poss, that's targeted at psych students who need their minds broadening? (me)

do you mean like Daniel Dennett kind of stuff?

not necessarily a fan but Lakoff and Johnson's stuff might be helpful and up your alley.

if you really wanna get freaky try Douglas R. Hofstadter.

I wish I knew what I meant! I'm not very inspired by experimental psychology at the moment and I'm trying to work out whether it's because in my lab/on my courses there just isn't enough effort to link things back to theory, or whether it's something more fundamental about the problem of conceptual confusion in experimental psych. (I haven't read any Wittgenstein - that is just an isolated snippet I happen to have heard about that struck a chord...) I certainly ought to read more Dennett (only ever got half way into Consciousness Explained). Hadn't even heard of L&J or Hofstadter - Hofstadter looks fascinating (especially the Strange Loop) but not the place to start; I'll check out L&J.

hey everybody come to this conference philosophyandtheoutside.wordpress.com/

looks like fun!

ljubljana, Hofstadter is fascinating and Gödel Escher Bach is a rewarding read for general audiences on a lot of topics. It's the book that turned my undergrad advisor on to AI when he was an aimless young person in Boston after graduation. Super idiosyncratic but lotsa fun. We used this anthology (Crumley, ed., Problems in Mind) in the one class I took on the subject and there's a good assortment of "classix" in there, including such greatest hits as Meditations II and VI, "Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes", and "What is it like to be a bat?".

Weirdly it doesn't contain Turing's Computing machinery and intelligence; I will refrain from making grandiose claims about its importance but you should read it right now.

The Stanford encyclopedia article on consciousness is a good intro.

Hofstedter is fun but more a "gee whiz" guy than making light of the unknown.

Making light or shining light? Dennett certainly in the former camp. There are no unknowns in his humble opinion.

thanks all, I will delve in.

shining light

ljubljana if you end up more interested in the philo side of psych, there's a great interdisciplinary Ph.D. program between psych (cog sci, neuroscience, etc) & philo at Washington University in St. Louis. you might also / instead think about the masters in philo programs at Tufts (where Dennett teaches) & at Georgia State (which has become a leader in the philosophy of neuroscience

Wertsch is at St. Louis, isn't he? He's actually the only somewhat-philosopher I've read! I still have Mind As Action somewhere.

So tempted to look at those programs, but as an international student I don't think I could transfer without nixing all savings and taking on debt, which is something I don't want to do for grad school because I'm lol old and won't ever manage to work it off. Good to know where and what they are, though. When I was choosing programs I did look into working with a particular philo-psych guy at UMD, but got an email back saying firmly that if I didn't have an undergrad degree in philo then there is no point applying. That seemed inflexible, but if you added '... or show us evidence at an interview that you've read extensively' or something like that, then it would be very reasonable I think. I definitely can't say that at this point.

grad programs in the USA don't distinguish between international & citizen students. you'd get a fellowship if you were admitted into Wash U that would pay your tuition + a stipend that would cover living expenses (around $15k a year). Georgia State offers every admitted student free tuition + health insurance, & many students get fellowships for living expenses as well. that's for a masters! they have a neurophilosophy masters track there.

so you wouldn't get rich but you needn't plan on much if any debt

the advantage of those masters programs is that they have extremely good placement records in Ph.D. programs in philosophy. they're *designed* for people without strong backgrounds in philosophy. the two I listed are the two best such programs in the USA, & they're both tops in the interface of psych & philo.

Wertsch has an appointment in the joint program at Wash U that I mentioned

Interesting! - I knew some US programs would not distinguish, but thought this was limited to a relatively small number of programs - will look into it. Also v interesting about the masters. Tbh I am not sure that at 41 I can face spending 6 or so more years in school though (vs. finishing this program as fast as I possibly can, maybe in 2 more years instead of 3 more years if I am lucky and my projects go well). But I will for sure look into it, and will then take it to the grad school threads - sorry for slight derail!

no derail! I am happy to keep philosophy rolling

rolling off philosophy 2013

popped a Dennett three hours ago now I'm coming down hard :/

What do people think of Giulio Tononi? I read one of his books and enjoyed it but like a lot of materialist accounts of consciousness it sorta ended with a lot of hand waving.

another guy worth looking at is perhaps Antonio Damasio

Yes, I did read The Feeling Of What Happens but now I've forgotten it all

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/shortcuts/2013/may/22/why-philosophy-students-do-most-drugs

i couldn't possibly comment.

while I'm struggling to sleep I'm going to share a story I remembered earlier today, which I think I read in some '70s book on Whitehead a few years ago though I haven't been able to locate it again* - apparently when he was at Cambridge, so some time in first decade of the 1900s, Whitehead had an academic role that involved selecting books to be translated into English. Among the books that was suggested was Husserl's Logical Investigations, but Whitehead passed it over, knowing only the title and having little to distinguish it from the slew of other books with similar titles at the time. He much later learned about Husserl's work, saw the resonance with what he and his colleagues were doing at that time and beyond, and regretted not ordering the translation, but ultimately I don't think Husserl was translated at all until the '60s. By which time of course the gap between post-Fregeans and post-Husserlians was well-developed and only set to expand further. So we can safely blame Whitehead, polymath, pluralist, and tireless bridger of gaps, for bringing about the break between analytic and continental philosophy.

*so, forgive my misrememberings

wow! that's a really cool story--i had no idea Husserl wasn't translated until the 60s.

a history of philosophy read through the vagaries of available translations would make for a fun read, though i don't imagine anyone's too desperate to set out working on it. e.g. i've heard people suggest that the standard readings of kierkegaard are bizarrely warped because they come filtered through philosophers who were reading french translations of bad german translations of the danish, misunderstandings accumulating everywhere along the way.

looking it up a bit more i see that there were some translations of husserl in the '30s, but most of it went untouched, logical investigations not appearing in english till 1970.

yeah id be very interested in a study like that. spending as i do a lot of time in peirce studies it's really interesting to see the reception of his thought go through stages as more things became available and inevitably filtered through the historical moment it arrives in.

amongst philosophers in the English-speaking world in the first half of the 20th century, though, German proficiency was standard, so I don't think the lack of translation is quite the problem you're suggesting

especially given how tricky Husserl is to translating.

& in the German and Polish-speaking worlds, also critical in the "break", this was def no problem. Carnap & Gödel knew their Husserl.

that's all to say, I don't think the "break" was chiefly a linguistic problem.

cf. http://www.amazon.com/Parting-Ways-Cassirer-Heidegger-ebook/dp/B004XOZ892

yeah i slightly overstate the case for joekz, but these historical contingencies are interesting nevertheless. and there's also something of just having the literature readily available, as in the case of bergson and husserl, who didn't really seem to bother to become aware of each other beyond second hand information until quite late in their lives.

it's still the case in France today that scholars here are frequently ignorant of what scholars are doing in other countries. again, it's not the language: they've that under control. but there's a "village" aspect to French intellectual life, wherein you study the works of contemporaries in your village, communicated largely through conferences but also through writings; & you don't venture outside this. it's what the French call "localisme". in Paris this means that you might not even know about the work being done by someone across town, or even down the street (if you're working in the 5th or 6th). & you don't really *want* to! you certainly don't *need* to in order to get by; for these villages are self-sustaining in terms of publishing, giving conferences...& yes, getting & giving jobs (though the nationalization of job hiring committees has somewhat mitigated that).

my understanding is that this "provinciality" is not new to France; that it was in place in the era you're talking about.

in the face of being wrong (not that I'm wrong wrong but you're quite right that France was a special case for that kind of academic factionalism even before it became the unfortunate standard in philosophy) I'm going to go with default internet protocol and respond with some cats:

http://binarythis.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/judith-butler-explained-with-cats/

so I thought I'd update everyone on my book. It was rejected last summer by the first press I sent it too. I just spend about 5 months doing heavy revisions and streamlining it and basically just improving the flow of it. very surprisingly got my proposal accepted by an even better university press and they even seem pretty enthusiastic about it. I'll send the full manuscript in a few weeks. so cross your fingers for me.

so chances at getting a book published have *slightly* improved but still gotta run the gauntlet of grouchy reviewers.

but I swear the learning curve of this process should be worth another degree at least!

wrote that on my phone so that's my excuse this time for poor grammar and spelling. this time.

cool man, congrats

rah

well done sir

thanks guys. obviously I may still not get this thing off the ground but I thought it would be fun to share the process.

One of the previous two reviewers was totally brutal though. To the point I could only read his response one time and then had to delete it. The other was very encouraging and really helped me.

very nice! good luck!