Tiberius and Gaius Speaking...

Weird...

   

This is pretty bizarre. Do you think Professor Scanlon included comments about my attractiveness in my rec? I certainly hope that if he commented on my looks, he commented favorably.

The National Research Council

    This coming year the National Research Council is doing its large-scale evaluation of university departments, including philosophy. And they have proceeded to subdivide philosophy for their evaluation purposes:

Ned Block (NYU) alerts me to the fact that the new National Research Council study of graduate programs (the last one came out in 1995) proposes to divide Philosophy into the following subfields for evaluation purposes:

Continental Philosophy

Epistemology

Esthetics

Ethics and Political Philosophy

Feminist Philosophy

History of Philosophy

Logic and foundations of mathematics

Metaphysics

Philosophy of Language

Philosophy of Mind

Philosophy of Science

       I have to admit that I find this list to be very puzzling (a lot of the reasons are in the comments). It lacks ancient philosophy, which I think could be easily characterized as its own specialty within philosophy. Putting it under Classics simply doesn't cut it because a lot of the philosophical work is being done in philosophy departments. Obviously, there is a lot of cross-pollination, but it seems to be short-changing philosophy.

    And it seems simply bizarre to lump political philososphy and ethics together but to give esthetics (sic?) its own category. If you are just going to lump it all together, then why not put all three together under value theory? If you are going to split them, why don't you split them up into Esthetics, Metaethics and normative ethics, and political philosophy (with philosophy of law attached). Again, there is non-trivial overlap between ethics and political philosophy (how could there not be?), but people do spend their career studying metaethtical questions that never directly affect scholarship concerning political philosophy, and vice versa. And far more people study just ethics or just political philosophy (in terms of their scholarly output) than just aesthetics.

    Further, the inclusion of Feminist Philosophy is pretty perplexing. First, it seems to represent a perspective of analysis more than a separate category or subject of . It seems that you have feminist ethics, feminist political philosophy, and even feminist philosophy of science and epistemology. What you don't have is a different category of philosophy, Rather, it is a difference (and oftentimes quite valuable) in perspective and emphasis within certain fields.* But if that is all that is necessary to warrant inclusion, then why not race theory or Asian philosophy as separate categories? Certainly there is a sense in which someone can focus on how feminism intersects with philosophy, but this seems to be quite different from the way in which metaphysics or ethics is a subject of philosophical inquiry. It seems like the council can't really decide on a criterion.

* This is part of what worries me about Queer studies, Woman's studies, African-American studies and the like. These new departments seem to cut across disciplines and methodologies. I am not sure how deep or important a critique this really is since maybe the standard disciplines lack shared methodologies and values of inquiry as well (I think anthropology, for example, has been pretty solidly riven in two), but I think it is a source of concern. Again, I have no problem with, and even encourage (not that these people would or should require my permission) people studying sociology with a deep focus in African-American studies or Feminist political philosophy, but I do think that if have these departments where you get a little of everything, it might get confusing and scholarship might get superficial. Of course, many quite brilliant sociologists/psychologists/anthropologists/political scientists etc  do great work in African-American or Women Studies departments. But they do so because they are really great at the discipline and they focus on a particular topic.
    There certainly is some value that the cross-pollination of different disciplines within a deparmtent  provides, but surely there is also great value in learning from people in your particular discipline (sociology or political science) that don't study your particular topic. Wouldn't interdisciplinary programs and centers be a better way of getting the best of both worlds? 

Keira....noooo!

    Not you too. The leggings must be stopped. They are now a threat to national security.

The Malpractice Myth

    When one has the girlfriend whose father is a doctor, one receives the occasional trial lawyers are evil lecture. But Kevin Drum has historically done some good work on this subject. This most recent post rounds up some of the recent studies on the subject. The one I found most interesting was that if medical malpractice became more accurate, then the amount paid out to patients would increase. 

    Everyone repeat after me: insurance companies bad; trial lawyers good.

Memorial Day

    Memorial Day was established in the years after the Civil War in order to honor those who had fallen in the recently ended conflict. And no wonder as the American Civil War was the deadliest in terms of American blood in our history. Around 600,000 people, the vast majority soldiers, died. If a proportionate number of people died today, the deaths would total greater than 5 million.

    I am going to honor the passing of Memorial Day by telling you one of the most inspirational stories from the Battle of Gettysburg. Now, most people today know all about Chamberlain and the 20th Maine, and that is a great story (and for people who say there are no heroes, I point to Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain as the definitive counter-example).

    But I want to talk about the 1st Minnesota, commanded by Colonel William Colvill. On the second day of Gettysburg, Longstreet's en echelon attack against the left flank of the Union lines seemed like it was headed for great success. This was mostly because Daniel Sickles decided to move his corp from strong positions along Cemetary ridge and Little Round Top and into an exposed salient in the Wheat Field and Devil's Den. When Sickles corp broke, it was left to Hancock to put the line back together as the Confederates attacked. When he came upon the broke line, he saw only the 1st Minnesota (a regiment of only 260). To buy time, he gave a simple order to Colonel Colvill, while pointing to a flag of the Confederates: "Advance, Colonel, and take those colors!"

    And the 1st Minnesota charged a vastly superior force and in the face of intense artillery barrage. Suffering 70 percent casualties, and losing every field officer down to the rank of captain, the 1st Minnesota's ferocious attack stopped the Confederate attack long enough for reinforcements to be manuervered into place even though they never took the colors.

    The 1st Minnesota was the only regiment from Minnesota in the Army of Potomac at that time. It had been involved in every major engagement that army had fought in since the beginning of the war. And, astoundingly, they were one of the regiments who received Pickett's Charge just one day later. I think one day a year is the least we can to honor people like this.

Montana Senate

    I have generally avoided posting or caring about the Montana Democratic Senate primary mostly because I have no influence and the Hackett/Ohio affair has made me a little gun shy about committing (not that it really matters, but who wants the aggravation of enraged supporters leaving comments). The Montana race I have been especially wary of because I had assumed that this was a typical DLC/netroots cluster fuck where a personable candidate with no resources sucking up to the blogosphere so they would support him instead of the establishment candidate who had a better chance of winning.

    However, I was wrong. Morrison, the establishment candidate, has a fairly ugly scandal brewing that involves both extramarital sex (whatever) and abuse of power (not whatever). I have no idea if the scandal is true, but Burns is primarily vulnerable because of his relationship with Abramoff and questions concerning his integrity. Why sacrifice that advantage? At the moment, both Tester and Morrison seem to have a roughly equal chance of defeating Burns.

    Further, I have always been nervous when someone has been described as a "populist progressive" since it is generally a euphemism for "economic populist who is a social moderate or even conservative." I have been peeking around for a discussion of Tester's (the outsider candidate) social views, and it seems like they are pretty solid. So, I am pretty impressed at the moment. It seems like a no-brainer to support a progressive candidate who has an equal to better chance of being elected with the less progressive one.

What a yahoo...

    Everytime I make a concerted effort to read the conservative blogosphere, I get quite disappointed. Al Gore recently answered a question about whether we should focus on the harm or the hope of global warming with this response:

Q: There's a lot of debate right now over the best way to communicate about global warming and get people motivated. Do you scare people or give them hope? What's the right mix?

A: I think the answer to that depends on where your audience's head is. In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

And this person responds by saying this:

Well fine then. I'm going to storm into an emergency and claim that my foot is infected with gangrene so that I can jump to the head of the line and have a doctor look at my ingrown toenail right away. After all, an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous my medical condition is is ok as long it will get my doctor to solve the crisis that is my ingrown toenail.

/sarcasm

Folks, this is reading comprehension 101. Is that what Al Gore meant? Did he mean we should lie or stretch the truth about the dangers of global warming? No, of course he didn't. Rather, he said that we should focus on the damage global warming will cause because many people in the United States are ignorant of it even being a problem. Focusing on the solution seems premature when most people are not convinced we are in need of one. Demanding that people make sacrifices won't work unless they realize they really must do so.

For the record, Al Gore is clearly saying that, of all the factual presentations about global warming, presentations on the damage of global warming should be overrepresented numerically or in terms of emphasis  in order to prepare the way for reform.

Anyone want to bet that if Gore ran for President, this wouldn't become a major scandal? Because I would take that action.

A Modest Proposal...

    The Pope asks God why he let the Holocaust happen. I suggest that he let it happen for much the same reason that Santa Claus lets some poor people go through Christmas without presents.

What do we study?

    Neal Tognazzini at the Garden asks how one might respond to the a query about what one studies:

If you were trying to explain what you study to someone who didn't know anything about philosophy, what would you say?  (It should be short and clear, but you can't cheat by just saying "I study ethics".)

I dunno. I have often found the cheating answer pretty satisfying. Most people seem to know what ethics and political philosophy are, and they generally recognize why someone would bother studying, but I roll with a pretty sharp crowd (I mean, just look at my readers). And I think I have it comparatively easy since I study political philosophy: "I study what constitutes just international relations." Seems fairly apropos....

The Midwest

    I am getting a little fucking tired of these cracks against the Midwest. Everywhere I look on the blogosphere, I see comments about how we are podunk, conservative, and prudish. It just irritates me. Here's a list of states in the Midwest (as opposed to the South or the Plains states) as I learned them in my 4th grade geography class: Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota. Here's a list of states that went for Kerry in 2004: Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota. Minnesota Democrats a legendary, and UW-Madison is a cradle of new progressive thought. Milwaukee has had three socialist mayors. Chicago was a center of union organizing and a birthplace of the New Deal. Illinois, after California and New York, is the biggest solid blue state in the Union. Just pisses me off.