Saturday, October 6, 2012

Choosing Our Motives

Leiter has a new post with a poll about the breakdown between vegans, vegetarians, and carnivores in philosophy. While this is interesting information to have, I guess, I wonder about the second part of the poll, the one that asks people whether their eating is shaped by ethics. First, I have no idea how philosophers can still believe that any of us have access to our motives, so I'm generally skeptical of people who claim to be vegetarians for ethical reasons (apologies to those of you who do so claim, but I think you're wrong). Let's say that you believe eating meat is wrong. You also find it easy and convenient, for whatever reason, not to eat meat. There's a correlation. You know that there is a correlation. But how could you possibly establish that there is a causal connection? Of course if you believe that you ought to X, and you do in fact X, it's extremely tempting to pat yourself on the back for a job well done. But how do you know that you've done the job? I think we in general have reason to be suspicious of ascribing efficacious motives to ourselves, especially in cases where we are likely particularly prone to self-deception. And so we should, perhaps, try to avoid encouraging the practice. Here I am only making an epistemic point: there is no introspective method for determining which of your motives in fact caused your action (especially since (i) we do not know all our motives, and (ii) we need not be aware of those motives in order for them to have causal efficacy). But I think there is also an important point about the metaphysics of agency: we tend to think that we have a power to choose between our motives (some--mistakenly, in my view--call this power "free will"). But why should we think we have this power?

Sunday, April 22, 2012

We're Ranking Non-Continental Continental Journals Now?

Ah, a lovely new Leiter poll, this time ranking "the best journals for scholarship on the post-Kantian traditions in Continental philosophy." Very sensible results, aside from EJP and Inquiry, if you assume that the best way to do scholarship on Continental philosophy is not to do it at all. Oh, sorry, PPR is in second place. I assume because having the word "Phenomenology" in your title means that your content is continental. And as for those silly journals that do publish on continental philosophy, well it doesn't matter if we call them "International Journal of Philosophical Studies" or something else that they aren't called, since most of the people voting most likely don't read continental philosophy in the first place.

Sigh.

I actually did look through the TOC's of the journals listed for the past few years, so I think my assessment of the current tally (namely, that those voting mostly don't read continental philosophy) has to be accurate, since most of the journals Leiter lists haven't published a single continental paper paper in the past two years, or perhaps only a single continental paper. So it's hard to imagine what this exercise is supposed to prove, unless Leiter is literally looking for confirmation that good continental philosophy is done only in analytic contexts. The contest seems a little rigged, though.

For those who have difficulty with online sarcasm, by the way: I take it that EJP and Inquiry are obviously the two best journals in the category. PPR, on the other hand, has no reason to be there (despite recently publishing Katsafanas's awesome article on Nietzsche and constitutivism; that only shows that PPR will occasionally publish good papers, not that it's any more a reasonable place to go look for scholarship in continental philosophy than NYU is a reasonable place to go study continental philosophy).

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Belated Note on Gutting on the Analytic-Continental Divide

I'm guessing everyone who might read this blog caught Gutting's piece on Bridging the Analytic-Continental Divide when it first appeared in The Stone way back. I'm a fan of Gutting, generally, but have to say that something about this piece didn't quite work for me: if Gutting is right about what continental philosophy is about, in any case, it seems like it can't be written more clearly. That's upsetting.

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Thursday, January 5, 2012

APA Savings

From a recent IHE article about the smoker at the APA (for background on the most recent criticisms of the smoker, see here):
[APA executive director David Schrader] noted the concerns of some women and said there had been informal discussions at the APA. Some had suggested a cash bar instead of free alcohol as a way of tempering bad behavior by making it a bit difficult to drink too much.
Seriously? Their plan is to save money on alcohol (keep in mind that this year the only free alcoholic alternatives were Budweiser and Bud Light) and spin it as a way of being more welcoming to women in philosophy? Does anybody else find this suspicious?

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Personal Identity, Duplication, and Divine Justice

One standard criticism of the memory (or virtually any psychological continuity) account of personal identity is that it is vulnerable to duplication. If person A is somehow duplicated, so that the resulting persons are B and C, and both have A’s memories and are otherwise psychologically continuous with A, this shows that psychological continuity cannot be the bearer of personal identity. After all, in this case, B would be identical with A, and C would be identical with A, so by the transitivity of identity, B would be identical with C. But since B and C are, ex hypothesi, two distinct persons, they cannot both be the same person as A. I have never found this argument convincing or relevant—it seems to me to miss what personal identity is about, because “same person” doesn’t mean “same variable” and personal identity involves temporal considerations that the duplication argument simply ignores. If we want to insist on using personal identity for a formal, atemporal, relation, my sense is that Parfit is right—personal identity isn’t a real property to begin with and we should switch to a different word that will be less confusing to metaphysicians. But I was just reading Lynne Rudder Baker’s summary of Gareth Matthews’ religiously motivated attempt to save the memory criterion and it strikes me as completely off track; let’s hope psychological continuity theorists don’t need to appeal to intuitions this vague!

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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Why Bother Talking to Analytic Philosophers?

Continental philosophers interested in communicating with their analytic analytic counterparts sometimes express frustration: why should they have to do all the work? It sometimes seems as if, in such situations, continental philosophers have to completely translate someone like Heidegger into analytic-speak and then relate the translation to clear, current problems in the analytic literature. That’s a lot of work! And for what? To get people who refuse to read Heidegger—obstinately, it seems—to accept that yes, maybe Heidegger had one good idea somewhere? At least, that’s what it can look like, and in light of this it isn’t surprising that so many continental philosophers want to retreat into an echo chamber of textual exegesis. Why bother to explain something, one might ask, to people who seem to have no interest in what you’re explaining, and who certainly won’t meet you halfway, but expect you to come to them? This isn’t helped by the fact that some analytic philosophers—though I think significantly fewer than one might expect—are actively hostile to continental thought. Consider, for example, this missive on Heidegger by Simon Blackburn, who seems to have skimmed Heidegger for the explicit purpose of criticizing him (to balance things, it may be worth noting that Blackburn did something similar with regard to Donald Davidson, though I’m not sure how comparable that hatchet job is). Or, perhaps even worse, Paul Edwards’s seemingly intentional misreading of Heidegger (there are few authors one can’t perversely misread if one sets one’s mind to it and if one’s colleagues will praise—rather than condemn—one for doing so). Ugliest of all, perhaps, a blurb from J.J.C. Smart on the back of the Edwards book claims that Edwards “explains clearly why those of us who are repelled by Heidegger’s style of philosophizing are right not to read him.” With garbage like this in the air, a Heidegger scholar might be excused for thinking that these here analytic fellows just aren’t worth talking to.

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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Why is so much Continental Philosophy so Bad?

Given the recent discussions over at the New Apps blog, I want to briefly comment on a question in some ways at the heart of things: why is so much continental philosophy so bad?

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Thursday, June 9, 2011

X-Phi, True Selves, and what Philosophy is Actually About: Knobe Again

Unlike certain elements in the philosophy blogosphere, I've been pretty happy with New York Times' The Stone. True, a few of the articles have been pretty bad, some haven't been all that enlightening, and I've made my views of the Stone's editor, Simon Critchley's, contributions to the column known (as well as the view that Critchley can be great in other contexts). But overall, I think it's had great stuff—I was happy to see Strawson featured, interested to read Priest, and—frankly—I liked that Bernstein piece about the tea party (I still don't know why Leiter hated it); with Burge, Pippin, Clark, Nussbaum, Railton, Bauer (writing about Beauvoir and Gaga—I threw that one right at my students) and that neat Gutting piece on religion, you have to be a bit near-sighted to condemn the whole enterprise because of a few pieces that fail. But what I really don't get is why Knobe just got his second piece (this time about the "true self") in the Stone. And I'm going to complain about it, because that's what blogs are for. And then, at the end, I'm going to say something about what I'd really like to see in a piece on the "true self" written by a philosopher for a popular audience, something that would give an indication of what philosophy is actually about.

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Friday, April 22, 2011

CFP: Time and Agency

CALL FOR PAPERS TIME AND AGENCY

George Washington University

November, 18-19 2011

Invited Speakers:

J. David Velleman, New York University

Lynne Rudder Baker, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Shaun Gallagher, University of Central Florida

John J. Drummond, Fordham University

Actions have a duration, they sometimes follow on intentions directed toward the future and are themselves sometimes directed toward bringing about future events. They may also be caused by past events, or be brought on by motives or reasons. Actions are also individuated from within a temporally extended continuous stream of activity. They are performed by agents, whose selves or practical identities may or may not be unified through psychological continuity, through their standing plans for the future, or through narratives. Agents inhabit a world that is temporally ordered, and that ordering is reflected in action. In seeing themselves as standing under an obligation, agents recognize reasons for future actions, and in judging them responsible for those actions we in turn trace their agency to past decisions on their part.

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Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Naive Action Theory: First Replies

Roman has some of the same questions I have. I’ll leave (1) until Chapter 8, ‘Action and Time.’ I think I know the answer to (2), but then again Thompson’s larger points get lost on me if I’m not paying sustained concentration, which is often enough that, well, Thompson’s larger points get lost on me at times.

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