The occasional thoughts of a working-class philosopher.
...is a collection of award-winning animation shorts in which your favorite movies are adapted to the very small screen, and performed in all of 30 seconds by freaky little bunnies. Really. Check it out here. "The Exorcist" is my favorite. Funny, and strange, stuff.
FUTON CHAIR - Excellent Condition
Ibanez IC350 Iceman Electric Guitar + Hard Case
Bass Guitar - Yamaha RBX-300
Moridira EX-06 Hurricane Electric Guitar
Peavey Minx Bass Amp (75W, 8 Ohms) - Good Condition
Microphone Stand - Excellent Condition
What's the chances of being an inconspicuous graduate student in history at the University of Texas and have the same name as a top-notch swimmer in the Olympics? This guy has gotten more press in the last few months than he will probably get during his entire professional academic career. I mean, the least he could do is start up a "Not that Michael Phelps" mailing list encouraging people to study history or something. One must capitalize on such rare opportunities! Especially given the attention-starved life of every other graduate student in the world.
(Here is the first instance of injustice.)
A new edition of the Philosophical Gourmet Report, what has become the authoritative ranking of graduate programs in philosophy in the English-speaking world, will be out this Fall and it's fair to say that the heirarchy will certainly change. The present rankings are almost two years old and the new ones will no doubt reflect the many faculty changes that have taken place since then within departments all over the United States and beyond.
As Brian Leiter has remarked, my own department, the University of Texas, has improved dramatically since the last rankings were published. The very recent appointments of eminent philosophers Jonathan Dancy and George Bealer, with other senior appointments to follow, have arguably put it among the top 10 departments in the country.
And in fact there is a strong argument to be made for this. To start with, Texas is well represented in the world of academic journals; we have one of the past editors of the most prestigious philosophical journal in the world, Mind (Mark Sainsbury), the current editor of the leading journal in moral and political philosophy Ethics (John Deigh), and the current editor of a leading journal in ancient Greek philosophy and science, Aperion (Jim Hankinson).
The department's reputation as an international center for the study of ancient Greek philosophy is over thirty years old; we have one of the world's leading authorities on the Pre-Socratic philosophers (Alex Mourelatos), an internationally known translator and scholar of Plato (Paul Woodruff), and leading scholars of Aristotle, the Skeptics, and the Stoics (Jim Hankinson, Steve White). And coverage in the history of philosophy does not stop there: UT has possibly the most distinguished Hobbes scholar in North America (Al Martinich), a number of excellent historians of twentieth century analytic philosophy (Ed Allaire, Herb Hochberg, Mark Sainsbury), and possibly the world's authority on Existentialist philosophy (Robert C. Solomon). Texas is also probably the best place in the world to study Nietzsche (see Leiter's informative discussion of this.)
But Texas is far from a department entrenched in history: we have developed into a center for research in logic and the philosophy of language (Nicolas Asher, Rob Koons, Al Martinich, David Sosa, Dan Bonevac, Mark Sainsbury...) as well as the philosophy of mind (Michael Tye, who is one of the leading philosophers of mind at the moment, David Sosa, George Bealer, and now Adam Pautz, a recent student of Ned Block and recent junior hire). We are gaining increasing notoriety as a place for studying moral, legal, and political philosophy (John Deigh, Jonathan Dancy, Robert Kane, Sosa, and Brian Leiter). Also, don't forget the rise to prominence of the Law and Philosophy Program (see Leiter's post on this) and our strengths in philosophy of science (Sahotra Sarkar, Cory Juhl, Jim Hankinson, Bob Causey).
As if the foregoing isn't reason enough to count Texas among the very best programs in the world, another reason is that many of those departments which outranked Texas two years ago have lost or will lose some of their most distinguished faculty. UC-Berkeley has lost Donald Davidson, Richard Wollheim, and Bernard Williams, three towering figures who are not easily replaceable (to say the least); Arizona may lose David Chalmers to a long-term stay in Australia; and Notre Dame has remained basically the same over the last few years while Texas has only improved.
So I think the bottom line is that Texas Philosophy is engaged in a kind of upward mobility we rarely see of graduate programs, in any discipline (the last time this happened in philosophy was probably about 15 years ago when NYU decided to buy up a bunch of world-class philosophers and instantly became a top-5 department.) It will be exciting to see the advances the department makes in the next two years, as the past two have been extraordinary. Viva Tejas!
Thanks, this piece clears up everything.
In 1913, two philosophy professors, one from Harvard and the other from Cambridge, published a work in 3 volumes called Principia Mathematica, which tried to show that the whole of mathematics is reducible, in principle at least, to a set of expressions in symbolic logic. The project was that ambitious, and while it is widely agreed that they failed to show this, most people regard the work as one of the great achievements in the history of philosophy. Unfortunately, I'm convinced that a very small number of people understand what the hell the book says. (Just look at another recent essay on the work; the author doesn't dare discuss the particular arguments of the book, but only discusses the things other people have said about it!)
Hence the need for an entire essay on the notation used there. It's too bad the essay is as incomprehensible as the original work!
Here's the argument:
(Premise 1) Consider the position the Roman Catholic Church takes in this bizarre story of a 9-year old girl whose First Communion was invalidated because, due to health reasons, she took a rice wafer instead of a wheat wafer at communion. The local diocese is reported as ruling that "the girl can receive a low-gluten wafer, or just drink wine at Communion, but that anything without gluten does not qualify."
(Premise 2) Recall the good ole Catholic doctrine of transubstantion - the view that when a priest during mass says the magic words, e.g., "This is my body which has been given up for you...", the wheat wafer is actually transformed into the body of Jesus. I wondered whether Catholics still advocated this metaphysically dubious idea; I wasn't disappointed. Here's a passage from the most recent edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: "In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist 'the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained.'" (Section 1374, quoting the Council of Trent, 1551, emphasis in text).
(Conclusion) And so the only reasonable conclusion to draw is: God is made of gluten. (A weaker, and slightly less exciting, implication might be simply that wheat is a divine substance. But why not bite the wafer - I mean, the bullet?)
I'm surprised that someone hasn't drawn the further, obvious conclusion from all this: the Atkins Diet is blasphemous and therefore seriously immoral.
why urban life should be avoided: human beings are so alienated and dehumanized by their surroundings that when they happen upon normal human interaction, they make a 'craze' - and a business - out of it. Sigh.
Such was the scene last night, when over 40,000 Austinites welcomed back homeboy Lance Armstrong from his historic 6th Tour de France win. For the 24 hours before I took this picture, I told myself I couldn't care less about the whole thing. Then, I found myself hopping on my bike to soak up the spectacle - and what a spectacle it was! There's no telling when the last event of this magnitude took place in downtown Austin (my guess was Lyndon Johnson's funeral in the 1970s). Stage lights and big screens on every block, and each side, of Congress Ave. Concession stands selling all sorts of Lance Armstrong (and "Live Strong") paraphernalia. 99.8% of the Austin Police Department in uniform. Much of downtown shut down for two days. Some might argue it was a little over the top - but so, I guess, is what he has accomplished. Easily one of the great athletes in American history. The fact that he's a cancer survivor will probably be a footnote in sports history, but it makes him that much more extraordinary here and now. There was a genuine sense of support in the air at this parade (where he pedalled up to the Capitol from the South, in khakis no less!, waving at all the cameras). It seemed liked there were plenty of hometown folk (to the extent that Austin has such a thing) in attendance who probably had an overwhelming sense of "hometown-boy-makes-good" (to say the least). All in all worth seeing.
The whole thing for some reason made me (re)affirm my enthusiasm for cycling as a primary form of transportation. I anticipate a blog post devoted solely to that topic shortly, but I'll just say now that it's refreshing to live in a city where biking is such an accepted, even expected, daily activity.
(1) An article in today's Wall Street Journal (p. A4 I think) entitled (something like) "Our Big Fat Greek Olympics." An intelligent and interesting piece on the significance to the Greeks of today of the Olympics being held in Athens this year and the complicated dynamic of modern Greek identity and politics, as well as some interesting historical tidbits about the Olympics itself(including its survival through the Roman conquest of the first century A.D., and its reinvention in 1896 by the then German leader who thought it would promote international peace and good will.) The writer is obviously not very sympathetic to the modern Greek "cause" (if there is one, as he says.) No surprise, since he's an established writer of the rather orthodox Times Literary Supplement in London. Nevertheless, worth a read.
(2) The cover story of The Economist magazine on the continuing crisis in Sudan (the same one I discussed earlier.)
(3) Jack Nicholson (yeah, the actor) writes a moving and funny homage/obituary of Marlon Brando in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. It is particuarly interesting because Nicholson was his next-door neighbor for over 30 years in southern California - and shares a few good stories about what it was like to be just across the yard from one of the great actors of all time. Check it out. Some short excerpts are here.
Having recently reached the 20,000 hits mark, in just under ten months, I wanted to thank everyone for reading! With an interesting and busy schedule ahead of me in the Fall, I think the blog will develop in different ways as the year goes on.
I caught a little of the "live feed" coverage of the Democratic National Convention on CNN today. The footage I saw was very C-SPANish: live, unedited, unexciting, somewhat amusing, yet very informative. John Kerry was shooting the breeze with (I think) a small group of Boston war veterans, while waiting for his ship to come in to travel across the Boston Harbor for another rally this afternoon. I should say: he was barely shooting the breeze. The most conspicious feature of this segment was the fact that Kerry seemed utterly and completely exhausted. His part of the conversation consisted of "yes", "uh, huh", "oh, sure", "yes, I talked to [some speaker at the convention] last night, wasn't he great?" He struck me as simply trying to stay awake - a far cry, of course, from trying to impress voters.
I then began to think about what his gruelling schedule must be like, and how long he's maintained it, i.e., throughout the primary. It's amazing that a guy his age can go on for weeks getting only 4-5 hours of sleep a night (if that) and still manage to smile for the cameras. But it's a wonder that the campaign meisters behind the curtain agree that it's alright for him to maintain such a schedule. Compare, for example, world-class athletes; you can bet Lance gets a good night's rest before and during his races. And boxers are always on a strict regimen before, e.g., a big prize fight. Why don't politicians follow this same approach? I think the same question applies to emergency room interns who are required to take 24 hour shifts. Why? Because the job might demand that one day? Perhaps. But most of the doctors I know get their sleep, as I'm sure does the President of the United States. You can't engage with people, or be quick with your facts, policies, and arguments, if you're dozing off. In any case, it's fun to imagine John Kerry as Mike Tyson.
