David - Vision's 'Veritas: The Correspondance Theory and It's Critics'

"Early in the 20th century, Russell and Moore maintained that a belief is true iff it corresponds with a fact, false iff it doesn't. This theory of truth is but one member of a large family whose various members invoke various relations, relating truthbearers of various sorts to worldly items of various ontological categories. In view of this multiplicity of versions of "the" correspondence theory, one might think the first item on the agenda should be to zoom in on one specific version and lay it out in some detail. But that, according to Vision, is not such a good idea. He points out that the main action in debates about correspondence is not about this or that specific version but about the viability of the correspondence project as a whole. If we tie our hands at the outset to one specific version, we will get enmeshed in debating the pros and cons of that particular formulation, losing sight of the more basic issues and the bigger picture. Not surprisingly, then, most of Vision's book is a general discussion and defense of the bigger correspondence picture. He conducts the discussion in informal terms and uses various alternative "broad characterizations" of correspondence-type theories, driving home the point that he does not want us to get hung up on the specifics of any one formulation." - NDPR.

Dalrymple - 'The Meaning of Beheading'

"You don’t have to be a follower of Jung to discern something deeply symbolic in these beheadings by self-appointed executioners. To sever the head from the body, at least nowadays when we have a more refined sensibility, is not merely to kill: It is symbolically to annihilate not only the biological existence of the beheaded, but the very thoughts he has had during his lifetime. To throw away a head as if it were a worthless inanimate object is to deny in the most categorical way possible any ideas that it might have had while living. It is to imply that only correct thoughts can henceforth be allowed to exist in heads, the kind of thoughts that the executioners themselves have; not until there is unanimity in thoughts, they imply, will our heads rest easy on our shoulders.

One hardly needs to emphasize the terrifying demonstration effect of the decapitation of supposed infidels by people to whom plenty of bullets are available as an alternative, swifter, and more certain method of procuring death. We conclude, as we are intended to conclude, that these are fierce and ruthless people whose belief in their own desert-tribal righteousness is unshakable. We should never forget that to commit barbarity in the name of righteousness is one of the greatest joys known to man — or at least to many men — and not just to Islamists, though at the moment it is they alone who have the courage of their barbarity, and rejoice publicly in it." - National Review.

Didn't Foucault make a similar point, somewhere, in Discipline and Punish?

Berlin - 'The State of Europe: Christmas Eve, 1989'

"The study of the ideas and activities of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia has occupied me for some years, and to find that, so far from being buried in the past, this movement—as it is still right to call it—has survived and is regaining its health and freedom, is a revelation and a source of great delight to me. The Russians are a great people, their creative powers are immense, and, once set free, there is no telling what they may give to the world. A new barbarism is always possible, but I see little prospect of it at present. That evils can, after all, be conquered, that the end of enslavement is in progress, are things of which men can be reasonably proud." - Isaiah Berlin, Granta.

[Hat Tip: 3QuarksDaily]

Chomsky Voted World's Top Public Intellectual

Noam Chomsky has been voted the world's top public intellectual, in a poll conducted by Prospect Magazine and Foreign Policy.

According to FP, Chomsky beat Umberto Eco, Richard Dawkins, Václav Havel, Christopher Hitchens, Paul Krugman, Jürgen Habermas, Amartya Sen, Jared Diamond, Salman Rushdie, Naomi Klein, Shirin Ebadi, Hernando de Soto, Bjørn Lomborg, Abdolkarim Soroush, Thomas Friedman, Pope Benedict XVI, Eric Hobsbawm, Paul Wolfowitz, and Camille Paglia.

It is interesting to note the number of philosophers (in the broad sense) hanging around in the top ten.

Duncan Cambell, in The Guardian, aptly observed "The most striking aspect of the list is the shortage of the young, the female and the French."

The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook

"October 12

My eye has become inflamed. I hate Camus ...

November 21

Camus came into the restaurant today. He did not know I was in the kitchen, and before I sent out his meal I loogied in his soup. Sic semper tyrannis.

November 23

Ran into some opposition at the restaurant. Some of the patrons complained that my breakfast special (a page out of Remembrance of Things Past and a blowtorch with which to set it on fire) did not satisfy their hunger. As if their hunger was of any consequence! "But we're starving," they say. So what? They're going to die eventually anyway. They make me want to puke. I have quit the job. It is stupid for Jean- Paul Sartre to sling hash. I have enough money to continue my work for a little while." [Italics added] - The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook.

[Hat Tip to Stalking Sophia; thanks!]

Pappas - Destree and Smith's 'Socrates' Divine Sign: Religion, Practice and Value in Socratic Philosophy'

"The Socrates depicted in Plato's dialogues spoke of a daimonion signal that came to him. That word daimonion is an adjective meaning "daimôn-ish" -- divine, or maybe what the English of earlier centuries called "weird."

Anyway the sign came as some kind of voice and Socrates claimed to have heard it since childhood. It was apotreptic rather than protreptic, never commanding Socrates to act some way but only making sure he heard the discouraging word whenever he chanced to embark on a harmful action (Apology 31d).

Xenophon's Socrates heard a somewhat different voice, one that did not hesitate to endorse one action over another. Plato consistently presents an inhibiting divine agent.

Xenophon and Plato agree however that the divine sign of Socrates needs specially to be discussed in connection with the trial at which Socrates defended himself with such famous unsuccess. In Plato's account of the trial, Socrates remarks on having heard no spooky peep that day either on his way to the courts or during his (impromptu, haughty) defense speech. He accepts the news of his death sentence with equanimity and even good cheer on the grounds that since the daimonion did not stop him, the death that will follow his behavior must not be a bad thing (Apology 40a-c)." - NDPR.

Possibly relevant for those writting papers on Socrates at present ...

Al-Saji - Young's 'On Female Experience'

"To Young’s credit, she is clearly aware of the ways in which the “aesthetic freedom” that Western middle-class women take in their clothing is embedded in patriarchal consumer capitalism and in exploitative and imperialist projects with respect to other cultures (p. 74). But if part of the motivation for expressing women’s experience and desires is to generate political solidarity between women, then more attention needs to be paid to how certain experiences are idealized to the exclusion of others.[4] This becomes important when the idealized (Western, middle-class, etc.) experience is identified as providing a certain freedom for women (albeit aesthetic or imaginative). The danger is, then, that this modality of freedom becomes presented as normative for all women." - NDPR.

Question - What's Wrong With This Argument?

A couple of anonymous vistors have left us with some interesting observations of late. One left the following, here:

"does this work? and if not why not? and if so why so?
NOBODY IS PERFECT
I AM NOBODY
THEREFORE, I AM PERFECT

ONLY GOD IS PERFECT
THEREFORE I AM GOD
THUS I HAVE PROVED I EXIST

PROOF DENIES FAITH
WITHOUT FAITH, GOD IS NOTHING
THEREFORE, I DO NOT EXIST"

In the interests of answering anonymous' question, it is brought to the attention of the general reader. Anonymous, it is supposed, would be grateful for any thoughts or comments.

Benjamin - 'Theses on the Concept of History'

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable." - 'Theses on the Concept of History', Thesis VIII.

Sciaraffa - Hetcher's 'Norms In A Wired World'

"One of Hetcher's main aims is to provide an account of ... informal social practices, which he refers to as norms. To this end, Hetcher argues in the first part of his book that norms are best conceived as patterns of behavior instantiated in a group and distinguishes between three kinds of norms: sanction-driven, coordination, and epistemic norms. Hetcher employs this conception and tripartite typology of norms in analyses of the evidentiary rule of custom in tort law and the emerging norms of online privacy in parts two and three of his book, respectively. The book's main and most interesting contribution to the literature is largely implicit in these analyses. Hetcher's basic idea is that characteristic of each kind of norm in his tripartite typology is a particular set of virtues and vices that have implications for how best to regulate a domain containing such norms. Thus, the wise legislator should take into account the kinds of social norms, if any, relevant to a domain before regulating it." - NDPR.

Draft Anti-Terrorism Legislation

In the interests (real or otherwise) of democracy and good governance, the Federal Draft Anti-Terrorism Legilation (all one hundred and seven pages) is available from ACT Chief Minister John Stanhope's website, in pdf.

En bris av frisk luft

En bris av frisk luft - a foreign language philo-blog (as a reminder that the anglophones don't have exclusive jurisdiction over this media), concerned with continential power and political theory (from the names and texts that can be determined). A couple of interesting links; firstly, Thoburn's Deleuze, Marx and Politics, and, secondly, a bunch of Jaques Camatte texts care of the Libertarian Comminist Library.

Diogenes On Virtue

"One of his frequent sayings was, "That men contended with one another in punching and kicking, but that no one showed any emulation in the pursuit of virtue."" - Lives Of The Philosophers.

Gray - Grayling's 'Descartes'

"One of the defects of contemporary philosophy is a lack of knowledge of the historical contexts in which philosophical ideas are produced. This is not entirely accidental. Especially in the English-speaking world, philosophers are anxious to set boundaries around the subject, marking it off from anything that looks irrational, or which current opinion finds somehow suspect. This strategy may promote clarity of thought, but essentially it amounts to the pursuit of respectabil- ity - a dreary ideal for philosophy. Nowadays the academy is obsessively secular. For most philosophers, anything that smacks of religion or mysticism is beyond the pale, fit only for the shelves in bookshops that deal with New Age cults.

The trouble with the attempt to purge philosophy of suspect influences is that it leads to a neglect of beliefs that actually inspired philosophers in the past. These were nearly always religious. Hegel's philosophy reproduced a Christian view of history, and Marx followed Hegel in seeing history as a purposive process - a view that derives from the idea of divine providence. Many contemporary philosophers believe that pursuing the sources of ideas betrays a genetic fallacy, which wrongly suggests that if a belief has a particular origin it cannot be justified in other terms. However, some views are indefensible and even incoherent when wrenched from their original conceptual framework. This is true of the teleological view of history advanced by Hegel and Marx, and of contemporary liberal conceptions of natural rights. Locke's liberalism was rooted in his version of theism. Without some such theological basis, the idea of natural rights that is at the core of his and other liberal theories is left hanging in midair. A great deal of seemingly secular philosophy is made up of religious leftovers of this kind ...

Grayling insists that, in the end, Descartes belongs among the founders of the modern scientific world-view rather than with the mystics, but one cannot easily distinguish between the two. The greatest modern scientists have often linked their work with beliefs that lie well outside the boundaries of empirical inquiry." - New Statesman.

Thoughts

Thoughts - concerned with cognitive philosophy, in the broadest sense; to be noted for its extended paper-style posts.

The Good and The Right

The Good and The Right - broad ranging grad philo-blog, with a political and ethical focus.

Strictly Speaking

Strictly Speaking - a US student blog, from the author of Inessentialism.org. Interesting range of posts.

Scruton - 'Democracy or theocracy?'

"The crucial point in all this is to recognise secular government as the sine qua non of democracy, and theocracy as its natural opponent. And secular government depends upon finding some other focus of communal identity and solidarity than religious faith ... The secular law in a country like the United Kingdom is made possible by territorial jurisdiction, and the territory in question is defined by permeable but historically vindicated national boundaries. Our political culture is a culture of the home and the homeland, rather than the faith and the faithful ... That kind of territorial patriotism has suffered erosion, not only from globalisation, but also from the mass immigration of minorities that do not share it, who define their communities in terms of religion rather than territory, and who do not in their heart accept the authority of a merely secular law. It has suffered too from a culture of repudiation among intellectuals who, for a variety of reasons, not all of them bad, have tried to discard national loyalty and to replace it with the cosmopolitan ideals of the Enlightenment ... The problem, as I see it, is that cosmopolitan ideals are the property of an elite and will never be shared by the mass of human kind." - Open Democracy.

Negri - 'A Contribution On Foucault'

"Foucault's work is a strange machine, it actually makes it impossible to think of history as other than present history. Probably, a great deal of what Foucault wrote (as Deleuze rightly underlined) should be rewritten today. What is astonishing - and concerning -, is that he never ceases to seek, he makes approximations, he deconstructs, he formulates hypotheses, he imagines, he makes analogies and tells fables, he launches concepts, withdraws them or modifies them… His is a thought of a formidable inventiveness. But this is not its essence: I believe that his method is fundamental, because it enables him to study and describe at the same time the movement from the past to the present and that from the present to the future. It is a method of transition where the present represents the center. Foucault is there, between the two, neither in the past where he does archaeology, nor in the future whose image he sometimes sketches - ““comme à la limite de la mer un visage sur le sable”” -. It is starting from the present that it is possible to distinguish other times. Foucault has often been reproached for the scientific legitimacy of his periodizations: we I can understand the historians, but at the same time, I would want to say that this is not a real problem: Foucault is where the questioning lies, which always originates in his own time.

Historical analysis, with Foucault, thus becomes an action, knowledge of the past becomes a genealogy, the future perspective becomes a dispositif. For those who come from the militant Marxism of the 1960s (but not from the dogmatic and caricatural traditions of the Second and Third International), Foucault's point of view is obviously perceived as absolutely legitimate: it corresponds to the perception of the event, of the struggles and of the joy of taking risks outside of all necessity and pre-established teleology. In Foucault's thought, Marxism is completely dismantled at the level of analysis of power relations and historical teleology, of the refusal of historicism or of a certain positivism; but at the same time, Marxism is also reinvented and remodelled on the perspective of the movements and struggles, i.e. actually on the reality of the subjects of these movements and struggles: because to know is to produce subjectivity." - From generation-online.

AskPhilosophers.org

AskPhilosophers is an interesting on-line philosophical project; basically, a collection of academic philosophers (including David Brink, Simon Blackburn, and Stephen Law [Yes, he of The Philosophy Gym!]) brought together to answer any question that the public feels like asking them. There are about one hundred and seventy responses to various questions already, and the site looks like being the sort of place that it is worth keeping an eye on.