A recent post on the philos-l email list (a vital source of all things news-like in philosophy I find) mentioned useful online tools for scholars.  Aside from things provided by google (see the previous post I made on this) there are a number of other tools and the two I want to mention today are Cite-U-Like and Netvibes.

Netvibes is a service that’s provided in a number of places nowadays.  It’s a single page where you can add or subtract modules that include things like feedreaders for keeping in touch with those interesting blogs. Google does a similiar thing with its’ personalised homepages and if you’re a student at Greenwich University then the new portal system may cover all you need in this area.  RSS feeds can of course be easily integrated into Firefox anyway and come up as buttons in the ‘Bookmarks Toolbar’ so it may be that the netvibes thing proves slightly redundant in the end, we’ll see.  It will depend in large part of what other modules they offer I expect.  I’m going to be testing it for the next while so any other comments on that welcome.

The Cite-U-Like service, on the other hand, looks like an absolutely vital integration of browser and research tools. You just add a bookmark to your browser and then when you come across a page useful for your academic research you can press this link and add it to your citeulike library.  It registers pages from peer-reviewed journals and so is able to seperate out the ‘definitely ok’ from the ‘slightly dubious’ and there’s also a ‘watch’ service which enabels you to watch the contents of various journals, as well as upload copies of the articles for your own private use, which means you can access these things from any web-browser – useful for that problem of keeping stuff together as you move form campus to home.  The watch service covers various journals as well as other citeulike participants, so you can also watch the citation library of others with research interests close to your own.  I’d recommend everyone get a citeulike page setup asap …

There’s a very interesting article on The New Atheism over at Wired magazine, worth a look (particularly, perhaps, for those in my Kierkegaard class).  I particularly liked the following extract from the conversation the author has with withDaniel Dennett, in particular the line about philosophers being the ones who refuse to accept sacred values.

“Yes, there could be a rational religion,” Dennett says. “We could have a rational policy not even to think about certain things.” He understands that this would create constant tension between prohibition and curiosity. But the borders of our sacred beliefs could be well guarded simply by acknowledging that it is pragmatic to refuse to change them.

I ask Dennett if there might not be a contradiction in his scheme. On the one hand, he aggressively confronts the faithful, attacking their sacred beliefs. On the other hand, he proposes that our inherited defaults be put outside the limits of dispute. But this would make our defaults into a religion, unimpeachable and implacable gods. And besides, are we not atheists? Sacred prohibitions are anathema to us.

Dennett replies that exceptions can be made. “Philosophers are the ones who refuse to accept the sacred values,” he says. For instance, Socrates.

I find this answer supremely odd. The image of an atheist religion whose sacred objects, called defaults, are taboo for all except philosophers — this is the material of the cruelest parody. But that’s not what Dennett means. In his scenario, the philosophers are not revered authorities but mental risk-takers and scouts. Their adventures invite ridicule, or worse. “Philosophers should expect to be hooted at and reviled,” Dennett says. “Socrates drank the hemlock. He knew what he was doing.”

With this, I begin to understand what kind of atheist I want to be. Dennett’s invocation of Socrates is a reminder that there are certain actors in history who change the world by staging their own defeat. Having been raised under Christianity, we are well schooled in this tactic of belated victory. The world has reversed its judgment on Socrates, as on Jesus and the fanatical John Brown. All critics of fundamental values, even those who have no magical beliefs, will find themselves tempted to retrace this path. Dawkins’ tense rhetoric of moral choice, Harris’ vision of apocalypse, their contempt for liberals, the invocation of slavery — this is not the language of intellectual debate but of prophecy.”

Read the whole thing here.

This afternoon I was chilling out a little after listening to Radio4′s ‘Afternoon Play’. It was an interesting one too, a ‘chiller’. The story involved a guy telling someone a story on a train, a two handed piece between an older man and a younger woman set in the late 1960′s and harking back to Ypres and the First World War for its ghost. I do love a good ghost story and it reminded me of these excellent recordings I have of some H.P.Lovecraft tales. One of those stories, about the music of Howard Zinn if I recall, has these screeching violins and the ‘Afternoon Play’ used little bits of that at the end today. It was as though there’s a sound, quite a specific sound, to this particular genre of story. The world-slipping, uncanny, ‘chilly’ world. Somewhere it’s going to be very cold in those stories. The shiver down the spine.

This particular story also made me think about a connection with Kierkegaard’s tale of Abraham. The shiver down the spine and the shudder of thought. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m generally interested at the moment in the distinction between the theoretical and the practical, a distinction that can be found throughout philosophy and which I increasingly think is a dominant distinction, though often in an unthought way. The interest in this distinction is what underlies my current writing project, a book that’s tentatively titled ‘Practical metaphysics’ (more about that another time). It’s also a distinction that is central to Husserl and Heidegger, albeit in various forms. Heidegger’s concern with ‘technik’ for example stems, I think, from a difficulty with the way in which this kind of practical knowledge closes down our relation to being. Husserl, however, seems to be grappling with this distinction in his early struggles to rid logic and philosophy of psychologistic prejudices. At the moment I’m reading back through the ‘Logical Investigations’ and it becomes increasingly clear that Husserl has a strong theory/practice split underlying his arguments against a psychologistic interpretation of logic. Read the rest of this entry »

As I keep telling my students, one of the main skills of philosophy is the ability to read well.  Along with logic, this art of reading forms perhaps the most basic of philosophical skills…trying to hear what an author is saying often relies upon the ‘principle of charity’.  There’s this interesting quote I came across today whilst I was going through some notes of mine from a course I delivered a couple of years ago (a third year philosophy of mind course at Wolverhampton University) – it’s from Brian Cantwell Smith:

“Everyone’s right.  Or anyway that’s what I tell my students.  ‘Look’ I say, ‘this paper you are reading was written by a dedicated, intelligent person, who has devoted their life to studying these issues.  The author’s had an insight, uncovered some subtelty, which they’re trying to tell us about.  Imagine that they’re showing us a path through the forest.  Problem is, people write in words; and words are blunt instruments: intellectual bulldozers … big bruisers, that cut wide swathes …

‘So here’s my advice’ I go on. ‘Don’t assume this text is written in a language you know, and take your task to be one of figuring out whether what they’ve written is true or false.  You will almost certainly judge it false.  Be more generous!  Assume what you are reading is true, and tell me what language it is written in … tell me, if we were to follow their path further, where would it lead” – p.170; Philosophy of mental representation, ed. H.Clapin; Oxford 2002.

Good advice…

http://www.icaris.info/Locke/

I was talking, on Monday this week, during the lecture of Kiekegaards’ Fear and Trembling, about the conception of faith. The notes that I have just uploaded to the students page don’t really touch on this discussion since they are still predominantly reading notes – though the section in there about the various different forms of conceiving of the work that we are meant to do is central to these thoughts.

The idea goes something like this: in the ‘Preamble from the heart’ Kierkegaard uses this continuous trope of ‘work’, of having to do some work in order to do justice to the subject. The subject under discussion is Abraham’s faith, his act of intended sacrifice/murder of Isaac, and the faith that underlies this act. Thus there is a certain amount of work that we need to do in order to understand his concept of faith, this experience of faith that is the one that makes Abraham sleepless, anxious. Without this work we will not be able to reduplicate the passion of the thought, we will not be able to truly shudder at the thought of faith.

If there is a certain amount of work to do, what exactly is this work? How would we know that we’re engaging in it, let alone succeeding in it? What happens through this work…

The suggestion I was making was that we have to do the work in order to rid ourselves of the concept of faith as a comfort, as a form of knowledge that we have because we have faith – faith, in this ‘comfort’ situation, provides us with a ground or major premiss for a general outlook on life or at least the specific situation of Abraham’s sacrifice. It provides us with some security – but then the issue becomes one of how does it do so and is this what Kierkegaard / Johannes Silentio means…

If we take the following structure we might see what I mean. We begin with a concept of faith that we bring to the table, something that derives from the commonsense understanding that is given us along with the giving of our language and its various meanings and concepts. We then engage in a work of philosophy, of questioning and thinking, which produces not a different concept (trust, perhaps) but instead a transformed concept of faith. The work both maintains and transforms this concept of faith, replacing the comfort viewpoint with one of trepidation, question, anxiety. This, after all, is precisely the concept of faith that seems to be inherent in Abraham – he is not simply ‘doing as God tells him’ in a comfortable way, in a dumb and unquestioning way – as though the questions never even occured to him. Rather he seems to be presented by Kierkegaard as precisely troubled, shuddering, aware of what he is doing and thus aware of the questions that arise (was it God talking to me, not the devil? why would God order me to do such a terrible thing? how can I murder Isaac? just because God tells me to do it, it doesn’t mean it is right – God must be telling me to do it because it’s right, but I can’t see how it is…and similiar such thoughts.) Without these worries, these anxieties, these questions it seems inconceivable that the struggle Abraham purportedly has could exist – what is the struggle if not with the apparent answers to these questions, answers which would imply disobeying God…faith, as Abraham has it, then seems to not be a comfort but precisely a capacity to act in the midst of the most terrible questioning, to carry out an act or move to do so in the midst of the questions. Without the questions the act of faith becomes dumb – no longer an act of faith, merely one of obedience, requiring nothing active from me but only a slave like passivity. Abraham isn’t just obeying – he is obeying in faith and thus obeying as the struggle with anxiety and questions. It is this struggle that characterises faith, or at least the faith of Abraham as Johannes wants to portray it.

Myspace.com:

History, Theory & Method: Critical Theory vs. Problem-Solving Theory
With specific reference to: Anthropogenic Climatic Forcing (problematising climate change knowledge)

Ruth Thomas-Pellicer
Centre for Environmental Strategy
Jointly with the Department of Sociology
University of Surrey

Place, Date, Time – 19th October, University of Sussex, Falmer House 228, 4.30pm

Objective – The session will explore the methodological implications of a piece of research critical in method, as opposed to one aimed at problem-solving. Note that any ‘research method’, whether of qualitative or quantitative nature, is compatible with either critical or problem-solving theory. To put it in a metaphor, theory fashions the spirit of the piece of academic work, whilst the ‘research method’ dictates its letter. Relevance – The session should be interesting in its own right. It may however appear particularly illuminative to those researchers at the stage when their methodologies are being defined.

Readings

[i.] FOUCAULT, Michel (1996) ‘What is Critique?’ James Schmidt, (1996) (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press; pp. 382-395. Lecture given at the Sorbonne on 27 May 1978; arguably, one of the finest essays of the French thinker.
[ii.] COX, Robert W. (1981), ‘Social forces, states, and world orders: beyond international relations theory’, in Robert W. Cox with Timothy J. Sinclair, (1996 [1999]) Approaches to World Order, Cambridge, New York & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press; pp. 85-123. First published in the journal Millennium, and subsequently copiously reproduced. It marked a turning point in international relations theory. For the avid reader, the article is photocopied in full, yet for the purposes of our session, the focus will fall exclusively upon the passages under the heading ‘On perspective and purposes’ pp. 87-91.

There’s some interesting essays over here, some of which touch on Kierkegaard. Hope you’ve all checked out the epigram …

The following came through my email via the nettime list today. The artist in question is not someone I’ve heard of before but someone I will definitely be looking at now. I even had a fleeting thought of trying to get over to see The Helpless Robot.

There’s something fascinating in this type of approach – the way in which White, towards the end of the interview, refuses to be classed as either self-expression art or straightforward science offers some glimpses into the reason for this. Somehow we need to maintain and develop the machines we have developed, that machines that are so intimately related to our nature that we could name ourselves as ‘the machines that now develop us’. Our relation with the machine is intimate and loving, not hostile, even if we might think that the culture we now live in seems to drive machines into the earth a little too fast.

Any odd formatting in the piece is a artifact of the email, as are line breaks. I’m correcting them as I notice them…

Read the rest of this entry »