MITPressLog

"Democracies are supposed to be spaces of reasons."

 

 In the following Election Tuesday post, Michael P. Lynch, author of In Praise of Reason, explains why we need shared standards of reason.

 

 

 

 

The Romney campaign declared last month that they weren’t going to be pushed around by fact-checkers. Such remarks were in turns horrifying and amusing to many, but their open acceptance by some on the Right was revealing. What it reveals is that current political disputes aren’t just over the facts. They are also over who has the best methods and way for determining what the facts are. And many on the Right are suspicious of “fact-checking” as just another way of using biased methods to impose a liberal view of the world.

This is frustrating. But rejecting it wholesale without trying to understand the underlying problem is a mistake. The real problem here is that when we can’t even agree over fact-finding methods, then we are disagreeing over our very standards of reason—over what counts as rational or justified and what doesn’t.  And when that happens, we’ve hit rock bottom—the debate has grounded out on principles so basic it is hard to see how it can be resolved because neither side sees the other as rational.

Democracies are supposed to be spaces of reasons. In democratic politics, we ought to give and ask for reasons for our political views. In order to do that, however, we need some common currency of shared standards—some common principles to which we can all appeal when assessing each other’s claims. Without that, reason-giving breaks down and politics becomes war by other means. And that is what is happening in our country right now.

What this means is that those of us who favor scientific methods can’t be content with just heaping scorn on the other’s sides standards of rationality. Nor should we assume that everyone will just see the virtues of a scientific approach to evidence and reason. We need to do more, to actively how why—morally and politically and not just scientifically—some standards of reason are more rational than others. Ignore this, and we run the risk of more people giving up not only on fact-checkers—but the facts themselves. 

Brain Awareness Week: A Q&A with Daniel C. Dennett

A Q&A with Daniel C. Dennett, whose most recent MIT Press book (with Matthew M. Hurley and Reginald B. Adams, Jr.) is Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind, to round out our Brain Awareness Week Q&A series:

 

 

 

 

What sparked your interest in philosophy and cognitive studies?

As a philosophy student, I was always interested in how the mind worked, and by that I meant how the brain worked. When I started looking at the attempts by scientists to address these questions, back in the mid 60s, I discovered that they were, with a few notable exceptions, baffled. The pioneers who had some hunches fascinated me, and I began to try to follow in their footsteps and even help with the exploration.

 

How have your research interests and methods changed over the course of your career?

I've learned--and had to learn--a lot of empirical science and scientific techniques. The philosophical imagination unhindered by facts is actually a very unreliable organ of discovery. My work has always depended on the constraints I have picked up from the various sciences that deal with the questions I'm interested in.

 

What kinds of changes (if any) do you think we need to make in brain science education?

There have already been huge changes. Even high school students can acquire a vivid, robust, dynamic (if sketchy) model of what the working parts of the brain are, and roughly how they interact. That rough-and-ready roadmap of the brain was something that took years of hard and imaginative work to acquire forty years ago. Since everybody gets to start much better prepared these days, the time is right for bold theorizing. We have the tools and the data to DISconfirm models now. What we need are intrepid model-proposers. They will usually be wrong, but we'll learn a lot. From one perspective most of what we've learned in the last half century is what promising ideas WON'T work. That's progress.

 

"A most ingenious paradox"

In "The Pirates of Penzance," time plays a trick on Frederic, making him a victim of "a most ingenious paradox" due to his Leap Year birthday. What better way to celebrate Leap Year 2012 than to dive into books that deal with the various paradoxes and definitions of "time"? Here are a few titles to add to your reading list:

 

The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality
by  David Couzens Hoy

A study of the emergence in post-Kantian continental philosophy of a focus on the lived experience of temporality.

 

 

 

 

Time and Identity
Edited by Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke and Harry S. Silverstein

Original essays on the metaphysics of time, identity, and the self, written by distinguished scholars and important rising philosophers.

 

 

 

Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means
Siegfried Zielinski; Translated by Gloria Custance

A quest to find something new by excavating the "deep time" of media's development—not by simply looking at new media's historic forerunners, but by connecting models, machines, technologies, and accidents that have until now remained separated.

 

 

Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives
Yuval Dolev

A new view of the metaphysics of time, arguing that the traditional tensed-tenseless debate within analytic philosophy should be seen as the first stage in a philosophical investigation of time, and that the next stage belongs to phenomenology.

 

 

twin time: or, how death befell me
Veronica Gonzalez

A young woman's fabulist search for her long-lost twin brother overturns all notions of motherhood, magic realism, and miscegenation.

 

 

Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture Sanford Kwinter An exploration of twentienth-century conceptions of time and their relation to artistic form.

Sharing the Love

Happy Valentine's Day! Here are a few books that we love:

 

The author of the classic philosophical treatment of love reflects on the trajectory, over decades, of his thoughts on love and other topics.

 

 

 

 

 

A vision of architecture that transcends concerns of form and function and finds the connections between the architect's wish to design a beautiful world and architecture's imperative to provide a better place for society.

 

 

 

 

A self-described failed filmmaker falls obsessively in love with her theorist-husband's colleague: a manifesto for a new kind of feminism and the power of first-person narration.

 

 

 

 

 

A vision of architecture that includes sculpture, machines, and technology and encapsulates the history of the human species.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A psychological exploration of how the love of nature can coexist in our psyches with apathy toward environmental destruction.

 

 

 

 

 

An exploration of the sensuous and the passionate, as expressed in operas by Mozart and Beethoven.

Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Laughter

To celebrate both Black History Month and Laugh and Get Rich Day, here's a passage from Anca Parvulescu's book, Laughter: Notes on a Passion.

 

A people of laughers, Langston Hughes has called his people. His poem “Laughers,” first published in Crisis in 1922 as “My People,” goes through a series of roles associated with African-Americans (singers, storytellers, dancers, but also dishwashers, cooks, and waiters), to conclude that they are laughers: “Yes, laughers…laughers…laughers— / Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands / Of Fate.  “Yes, laughers…laughers…laughers” comes as a response to a doubtful question: “Laughers?” “Yes, laughers…” is the insistent answer, its insistence a function of the acknowledged irony of an African-American poet in 1922 describing his people as laughers.

“I love myself when I am laughing” is also Zora Neale Hurston’s provocative statement, an attempt to claim membership with the same people of laughers. It is a response to Carl Van Vechten, who had taken a series of photographs of her laughing; but also to Hughes and his accusations that she had put on a “happy darkie” show and played the primitive. The sentence would be the site of Hurston’s recuperation by 1970s feminism, becoming the title of her 1979 collection published by Feminist Press. It condenses an “attitude” that brought Hurston intellectual annihilation in the 1930s and posthumous fame. A list of adjectives describes the “attitude” within different contexts: quick-tempered, arrogant, rude, inconsiderate, unladylike; or, alternatively, enthusiastic, confident, unconventional, outspoken, free-minded. Photographs of Hurston laughing, marking this “attitude,” have become her trademark. One sees them wherever Hurston’s name appears. And then, “I love myself when I am laughing.” What does Hurston see when her laughter returns to her in the form of a photograph?

What is clear is that both Hughes and Hurston are deeply invested in a wider struggle over African-American laughter. Hughes would write about Hurston: “To many of her white friends, no doubt, she was a perfect ‘darkie,’ in the nice meaning they give the term—that is a naïve, childlike, sweet, humorous, and highly colored Negro.” This description came in the wake of the fight between Hughes and Hurston over the authorship of their 1930 collaborative work, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, which they imagined would be the first African-American comedy. Their conflict is considered one of the most notorious “literary quarrels” in the history of African-American literature. “Playing the primitive” is in this context the insult one injured party throws at the other. But, in close proximity to the primivitist theme, the quarrel is also symptomatic of the desire to rescue African-American laughter from those to whom Hughes refers as Hurston’s “white friends,” known for their indulgence in fantasies of black laughter.

It would be Ralph Ellison who would take it upon himself to explicitly frame the struggle over African-American laughter, and to bridge the discussion between a wider modernism and the African-American tradition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

August Fools' Day

It may not be official, but National Tell a Joke Day has been celebrated for years. Prepare your one-liners with help from a few MIT Press books:

 

Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind
By Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams, Jr.

 “You can tell a joke in one crowd and be rewarded with laughs, yet in another group be repaid with anger. Here’s a joke that some find funny, though others might not agree and some may even be offended:

Q: What has two legs and bleeds?

A: Half a dog.”

 

 

Laughter: Notes on a Passion
By Anca Parvulescu

Uncovering an archive of laughter, from the forbidden giggle to the explosive guffaw.

“Laughter is a motion, forceful, sudden and repetitive; and it is the sound of a bursting, inarticulate voice… As for the passional chemistry needed to produce laughter: it always involves a dose of wonder, sometimes joy, sometimes hatred, sometimes both joy and hatred.”

 

 

The Odd One In: On Comedy
By Alenka Zupančič

Zupančič examines the mechanisms and processes by which comedy lets the odd one in.

Comedy by its nature is difficult to pin down with concepts and definitions, but as artistic form and social practice it is a mode of tarrying with a foreign object—of including the exception. Philosophy's relationship to comedy, Zupančič writes, is not exactly a simple story (and indeed includes some elements of comedy).

 

 

The Artist’s Joke
Edited by Jennifer Higgie

Jokes and humor in avant-garde and contemporary art, as discussed by writers and artists ranging from Freud and Picasso to Andrea Fraser, Guerilla Girls, and Slavoj Zizek.

Ever since Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious appeared in 1905, humor both light and dark has frequently surfaced as a subversive, troubling, or liberating element in art. The Artist's Joke surveys the rich and diverse uses of humor by avant-garde and contemporary artists.

Bastille Day Reading

Happy Bastille Day! Here’s an excerpt from The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France, edited by Michel Feher, to celebrate.

 

Libertinism, as developed in this reader, refers first and foremost to the licentious ways of the declining French aristocracy. However, before the eighteenth century, the word “libertine” did not refer exclusively to sexual mores. The term appeared as early as the middle of the sixteenth century within a theological context: Calvin used it to denounce a sect of dissident Anabaptists whom he accused of abusing their freedom by “transforming Scripture into allegory.” Others used it more generally as a synonym for “atheist.” By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the words “libertine” and “libertinism” became associated with an actual school of thought. The “scholarly libertines” (les libertines érudits), an assortment of scholars, poets, and dilettantes, formed a small group of freethinkers who shared an aversion to dogma; seeking to demystify superstition and to dismantle baseless beliefs and preconceived ideas, they contested both political and religious authority. Every watchword imposed by the powers that be, or accepted without question by the public, inevitably raised the libertines’ hackles. Conversely, any thinker persecuted for his opinions was counted, by definition, as a member of their circle…

After 1715, libertinism pertained almost exclusively to erotic matters…Neither moralistic nor strictly amoral, libertine fiction is nevertheless primarily about morals. Its main purpose is to examine critically the ethos of the petits-maîtres and of the dangerous men, as well as of the women who are the targets of the libertines’ maneuvers. In this respect, the writers in question paid special attention to their characters’ views on love, desire, and pleasure; first, because the libertines they describe spend most of their time devising and executing campaigns of seduction, and second, because they use their philosophical positions on love, nature, and society as a justification for their reckless ways.

Although libertine fiction is largely devoted to describing the schemes and the prowess of the petits-maîtres and the dangerous men, it also endeavors to underline the problems, the impasses, and even the tragedies to which the libertine life can lead.

 

Cosmopolitanism vs. Environmentalism vs. Feminism vs....

In this excerpt from his book Beyond Red and Blue: How Twelve Political Philosophies Shape American Debates, Peter Wenz helps us determine our own political identity--and gives us conversation fodder for our July 4th BBQs.

These twelve political philosophies can help most people identify and critically assess their own political leanings and priorities. You can get an inkling of your own political identity by looking at the main values featured in each philosophy:

• Theocracy—the state should promote the values of a particular religion.
• Natural law—state laws should reflect what is natural for human beings and consistent with the proper role of humanity on Earth.
• Libertarianism—the state should limit itself to fostering maximum individual liberty while protecting human life and property rights.
• Utilitarianism—the state should promote the greatest happiness or preference satisfaction in society.
• Free-market conservatism—the state should foster maximum economic growth.
• Contractarianism—the state should protect individual liberty and promote economic growth while maximizing benefits to the poorest and most vulnerable members of society.
• Social conservatism—the state should preserve and protect social, political, and religious traditions that have served well in the past.
• Feminism—the state should ensure that no person is disadvantaged for being female.
• Multiculturalism—the state should recognize that no one culture holds all the keys to human flourishing and should therefore tolerate or promote cultural diversity.
• Environmentalism—the state should protect people and other species from unnecessary environmental degradation.
• Communitarianism—the state should foster bonds of community over tendencies to excessive individualism.
• Cosmopolitanism—the state should support certain universal values and norms.

Few people, if any, are moved by the values central to all twelve philosophies. Some people don’t care at all if our country contains the cultural diversity that multiculturalists favor. Many individualists have no sympathy with communitarian critiques of individualism and individual rights. Some thinkers, convinced that we can improve on conditions of ages gone by, have no interest in the traditions that social conservatives want to preserve. Those who believe that the international world is so dangerous that good nations must combat evil terrorists “no holds barred” reject cosmopolitanism’s universal norms of humane treatment (for terrorists). One way of locating yourself on the political landscape is to identify the values you reject.

 Another way is to identify the trade-offs that you find reasonable. Almost all of us experience political ambivalence from time to time, because we respect and want to promote a plurality of values in circumstances where trade-offs are required. For example, just about everyone wants the country to be secure from attack. But most people also respect the principles, championed most forcefully by libertarians, of individual privacy and freedom from government control. Security and liberty are in tension in this context, because the greater the scope for privacy and freedom, the greater the chance for a terrorist to evade detection and attack our country. Where security and liberty are concerned, we must often trade some of one to get more of the other. Our political identities are revealed to ourselves and others largely by the trade-offs that we find acceptable.

 

Free Will?

At time when many of us are making new year’s resolutions, Dennis Overbye explores the concept of free will in an article is today’s New York Times. He asks whether or not free will is an illusion or something more and what happens to moral responsibility and imagination in the upheaval. Can we stick to our new year’s resolutions? Or, is it entirely out of our control? Should we even try to start that diet or exercise plan?

Mr. Overbye quotes Dan Dennet, well-known philosopher and cognitive scientist, who authored the MIT Press book Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness. Dan Wegner, a Harvard psychologist and author of The Illusion of Conscious Will, is also quoted.

Take a Hike for the Holidays

Looking for a last minute gift?  Or a fun and educational way to shed those holiday pounds?  In a recent article in the Boston Globe, Michael Kenney highlights a few Boston guidebooks that might just accomplish both.  One of the books he mentions is Nancy Seasholes latest, Walking Tours of Boston’s Made Land, twelve walks that trace where and why Boston's man-made land was created, and, along the way, Seasholes uncovers fascinating and little-known pieces of Boston history. The walks grew out of a course she teaches on the subject at the Harvard Extension School and they provide a new and different way of looking at this historic city. 

And for the armchair travelers on your list, Adam Sharr’s Heidegger’s Hut provides an intense look at the relationship between Martin Heidegger and his cabin in the Black Forest.  In her gift book round up in the New York Times, Penelope Green calls it:

A straight-faced look -- with photos, floor plans and even architectural models -- at the four-room mountain cottage that was the philosopher's Walden Pond. Photographs of Heidegger at the well, at his desk (with mysteriously empty shelves) and with a walking stick give this little book the feel of a family album. Was Die Hütte, as Heidegger called it, ''the site of a heroic confrontation between philosopher and existence''? A weekend getaway for a suburban romantic? Or an incubator of fascism?

Probably a little bit of each, implies Mr. Sharr, an architect and a professor at Cardiff University in Wales, who wrestles with Heidegger's role as a Nazi apologist (as well as his role as a suburban householder) but is mostly reverent in this examination of the phenomena (a hut, an outhouse, a well) that inspired the phenomenologist.

Also, remember that our holiday book sale—with lots of great last minute gift ideas—runs through December 31st.