March 21st, 2009 §
Sometimes a speaker is so persuasive that one cannot help believing him. But one can find oneself doing all sorts of things—stroking one’s beard, brushing one’s teeth when one intended merely to get a drink of water, and so forth.
Harman, Gilbert. 1997. “Pragmatism and Reasons for Belief”, in Christopher B. Kulp (Ed), Realism/Antirealism and Epistemology, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham MD, pp. 123–147. Reprinted in his Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 93–118.
(I would like to be a speaker so persuasive that before you realise it, you find yourself brushing your teeth).
March 17th, 2009 §
If you’d like to make a professional philosopher uncomfortable, try asking for clear examples of our discipline’s achievements in settling important questions:
Katie Couric: I’m just going to ask you one more time—not to belabor the point. Specific examples in the last 2600 years of sustained philosophical investigation…
Philosopher (visibly straining to look upbeat): I’ll… try to find ya some, and I’ll bring ‘em to ya!
David Christensen, “Disagreement as Evidence: The Epistemology of Controversy“, Philosophy Compass, forthcoming.
(Christensen is riffing, of course, on the train-wreck that was this).
March 13th, 2009 §
Prompted by the extremely polarised reception it has received, and having been curious about the novel since it was first published in France (I mentioned it briefly here and here), I have started reading The Kindly Ones. I’ve also been following some of the critical reception. Now, I am not even a tenth of the way through, so am far from having a verdict—though I did find the Dostoyevskian opening section impressive. Until then, allow me to note the ineptness with which the novel has been reviewed in the New York Times, underscoring the uselessness of newspaper reviewers in the face of intellectually ambitious work. Compare the simplistic, posturing reviews of Michiko Kakutani and David Gates with Daniel Mendelsohn’s penetrating review just published in The New York Review of Books. On the possible theoretical rationale for the psychological perversity of the narrator Mendelsohn provides the most helpful reading I have seen. In contrast Kakutani offers no comment, while Gates somewhat astonishingly flags his own intellectual laziness by writing:
I suppose we’re to connect this compulsion for self-completion with his indifference to the mass murders in which he’s complicit.
You suppose? No wonder Littell doesn’t bother coming to America.
March 3rd, 2009 §
Mark S. Ashbaugh, Carmen C. Chicone and Richard H. Cushman. “The Twisting Tennis Racket“, in Journal of Dynamics and Differential Equations, Vol. 3, No. 1, January 1991, pp. 67–85.
The classical treatments of the dynamics of a tennis racket about its intermediate axis fail to describe a remarkable aspect of its motion which is revealed in the following experiment. Mark the faces of the racket so that they can be distinguished. Call one rough and the other smooth. Hold the racket horizontally by its handle with the smooth face up. Toss the racket into the air attempting to make it rotate about the intermediate axis (namely, the axis in the plane of the face which is perpendicular to the handle). After one rotation, catch the racket by the handle. The rough face will almost always be up! In other words, the racket typically makes a half-twist about its handle.
March 3rd, 2009 §
Someone at Oxford University Press seems to have gone crazy for the work of German photographer Candida Höfer. Three recent covers:
March 2nd, 2009 §
Christel Devuea, Stefan Van der Stigchelb, Serge Brédarta and Jan Theeuwesb, “You do not find your own face faster; you just look at it longer“, in Cognition, Vol. 111, No. 1, April 2009, pp. 114–122.
Abstract
Previous studies investigating the ability of high priority stimuli to grab attention reached contradictory outcomes. The present study used eye tracking to examine the effect of the presence of the self-face among other faces in a visual search task in which the face identity was task-irrelevant. We assessed whether the self-face (1) received prioritized selection (2) caused a difficulty to disengage attention, and (3) whether its status as target or distractor had a differential effect. We included another highly familiar face to control whether possible effects were self-face specific or could be explained by high familiarity. We found that the self-face interfered with the search task. This was not due to a prioritized processing but rather to a difficulty to disengage attention. Crucially, this effect seemed due to the self-face’s familiarity, as similar results were obtained with the other familiar face, and was modulated by the status of the face since it was stronger for targets than for distractors.
Olivier Sidet, Ghost.
The Icelandic Love Corporation.
