Mini-Heap
Happy Friday, everyone! Here’s the latest Mini-Heap: 10 11 recent items of interest to philosophers (and others interested in philosophy) from the Daily Nous Heap of Links.
(The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap.)
- Don’t raise the significance level; acknowledge the significance of Bayes — David Papineau (KCL) explains Bayesianism and why it is important for addressing today’s replication crises
- Avital Ronell (NYU), accused of sexually harassing a male philosophy student, has horrible friends — here’s an article about that stupid letter they wrote in support of her, including their pathetic defenses of it and their bizarre conspiracy theories
- The time before dystopia — Is there a lesson in its omission from most dystopian fiction?
- Waiting for a response from a philosophy journal? There’s an app for that. — from Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto), a little app that displays wait time forecasts and data from the APA Journal Survey
- How to give a good gift — Jennifer J. Rothschild (Florida) on giving gifts well
- “Feminists should challenge the ways patriarchy and fear violently constrain the ways being a woman can be embodied and enacted” — Aaron Jaffe (Juilliard) on recent discussions in philosophy about trans women
- A bet made 20 years ago, for a case of fine wine, over whether, within 25 years, someone would discover a specific signature of consciousness in the brain — Christof Koch, a neuroscientist, bet in favor. David Chalmers bet against.
- Philosophy illustrated, New Yorker Style — in the actual New Yorker, by Edward Steed
- Two new operas: one about Walter Benjamin and one about Hannah Arendt — debuting in Germany this season, and reviewed in the NYT
- “Philosophy is a social institution with its own set of hierarchies, vested interests, and professional norms which can be quite orthogonal to truth, knowledge, and justice” — Robin Zheng (Yale-NUS) interviewed about her recent work on contingent labor and gender in academia
- “But new to me is this fresh, rude thought: This is it.” — Philosopher and poet Brook J. Sadler (USF) is the 2018 Spring Poetry Winner at Causeway Lit
Re the Ronnell article: It’s irksome that Zizek gets taken seriously by anyone. He’s pretty much the best example of a flat out charlatan I can think of. It’s particularly distressing that Haaretz describes him as “the moral conscience of human rights.” Whoever wrote this really shouldn’t be allowed to write about philosophy.
On another random note: I’m really happy to see that from previous links that you linked to the “Medium” article on the Stanford Prison Experiment, but I can’t help thinking that that merits a whole post on a philosophy blog somewhere. The article got me thinking about how I used the SPE in my classes and how I should have probably been more suspicious of it.
Seems to me that the much more damning participant is Judith Butler. And a number of the other activist-scholars who signed.
It would be wonderful if this actually led to some tough examination of that portion of academic scholarship, which by way of its intense and aggressive moralizing has thus far avoided it. But I am almost 100% certain no such thing will happen and that it will not lose one ounce of the moral authority it has assigned to itself in contemporary discourse.