Links for Thinking

* A computer analysis of the Shakespeare authorship question. (ht)

* Clayton recently had a paper for a conference simultaneously rejected and accepted. Fortunately, as you might expect, it was really accepted.

* Sudy at "A Womyn's Ecdysis" has an interesting argument that feminists should favor the concept 'kyriarchy' over the concept 'patriarchy' in analysis of oppression.

* A meme for teachers went around a while ago, the 'Passion Quilt'. If you haven't browsed some of the entries for it, you should. There are metaphorical entries, literal entries, some quite clever, many quite thought-provoking.

* Mark Chu-Carroll has been doing some posts on zero-sum games:
Zero Sum Games
Simple Games, Utility Functions, and Saddle Points
Iterated Zero-Sum Games

* The Proceedings of the Old Bailey is a treasure-trove of information about crime and punishment in England, 1674-1913. (ht) They've recently added the Ordinary's Accounts, which are especially interesting.

* Turkel's book, The Programming Historian, online. This looks like a great resource for scholarly online work; I'll be perusing it. (ht: EMN, with additional resources)

* (Speaking of historians, I'm looking for good resources -- especially books, but other resources will do -- on archive theory, if anyone has any recommendations.)

* Illuminating Lives, by Beth Randall (a series of biographical sketches of "various people whose lives illuminate some aspect of the religious quest")

* The Gifford Lectures Online. I've linked to it before, but it was still in a pretty primitive state at the time. It has come along nicely. Almost 120 years of arguably the most prestigious philosophical lectureship in the world, much of which is online, searchable, and almost all of which is well worth browsing.

UPDATES:

* Stern & Jones, The Coherence of Natural Inalienable Rights (PDF)

Three New Poem Drafts and a Re-Draft

The last word of the last line of the third, by the way, is deliberate: to tale, i.e., to tally. The Gubbio reference is to the wolf in the famous legend about Francis of Assisi.

Thorn in the Side

Lest I take the lesser road,
spur me in my side;
lest I arrogate myself,
puncture all my pride;
let no willow rod be spared
to spoil this wayward child,
yea, though it be a bitter pill
to drive a man half-wild,
lest I wander, ever lost
in lands of lie and fear,
or trap myself in mirror-glass,
that maze of death and tears!

Devilish

How devilish the devil is,
how filled with devil's wiles!
Let out the trump of virtue,
the devil only smiles.
Each hand manipulates the world,
each word is laced with guile:
How devilish the devil is,
how filled with devil's wiles!

Extension

The wideness of God's mercy, like the all-extending sky,
sublimely outextends any mercy in my eye,
overrules this little world like heaven's endless vault,
and beyond each mountain's snow-crown looms and overexalts.
And the boundless blue above, by sweeping light reminds
that I am not the one who judges all, and rules, and binds;
that from Heaven I cannot bar whatsoever folk I please;
that, yea, the slimy worm, and such slithering snakes as these
may play in God's own land with peace and even grace;
that that murderer, the lion, may with the lamb share place;
that the wolf that once mauled calf may, like Gubbio's distress,
snuggle there with calves and by those calves be blessed;
that though it be by fire, with smoke upon their tails,
saved may be the wicked, by a grace no man can tale.

The Narcissist

So fair is his existence,
no eye resists;
a third of heaven would turn traitor
and give up bliss
for but the lying promise
of his kiss.

The Devil is a lovely creature --
and he knows it.
All creation and his smile
show it.

His beauty is so great,
his style so nice;
his smile sparkles so,
like starlit ice,
that God might die to make him --
if that's the price.

Yes, the Devil is a lovely creature --
too bad he knows it,
and would to God he had the grace
not to show it.

Disjunctive Syllogism and Material Conditionals

I have always been puzzled by the fact that philosophers working with paraconsistent logic have always had a thing against disjunctive syllogism. Since someone dealing with paraconsistent logic wants a logic that does not allow contradiction explosion (if a contradiction is true, everything is true), the ostensible reason is that DS requires explosion:

(1) p & ~ p
(2) p
(3) p v q
(4) ~p
(5) q

(2) and (4) come from (1) by conjunction elimination; (3) from (2) by the disjunction rule called addition (also commonly called disjunction introduction); and (5) from (3) & (4) by DS. But this is not an adequate reason; you can also block the argument by rejecting addition, and there's a fairly obvious reason for it. Contradiction explosion occurs because any arbitrary proposition can be introduced; but DS does not introduce any propositions. Addition, however, does. Addition, in fact, is already explosive, in a mild sense: given addition, any proposition can be introduced into any argument. And we find that outside philosophy (e.g., computer science) it seems fairly common to explore paraconsistency by rejecting addition. So is there any other reason for picking on DS?

Graham Priest (An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic 1.10.4-5) gives the following sort of argument. The following principle seems reasonably plausible:

(*) 'If A then B' is true if there is some true statement C such that from C and A together we can deduce B.

But we can reason in the following way:

[Mat]
Assumed:
(1) ~A v B
Assumed:
(2) A
By Disjunctive Syllogism, from (1) and (2):
(3) B

Then by (*) we get 'If A then B'.

OK, so why is that supposed to be an issue? The above argument is apparently supposed to be an argument that 'If A then B' is a material conditional. But this is a problematic conclusion; and DS is certainly responsible if anything is.

I find the argument intriguing; I'm no fan of the material conditional interpretation, so I would consider an argument that DS requires that interpretation to be a strike against it. But this argument doesn't show that 'If A then B' is a material conditional; it simply shows that whenever you can assume both A and (~A v B) you can conclude 'If A then B' (if you assume DS). But this is not particularly interesting, because it is not distinctive to the material conditional interpretation. If the material conditional interpretation is true, you can conclude 'If A then B' from (~A v B), without having to combine (~A v B) with A; and the argument doesn't show that you can do this. All it does is show that on the material conditional interpretation DS and modus ponens are redundant: you can do with DS anything you can do with MP.

We can see the problem more clearly when we realize that there are other statements that can be plugged into (*)'s C. Consider this one:

Assumed:
(1) Necessarily (If A then B)
Assumed:
(2) A
From 1, by T axiom (i.e., in modal system M):
(3) If A then B
From (2) and (3):
(4) B

And by (*) we can conclude 'If A then B'. So by parallel reasoning, 'If A then B' must be the modal 'Necessarily (If A then B)'; and, being modal, this is definitely not a material conditional. But you can run the first argument in modal system M, too. So if the above argument were acceptable, it would imply that for M 'If A then B' is both a material conditional and not a material conditional; and this is a problem for the material conditional interpretation. This confirms the point above about the gist of the original argument.

So I'd say there's nothing problematic about [Mat], even for one who rejects the material conditional interpretation. This was so obvious to me on reading it that I really wonder if I'm missing something subtle and clever.

Petition, re UF's Philosophy Ph.D. Cut

Apparently the University of Florida is cutting its Ph.D. in Philosophy. It has had some discussion in the blogosphere. Honestly, I think it's a good thing; the philosophy market can't handle the Ph.D.'s being produced as things are. (For similar reasons, I think the recent increase in philosophy majors is bad for the profession, not because it's bad to have more philosophy majors, but because we are kidding ourselves or lying to our students if we are suggesting that things are set up so that they are likely to gain anything more from the philosophy major, relative to other degrees, than the personal philosophical growth they might get from it if their program is well taught. If the increase consisted of all double majors, that would be different.) Better that it be simply cut at a university that is being forced into massive budget cuts than to limp and decline as crunch after crunch comes along under an administration that isn't going to make it a priority. But I seem to be very much in the minority on these issues (unsurprisingly). For thoughtful contrary arguments see Leiter Reports, Praeter Necessitatum, and the Florida Student Philosophy Blog. There is an online petition, put together by Sabrina Jamil, to protest; I won't be signing it, of course, but if you feel strongly about the issue, it is something to consider. (If you do sign the petition, be sure to follow Leiter's advice and put some indicator of who you are, e.g., "assistant professor in philosophy at Ivory Tower University," "graduate student in philosophy at Hudson College," or whatever, so that there's more than just the name.)

UPDATE: Sabrina Jamil left a comment that I'll put here, so it doesn't get eaten by Haloscan down the road.

A dissenting opinion is always valuable, and I think you make some excellent points, but it seems that the problem you target (issues with the job market) are the result of a larger attitude that treats philosophy as unimportant. At institutions where philosophy is valued, in fact, the potential for jobs is ample, but budgetary constraints prevent them from becoming actual jobs. For instance, at Miami Dade College (where I currently work), there are very few full-time lines in philosophy -- one to two per campus, over eight campuses -- but the college overall easily offers 3 or 4 times the number of courses that can be taught by full-time faculty. The remainder courses are taught by adjuncts. If the budget allowed for it, presumably the College would open up more full-time positions, and hire more Ph.D. faculty, rather than M.A. faculty such as myself. The issue here is no different than it is for any other discipline within the "humanities" umbrella -- the discipline itself is undervalued by institutions of higher learning, so the budget for those disciplines is constrained. A better approach to the problem of job flow is to encourage growth in the discipline that will push institutions to open more full-time positions. (This is effectively how the position I hold now was created.)

Nussbaum on Shakespeare and Philosophy

Martha Nussbaum has a fascinating review of a number of works on Shakespeare and philosophy (ht):

Philosophers often try to write about Shakespeare. Most of the time they are ill-equipped to do so. There is something irresistibly tempting in the depth and the complexity of the plays, and it lures people who respond to that complexity with abstract thought, even if for the most part they are utterly unprepared, emotionally or stylistically, to write about literary experience. Such philosophers see profound thought in Shakespeare, not wrongly. But armed with their standard analytic equipment, they frequently produce accounts that are laughably reductive, contributing little or nothing to philosophy or to the understanding of Shakespeare.

To make any contribution worth caring about, a philosopher's study of Shakespeare should do three things. First and most centrally, it should really do philosophy, and not just allude to familiar philosophical ideas and positions. It should pursue tough questions and come up with something interesting and subtle--rather than just connecting Shakespeare to this or that idea from Philosophy 101. A philosopher reading Shakespeare should wonder, and ponder, in a genuinely philosophical way. Second, it should illuminate the world of the plays, attending closely enough to language and to texture that the interpretation changes the way we see the work, rather than just uses the work as grist for some argumentative mill. And finally, such a study should offer some account of why philosophical thinking needs to turn to Shakespeare's plays, or to works like them. Why must the philosopher care about these plays? Do they supply to thought something that a straightforward piece of philosophical prose cannot supply, and if so, what?

The review is Nussbaum at her best; well worth reading.

Masculine Sensibility

While the traditional masculine ideals of 'independence, moderation, courage and self-command' remained central, from the late seventeenth century, increasing emphasis was placed on civility, as the ideal of 'the polite man of the eighteenth century replaced the martial hero of earlier periods'. And with the emergence of the 'culture of sensibility' in the middle of the eighteenth century, sensibility came to be viewed as both a touchstone of true civility and gentlemanliness and a corrective to artificial politeness and over-refinement. Nor was there any inherent contradiction between sensibility and manliness, as Adam Smith maintained: 'Our sensibility to the feelings of others, so far from being inconsistent with the manhood of self-command, is the very principle upon which that manhood is founded', as 'the man who feels the most for the joys and sorrows of others, is best fitted for acquiring the most complete control of his own joys and sorrows'.

Andrea McKenzie, Tyburn's Martyrs. Continuum (New York: 2007) p. 213. Quite a good book, by the way.

A Rough Jotting on Ecumenical Theology

One of the difficulties in talking across ecclesial and denominational lines is that the same words often don't mean quite the same things. For instance, when a Baptist talks about 'women's ordination', he means the notion that women may be called or consecrated to pastoral ministry and preaching, and that this call or consecration may be recognized as part of the worship of the congregation. This is not at all what a Catholic would mean when talking about women's ordination. Indeed, for a Catholic 'women's ordination' in a Baptist sense has long been a settled issue: in the Catholic tradition women can be called to pastoral ministry and preaching, and their ministry and preaching can be recognized as part of the worship of the congregation. There is a long history of this, in fact; the most obvious examples are abbesses. One finds that even among Catholics who are very conservative on the question the issue is clear enough; for instance, very traditionalist Catholics will deny that an abbess can preach but when pressed will affirm that an abbess can exhort. There are not-wholly-unreasonable reasons for this -- the point is to make very clear that the abbess has no sacramental function, and so where a word, like 'preaching', is often associated with the sacramental function of bishops, traditionalists tend not to use it outside of that sacramental function. But sacramental function aside, there is no functional difference between the pastoral role at least some abbesses can legitimately yield and that of any other pastor of the Church; and insofar as preaching involves, e.g., giving pastoral exhortation in public, abbesses can be said to have some authority to preach (e.g., in chapter). So any controversy over women's ordination among Baptists has no real parallel among Catholics; at most there there is room to dispute how far an abbess's authority as spiritual mother can extend, in matters like preaching and correction, before it invades the sacramental precincts reserved to prelates. When Catholics talk about 'women's ordination', they are not talking about whether women can be called to pastoral ministry, understood as the sort of functions exercised by a Baptist minister (which, consistent with the actual practice of the Catholic Church through the ages can only be given an affirmative answer; and, indeed, there is no doubt that an abbess in Catholic tradition is understood to have much greater spiritual authority over her 'congregation' than a Baptist pastor over his), but whether they can be called to the sacramental ministry associated with the sacrament of holy orders (which is answered firmly in the negative). And it is noteworthy that no less an authority than Thomas Aquinas holds that this latter is the one and only form of authority a Catholic woman cannot exercise: every other form of temporal and spiritual authority (even, he says, spiritual authority greater than that of a bishop, where God has intervened with a special gift) is open to her if God calls her to it; and even this one is only denied her to signify a divine point until glory, which transcends every such gift of grace we may receive in this lifetime. Thus a Baptist and a Catholic talking this matter over have to be careful to understand what the other person really means.

Similar impediments to straightforward discussion are everywhere. A Catholic, for instance, must think that the Zwinglian is wrong about the Catholic Eucharist; but since the Catholic doesn't think the Zwinglian Lord's Supper is sacramental, the Catholic can't immediately rule out the possibility that the Zwinglian is right with regard to that. Indeed, the question with which the Catholic is faced is whether the Zwinglian is right or is (so to speak) selling himself short. Thus in every case of discussion across ecclesial or denominational lines, care should be taken to know how the person across that line is using the term, and good judgment should be used in comparing it to usage on this side of the line.

Augusta Ada, Countess Lovelace, on Mathematical Machines

Those who view mathematical science, not merely as a vast body of abstract and immutable truths, whose intrinsic beauty, symmetry and logical completeness, when regarded in their connexion together as a whole, entitle them to a prominent place in the interest of all profound and logical minds, but as possessing a yet deeper interest for the human race, when it is remembered that this science constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world, and those unceasing changes of mutual relationship which, visibly or invisibly, consciously or unconsciously to our immediate physical perceptions, are interminably going on in the agencies of the creation we live amidst: those who thus think on mathematical truth as the instrument through which the weak mind of man can most effectually read his Creator's works, will regard with especial interest all that can tend to facilitate the translation of its principles into explicit practical forms.

This is from one of the great early classics of computer science, Ada Lovelace's translation of Menabrea's 1842 "Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage," complete with her notes, in which she brilliantly lays out a vision of a mathematical science of operations, thus earning herself a place in history as the founder of computer programming. Babbage and others had programmed machines before, of course, including early models and parts of Babbage's engines, but Lovelace was the first to recognize that such programming was more than just adjustment of a machine to get results, that it was a mathematical approach in its own right.

UPDATE

Here's the passage from Babbage's Passages from the Life of a Philosopher in which he notes Lady Lovelace's work:


Passages from the Life of a Philosopher By Charles Babbage

Boole on Identity, Noncontradiction, and Excluded Middle

As the principles of identity and excluded middle...are true principles and are moreover either first principles or as consciousness informs us lie close to the very ground of the possibility of thought (it matters not here that they have been regarded by some as metaphysical and not logical and by others have been considered frivolous and trifling). A theory of Logic which does not both recognise them and give to them a very important place must be a very imperfect theory. It does not suffice that their existence should be casually noticed.

On the other hand it is very evident that the principles of identity, contradiction and excluded middle are rather principles which relate to conception and to judgment -- to the power by which [we] conceive of things as existing and as existing in relation expressible by propositions -- than to reasoning. To the latter they seem to belong only or chiefly in an implicit manner inasmuch as reasoning presupposes conception and judgment as the sources form which the materials upon which it operates are derived.

George Boole, Prolegomena, sects. 4 & 5, Selected Manuscripts on Logic and its Philosophy, Grattan-Guinness and Bornet, eds. Birkhäuser Verlag (Boston: 1997) 51-52.

A Poem Draft

Half Asleep in a Thunderstorm

I lie in bed at night,
a fan above my head;
my mind whirls round and round
and I dream that I am dead.

The darkness all around me
like a blanket on the brain,
my heartbeat in my ears
like the pounding of the rain,
I watch the world go by,
just leaves upon the gale,
seeing visions of lost time
and the lapse of every tale.

The darkness thunders softly
as I drift here in my bed,
half in the world and of it,
half out of it and dead.

Dark Satanic Mills

Mark Shea notes the oddity of the hymn "Jerusalem", and of its popularity. The hymn was fashioned from a poem in the preface to William Blake's Milton:

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor Shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.

I think the popularity of the hymn has to do with its militancy. Militant hymns are striking and stirring in ways that many other hymns are not; they make you want to rise up and do something. And they invoke the sublime, and that is a rare quality in hymns, or, indeed, in any songs whatsoever. Most songs, of course, are better off not even attempting it; but a song that manages to do it without obviously descending into a sort of parody is a rare thing.

Of course, there are hymns that do these things much better than "Jerusalem" does. "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," for instance. But the Battle Hymn, for all its Unitarian provenance, can't be (as Shea notes "Jerusalem" is) a post-Christian hymn; it lacks, for instance, the neo-Pelagian view that progress is something you build by imposing your will on the world. In the Battle Hymn, it is not you who bring progress: it is God's truth that marches on, as inevitable and inexorable as the glory of the morning on the wave, it is He who looses the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword, against which those who oppose the march of His truth cannot stand. And the only contribution the hymn exhorts people to make to this progress is this, that just as Christ died because that was what it took to make men holy, so we should be willing to die if that's what it takes to make men free, because God is marching on. So much easier to sing that you'll fight ceaselessly to destroy all of the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the basis of a story nobody believes....

Decisive Voting and Oxfam Alternatives

Harry Brighouse has some arguments that there is no strict obligation to vote. There are a few points in the post I agree with (e.g., I don't think anyone has a moral obligation to vote), but he also gives an argument that just gets on my nerves:

Finally, whereas campaigning really does matter in well structured institutions, voting is very strange – the chance that your vote will, in fact, be decisive is almost zero (usually). Suppose it takes you 30 minutes to vote. Even if you earn minimum wage, it would almost certainly be better to work that 30 minutes, and donate the proceeds to Oxfam. All I can say about this is that most people who don’t vote do not, in fact, spend the time they gain from not doing so working for a wage they donate to Oxfam.

I do agree that if you are the sort of person who is persuaded by this argument, you probably should not vote. Ever. It provides such an utterly ridiculous criterion for what would make a vote "matter" that you would think that people who give arguments like this would pause a moment and say, "Well, now that I say it, that doesn't sound quite right." Under what reasonable, rational conception of voting does voting only matter if your vote, in particular, stands a good chance of being decisive? So that's one part of the argument that gets on my nerves.

But the rest gets on my nerves, too; there is, I've found, a whole class of arguments (particularly popular among utilitarians, but not exclusively among them) which might be called "Oxfam alternative arguments", where an activity is compared to donating to Oxfam (or something similar), or working for a period of time and donating to Oxfam, and the comparison is always, of course, unfavorable to the first choice. But this is silly; there is no way to compare the two activities unless we know the field and standard of comparison. Suppose, for instance, that you value participation in the institutions and traditions of your nation. Then it would be utterly silly to say, in light of that value, that it would almost certainly be better to work to donate to Oxfam than to vote. Even if it were still better to work to donate to Oxfam, it would not 'almost certainly' be so; and it could only be so because some greater value took precedence over the value of participation. So such comparisons are meaningless. Which is better, throwing a birthday party for your daughter or giving all the money to Oxfam? Which is better, typing up a post about whether you should vote or spend that time working and donating the money to Oxfam? Which is better, getting eight hours of sleep, or only four while working the other four to donate to Oxfam? There is no meaning to such vague and indefinite comparisons.

Feast of St. Athanasius

Who, then, is this Christ and how great is He, Who by His Name and presence overshadows and confounds all things on every side, Who alone is strong against all and has filled the whole world with His teaching? Let the Greeks tell us, who mock at Him without stint or shame. If He is a man, how is it that one man has proved stronger than all those whom they themselves regard as gods, and by His own power has shown them to be nothing? If they call Him a magician, how is it that by a magician all magic is destroyed, instead of being rendered strong? Had He conquered certain magicians or proved Himself superior to one of them only, they might reasonably think that He excelled the rest only by His greater skill. But the fact is that His cross has vanquished all magic entirely and has conquered the very name of it. Obviously, therefore, the Savior is no magician, for the very demons whom the magicians invoke flee from Him as from their Master. Who is He, then? Let the Greeks tell us, whose only serious pursuit is mockery! Perhaps they will say that He, too, is a demon, and that is why He prevailed. But even so the laugh is still on our side. for we can confute them by the same proofs as before. How could He be a demon, Who drives demons out? If it were only certain ones that He drove out, then they might reasonably think that He prevailed against them through the power of their Chief, as the Jews, wishing to insult Him, actually said. But since the fact is, here again, that at the mere naming of His Name all madness of the demons is rooted out and put to flight, obviously the Greeks are wrong here, too, and our Lord and Savior Christ is not, as they maintain, some demonic power.

If, then, the Savior is neither a mere man nor a magician, nor one of the demons, but has by His Godhead confounded and overshadowed the opinions of the poets and the delusion of the demons and the wisdom of the Greeks, it must be manifest and will be owned by all that He is in truth Son of God, Existent Word and Wisdom and Power of the Father. This is the reason why His works are no mere human works, but, both intrinsically and by comparison with those of men, are recognized as being superhuman and truly the works of God.

From Athanasius, On the Incarnation (ch 8/sect. 48).

Indicative Conditionals and Material Conditionals

A nice little argument worth thinking about. The following is a valid inference.

(p → q) & (r → s), therefore (p → s) v (r → q)

But given this we can easily show that at least some cases of English indicative conditionals do not fit this scheme. Since they would if they were material conditionals, they are not material conditionals. Here's an example, taken from Graham Priest, who takes it from W. S. Cooper:

If John is in Paris he is in France & if John is in London he is in England.

From this we obviously cannot conclude

If John is in Paris he is in England or if John is in London he is France.

Another one. This is valid:

~(p → q), therefore p

But this is not:

It is not the case that if there is a good God the prayers of evil people will be answered. Therefore there is a good God.

Because, of course, it does not follow that there is a good God merely from the assumption that "if there is a good God the prayers of evil people will be answered" is false.