Category Archives: Philosophy

Monday grab bag (with important question to readers)

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Yeah, I’m grading. (Maybe you would be too if you weren’t reading the blogs, hmm?) But I wanted to check in.

  • I pulled my back loading the car for the last soccer game of the season. What’s the proper inference to draw from that (besides the obvious: that I’m getting old and all this grading is doing nothing for my muscle tone)?
  • How is it that if I make assignments at school they often are left undone, whereas if I make assignments on my blog, people do the work and turn it in? (Are we now awarding ScienceBlogs course credit?)
  • As much as I hate feeding capitalism (seriously, ask these guys) and consumerism, I do like nurturing the interests of the young in positive directions. So, to balance the bad stuff out there on the market, I’m putting together a round up of brain-friendly gift ideas for the youngsters. My question to you: What games, toys, or other giftables would you recommend for a kid who may or may not have an interest in math and science? Tell me by email (and expound on why your suggestion rocks), and I’ll compile a list of the favorites to go up in the neighborhood of Buy Nothing Day. (You can research on Buy Nothing Day, I think).

More when I emerge, victorious, from the stack of papers.

The dangers of reading a paper at a conference.

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Chad Orzel has an excellent post up about good ways to use PowerPoint for a presentation. In a similar vein, I’d like to offer some reasons for academics in disciplines (like philosophy) in which it is the convention to read papers to each other at professional meetings to consider breaking with tradition and not just reading the papers they are presenting.
First, for those of you in science-y fields puzzling over that last sentence: Yes, a great many philosophers really do go places and read their papers to other philosophers. Yes, when I saw it the first time, coming to philosophy via chemistry where people don’t do this, it confused the heck out of me, too. The setting in which this manner of presentation struck me as the most misguided was in department colloquia where the speaker had sent a copy of the paper ahead so that people had time to read it — and indeed, many people in attendance had photocopies of the paper with them at the colloquium — and yet, the speaker still read the paper to these presumably literate members of the audience!
Academic philosophers are a funny bunch, and a complete analysis of their customs is beyond the scope of this post. My goal for the moment is to urge examination of this particular custom — and some of its pitfalls — in the hopes that it may lead to more productive communication at future conferences and colloquia. (Am I looking out for my own interests as a person in the audience for philosophy presentations? You’re darn tootin’!)

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A backward glance at PSA 2006

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ScienceBloggers meet in the three-dimensional world: (from left) Janet Stemwedel, John Lynch, Prof. Steve Steve, John Wilkins, David Ng, Ben Cohen.
I managed to get back home last night from the PSA meeting in Vancouver, although just barely. My co-symposiasts got a rental car and headed off to see mountains, an expedition I’d have joined were it not for my plane-missing paranoia. (“You realize that flying home from Vancouver is essentially a domestic flight, so you probably don’t need to check in until about 90 minutes before flight time,” the field trip organizer assured me. But I know what I worry about, rational or not.) Given that the hotel had pretty much cleared of philosophers and historians, I got bored enough hanging around in the lobby that I ended up catching an earlier airport shuttle, which proceeded to get stuck in traffic. No matter, I was still at the airline check-in kiosk 2.5 hours before my scheduled departure time.
And then the kiosk informed me that my flight had been cancelled. AAAAAAAIIEEEEEE!!
One of the remaining human gate agents was able to work out how to get me booked through to another Bay Area airport as my final destination. “But,” she said, “your flight out of here departs in 30 minutes, so you’re going to have to hustle!” Through customs, through security, to a gate in the hinterlands that required that I run across a large connecting tube, down a flight of stairs, across another large stretch, up a flight of stairs, and then a little further to the gate (carrying my coat and shoes the whole time, of course). But I made it.
Off the top of my travel-tired head, here are some observations from this year’s conference:

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Panda and philosophers meet paparazzi.

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Guest Blogger: Prof. Steve Steve

My adventures with John Wilkins at the PSA meeting in Vancouver continue. Last evening, Wilkins brought me to a reception where I had the pleasure of mingling with a great many philosophers who have made philosophical studies of various aspects of evolutionary biology. Strangely, these minglings were punctuated with camera flashes. Here I am trying to have a word with Robert Brandon as the paparazzi close in on us.

Here I am trying to catch up with Roberta Millstein (who blogged at the much-missed Philosophy of Biology) about her recent move to UC Davis. Once again, some interloper with a camera decided to butt in. How do philosophers manage to carry on a conversation with distractions like these? (Why, for that matter, were there paparazzi in a gathering of academic philosophers?)

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A panda’s-eye view of the PSA.

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Guest Blogger: Prof. Steve Steve

My esteemed Panda’s Thumb colleague John Wilkins invited me to attend the PSA meeting in Vancouver. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so I agreed.
Last evening started pleasantly enough. I met Wilkins, John Lynch, Ben Cohen and David Ng, and Janet Stemwedel (from whose blog I am writing to you now) for refreshments. Yes, there was a bit of confusion when it turned out that the hotel didn’t have an ice machine on every floor. As well, there was the puzzle of how properly to utilize the fresh limes for beverages in the absence of a knife. (The solution: quick and forceful jabs with a house-key. There was no suitably clever solution to the puzzle of how to extract a cork without a corkscrew, however, so the wine remained in its bottle.) Still, there was lively conversation and good cheer.

After the ScienceBloggers confab, we joined the larger conference reception, where I greeted an important philosopher of science:

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What’s the point of a college education?

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I started out thinking I was writing this as an open letter to my students, but it turns out I’m talking to you all, too.
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I have very strong feelings about what the point of a college education should be. Maybe you do, too. It’s entirely possible that we would disagree about this issue, or that you are so happy with your own picture of the point of a college education that you really have no interests in anyone else’s.
That’s fine. But if you’re my student, certain things I get worked up about may strike you as mysterious if you don’t know what I think this whole thing is aiming for. On the off chance that you’d rather not see your instructor as eccentric or wacko, this is where I lay it all out.
A college education is not job training.

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Disciplinary misconceptions (philosophy version).

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Chatting with the chair of the philosophy department at one of the local community colleges:
CC Dept. Chair: Yeah, so I’m scheduled to teach six classes this term.
Me: Six?! While you’re the chair?!!
CC Dept. Chair: Yeah, six. We have big enrollments, the full-time faculty are fully scheduled, and I can’t find enough part-timers to teach all the sections.
Me: Good grief! So you have to teach them yourself?
CC Dept. Chair: The enrollments are what will get us permission to hire another full-timer, so I can’t not teach them.
Me: Yikes!
CC Dept. Chair: Also, I need to counteract the effect of some of the instructors who, erm, are driving the students away.
Me: Driving them away?
CC Dept. Chair: Yeah. Dry lectures, three hour blue-book exams, that sort of thing.
Me: In philosophy? What the hell?!
CC Dept. Chair: Exactly.
Me: Seriously, philosophy class is supposed to be the one that’s so engaging that it lures you away from what your parents want you to major in.
CC Dept. Chair: That’s my feeling on it.
Me: Have these three-hour-blue-book-exam folks forgotten that our business is corrupting the youth?
CC Dept. Chair: Apparently. Which is why I have six classes worth of youth to corrupt this term.

Sounds better than pinching yourself.

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Younger offspring offers a way to distinguish dreaming from conscious experience:

I thought I was really awake, so I reached up to touch a cloud, but instead of feeling fuzzy like a cloud would feel, it was like touching an empty space. So that’s how you can tell if you’re dreaming, if you touch the clouds and they feel like empty space.

The child hasn’t read Descartes yet, but we’ve got all summer.

Is all animal research inhumane? (More from the vault)

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This post, originally posted 8 January 2006 on the old site, responds to an email I got after the last post. Given John’s recent post on Pro-Test, the questions are still timely.
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I received an email from a reader in response to my last post on PETA’s exposing of problems with the treatment of research animals at UNC. The reader pointed me to the website of an organization concerned with the treatment of lab animals in the Research Triangle, www.serat-nc.org. And, she wrote the following:

Some people may think that PETA is extreme. However, the true “extreme” is what happens to animals in labs. If the public knew, most would be outraged. But, of course our government hides such things very well. Those researchers who abuse animals in labs (which is ALL researchers, by my definition), cannot do an about turn and go home and not abuse animals or humans at their homes. Animal researchers are abusers, and there is enough research on people who abuse to know that abuse does not occur in isolation. The entire industry must change.

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