The Sooty Empiric

For my own purposes I am going to summarise a line of argument I think is largely drawn from feminist philosophy of science, maybe especially the work of Helen Longino  - see here  for an early and relatively complete outline of the argument I summarise below. I'm spurred to do this after some internet discussion made me see that I did not have the same understanding as my interlocutors regarding what the most influential strands of feminist philosophy of science have been. If we're going to disagree about feminist philosophy of science, I'd at least like it to be clear what kind of thing I have in mind! So I hope this fosters dialogue. (Note that I don't claim any originality for this at all, in fact if I am right in my self-understanding then I am just summarising the results of a well known and developed research programme. I will often mention Longino, but she's certainly not the only person to contribute to this. Some of the relevant stuff is discussed here ....

Round here I do a fair bit of meta-philosophy. Sometimes I am opine about how we   ought   decide   upon our research questions , sometimes about how we ought evaluate our answers . Today I am going to pontificate about both at once. My aim in this blog post is just to write down in one place what seems to be the consequences of the picture I have drawn in a scattered fashion. Not only do I not claim any originality for this, my self-impression is that I am just making explicit a fairly widely held and probably communally standard picture in Anglo-American philosophy. I would be very unsurprised if somebody has published this before, please link me in the comments! Finally, not only does not my work not live up to the ideal to be expressed, but this blog post was in very large part inspired by recent self-critique, so I most certainly do not offer my own work as exemplifying this process. What follows is an idealised processes by which one might hit upon a positio...

As mentioned before , I have been following the Heidegger scandal from afar. In short, it's apparent that Heidegger's Naziism runs deep. As far as I can tell, the scholarly discussion after the publication of the Black Notebooks has largely resulted in acceptance of the claim that his Naziism is not so easily divorced from aspects of his thinking that people have wanted to take up and incorporate into their own work. The hard task of seeing what can be disentangled and how thus begins in earnest! Well, recently, a tweet , a book review , and a blog post , have all got me thinking more about this. In the below I am going to outline a thought I have discussed in conversation with a few people but never run past people who I think know enough about Heidegger or the present scholarly debate on his work to really have it tested. Like my first blog post on this (first link!) it's very much an outsider's perspective, which means it runs a high risk of being either so obvious...

When I was 14 my mother died. By this point I was rather a bookish child, and so my instinct was to turn to some text and find solace therein. My faith made the choice of text obvious, but, still, the Bible is a big book containing many literary mansions; what to read therein? What I ended up settling on was the Book of Job --  I read and reread this text, and for some time could quote lengthy passages from the Authorised Version off by heart. No stranger to teenage melodrama, I found myself really identifying with Job's dignified resolve in the face of a fundamentally unfair and (to him) inexplicable cruelty. It brought me comfort to think that I might hope in my own way to exemplify the same sort of courage, to squarely face tragedy as tragedy, yet never give in to the temptation to simply curse God and die. However, some years later when somebody else I knew was faced with their own loss, I recommended reading Job to them - but they found this perverse, utter...

By Liam Kofi Bright and Rose Novick . (Joint work with equal contributions.) Kongzi, on being asked the first thing to do in administering government, gave a surprising answer: Zilu asked, “If the Duke of Wei were to employ you to serve in the government of his state, what would be your first priority?”  The Master answered, “It would, of course, be the rectification of names.” (Analects 13.3, tr. Slingerland) Rectifying names (正名 zhengming ), Kongzi says, is the basis of social flourishing. If names are out of order, speech will not match reality, plans will be impossible to put into action, culture will decline, and punishment will be ineffective. The central task of the gentleman, then, is put names in order. As Kongzi puts it, “The gentleman simply guards against arbitrariness in speech” (13.3). We suggest that Carnap (though we expect that similar things could be said for others of the logical empiricists) had an interestingly similar conception of the philosophe...

Recently Peter Wolfendale wrote up a very frank and honest discussion of his time in and out and on the edge of academia, and the relationship between this and his type II bipolar disorder. It's a long essay - insightful, but heavy stuff, so give it a read when you feel in a place to read about depression and its effects on a philosopher's life. (It will perhaps pair well with this  interview with Carrie Jenkins.) While it's not really the focus of the essay, I was really struck by PW's description of how he thinks about philosophical problems: Here’s how I think about a philosophical problem. It is a branching tree of paths, splitting off into alternative solutions, each with their own forking reasons, each caught in dialectical interaction with its opponents. You choose a path that seems right, and if you’re lucky you outlast the alternatives, chasing them into dead ends of bare assertion or loops that beg the question (either is a pyrrhic victory). However, the...

I object to the idea that we do and should decide what philosophical positions to adopt by amalgamating our opinions about the various theories' virtues like empirical adequacy, simplicity, explanatory power, fruitfulness, consistency, etc. Ever since Kuhn's work (at least) this has been a popular idea about how scientists do or should go about deciding what theory to adopt, and my impression is that many in our field propose we adopt a similar practice in philosophy. (This idea has appeared in print a few times, but I don't want to make this about disagreeing with particular people -- I hear the idea informally quite a lot, and so I am responding to something that I take to be in the air and which I object to quite generally, rather than in any particular spelling out.) I object to this on both the individual and social level -- I don't think each or any of us do or should do this, and nor do I think we should collectively do this when making joint choices. Likewise so...