Digressions&Impressions

What Would Mary Philosophize About After a final Theory?

In the days after humanity miraculously avoided nuclear annihilation in the wars and turmoil subsequent the permanent disruption of global ecology and trade patterns in the light of global warming,* the Guardians of Humanity re-discovered the work of Heather Douglas and George Smith, and they organized the sciences in such a way that a new age of Enlightenment was ushered in; in their institutional desig the sciences reflexively integrate human value and passion as well as systematically exploit anomalies such that after centuries of virtuous epistemic feedback loops, they attain a final theory about the world. A key role was played, following the Schaffer-rule, by the fruitful heuristic of searching for essences, or formal causes, by deploying the PSR and the introduction of quasi-final-causes (which are dispensable). 

Physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, and psychology** are essentially complete. It is a joyous time for the Regimenters and the Ideologists, who offer the definitive interpretation of the book of the world. It has turned out that despite the nay-sayers (and their silly mutterings of neutral quantification), there is, indeed, a single modal logic that captures the modal structure of the world. In this Golden Age, Mary, the brilliant product of several generations of directed enhancement, has special exemption from the rules that govern the epistemically promising. In their collective wisdom the Guardians of Humanity have decided that The Exempt can choose their own intellectual trajectory so as not to stifle human innovation by over-planning. Mary is sent to the Pauline academy, where the Guardians teach the Next in addition to a multitude of engineering sciences (including higher computational Bayesianism), the history of political philosophy (especially the Fragments of Zeno of Citium, Plato, More, Bacon, and Wollstonecraft) as well as Epistemic Policy Science (lots of Swift, Knight, and L.A. Paul).

She enjoys the historians of philosophy she encounters, especially their subversive sense of humor, but she dislikes their spleenish hatred of Enlightenment and their condescension toward the Living Stoics (a sect that does no harm and plays its assigned role) and the academic Aestheticians. She enjoys pure mathematics and para-consistent logics as a pass-time, but prefers N-dimensional chess puzzles and writing poetry. The pull of engineering is great because humanity's needs continue to outstrip its resources; it is what her unit expects, but, perhaps that's why she won't. She recognizes that technology's dance will continue to feed the need for creative policy ethicists who can continue the work to search for an ongoing reflective equilibrium between the Syncretic Gospels and the demands of the PSR, but she becomes restless without fully understanding why at each Simon solution.

Yet, the Hymn recounts that one day, after her morning exercise, Mary found -- to speak metaphorically -- her voice and took the her first step on the path to true philosophy. --From: The Chronicles of Mary, 'The Revival of the Academy' (I).

 

Self-loathing in Philosophy

Under no circumstances should this department sponsor or be affiliated in any way with an event that includes alcohol. (Report  on  Site  Visit Conducted  by The  American  Philosophical Association  (APA) Committee  on  the  Status  of  Women  (CSW), p. 12.)

Last night I was reminded of the passage above. I heard a story about a prominent philosopher that I admire, who had groped a graduate student while under the influence of alcohol. I wondered if there was a pattern or a one-off. A few weeks earlier, before the Peter Ludlow story hit the media, the philosopher Abe Stone, asked on his facebook page, "why do philosophers drink so much alcohol in professional contexts?...Even if this had no bearing at all on the issue of sexual harassment (though clearly it does have some!) it would be something we ought to discuss." I think Stone is right about the phenomenon: there is a problematic, drinking culture in philosophy. In some departments it is passed on from one generation to the next. I always found it remarkable that my supervisor preferred Chinese food over beer.  (I am pretty confident that was one of the many subtle reasons why I gravitated toward him.)

This is no surprise, of course. There is a lot of drinking in the societies in which professional philosophy is embedded. But the problem is notable in professional philosophy because it has extremely fluid boundaries between work and not work. (This is a field that has, of course, low tolerance for the very intelligibility of ontological vagueness.) So, even if one were to ban alcohol from all sponsored events (not just the Boulder department, the APA smoker, etc.), the alcohol related problems, including sexual harassment, would not disappear in professional philosophy. (This is no criticism of the CSW Report at Boulder!) For, alcohol is one of the social glues of our profession (which, after all, has a legitimate professional fondness for conversation). For example, I edited a volume where in his acknowledgments, my co-editor promised me a drink.