If you’ve been paying attention to the news recently you might have noticed that the university where I work – Washington University in St Louis – has decided to give an honourary doctorate to Phyllis Schalfly. I, like many people here, hadn’t heard of Ms Schlafly, but having read some of
her columns and having learned of her work against the Equal Rights Amendment, I’ve signed the letter from the Association of Women Faculty protesting the decision. It’s hard to see how our university can support someone whose life work has been to undermine the legal and social status of so many of its students and colleagues.
But enough about Schlafly. Those more familiar with her will provide a better rapsheet. D’s description of the up-coming ceremony as the worst graduation ever made me try to remember who had been honoured at my own undergraduate graduation ceremony. And the person who sticks out most in my mind is the actress Helen Mirren, who was then famous for playing Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison in the TV-series Prime Suspect. And I remember, not just because my dad was rather awed to see Mirren in real life, but because of the speech one of the St Andrews officials gave to introduce her. He talked about how, when he had been growing up, and a girl his own age had been asked what she wanted to be when she grew up she had usually replied with one of the few professions that were thought of as suitable to women at the time: nurse, air-hostess, etc. But last week when he asked his own young daughter what she wanted to be, she’d replied, to his surprise: “Detective Chief Inspector”.
I wonder what my students will remember about their graduation ceremonies this year.
Posted by Gillian Russell at 9:02 pm
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My first ever book has just come out, and is now available world-wide. Here’s what it looks like:
It’s called Truth in Virtue of Meaning and it’s basically a new account of the analytic-synthetic distinction (one which is designed to fit better with phenomena like contextualism and semantic externalism than pre-Quine conceptions of the distinction did), and a defence of that distinction against about 7-zillion arguments (ok, maybe more like 15 arguments) against analyticity.
I’m going to post a bit more about the content of the book later in the week, but what I thought I’d do right now is tell you a bit about the photograph on the cover. The photo is by a Maldivian photographer called Shazeen Samad. He has a beautiful website and some of my favourite images of his are here, here, here and here. If you are looking to procrastinate while you should be grading/writing that final paper, and you won’t be depressed by images of incredibly beautiful people hanging out in what appears to be the most beautiful place on earth, then the site comes highly recommended.
The photo that Shazeen very kindly let me use is called “Maldavian Reflection” and it is an image of the ocean at sunset, when the water is so still that the entire sky (which has lots of cool clouds) is reflected in it. A couple of people have remarked that the picture is beautiful, but doesn’t have much to do with the topic of the book. But to those people I say two things: first, off, what did you want? pictures of bachelors? of one concept containing another? and second: not so! when you first look at the photograph it can seem pretty chaotic and hard to work out what it is a picture of. But then you look harder, and you realise that it is in two halves, with the horizon down the middle and that everything below the horizon is water, and everything above it is sky. What could be more appropriate?
Posted by Gillian Russell at 5:09 pm
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This stuff is
great. I’ve been teaching a slightly-harder-than-usual logic course this semester and I really wanted a blackboard for my office, for practicing proofs on.
One of those things that I think good logic students quickly realise is that it’s one thing to be able to follow a proof in class, and quite another to be able to reproduce it yourself in homework or on a test. Well one of the things that I’ve learned from teaching logic is that it is one thing thing to be able to scribble a proof out on a notepad, and another to be able to present clearly on a blackboard during a lecture.
Why? Well, it has something to do with the fact that one’s notepad is uebersichtlich – scrawling out some complicated instance of an axiom isn’t that hard if the axiom is at the top of your page, but it can be a bit harder when that axiom is 2 blackboards back, or on the other side of the room. (My logic classroom has 6 huge boards that scroll past each other – I rather like that, but it can make it easy to loose the first part of a proof.) So I think that for me to write a proof on the board requires that I know more of the proof off by heart than when I’m just writing it on paper. Second, of course, there’s just more pressure when 30, or 60, eyes are on you, all waiting to be reminded what the induction hypothesis 2 boards ago actually was. And third, when I’m putting a proof on the board I’m often talking at the same time. And as teachers everywhere know, talking goes faster than writing, so you’re basically running two trains of thought at once anyway.
So I’d been yearning for a blackboard in my office, and then I found this stuff. . It consists of flexible blackboard tiles that stick to your wall (they’re removable and re-positionable- they come off my white-painted wall easily, without leaving a mark, and stick right back on, and, surprisingly, it’s really easy to write on them with chalk and clean them off. (I imagine if your wall is a different colour from your chalk you’ll end up with a chalk-coloured “halo” around the board though.) They’re a bit smaller than they look in the photo – each tile is about the size of a US letter sheet of paper – and I ended up buying 2 packs of 4. Also, I think the tiles are a little prone to getting scratched by the chalk – I can imagine having to buy some more after a couple of years or so. But they look great on my wall and they do the job (every Tuesday and Thursday morning before my logic lecture…)
Posted by Gillian Russell at 3:45 pm
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I think it’s pretty common to think of
how asleep someone is as something that comes in degrees, by which I mean that someone can be a little bit asleep (in which case their eyes will be closed, but they might remember overhearing a conversation nearby, and be wake-able with very little stimulus, such as someone whispering their name, or opening the door of the room they are in), or very very deeply asleep, in which case they might sleep through a loud storm/band playing next door/someone poking them or even moving them, and in all kinds of states in between. But Demmett and Vaughan’s
The Promise of Sleep argues that this is wrong: though there are indeed different kinds of sleep (i.e. stages 1-4 and REM sleep) sleep itself is discrete on/off thing.
The main experiment Demmett cites in support of this goes more or less like this: you keep a subject awake for 3 or 4 days, so that they build up a large sleep debt, making them liable to fall asleep quickly. Then you clip their eyelids open (yes, it does sound torturous) and sit them in front of a bright flash, like that of a camera, which goes of randomly, but on average every 8 seconds or so. Then you ask them to push a button every time the flash goes off. Here’s what happens. For the first couple of minutes they push the button diligently every time the flash goes off. But after a couple of minutes, there is a flash and they fail to push the button. The experimenters ask them why they didn’t push the button, and the subject replies that there was no flash. But of course, there was a flash, the experimenters all saw it, and the subject is sitting there with their eyes pinned open in front of the flash bulb. The electrodes attached to the subject’s scalp (which you can use to measure electrical activity in the brain) show that the subject actually fell asleep for 2 seconds.
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Posted by Gillian Russell at 4:15 pm
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Good luck to everyone who’s being interviewed at the APA this week.
In some ways it’s a weird, weird process – not obviously geared to producing good results, and clearly torture for some participants. I suppose I can imagine someone arguing that the ability to get through it is a sign that a candidate has some of the qualities they want in a colleague (organisational skills, ability to push on and keep working under stressful conditions, ability to cope with difficult people and formal situations etc.), but when I was reading Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained recently, and he described a coming of age ceremony in which adolescent boys are subjected to a terrifying ritual in which their deaths are faked (they are held underwater and it is made to look as if a spear is plunged into their bellies) before they are taken away from the village by the older men and basically hazed for an extended period of time, I couldn’t help being reminded of the APA. Good luck keeping your heads, guys.
(N.B. Just to clarify, I haven’t actually heard any stories about APA interviews involving water-boarding. And there is a rumour that girls are sometimes interviewed too.)
Posted by Gillian Russell at 4:54 pm
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The
BBC notes that it is illegal to name a pig “Napoleon” in France. Good job we saved it for the aarkvark then.
(p. 96 of Naming and Necessity)
Posted by Gillian Russell at 8:55 pm
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Logicians often complain that there are no logic jobs in philosophy, but Adam Morton has just sent me news of one, and it’s at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where I did a postdoc. Alberta is a great department – I had an absolutely fantastic year there – and Edmonton is a great place to be if you have any interest in winter sports…or theatre for that matter, the Edmonton Fringe Festival is some of the best fun you can have without snow.
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The Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, invites applications for a tenure-track position in Philosophy, with a specialization in Logic. Other areas of research and teaching specialization and competence are open. The appointment will be made at the rank of Assistant Professor, effective July 1, 2008. Responsibilities include undergraduate and graduate teaching and maintaining an active research programme. Tenure stream faculty normally teach four one term courses per year. Candidates should hold a PhD in Philosophy and provide evidence of scholarly and teaching excellence. Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience, and the benefit package is comprehensive. Applicants should arrange to send a letter of application indicating the position applied for and describing areas of research interest, curriculum vitae, all university transcripts, a sample of written work, letters from three referees, and, if available, a teaching dossier and teaching evaluations to Bruce Hunter, Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, CANADA, T6G 2E5. CLOSING DATE: November 10, 2007. The University of Alberta hires on the basis of merit. We are committed to the principle of equity in employment. We welcome diversity and encourage applications from all qualified women and men, including persons with disabilities, members of visible minorities, and Aboriginal persons. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens and permanent residents will be given priority. For further information concerning the Department, please consult http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/philosophy/.
Posted by Gillian Russell at 10:17 am
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The
2nd Online Philosophy Conference has just entered its second (and final) week.
My paper on Logical Pluralism (which is, in a way, a paper about the objects of validity) is up, with comments by
JC Beall and
Jonanthan McKeown-Green. I was really happy that JC agreed to comment on the paper, since he and
Greg essentially wrote
the book on logical pluralism. Jonathan is a good friend of mine from my graduate days. He had the office nextdoor to mine for a while at Princeton, but he has since returned to Auckland, where (some of you may be interested to note) there is currently a
vacancy in logic. Anyway, the paper is only 14 pages long, and I’d be really grateful for any comments.
The Online Philosophy Conference is well worth supporting of course, and this week it also features papers from Derek Pereboom, Jeff McMahan, Caspar Hare, John Martin-Fischer and Jonathan Dancy.
Posted by Gillian Russell at 3:46 pm
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Martha Nussbaum has an
article on Indian politics in the Chronicle today, (linked to by
Arts and Letters Daily, who also link to an
article on Western vs Islamic feminism which praises Nussbaum.)
Once I spotted this I did a quick google search for other recent artlces featuring philosophers and discovered this from three days ago.
Posted by Gillian Russell at 1:17 pm
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Today I’ve been getting my book manuscript ready for its final submission to Oxford University Press. Nothing very exciting – just working out how to get LaTeX to comply with their “Notes to Authors” instructions. I thought I’d make some notes here about solutions I’ve discovered to the various problems. (I’d only recommend venturing below the fold if this is the kind of thing that interests you…)
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Posted by Gillian Russell at 3:16 pm
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