The Philosophers' Cocoon

New Athens? For the Few!

It might seem as if New York City is a great place for early-career philosophers—the New Athens. After all, in Manhattan alone there are several PhD programs, such as NYU, Columbia, CUNY Graduate Center, and the New School. Unfortunately, appearances are deceiving in this case. As a matter of fact, opportunities in NYC for early-career philosophers to present their work are scarce. Of course, many PhD programs have their philosophy colloquia but early-career philosophers rarely, if ever, get invited to present work at these colloquia. Similarly, many of the conferences organized by these PhD programs are by invitation only (to present, that is, not to attend).

So, NYC is a great place to attend talks by big names in philosophy. If you are an early-career philosopher, however, your options for presenting your work are very limited. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, the only regular conference in the NY area that is truly open to early-career philosophers, including adjuncts, contingent faculty, and the like, is the Long Island Philosophical Society (LIPS). As a contingent faculty member, without a research budget or travel funds, I often have papers accepted to conferences I cannot afford to attend. So I go to LIPS because it is a local conference. Another great thing about LIPS is that it is a conference that is truly pluralistic in terms of both speakers and content.

If you are in the NY area on April 26, then, please consider attending and showing your support for the LIPS conference. It’s the only one we (early-career philosophers and contingent faculty) have got!

Interesting!

Readers may be interested by this statement by Amy Ferrer (APA Executive Director) and John Heil (Editor in Chief of the Journal of the APA) on the editorial aims and official editorial statement for the new Journal of the Americal Philosophical Association. The following are a few choice excerpts from the journal's official editorial statement:

The impending launch of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association affords a unique opportunity for philosophers around the world to participate in the birth of, not simply another philosophy journal, but a preeminent journal. Achieving preeminence will require: 

• Publishing papers that go out on a limb, papers that start trends rather than merely adding epicycles to going trends. 
• Publishing papers from early‐career philosophers as well as  established philosophers already recognized for their work.
• Publishing papers on topics that draw from and appeal to diverse philosophical constituencies and traditions. 
• Publishing readable papers that can be appreciated by philosophers not already steeped in the subject matter.
• Providing a quick turnaround for submissions and the timely publication of accepted papers: no backlogs, no embargos.  
• Providing comments to authors aimed at improving papers and not merely singling out reasons for rejection.

Sound familiar? From my perspective, a very welcome development indeed. I hope they consider using something like the method(s) I tentatively proposed in my previous post. It will be interesting to see how the new journal goes!

Rethinking journal reviewing standards -- a rough first pass

As a follow-up to my previous post, in which I questioned whether dominant philosophical standards are exclusionary, in this post I will present a tentative, very rough first pass proposal for how journal refereeing norms might be revised so as to promote inclusivity, where this understood in terms of both of the goals Elisa mentioned in her post (including underrepresented people and underrepresented ideas). Again, just to be clear, I offer up the proposal only as a very rough first pass. My main hope is not that the proposal is adequate, but that it will generate further discussion of how we might improve things.

I want to begin by reflecting on how the review process typically works with philosophy journals. Almost all of the journals I have reviewed for give few, if any, guidelines for how referees are supposed to proceed. Basically, the paper is given to the referee, and the referee is to write up a review justifying a recommendaton (viz. accept, reject, R&R, etc.). Then, in light of referee comments, the editor makes an editorial decision.

The most striking thing about this practice is the sheer amount of latitude it gives reviewers (and editors) to judge papers by reference to their own preferences/biases. In my experience, referee comments tend to read as though the referee was primarily asking themselves something like the following questions:

1. Do I find this paper's argument persuasive?
2. Will the dominant readership of this journal find its argument persuasive?
3. Do the author's premises (A) cohere with "commonsense", as well as with (B) premises commonly appealed to in the literature in question?

These are natural enough questions to ask. The first thing I do when reading a paper is ask myself whether I think its argument is any good. But I think this is a problematic way for journal referees to approach their task, and for the reasons I outlined in my previous post. If most referees come from the same background (i.e. not only racial, gender, etc., but also philosophical background, viz. prioritizing "rigor" above all else), the practice of referees asking themselves what they think of the paper threatens to have unintended consequences: namely, most referees with end up rejecting things because the paper they are reviewing contradicts the "received wisdom" that they have internalized as philosophers. In other words, if a vast majority of reviewers come from one background X, and they tend to ask themselves, "Do I find this paper persuasive?", the end result will tend to be: rejecting papers that conflict with their background -- which I have suggested excludes alternative ideas and perspectives. And now notice how innocent it all is! Individual reviewers may not regard themselves as philosophically biased, and yet, if reviewers are given complete latitude to judge "for themselves" whether a paper is any good, the expected end result can be the systematic exclusion of underrepresented perspectives!

I think that this has happened in professional philosophy. Professional philosophers prize rigor, but unfortunately, they have also (as I argued in my previous post) defined rigor relative to the "commonsense intuitions" of an insular few. So, when someone with different intuitions -- or wanting to defend a different (e.g. feminist, racial, non-Western) conceptual framework -- the average reviewer at a mainstream journal thinks to themselves, "This doesn't sit with my intuitions or the intuitions of people who read this journal. Reject." I think this is bad. I think it leads to overly conservative, exclusionary philosophy. I almost don't want to say it, but I have a hard time reading some "top" journals these days. Some of them seem so narrowly focused, and certain debates so far down a deeply mistaken garden-path, that I find the work completely boring. There, I said it. :) This isn't to say that I think all work in analytic philosophy is boring, or even that most of it is. All I am saying is that too much of it is -- and does anyone really disagree with this? I hear it said all the time!

How, then, can philosophy become more inclusive and less boring? To get started, I think it is worth noting that a few journals present reviewers with a very different task than the traditional one I laid out above (viz. "Reviewer, decide for yourself, according to your own unguided judgment, whether this paper is any good!"). What is this alternative? Well, some journals (I can't think of which, but I've reviewed at least a paper or two for one!) instruct reviewers to rate the article under review along several dimensions. Very roughly -- and yes, I am paraphrasing very roughly off the top of my head, some journals give reviewers a form that reads something like this:

Rate the following paper on a scale from 1-10 (1 being "poor", 10 being "excellent"):

1. How clear is the paper's argument?
2. How rigorously is the paper's argument defended?
3. How innovative is the paper's argument?
4. Does the paper deal adequately with potential objections?
5. Etc.

I think this is good because it prompts the reviewer to rate the paper in question on matters that the reviewer might not have thought of or even care about but which would enable a good editor to prioritize things that the reviewer doesn't. Here are some additional questions that might be included so as to enable an editor to select articles that challenge conventional ways of thinking:

• How far does the paper challenge conventional thinking on the issue examined?
• Can this paper be expected to appeal primarily to a crowd sharing certain intuitions, but not appeal to people not sharing those intuitions?
• Can this paper's premises, even if they do not seem "plausible" to you, be reasonably expected to seem plausible to someone from a different background or vantage-point (e.g. feminists, non-Western philosophers, members of other underrepresented backgrounds)?
• Will this paper be remembered in five years as making a major contribution to the debate, or does it merely make a "small point"?

I don't know quite how these questions might be formulated -- and yes, I do realize that my attempt to formulate these has been pretty ham-handed -- but still, it seems to me a promising way to focus reviewer attention and judgments on criteria other than the conventional, conservative, potentially exclusionary ones they might otherwise be drawn to (i.e. their "own intuitions" and the "commonsense" of those similar to themselves).

If such questions/prompts were formulated well and then given differential weights by clever editors (for instance, since I think really innovative stuff is hard to pull off rigorously -- see e.g. Kant's Groundwork -- as an editor I might come up with a formula or something to discount rigorous work on "small problems" and prefer somewhat less rigorous work with particularly innovative insights), then, I think, we might have a mechanism for encouraging reviewers, and editors, to publish more inclusively (i.e. not excluding ideas/arguments simply because they do not appeal to a narrow in-crowd).

Anyway, although I'm not quite sure how to formulate such questions properly, that's the (very tentative) proposal. I'm curious to hear all of your thoughts!

There's another way

I agree with Marcus when he says that, for the most part, philosophical theories are tested against intuitions, which are "subjective," whereas scientific theories are tested against something far more "objective," namely, the empirical world.

In this post, I would like to take that as a starting point and make two suggestions:

• It gives philosophy a bad rap. From my experience, many undergraduates have the impression that philosophy is "just a matter of opinions, not facts." In other words, undergraduates tend to be relativists about philosophy in general (not just ethics, say). I would like to suggest that the way philosophical theories are tested against intuitions contributes to this misconception that undergraduates have about philosophy. When we (as professors in the classroom) discuss hypothetical cases with undergraduates in class, and they get to say what they think about these cases, they often get to hear various reactions to the same hypothetical cases from their fellow students, which then contributes to their idea that philosophy is "just about opinions."
• We can do a lot better. I would like to suggest that we can do a lot better than test philosophical theories against intuitions. That is, philosophical theories can be tested against something that is far more "objective" than intuitions. In philosophy of science, for example, philosophical theories about science can be tested against the historical record or scientific practices. This is something that I have been doing in my own work on scientific progress. But other philosophers of science have been doing so as well (see, e.g., this awesome conference, Testing Structural Realism, which will take place in June at Case Western Reserve University).

What do you think my fellow pupae?

What are we talking about when we speak about "making philosophy more inclusive"?

Due to the fact that I work in an underrepresented area of philosophy (Indian philosophy), I am a woman and I belong to another minority group (I don't want to reveal which one here, hoping that one can trust my arguments and not me) I am more than interested in the general topic of "making philosophy more inclusive" (By the way, thanks, Marcus, for being so active about this problem). But what do we really mean by this slogan?
We might mean:

1. Including more people from underrepresented groups (women, trans people, disabled people, black people, ethnic, political, social and religious minorities…)


2. Including more people working on underrepresented topics (e.g., feminist philosophy, (critical) race-theory, philosophy of disability, Africana philosophy…)

Now, we might want to achieve 1) for obvious reasons, the first of which being that, e.g., disabled people are very likely to be at least as bright as non-disabled people and keeping them away from philosophy means that we, as scholars of philosophy, miss their important contribution. Thus, it is not only fair to want to include them. It is also in the interest of the discipline.

We might also have very good reasons to achieve 2). In my opinion, the main point is that non-standard philosophies will most likely shake our usual assumptions. And the ability to question one's assumptions and theories is exactly what makes philosophy more than a sheer technique.

Thus, both 1) and 2) are important goals. However, it is important to distinguish the two, because although it is true that sometimes women work on feminist philosophy, and so on, this does not need to be the case. We don't want women to think that they are only accepted if they work on feminist philosophy, do we? We don't want to blame disabled philosophers because they do not focus on the impact of embodiment on philosophy and prefer to specialise on modal logic, do we?

An important consequence of this distinction is that tools which might be useful for the first goal may be useless as regards the second, and vice versa. This is obvious in the case of women, disabled people, non-Caucasians, etc. who do not focus on their "corresponding" fields of philosophy. But it also means that we might want to offer more positions to non-standard scholars (goal 2) even if they do not belong to a group which is underrepresented in society in general.

Which goal do you think should be our priority?

Order of Paper Submission

So I'm in the process of figuring out which journal to submit my paper to and I wanted to ask the cocoon community on what the best method is. Do you aim for the best (and relevant) journals first and then work your way down?

Does making philosophy more inclusive require rethinking philosophical methods and standards?

Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman's piece in Times Higher Education, "Philosophy is dead white--and dead wrong", is receiving a lot of attention (see here and here), and, I think, deservably so. Coleman raises a lot of important questions about race and the sociology of our discipline -- questions the discussion of which, I agree with Coleman, are long, long overdue.

Rather than recapping Coleman's piece (which I think I could hardly do well), I would like to share some thoughts that it raised in my mind -- thoughts which Kristie Dotson's paper, "How is this philosophy?", also gave rise to in my mind a while back.

In her paper, Dotson argues that philosophy's "culture of justification" is not an attractive working environment for many diverse practitioners. According to Dotson, it is not the (legitimate) demand that philosophers justify their arguments that makes philosophy unattractive to people from diverse backgrounds. Rather, it is the illegitimate demand that people justify what they are doing as philosophy (a demand which, in practice, tends to exclude work done by diverse practitioners as "not philosophy").

I want to suggest that the problem is even deeper than Dotson believes. Again, Dotson doesn't think it is the way we require justification in arguments that excludes people. I want to suggest, to the contrary, that it is the manner in which our discipline requires justification in arguments that excludes people. That is, I want to suggest the very way we do professional philosophy today -- the manner in which our profession requires justification in arguments, and the dominant standards for what counts as a "good argument" or "good paper" -- may be exclusionary. Allow me to explain how. 

It is no secret that our discipline prizes "rigor." Roughly speaking, rigorous arguments are good arguments. Rigorous papers are good papers. Etc. But how is rigor defined? Here is a sketch. First, prevailing philosophical standards test arguments against "common sense" or "common intuitions." One must begin with premises your audience is liable to accept. Also, if the conclusion of your argument conflicts with "common sense", then your argument is considered "less plausible." But now how are "common sense" or "common intuitions" defined? Roughly speaking, in terms of the preexisting literature, and the intuitions of philosophers steeped in that literature. In my experience, as graduate students and professionals, we are constantly told that "a good paper makes a small, careful contribution" to whatever literature already exists. You must "situate your project" in the literature -- basically, working within prevailing paradigms -- and you cannot deny a premise in the literature that everyone accepts unless you can do so on the basis of some other premise(s) that people steeped in that very literature are apt to accept.

In this way -- and I am far from the first to note this -- professional philosophy today aspires to be like the sciences (or, at least, "normal" science, as Kuhn termed it), where each published result builds in some small way on "already accumulated knowledge."

Here, though, is I think the problem with this (well, one problem at least; I think there are others too -- for more, see here and here). Philosophy is not like science. In science, the objective world outside of us dictates the facts. The Sun is in the sky whether anyone likes it or not. In contrast, in philosophy, the "accumulated knowledge" that professional philosophy takes as given -- as the "jumping off" point for a "good paper or book" -- are simply the intuitions or judgments of persons. And yet the intuitions/judgments that comprise received wisdom in philosophy are primarily the intuitions/judgments of a privileged few. For instance, it is not as though professional philosophers today tend to, say, begin philosophy papers with Frederick Douglass' intuitions about justice. No, they tend to begin with "mainstream works" in philosophy -- which tend to be comprised by individuals from a very narrow array of backgrounds. If someone wants to challenge that mainstream body of work, one is expected to do it in a "careful, rigorous way", which, unfortunately, still means from within the perspective of the very intuitions (about, say, justice) that have comprised the dominant, non-diverse philosophy up to the present day.

What I am suggesting, in other words, is that the very focus on "small, rigorous arguments" -- the dominant conception of what counts as a "good argument" in professional philosophy today -- may itself exclude people from our profession. Our discipline's conception of what counts as a "good argument", however much we might like to consider it nonideological or "objective", is ideological, privileging an "established body of knowledge" arrived at primarily by a very narrow body of people.

Or so it seems to me. Moreover, I think I've seen these forces play themselves out in the classroom, in philosophy seminars, and in professional conferences. I've taught in classrooms, for instance, where -- after spending, say, an entire semester teaching "The Greats" on ethics, or epistemology, or whatever -- I'll assign something by a feminist, or a critical race theorist...and my students will seem so much more skeptical than they did about the "Greats". Why? Here again, my feeling is this: the students are skeptical because the things the feminist or critical race theorist are saying conflict with the received "body of wisdom" they have been steeped in. Similarly, I've sat in philosophy talks where someone -- often someone from a different background from the majority -- tries to raise an alternative point-of-view, and the "feel" in the room is something like, "Okay, can we get back to Kripke/Rawls -- the "real stuff" -- now?" Finally, I've sat in APA sessions on feminist philosophy or African philosophy, and here too a couple of things stood out to me. First, the audiences in the room were pretty homogenous, with few representatives of dominant backgrounds or philosophical viewpoints in attendance. People working within dominant traditions in philosophy, by and large, just didn't bother to even attend these sessions (at least the ones I have attended). Second, in these cases I was struck by just how unlikely it would be for many of the arguments given in these sessions to "fly" with, say, a journal referee or editor of a mainstream philosophy journal. The more I listened, the more it seemed to me that our disciplinary standards for what counts as a "good argument" would immediately rule out the arguments given as bad arguments. Why? In my view, very roughly: because the premises people were appealing to "conflicted with received wisdom." Few things could drive a person from a field more, I think, than saying to them, "Well, the premises you find attractive conflict with the premises we find attractive -- and our premises are the ones you must work with if you don't want to be an outsider."

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I think our discipline's obsession with "rigor" is bad. Not that rigor is bad -- but rather, a certain conception of it, and preoccupation with that conception, is bad. Philosophy is not science. In science, working with an established body of knowledge makes sense. For in science there is an established body of knowledge. But, philosophy is not like this. After thousands of years, there are precious few things that professional philosophers agree upon. Philosophy is driven my the intuitions and judgments of people (philosophers!), and insofar as the mainstream tradition has been dominated by white men, the unfortunate result is that the "received wisdom" professional philosophy builds upon is, by and large, the received wisdom of white men.

As an illustration, I was just reading this (otherwise great) paper by David Chalmers, and I couldn't help but be struck by the following sentence:

Despite this lack of convergence, it is hard to deny that the insights of Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Kant, Frege and Russell, Kripke and Lewis have involved significant philosophical progress.

Maybe these individuals' insights comprise "progress" (though, for my part, I am skeptical about several of the names listed). But notice anything about the list of individuals given? It is not exactly a very diverse list of people. Or consider the table of contents from The Great Conversation, a fantastic introduction to mainstream Western philosophy which, alas, reveals just how insular the tradition has been. Here's the table of contents, with each chapter's covered authors in parentheses:

1. Before Philosophy (Hesiod & Homer)
2. Philosophy Before Socrates (Thales, Anaximander, Xenophanes, Pythagoras, Hericlitus, Parmenides, Zeno)
3. The Sophists (Protagoras, Gorgias, Aristophanes)
4. Socrates (Socrates!)
5. The trial and death of Socrates (Plato)
6. Plato (Plato!)
7. Aristotle (Aristotle!)
8. The Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics (Epicurus, Leucippus, Democritus, Zeno from Citium, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus)
9. The Christians (Jesus)
10. Augustine (Augustine!)
11. Anselm and Aquinas (Anselm and Aquinas!)
12. Medieval to Modern (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, da Vinci, Erasmus, Martin Luther, Montaigne)
13. Descartes (Descartes!)
14. Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley (H, L, & B!)
15. Hume (Hume!)
16. Kant (Kant!)
17. Hegel (Hegel!)
18. Kierkegaard & Marx
19. The Utilitarians (Bentham, Mill, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft)
20. Nietzsche
21. The Pragmatists (Pierce, Dewey, and James)
22. Wittgenstein (Russell, Wittgenstein)
23. Heidegger
24. Simone De Beauvoir
25. Postmodernism (Derrida, Rorty)

Not a very inclusive conversation! (55 white men, 2 women, and no one else)

So, then, have prevailing philosophical standards -- standards which are clearly conservative, requiring people to begin with "common sense" and make "small steps" in prexisting bodies of "received wisdom" -- themselves worked, by their very nature, to systematically exclude people, and diverse points of view? From my perspective, this is almost the wrong question to ask. The question isn't whether prevailing philosophical standards have systematically excluded people "from the conversation". The question is: how could they not?

Our discipline's standards of what counts as a good argument seem to me to be so conservative that they are systematically designed -- albeit, I think, probably unwittingly -- to exclude alternative points-of-view (or, at least, place such a high burden of proof on alternative points-of-view that proponents of those views can never, or almost never, meet the burden). After all, if you are told that one must work within a body of received knowledge, with premises the dominant tradition accepts, and you do not find those premises the least bit attractive yourself, the burden of proof you face in order to make a case for the premises you find attractive are almost impossible to meet. You will find yourself not being able to appeal to premises you find attractive. No, you will have to appeal to premises that the dominant majority finds attractive -- premises that you may not buy at all. But there you are: you have to work with their premises, not yours. (Or, of course, you can always set up a society of Philosophers-like-you -- but then your society will be seen as outsiders, outside of "the conversation").

And so, it seems to me, if you come from a different perspective, you will find yourself faced with a choice: you can either work within the received body of wisdom against your personal belief that the body of wisdom is backwards (thus going against your own feelings of personal integrity), or you can leave the profession. And which of the two options can seem like the more sensible choice: working within a tradition that seems systematically designed to marginalize your point-of-view, or leaving it altogether? Is it any real surprise, then, that philosophy has a diversity problem? What else can a discipline expect when its very method and disciplinary standards are stacked against minority points-of-view?

This post, obviously, has been very critical of our history and dominant standards. I do not mean to suggest that we should jettison all traditional methods or standards of what counts as a good argument. I do mean to suggest that we should have a conversation about our methods, the extent to which they may (or may not) marginalize people, and how we might revise our methods and standards to foster greater inclusion. My next post will be more positive. I will try to advance a more open-minded approach to doing philosophy -- one that I think may provide some concrete guidelines for making philosophy more open and inclusive, without jettisoning standards altogether.

Will the journey ever come to its goal? On comparative theology in Clooney 2013

Several years ago I had some pain in convincing a friend working on Husserl that the "phenomenologist" J. Mohanty which he knew too well was the same as the scholar of Sanskrit Philosophy J.N. Mohanty (I had similar problems in convincing the same person that avatar is a Sanskrit word).

Just like there are two Mohantys, with two different target audiences, so there are two F.X. Clooneys. Scholars of Indian Philosophy will know mostly the author of essays on Mīmāṃsā and Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta (1986, 1988, 1990), whereas Catholic and other Christian theologians and believers will know mostly his works dedicated to comparative theology (1996, 2005, 2008, 2010, 2014).

In the former works, Clooney conforms to the common rules of academic writing (disembodied, impersonal, "scholar"), although an attentive reader might detect also in them a hue of the latter Clooney. The "theological" Clooney is passionate, engaged in what he writes and sensitive to the transformative enterprise of writing. One even gets the feeling that he might think that writing is a performance on something yet-to-be-estbalished (sādhya, to go back to the Mīmāṃsā terminology), rather than a description of already settled (siddha) conclusions.

Consequently, as a reader of His hiding place is darkness one is split by two different feelings. On the one hand the positive feeling on being on a journey with someone who is also on the same path, on the other the frustrating feeling not to be able to come to a scholarly sound conclusion. The book is, in fact, programmatically unsettled and unsettling. Nor could it be differently, since it puts side by side the Old Testament's Song of Songs and the Tamil Tiruvāymoḻi ("The holy word of mouth"), song 1.4 and 1.5, without having previously established any essential similarity between the two. Rather, Clooney just chose them out of inspiration, in a way which could be compared to J. Derrida's approach to texts in themselves, without the safeguard of their historicisation, without a safety net and in fact Clooney starts the book with two long juxtaposed excerpts of the two texts. And similarly ungrounded is also the juxtaposition of Jorie Graham's poetry in the first chapter (tellingly called "Act One"). The Tamil text comes from the Tiruvāymoḻi, which is part of the Divya Prabandham, the collection of songs of the Āḻvārs, poet-saints who composed their mystical poems in South India, in the first millennium of the CE.

Although the Aḻvārs were considered by the later tradition as inspired mystics, and revered as founders of the Śrī Vaiṣṇava religion, the songs chosen by Clooney are written from the perspective of a young girl who burns for love for God, Viṣṇu, but cannot find Him. She is desperate and in her desperation she blames herself for her sins, due to which she cannot come closer to Him, the people who do not pity her, and last even God Himself who, notwithstanding His merciful nature does not come to her. Clooney noticed the similarity in the religious application of the motif of a young girl's passionate love and of her desolation once the lover has disappeared and put the text side by side with the portions of the Song of Songs in which the girl is left alone and laments her solitude.

Clooney offers helps and guidances, such as his translations of the Tamil text, his frequent reference to contemporary exegesis of the Song of Songs and, more importantly according to me, quotations and interpretations from religious commentaries of the one and the other text. Nonetheless, Clooney programmatically avoids to settle the issues he opens. There is no solution to why the girl in the Song of Songs at once sends her lover away at night, only to repent soon thereafter, nor to why the daughters of Jerusalem laugh at her. Even more disturbing is that there is no solution of the problem of the co-existence of two exclusivist religions which both see themselves as the only one but share striking similarities and coexist in a contemporary world in which exclusivist faith seems no longer possible ---and probably not even desirable.

Notwithstanding the above, also an academic audience can profit of His hiding place is darkness. I have, for instance, appreciated Clooney's ability to detect the purpose and meaning of seemingly merely decorative poetical elements.

More in general, Clooney's way of seeing poetry as theology throws indirectly light on why so many theologians decided to write poems and not (or not only) treatises. Theology enabled them different perspectives. If Clooney is right, at least one of the reasons for choosing the poetical medium is its theopoetic ability. The term comes from the theologian Urs von Balthasar and indicates a poem's ability to dynamically enliven rather than represent.

Clooney chose von Balthasar and (implicitly) Derrida. Which other ways do you use to do comparative theology?

(cross-posted, with more Indian and less Biblical emphasis, on my personal blog)

The Big Cosmological News is Bigger Than You Probably Know

Some of you may have heard the big news the other day that gravitational waves emanating from the Big Bang appear to have been observed. You might have also heard that, if these observations are correct, they confirm the inflationary theory of the Universe.

For those who might not know, the inflationary theory is not the Big Bang theory. It is a component of one version of the Big Bang Theory -- a version which holds that shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe's expansion suddenly accelerated due to an inflationary force (as though pushed by additional "booster rockets"). Until now, inflation was "just a theory." Some of the primary theoretical motivations behind it are that it would explain why the Universe is so darn big, why its matter and energy are distributed in a remarkably homogenous (or even) manner, and finally, why the overall geometry of space time is remarkably flat. If the observation just announced holds, inflation is no longer a theory: it is a known fact.

What you probably haven't heard, however, is that the observations are a far, far bigger deal than this. They not only confirm inflation. They appear to establish a number of other physically and philosophically important phenomena. Allow me to explain.

The information that follows is my simplification of information I've taken from this post over at one of my favorite physics blogs, Of Particular Significance -- the personal blog of a very well-known and well-respected theoretical physicist, Matt Strassler (until recently full Professor of Theoretical Physics, Rutgers, now visiting at Harvard). I hope I don't muck any of it up (if I have, apologies!), but in any case, here goes.

According to Strassler (also see here), the new observations indicate two important things:

1. Gravity is probably quantized (i.e. a part of quantum mechanics).
2. All of space and time are probably quantized.

This is a very, very big deal. Here is why. Presently, we do not have a "single best theory" of physics. We have two best theories: quantum mechanics, and the General Theory of Relativity. It is sometimes said that quantum mechanics explains the "micro-world" (small things) really well, and Relativity the "macro-world" (big things). This isn't exactly right. Quantum mechanics explains just about everything we know about matter and energy...except for gravity. In contrast, Relativity explains gravity but not the other forces. However, quantum mechanics and Relativity are, in their present form, incompatible. Specifically, quantum mechanics holds that the world is "quantized", or broken into distinct "packets" of information. Relativity, on the other hand, treats reality as as a smooth, non-quantized continuum. Although physicists have developed theories attempting to unify quantum mechanics with relativity -- through theories of quantum gravity (one example is "loop quantum gravity"), quantizing gravity -- until now we had no clear evidence whether gravity is quantum-mechanical. 

As Strassler points out, the new observation shows that gravity is probably quantized. But, since the Standard Model accounts for all matter and energy, the theory of relativity deals with gravity, and space and time are defined in terms of matter, energy, and gravity, it follows that all of space and time is probably quantized.

If there were any doubt that gravity is controlled, just like everything else, by quantum physics, it would erased; BICEP2′s observation would imply that just like other fields, which are subject to quantum jitter (i.e., random “fluctuations“), space and time (somewhat more precisely, the metric that determines distances) undergoes the same type of quantum fluctuations as other fields, fluctuations that any quantum version of Einstein’s theory of gravity would predict.  

Second, as this article over at New Scientist explains, the theory of inflation (particularly given the incredibly large strength of the inflation field observed) is new evidence for the multiverse hypothesis. According to the inflationary model the observations support, the early Universe expanded so quickly that vast swaths of it expanded beyond the area we can observe. In other words, the observations indicate that the observable Universe is merely a "pocket" in a much larger reality undergoing eternal inflation: with pocket Universes spawning new pocket Universes, etc. So, while the idea of the Multiverse has been almost purely speculative until now, now it is a whole lot less speculative. Some version of it is entailed by the laws of inflation that we appear to have just observed. So, we have:

3. Some new evidence for the Multiverse Hypothesis. 

These are huge findings, for obvious reasons. Note, further, that all three implications would also seem to be good news for the P2P Simulation Theory of reality I developed in, "A New Theory of Free Will." First, the P2P Simulation Theory as I laid it out contains the Multiverse Hypothesis as one component. So, one of its most speculative components now seems to have some new evidence in its favor. Second, in order for reality to be a digital peer-to-peer simulation, reality must, at the very least, be digital, rather than a smooth continuum of information. The new observations fit with this digital picture of reality, insofar as they suggest that all of space and time obey the laws of quantum mechanics (and so, are quantized, coming in distinct packets of information).

Here is a fourth thing the new observations appear to establish:

4. There is "new physics" out there beyond the Standard Model.

There is an all-out crisis going on right now in theoretical physics. String-theorists and proponents of supersymmetry in particular -- one of the most popular theories for the past several decates -- have been in an all-out panic because the Large Hadron Collider has found nothing beyond the Higgs Boson. Theorists were predicting all kinds of observations -- micro-black holes, supersymmetric particles, etc. -- and yet none of them have been observed. This has been described in the physics community as their "nightmare scenario." An entire field -- and many, many jobs and funding -- literally hang in the balance! However, as Strassler points out, the new observation shows that new physics beyond the Standard Model does exist, and it gives us tantalizing new clues about what that new physics may be (for his part, Strassler says to keep an eye out on axions, a fundamental particle not included in the Standard Model which some have proposed to handle certain problems in quantum chromodynamics, as well as a candidate for dark matter -- one of the most mysterious outstanding problems in physics!).

Here's another wild thing Strassler suggests the new observations indicate:

5. Anthropic reasoning (viz. our Universe is the kind you would probably expect given that life exists) cannot explain the universe's "fine tuning."

I'm sure you have all heard of the idea that the laws of physics appear to be "finely tuned" to give rise to a stable universe with galaxies, planets, and life can exist. In response to this fine-tuning argument, many have suggested that anthropic considerations can explain away this apparent fine-tuning. According to Strassler, the new observations stand strongly against such anthropic explaining away of fine-tuning. 

First, the observations indicate that the inflation field that caused the Universe's expansion to accelerate is trillions of times higher than it needed to be in order to produce a Universe compatible with life. Second, this is only one piece of fine-tuning on top of another (fine-tuning of the Higgs field), on top of another (the Standard Model, which is highly fine-tuned), on top of another (the gravitational constant), etc.. 

[H]aving only the Standard Model, with the Higgs field turned on just a little, plus quantum gravity and an inflaton field (and plus something to explain dark matter and neutrino masses) would pose many grave conceptual problems, ones that anthropic reasoning would not address.  [Experts: Anthropic reasoning can be used to argue why the cosmological constant might be small; it can be used to argue why there is a hierarchy between the Planck mass and the proton and electron masses; but it cannot easily be used, without huge and problematic assumptions, to argue why one would find just the Standard Model at the LHC, with one light scalar Higgs field and nothing else new.].

Here's another thing the observations indicates:

6. There really is "dark energy."

Cosmologists have long suspected that a heretofore unknown energy force ("dark energy") is necessary to explain why the Universe's rate of expansion is increasing. However, there have been no direct observations of dark energy. According to Strassler, the new observations indicate that this force does exist, and that it is the same force that caused inflation.

Finally, the observations provide a lot of tantalizing hints that:

7. At least 3 of the 4 forces of nature were unified early on in the Universe's history, and so are different aspects of one force.

As some of you might know, Einstein spent the last several decades of his life searching in vain for a "unified field theory" -- something he was often ridiculed for (he was considered a "dinosaur" in this regard). Turns out, he might have been right again after all...yet again. :)

Anyway, I know this is a philosophy blog, but seeing as these observations appear to have such mind-boggling implications -- including implications for the "fine-tuning" argument in the philosophy of religion -- I thought they might be worth sharing. This is big, big stuff!

On rest, and being good to oneself

I mentioned in my previous post, "How do you write?", as well as several times before, that I once received advice that maintining a positive daily attitude is crucial to being a productive writer. In brief, the suggestion was that more positive your attitude is, the more likely it is that you will want to put in all the time and effort it takes to be productive. I then shared one method for fomenting and maintaining such an attitude: a daily free-write of 3-5 pages, without editing, before one moves on to other things.

Today, I'd like to dwell a bit more on the broader issue of maintaining a good attitude and personal well-being, and their relationship to work. Although my experience is anecdotal at best, one think that has really struck me the past several years is just how strongly tied together a good attitude, personal well-being, and productivity seem to be (at least in my case). On the whole, it seems to me that the happier I've been, the more productive I've been, and the better the results I've received as a teacher and researcher. On the whole, my experience has been very simple: the better, the more positive I feel, the more effort I put into my work, and the easier things seem to be. When things aren't going so well -- when I'm frustrated, for instance -- I just seem to have a vastly more difficult time (A) solving philosophical problems, (B) getting things written, (C) putting good class lectures together, and (D) performing well in class.

In short, I've found that maintaining a really good attitude -- and overall personal well-being -- is crucial for me. I just seem to perform better all around when I'm enjoying life, and perform worse when I'm not. While I realize this may not be true for everyone (people like Wittgenstein and Nietzsche immediately come to mind as counterexamples!), I suspect that most people do better work when they are a positive frame of mind. The question then is: how does one do it? What steps can one take to promote a good frame of mind and overall well-being as an academic?

I do not, of course, have all the answers here. Everyone is different. But allow me to offer a few suggestions. The single best piece of advice I think I ever received on this score came, funnily enough, from my mother. The advice was simple: be good to yourself. I know it sounds trite off hand, but I've found just reminding oneself of it works wonders. As difficult as things may be -- whether you are struggling with your dissertation or having a nightmarish season on the job market -- be good to yourself. Don't shut yourself up in your room and ruminate. Have beers with friends, go to sporting events, go on daily runs with your dog, cook dinner with your partner -- whatever. Be good to yourself. You will thank yourself later. ;)

Another thing I think I've learned on the same score is that it is important to take an occasional rest. Look, I'm a damn workaholic. I expect many of you are, too. There are always so many things to do: lectures, conference, publications, etc. But sometimes, I think, you need to take a break. Every several months, after working my tail to the bone, I just get this feeling like I need to take a short break. This happened to me last week (on my Spring Break). The previous Friday, when break commenced, I felt excited to...spend my spring break revising my book manuscript. Then, however, when Monday came around (I don't work on weekends), I just felt tired. I realized that I was exhausted by the last several months of hard work. I felt in my bones that I needed a break, and I let myself have it. Truth be told, I felt uneasy about it for a part of the time (you workaholics will know what I'm talking about!). But still, I did not give into my unease. I realized I was tired, and so I forced myself to take the week off. As spring break went further along, it really dawned on me just how much I needed it. I literally felt like I was recharging my batteries. It was good. And now that I'm back to work, I feel great. So, I say, if you feel like you need a break, try to find the time to take one. We all need to recharge from time to time. 

Or so say I. What say you, my fellow Cocooners? What strategies have you found help you to maintain a positive, productive mood and well-being?

How do you write?

I thought I might follow up my post on reading philosophy with a post on writing! Here again, I'll share my approach, and then ask you all to share yours. It'll be interesting to see, I think, how different people go about the writing process. Okay then, here goes.

My writing process has changed immensely over the years. As an undergraduate, and for most of my career as a graduate student, I absolutely slaved over papers, composing them slowly and carefully, crafting and revising every sentence as I went along. When I was writing (typically, term-paper time), I would literally spend all day, just about every day of the week, for weeks or even months on end, to get the paper just right. Unfortunately, at some point in grad school -- unsurprisingly, I think it was around the dissertation time -- this process stopped working effectively. My production ground to a halt. I think, like many grad students, the dissertation seemed like such a monumental, herculean task that carefully crafting one page at a time rapidly transformed into crafting no pages at a time. ;) 

Since that time, I've had three particularly formative experiences, each of which dramatically changed my writing process, and which I'd like to share now.

I've shared the first of these formative experiences several times before. As luck would have it, after a couple of years of getting nothing done on my dissertation, I received an unsolicited self-help book in my department mailbox on how to write a dissertation. Although I normally have no interest in self-help books, I was so desperate with my dissertation at that point that I said, "What the heck!", and actually read it. Its main piece of advice was this: make yourself free-write some small number X (e.g. 3-5) pages per day -- never any more, never any less -- with absolutely no self-censorship or editing, and preferably first thing in the morning. The advice then allowed you to do other stuff (editing, revising, etc.), but only after you'd completed your mandatory free-write.  The basic rationale behind the advice is that the most crucial things with writing are to (1) actually force stuff out of your head rather than procrastinate, and (2) maintain a positive daily attitude where you actually wake up each day wanting to write. 

My experience following this advice was astounding. I can still remember the very first week I did it. For about 18 months prior, I'd gotten basically nothing complete with the dissertation. I was always doubting everything, scrapping stuff I'd written as garbage. Then, that first week trying the book's advice, I did it. I got 5 pages of garbage out of my head in a couple of hours the first day, then the same thing the next day, the same thing the third day, etc. By Friday I had 25 pages of garbage. Then, on Saturday, I took that 25 pages of garbage and whittled it down to about 10 pages of really good stuff. I was sold. 9 months later -- after following the advice to a "T" -- I finished and defended my dissertation. Like many dissertations, it wasn't great. But whatever. I got it done. I later gave the book to a friend a year behind me in the program who was also struggling immensely (she basically had none of her dissertation written either). She followed the advice and, just as I did, finished her dissertation about 9 months later. Crazy. I suggest that anyone who finds themselves struggling try the same.

My second formative experience occurred during my first year out of graduate school, during the year I was a VAP at the University of British Columbia. Although the writing strategy above was still working for me, I wasn't publishing. So, I picked up the phone and called a couple of friends from grad school had been publishing up a storm (and in great journals). I asked them what their secret was. They both said the same thing: they write and send out a ton of work, with around 10 articles under review at journals at any given time. Basically, their rationale was this: acceptance rates are so low, and reviewers so unreliable, that this is the only rational way to "play the odds." In their view, even if a particular article is great, chances are it will get rejected several times, in which case if you only have a few papers out for review at any given time, you may not publish anything for years -- again, even if your work is awesome (side note: it's public knowledge that some very famous articles in philosophy were rejected by numerous top-ranked journals before being accepted anywhere). So, anyway, I followed their advice. Instead of wasting a bunch of time "polishing" papers I already had, I basically drafted paper after paper, revised them a bit, and sent them out. Like them, I began publishing up a storm. And, far from leading me to do work of lesser quality, I believe the process of continually drafting and sending out papers led to an increase in the quality of my work. Of all the papers I have published to date, I do not think any of them would have been substantially better had I spent substantially more time on them. Good ideas are good ideas, bad ideas are bad ideas. The quicker you get them out of your head and out to conferences and journals, the quicker you find out which are which. Over the past 6 years, I've drafted well over 30 papers. Only 10 of them have been published. Not a great batting average to be sure (though I think a few of the unpublished ones are very good), but in my experience this is pretty much par for the course. Many people who engage in creative endeavors -- authors, artists, etc. -- will tell you that the vast majority of their work is garbage. As Linus Pauling is famous for saying, "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas." Indeed, if anything has been my experience, this has.

My third formative experience was the day, during my first year at Tampa, that my hard drive died and I lost 6 months worth of work (note to you: back up your work!;). I had just spent the previous six months writing, and then polishing, two papers -- both of which I went on to later publish. Indeed, I had literally just put the finishing touches on both papers the day my hard drive died. I was devastated. I couldn't believe that I had lost 6 months of work. But I wasn't about to accept that. So, I went to Best Buy, bought a new laptop, and resolved to rewrite both papers from scratch as quickly as possible, before I forgot everything that I had written. I rewrote both papers from scratch in two days or so, revised them quickly, sent them off, and they both got accepted. And somehow, from that point on, I became able to write papers insanely quickly. As "unlucky" as losing my hard-drive was, in retrospect it now seems like one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me.  These days, I find myself writing first drafts in a few days to maybe a week or two tops. Some days, I'll draft 5 pages or so. Other days I may draft anywhere between 15-20 pages. Revising, obviously, takes much, much longer. But still, I typically get full drafts done super quick now. And apparently I'm not alone. I've heard similar things from some other people I know, as well as from my wife, who works in a different field (her mentors say that they, too, tend to write paper drafts in a couple of days). Just a few years ago, I would have never imagined writing papers so quickly -- and I certainly never would have imagined it in grad school. But that's the way it is now. Somehow, over time, one just becomes much more efficient -- and again, I don't think it's come at a cost of quality.

Finally, I guess I will share in a bit more detail what my actual writing process looks like. When drafting, I tend not to have any notes or books around. I also do not do outlines (I never have). I more or less just sit down and start writing off the top of my head. If I don't know the literature well enough to do that, as far as I'm concerned I'm not ready to write. So, I only sit down to write once I feel like I know the literature well enough in my head to situate my work in it -- and, because of this, I don't worry about references (and such) at the drafting stage. I just write. I get the introduction out quickly, then summarize whatever I need to in the literature, and then just lay out my argument, consider objections, and go from there. When I told my wife this is how I draft -- without books, without notes -- she was very surprised. But then she asked her mentors (again, in a very different field) how they draft, and they said they do it the same way. And she works in a field that has very strict citation requirements. So, it seems to me, what I do is apparently what other people do too. Getting bogged down with books, articles, and notes just slows me down too much at the drafting stage. Again, as far as I'm concerned, if I can't lay out my project and situate it in the literature off the top of my head, I'm not ready to begin writing. It's only after drafting that I will go back, sentence by sentence, and section by section, with books, articles, and notes to add in citations, deepen my discussion, etc. Anyway, that's my drafting process: quick and straightforward. Phenomenologically, it feels a lot like laying brick work or planks in putting a boat together. I just lay things out as simply and straightforwardly as I can, and fill in all the details later.

My revising process is much more labor intensive. After I have a complete draft (and only then), I will go back and start reading my work at page 1. Here, I try to make each sentence as clear and lean as I can, cutting away unnecessary words and chopping up overly long sentences into multiple shorter ones. I also put in citations, and try to clear away unnecessary italics (which I have a really bad habit of overdoing when I write;). If, say, I get to editing/revising page 5 on a given day, I will not start at page 5 the next day (there go those italics again!). Rather, the next day, I will start once again at page 1, read all the way up through page 5 (making any necessary revisions along the way), and then engage in the labor intensive revisions from page 5 forward. Let's say, then, that I make it to page 10. Do I begin at page 10 the next day? No! I begin, once again, at page 1. It drives me a bit batty, but each time I do this I discover things I don't like, and end up making changes. In this way -- by starting my revisions at page 1 every single time -- I force myself to repeatedly read, assess, and fix earlier revisions. Which I think is a good thing.

That, more or less, is how I revise. What about feedback? I've heard many people say that getting good feedback on work is crucial. I sort of agree, but for reasons I'll give below, I'm actually of two minds about it. I've always been pretty bad at seeking out feedback. First, believe it or not, I'm rather shy, both intellecually and socially. I always get nervous showing people my work, and so, all too often, I just avoid doing it. Second, I also work in an extremely small department -- there are just 3 of us, and we work in different areas -- so it is hard to seek out feedback locally.

In some cases, I think my difficulties getting feedback has worked against me. It took 6 years for me to publish my paper, "First Steps Toward a Nonideal Theory of Justice" -- and, while I'm thankful that the process turned out the way it did (I think it really did take all that time to become the paper it should have been), I suspect it might not have taken nearly so long had I been better about seeking our feedback (almost all of the feedback I received on it came from journal reviewers, as well as a few conferences). In other cases, however, I think my not seeking out much feedback has worked in my favor. Early in my career, I was easily discouraged, especially when working on really ambitious ideas. While it is important to get, and be open to feedback, I also think it is very important to learn to trust oneself as a philosopher -- and I think working more or less alone has helped me in this. In short, I think "the right amount of feedback" is a fine line. If you don't get enough feedback, you may end up toiling away on bad ideas -- ideas that feedback could set you straight on. On the other hand, too much feedback can be stultifying. My feeling is...you sort of have to feel it out, and see what amount and what kinds of feedback work best for you.

Anyway, this is how I write. How do you?

How do you read philosophy?

A reader recently emailed me the following series of questions:

I would like to ask you and your audience a simple question: How do you read philosophy? What methods have you experimented with in the past, which of these have stayed with you, and which proved ineffective and were tossed aside? Are you a heavy quotation scribbler, apt to copy several direct quotations from the book chapter or article you are working with, and then complementing these with your own expository notes? Or, like many I have spoken to, do you prefer to give a text a quick read, with no pen and paper or laptop nearby, and then go back and have a second (or third), more focused look, writing short but detailed paragraph summaries, that reconstruct the author's argument and bring out the implicit considerations and philosophical commitments that lay within the text, etc.? 

How long will you read for per day? An article or two, fifty or so pages, how much? Do you find there are certain techniques that can keep you from burning out when working with an especially dense piece of philosophy? I am interested in all these things and more. I have an MA...am hoping to enroll in a PhD program in the fall, and have been experimenting with new reading methods and note taking techniques. Given that you often stress your own fondness for rapid production of work, and place heavy emphasis on not getting bogged down in the research process, I was hoping you could speak to how you accomplish these things on a day-to-day basis. 

I think these are really great questions. During the course of my career, I cannot recall ever being given detailed tips on how to read. The only directions I can recall being given were, "Read quickly once to get the big picture, then go back and read more carefully." I also cannot recall ever discussing how to read philosophy with anyone. All of which, now that I think about it, seems rather bizarre. Reading is an enormous part of doing philosophy. It is also, in my experience, something of an artform -- an artform which affects the way one does many other things (e.g. develop paper topics, etc.). 

Maybe one reason the question of how to read isn't often discussed is that it is a very individualized affair. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses, and we must learn to read in ways that speak to our strengths and improve our weaknesses. There is, I think, some real truth in this. Each person must learn what works best for them, and this typically involves quite a bit of trial and error. That being said, I think an open discussion of reading styles and tips could be really fun and informative. So, I guess I will begin.

The first thing that occurred to me when thinking about the reader's questions is that I think how to best read philosophy may be different at different stages of one's career. At an undergraduate level and in grad school, for instance, I think it is really crucial to practice close reading: taking detailed notes, doing paragraph summaries, and reconstructing arguments on paper. I think it's crucial to do a lot of this stuff at these stages because these are crucial philosophical skills to learn, and they take a lot of practice. Then, in my experience, as one goes further along in one's career (e.g. at a faculty level) these things become so second-nature that one needn't do them so much (one learns to trust oneself to choose when to read closely, reconstruct arguments, etc.). So, that's one thing I thing.

The second thing I think is that it is important to learn to read in ways that play to your strengths and improve upon your weaknesses. Some people are really good at "getting the big picture", but have trouble nailing down all the details. Others are super good at nailing down details but have trouble with the big picture. I think it's philosophically important to be a good, well-rounded reader, and work on one's weaknesses. That being said, at certain points in my career I feel like I was discouraged from doing what I think do well (i.e. really big picture stuff) -- I was told by some people to not be so ambitious, and really focus on nitty gritty details -- and I think this worked against me. I can be good at philosophical details, but only if I'm passionate about, and "see", the big picture. 

So much for general remarks. I'd now like to share what my actual reading process is like nowadays (i.e. what I think works for me).

First, whatever I'm reading, I always give a quick first read to get the "big picture" (i.e. what the author is trying to do, what the gist of their arguments are, and how their arguments fit in the existing literature). Typically, at this stage, I will read with a pen in hand, underline "big idea" passages, and maybe jot down them down in a notebook in a few sentences. At this stage, I will also jot down any big worries I have about the project (viz. anything that sticks out at me, setting off my philosophical alarm bells).

A second thing I do here, during my quick first read -- if I find something I do not like about what the author is doing -- is to reconstruct what I think the author is trying to do, in my head, in my own terms, and see whether I think they went about it the right way. In my experience, some people discourage this approach. Some say, "You really need to understand what the author literally wrote before you try to understand what you think they should have written." I couldn't disagree more. I find that it is very important for me to think through a person's project in my own terms before I get too immersed in their own arguments. For, in my experience, it is all too easy to get sucked into someone else's way of thinking in a way that prevents one from seeing things afresh. Indeed, I've seen entire bodies of literature in which I think people have been so sucked into a bad way of thinking that they're unable to see their way out. I think I've fallen into this trap many times too, and my experience is that the best way to avoid it is to always think for oneself when one is reading. Don't just pay attention to what the author is writing. You should always ask yourself, "Do I think this philosopher is going about this the right way?" At least, I find this works for me.

Third, if at the level of a quick first read I find what I take to be a big picture error (i.e. a false or unjustified foundational assumption) on the author's part, I immediately pick up other articles/books in the same area, give them a quick read, and see if I they made the same big error. Notice what I still haven't done yet here, at what is essentially the third step in my reading process. I still haven't even begun to go back and read carefully. I'm still operating at the "quick read/big picture" stage. I do this deliberately because, again, I do not want to get sucked into the details of the literature -- i.e. lose the forest for the trees -- before I see whether I think the forest is well arranged. 

If, after these first three stages, I find a foundational assumption that I think many people are getting wrong, I just read a little bit more closely, make sure I think there's a big error, and then write a paper on it. In these cases, I only engage in close, targeted reading to whatever extent that I need to in order make my argument that there is a foundational error in the piece/literature.

When I don't find what I take to be a big foundational error in a piece (or in the literature surrounding it), I face a choice.

On the one hand, if -- despite not finding any "big problem" -- I find a particular piece or body of literature interesting, I may go back and give it/them much closer readings, taking detailed notes, reconstructing arguments, etc. Then, if I find something that I think doesn't work, I might get a paper idea and write a paper, using my notes to write a draft (note: I almost never draft papers while reading. If I can't write a draft out of my head or off my reading notes, I conclude I haven't understood the stuff well enough to start drafting -- and so I go back, read more, and take more detailed notes. In my experience, drafting papers while reading retards my writing process. My wife reports that many people she knows in her field write papers the same way. I only go back to books/articles themselves after drafting, when I begin writing revisions).

On the other hand, if I don't find the piece/literature all that interesting, I'll just move onto something else entirely. I see no reason to get "stuck" on articles, books, or bodies of literature that I do not have clear ideas about. If nothing "jumps out" at me, setting off my philosophical alarm bells, I just move on to something else.

In a nutshell then, close, targeted readings where I take detailed notes and reconstruct arguments is literally the last thing I do. This is not to say that I do these things rarely. I do them often (I've literally worn my way through several copies of particular books and articles by poring over them so much). I just find that most of the important work I do while reading comes long before the careful, targeted reading stage. Close, targeted reading is important, but for me, it is crucial that I do all of the "big picture" stuff (and do a lot of it) before I get lost in the details. Also, as an aside, I think the "reading fast to get the big picture" element of my approach has a lot to do with my increases in scholarly productivity the past several years. It is easy to get "stuck" on an argument if one reads everything with a fine-tooth comb. The more material I get through, the easier it seems to me to come across a "big problem" worth writing about.

As for how many pages I read per day, etc., I have no simple answer. The answer is that it is quite irregular. If I'm trying to get a big picture view of a body of literature, I may go through a few hundred pages a day. However, if I'm trying to get an argument from one paper down cold, I may spend an entire day on several pages. It really just depends on what I need to do. I let whatever project I'm working on dictate how much, and how, I read in a kind of organic fashion.

In closing, I guess I should emphasize again that I think "how to read" is probably a highly individualized thing, and that one must experiment a lot in order to figure out what works for oneself. For several years in graduate school and afterwards, I tried to read and do philosophy in a certain way (roughly, the way I saw others doing it around me). It didn't work. I had trouble getting work done, and the work I did get done wasn't all that good. It just wasn't who I am. Experimenting led me to the reading, writing, and thinking styles that I have now -- and they seem to work. I have been far more productive, and I think I am doing far better work. I wouldn't recommend my approach to everyone, but it seems to work for me.

Anyway, this is how I read. How do you?

"The Secret of Artistic Success is...Luck?"

An interesting blog post over at Talking Philosophy on a fascinating study. It would probably be difficult, but I'd be curious to see the results of a similar study in philosophy!

"Rejection Letters of the Philosophers"

Readers may find this site of fictitious job and journal rejection letters to Great Philosophers letters amusing.

By and large, the letters are not quite as funny as this fake rejection of Plato's Euthyphro, this fake rejection of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, or the last two paragraphs of this real review of Rawls' A Theory of Justice. However, I did find this fake PFO letter from Oxford to A.J. Ayer hysterical, particularly the following passage:

I do realise how disappointing this will be, though I am not particularly sorry not to have better news about your application here. Furthermore, I will not patronisingly remind you that competition for places at Oxford is extremely strong. I should nevertheless point out that you may not invoke a conception of justice or morality in forming an argument for appealing our decision. Such ideas are now considered literally meaningless by the admissions office.

I hope, however, that you will be comforted over Christmas by the fact that any disappointment you may feel is nothing more than mere emotion. You should not, therefore, spend time in trying to reason through or come to terms with our decision since this exercise would inevitably be devoid of analytically verifiable content.

I've written before how these sorts of fictitious reviews seem to me uncomfortably close to reality. How well would Great Works fare if they were sent to contemporary philosophy journals or book reviewers? Not too well, I expect -- and not just because the works themselves are anachronistic, but because of how narrow and conservative disciplinary standards have become (for more on this, see here). Anyway, some funny stuff - and food for thought!

On not acting like a grad student

I expect that grad students on the job market this year have heard the familiar refrain: "Don't act like a grad student!" 

I was reminded of this refrain by a facebook post this week drawing my attention to this post by Monica Miller, which in turn drew my attention to this post by Karen Kelsky. Although both posts seem to me to contain some helpful material, I thought it might be good to discuss this issue here. We appear to have a lot of grad student readers after all, and it seems to me that a discussion of what does and does not come off as "grad-student-ish" might be helpful.

What, then, does it take to "not act like a grad student"? Allow me to share a few brief thoughts of my own. One passage in Miller's post really jumped out at me. The passage is this:

Many of the behaviors Kelsky describes involve a paradoxical sense that grad students tend to act both underconfident and overconfident. On the one hand, grad students are too quick to qualify their own ideas, too inclined to end each sentence as though it were a question? On the other, they’re often too willing to share their views on theory they don’t fully understand, or to be overwhelmingly negative in their comments on the work of classmates and scholars. And then there are hallmarks of grad-student behavior mentioned by Kelsky that seem simultaneously insecure and arrogant...

This passage really hit the nail on the head for me. This is exactly how I behaved and saw many of my fellow grad students behave: simulataneously over- and under-confident. How so? Here are a few common examples:

1. Stubbornly clinging to a thesis or argument, denying a good worry or objection that someone has raised "come hell or high water"...instead of admitting, "Yes, that's a good worry. I need to think about it more. Can you perhaps help me think it through."  
2. Raising -- and then repeatedly pressing an objection "until you've won" -- at a talk where it is clear that your purpose is to show that you are right..instead of presenting the worry in a friendly way as a genuine concern, and being willing to help the person work through it.

Notice a pattern? There's a certain attitude of defensiveness and one-upmanship. In my experience, if anything gives off a "grad-student-ish" vibe, that's it: behaviors that ooze a need to "prove oneself" in public. This desire to prove oneself simultaneously comes off as overconfident (viz. you're really, really sure that your objection refutes the speaker's argument!) and under-confident (viz. why the need to go out of your way to show how smart you are?).

I do not mean to blame grad students for enaging in these types of behaviors. I remember what grad school is like. There is a lot of pressure to prove oneself and "look smart" to other students and faculty. I get it. My point here is not meant to be critical so much as it is meant to be instructive: if you don't want to look like a grad student, you need to unlearn all the defensiveness and posturing, and approach people as colleagues engaged in the project of helping one another improve one another's work.

Believe it or not, people in the profession at the faculty level generally just have very little interest in all the ego-stroking. Sure, some faculty do engage in it on occasion. In my experience, it is most often "famous" people -- people with enormous egos who can get away with behaving boorishly -- though, on occasion, other people fall into it as well (and indeed, I would be lying if I said I never fell into the trap anymore myself! I just think I fall into it far less often than I used to). The point isn't that faculty never ego-stroke. The point is that they do it (in my experience) on average far less than the typical grad student.

My experience is that after grad school, here is what you will discover. The profession does have some people who are constantly comparing themselves to others, engaging in one-upmanship. But, for the most part, most people in the profession just aren't like this. By and large, the profession consists of people who realize that everyone at this level is super smart, and who are just looking to improve their work, get to know each other as friends and colleagues, and discuss philosophical ideas. The sooner you begin to see people this way, the better off you'll be. You'll feel a whole lot less insecure, a whole lot less of a need to constantly "prove yourself", and appear a whole lot less like a grad student.  

Or so say I. What say you, my fellow Cocooners?

What is the purpose of God's creation?

The question could be formulated in different ways. If, for instance, one does not believe in a creatio e nihilo, one will rather ask why does God allow the persistance of the world or just "why something and not nothing?". But I am sure that the question becomes particularly relevant if one adopts the creationist perspective, so that God must have actively decided to create the world, a decision which S/He could have avoided and which was completely in His/Her hands, since there was no reality such as matter independent of Her/Him.

In a comment to this post, Roger suggests that "bringing glory to God is the highest good--and God's purpose for doing anything at all".

Now, I can see that this seems in harmony with so much theological thought. However, I cannot be convinced by it.

To me, this seems too close to the idea of an egotic God, who wants to be celebrated. An alternative reading would be the pantheistic view that there is nothing but God and what brings glory to Her/Him brings glory to everyone else.

If I were to look for a solution to the initial question, though, I would rather imagine that God created us because S/He missed us. S/He could not avoid feeling a love which went beyond Him/Herself (yes, I know that this points to God's incompleteness, but I prefer a God who is charitas to a God who is an Aristotelic Perfect Being).

On balancing what matters

In reponse to my post asking readers what their typical work week is like (and sharing mine), Carrie, a third-year graduate student writes,

[W]hat strikes me about all the replies here is how much work-life balance is being stressed. This is something I've talked about with my fellow students, since our observation of our professors at our university is how little work-balance many of them have, whether they are are pre- or post-tenure and whether they have partners and/or children or not (e.g., never taking weekends off, feeling like they don't have enough time for daily tasks like cooking and cleaning, etc.). Perhaps this is a generational phenomenon (although some of them are pre-tenure, so not too much further along the the posters here), or part of being at a research school? Either way, it's encouraging to hear stories from people who are getting a lot of research work done and still spend time with family, friends, and things outside philosophy. 

I wonder what readers think. In reply to Carrie's comment, I shared my (admittedly anecdotal) sense that it may have something to do with working in an R1 environment (where one must publish a lot of stuff in top-ranked journals to get tenure). What do readers think?

Also, since Carrie brought it up, what sorts of work-life balance rules do readers follow (and how do you find that they work)? Again, my rules are pretty simple: no work at night (past 6pm) or on weekends (I break these rules only very occasionally, maybe a few times a year). 

"A New Theory of Free Will" and the Peer-to-Peer Simulation Hypothesis

[Cross-posted at Flickers of Freedom]

Last year I published an article in The Philosophical Forum entitled, “A New Theory of Free Will” (a free unpublished version is available here). Because I think the theory the article develops may be of interest to readers of this blog who may not have come across it, I thought I might provide a brief précis of the article here, as well as lay out some additional evidence for why I think the theory is worth taking seriously.

Nick Bostrom is of course well-known for arguing, on probabilistic grounds, that we are probably living in a simulation. Somewhat similarly, David Chalmers has argued that we should consider the “simulation hypothesis” not as a skeptical hypothesis that threatens our having knowledge of the external world, but rather as a metaphysical hypothesis regarding what our world is made of. Finally, the simulation hypothesis is gaining some traction in physics.

My 2013 article and subsequent unpublished work go several steps further, arguing that a new form of the simulation hypothesis -- what I call the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Simulation Hypothesis -- is not only implied by several serious hypotheses in philosophy and physics, but that it also provides a unified explanation of (A) the mind-body problem, (B) the problem of free will, and (C) several fundamental features of quantum mechanics, while (D) providing a new solution to the problem of free will that I call "Libertarian Compatibilism."

I begin my 2013 paper by arguing that we presently have some philosophical and scientific evidence in favor of each of the following hypotheses:

1. Eternalism about physical objects and properties: past, present, and future physical objects and properties exist “timelessly.”
2. Mind-body dualism: the mind is at least partly comprised by non-physical properties or substance(s).
3. Subjectivity about the passage of time: time’s passage occurs within consciousness alone.
4. Only one timeline (ours) is actualized, or consciously experienced by observers.
5. The holographic principle: the physical universe is simply a series of ordered two-dimensional information (i.e. 1's and 0's) “written” on the cosmological horizon.
6. The multiverse hypothesis: the observable physical universe is merely a small part of vast multiverse of alternative possibilities.

I then argue that if all of these hypotheses are true, it follows that our reality is structurally identical to a particular kind of online interactive computer simulation: a peer-to-peer networked simulation.

In computer science, there are two types of online simulations: (A) dedicated server simulations, in which one computer on the network (the "server") serves as the definitive representation of objects and properties in the simulation, and (B) peer-to-peer networked simulations, in which no single computer on the network serves as the definitive representation of objects and properties in the simulation, but in which, instead, "the" simulation is simply represented in parallel on the various interacting computers on the network.

Here is why, if all of the aforementioned hypotheses are true, our reality is structurally identical to a P2P simulation. A P2P simulation just is:

1. An array two-dimensional information (e.g. each computer's game program or DVD)
2. Comprising a vast array of "possible pasts, presents, and futures" for the simulation,
3. Being read in real time,
4. By a multitude of external measuring devices (i.e. each computer on the network),
5. All interacting in parallel, such that
6. The joint measurements of all the computers on the network result in the appearance of single observed, intersubjective reality.

These six features of a P2P simulation are identical to the six aformentioned hypotheses.

Next, let us think about the philosophy of mind and the problem of free will.

First, the P2P model explains, and promises a new resolution to, the problem of free will. Here's how. Anyone who has played an online simulation knows that once one “plays the game”, one can rewind the game back to the beginning, press the “play” button, and watch all of the game that just completed inexorably play out just as it did the first time. Accordingly, from the reference-frame of anyone within such a simulated reality, their “physical” world would appear to be causally closed. Observers within the system, when looking at the physics of their system (viz. at how gravity works in the simulated environment, etc,) would be led to believe that the system must be closed under the laws of their physics. But, of course, we – the users, outside of the simulation – know that their experience of causal closure in their reference frame is an illusion generated by the choices we freely make in our higher reference-frame (where our choices "outside" the simulation dictate what "inexorably" happens within it). Finally, although in our case our choices outside of online simulations appear themselves to be dictated by the laws of physics, the model makes room, in principle, for true libertarian free will in a higher reference-frame -- viz. pure conscious will (if mind-body dualism is true) -- to generate the illusion of causal in our reference frame. In other words, for all we know, consciousness really is a medium outside of our laws of physics that generates free choices ex nihilo in a way that appears deterministic from a "physical" frame-of-reference.

Second, the model helps to explain the mind-body problem. Observers trapped in the kind of simulation I am describing would be convinced – just as many of us are – that there is something about their subjective point-of-view that cannot be captured in the physics of their world. And they would be right. After all, the hardware upon which the simulation is running – the processing apparatus (viz. DVD laser apparatus/processor) – would comprise their subjective point-of-view but otherwise be inaccessible to them. From their reference frame, everything besides their subjective point-of-view would be physical information (i.e. the 1’s and 0’s that make the information of their physical world). Thus, the model explains the mind-body problem. If the model is right, our reality really is made of two fundamentally different things: "hardware" (i.e. consciousness) and "software" (i.e. physical information) interacting.

Next, in the paper I argue that the P2P Hypothesis provides a better interpretation of quantum mechanics than more traditional interpretations (e.g. the Copenhagen, Everett, and Bohmian interpretations) because, unlike those interpretations -- which simply interpret quantum phenomena -- the P2P hypothesis promises to explain why quantum phenomena exist in the first place. Further, in work presently in draft I argue that P2P simulations replicate and provide a unified explanation of several otherwise unexplained features of the quantum world -- specifically:

1. Quantum superposition
2. Quantum indeterminacy
3. The quantum measurement problem
4. Wave-function duality
5. “Wave-function collapse”, and
6. Quantum entanglement

Physicists have explained how these features of our world work, but not why they exist. I believe the P2P Simulation hypothesis promises to provide a unified explanation of their nature and existence.

Here, in brief, is how.  A P2P simulation, again, is simply one in which no individual computer serves as the “server” representing where all objects and properties in the simulation are (for the various computers on the server). Rather, in a peer-to-peer network, "the" simulated environment simply is the multitude of computers all networked together, with each having its own representation of the observed reality, and in which a netcode is used to ensure that the computers do not get too far out of line (so that they all nearly agree on where objects and properties are in the simulation). Now, here are the really neat things about P2P simulations:

1. A peer-to-peer simulation just is a superposition of different parallel representations of the simulated environment on different computers on the network  (viz. each computer has its own ever-so-slightly different representation of where things in the simulation are, such that the union of the different representations of "reality" is a giant superposition of alternate states),
2. "The" location of any object or property in a P2P simulation is therefore also indeterminate, given that each computer on the network has its own representation of where "the" object or property is, and there is no dedicated server on the network to represent where the object or property "really" is (any object or property "really" is represented at many different positions on the network, thanks to slightly different representations on many computers all operating in parallel),
3. Any measurement taken by any single measurement device a P2P network also thereby affects the network as a whole (since what one computer measures will affect what other computers on the network are likely to measure at any given instant), giving rise to a massive measurement problem (one can only measure an object is on the network by disturbing the entire network, thereby altering where other computers on the network will represent the particle as being),
4. Because different machines on the network represent the same object in slightly different positions at any given instant (with some number n of machines representing a given object at position P, some other number n* of machines representing a given object at position P*, etc.) a dynamical description of where a given object/property probably is in the environment will have features of a wave (viz. an amplitude equivalent to the number of computers representing the object at a given instant, and wavelength equivalent to dynamical change of how many computers represent the object at a given point at the next instant), while at the same time
5. Any particular measurement on any particular computer will result in the observation of the object as located at a specific point (thus embodying a wave-particle duality), such that
6. Any particular measurement on any particular computer will result in the appearance of a “collapse” of the wave-like dynamics of the simulation into a single, determinate measurement (thus modeling wave-function collapse), 
7. Finally, it is a natural result of a peer-to-peer network that single objects can “split in two”, becoming entangled (in a peer-to-peer network multiple computers can, in a manner of speaking, get slightly out of phase, with one or more computers on the network coding for the particle passing through a boundary, while one or more other computers on the network coding for the particle to bounce backwards – in which case, if the coding is right, all of the computers on the network will treat the “two” resulting objects as simply later continuants of what was previously a single object).

If all this is true (a big if, I realize!), then quantum phenomena may no longer be as mysterious as they have long seemed. Rather, quantum phenomena just are evidence that our reality is structurally identical to a peer-to-peer simulation ("coded" in a system in a higher frame-of-reference inaccessible to us within our frame of reference).

Finally, there are several tantalizing new lines of evidence in favor of the theory. First, 2013 National Medal of Science award-winning physicist James Gates has found the existence of binary-error-correcting block codes embedded in the equations of string theory: error-correcting codes just like those computer programmers actually use to prevent inconsistencies in online simulations. Second, the kind of quantum feedback mechanism I predicted on p. 41 of “A New Theory of Free Will” – a mechanism for primitive, libertarian free will to interfere with and alter the normal quantum wave-function (which was also predicted far earlier by the ORCH-OR theory of consciousness) -- appears to have been observed.

Anyway, the theories -- Libertarian Compatibilism and the P2P Hypothesis -- may both turn out to be wrong. However, these are the reasons why I think, at present, they both deserve to be taken seriously.

Final CFP: Second Annual Philosophers' Cocoon Philosophy Conference

This is just a quick reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the Second Annual Philosophers' Cocoon Philosophy Conference (PCPC) is just a couple of weeks away (March 15th). Don't forget to submit! Click here for conference details and submission instructions.