subject to change

This blog is doomed.

2007-06-20T17:15:00.000-04:00

This blog is doomed. I've been told that it's only faculty blog hosted in this was by a KSU server. Even if I'm not violating any policies, my time at KSU is limited. Thus, the future of this blog is rather limited. As such, I won't be contributing anything more to it. For anyone who's interested, I will be maintaining my other blogger blog, Free the Turtles and I've started a new blog on wordpress, and then what? , which is no longer anonymous.

Argument Diagramming

2006-10-31T11:26:00.000-05:00

Principles of Thinking People, just in time for us to move on to a new chapter, I've started getting some solid ideas about how to teach argument diagramming.

In case anyone is interested in being able to refine their diagramming skills, say to do well on the final, I'm going to be constructing a list interesting and useful web resources in this post. (I'll revise it in the future.) For those who are really interested in argument diagramming, the next series of posts in this blog will be devoted to my reflections on how to teach this stuff.

Argument Mapping

2006-08-15T17:27:00.000-04:00

Another member of my 20th C. Philosophy class has been publishing a blog. Linda has been publishing a chronicle (http://furtilground.blogspot.com/) the weeks she spent studying art in Italy this past summer.

Jewel Of The Kingdom

2006-06-07T18:40:00.000-04:00

Another student has set up a blog, Jewel Of The Kingdom,
in this case, Jake will be chronicling his year plus on active duty in Bosnia.

This looks to be a very promising read.

the girl who did not believe in rain

2006-05-04T11:46:00.000-04:00

I once knew a girl who did not believe in rain.

She never wore a rain coat or carried an umbrella. If you were walking with her in the rain and asked her "Aren't you getting wet?" or "Is water falling on your head?", she would answer "no".

She acknowledged that plants needed water to thrive, but claimed to be as ignorant of where that water came from as she was of the details of photosynthesis.

"Yes," she might say "Plants need water, but I'm only vaguely aware of how plants work, so I'm not going to pretend otherwise."

She was however smart enough that if someone started a longish rant about chlorophyll, she'd be able to trip them up, though I never saw her talk to a botanist. She thought that meteorologists were all too insane to talk to, so trying to explain weather patterns to her was about as useful as explaining the details of the global alien conspiracy to me.

The person I really knew would acknowledge the rain whenever it made her feel as if she were in a Jane Austen novel. The stance was a game, an affectation, albeit one that often required becoming uncomfortably wet. Though it was really quite charming, it would be more interesting to consider the character of the Girl Who Does Not Believe in Rain.

Can she ever be caught on the horns of a dilemma?
Is there a way to play the game against her? (and let's be clear this is a game and GWNBR, ok call her Gwen, is playing.)

Postscript:

My meditations on Gwen are inspired both by conversations in my Introduction to Philosophy class, as well as my recent discovery of the online comic strip 1/0.

Zach's Thru-hike 2006

2006-02-27T14:22:00.000-05:00

May I present Zach's Thru-hike 2006, yet another member of the Twentieth Century Philosophy class who has chosen to pursue adventure as far from Kent as practical?

If not, well it's too late now, isn't it?

2005-11-11T17:26:00.000-05:00

Mark Smolinski, who was in my Twentieth Century Philosophy class last year, is documenting his European travels on his blog. Since the most common visitors to this site seem to be people who were enrolled in that class, I thought it might be of significant interest.

hiatus

2005-11-06T14:15:00.000-05:00

This semester, I am not using blogs as a graded assignment in any of my classes. This has reduced my blogging incentive quite abit.

Also, stories like this one [link to Inside Higher Ed article] may have damped my enthusiasm some what.

Damn cool illusion

2005-10-26T19:14:00.000-04:00

and if that's not enough fun, there's an exhaustive collection here : http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/index.html

Anscombe's Virtues: Simply Wrong?

2005-10-19T17:22:00.000-04:00

I don't often teach Introduction to Ethics, but when I do I have students read G. E. M. Anscombe's ``Modern Moral Philosophy'' about three quarters of the way through the semester, after they've had a chance to read Aristotle, Kant and Mill. Anscombe refers to each of these thinkers in her paper, but not necessarily in the most convincing or even fair way. Her attack on Kant always gets a smile (``Kant introduces the idea of 'legislating for oneself', which is as absurd as if in these days, when majority votes command great respect, one were to call each reflective decision a man made a vote resulting in a majority, which as a matter of proportionality is always overwhelming, for it is always 1-0.'') The value of this exercise is that after at least ten weeks of carefully trying to understand the positions of the each of the previous, Anscombe provides a model for making comparisons and critical judgements. The students in my classes generally don't accept Anscombe's conclusions, but she always refreshes the interactions in the class. Anyway, there's a discussion of this paper over at Leiter Reports. (Guest Blogger William Edmundson Oct. 17-23: Anscombe's Virtues: Simply Wrong?)

The 1,000th visit

2005-08-01T15:04:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to the Ameritech.com user who was my 1000th visit over this past weekend. This visit came from a google search for "examing personal views" showing once again the value of sloppy proof-reading in attracting traffic.

Teaching Kant 1

2005-07-13T18:28:00.000-04:00

Last night we began discussing Kant's Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals in Ethics class. The class reaction followed a two step evolution similar to that I've encountered in other classes where Kant was being read for the first time.

Step 1: complete befuddlement. Kant's approach to transcendental philosphy is, well, completely alien the way that most people think. I generally begin by doing a quick inventory of the limitations that Kant places on his own available evidence. Pure inquiry, empty of empirical content strikes the naive reader as being a meditation of nothing at all. Some commentators have noted that this is probably a healthy reaction and training students out of this reaction may not be in their best interest.

Step 2: intrique. Kant's arguments can, with effort, become clear. That clarity is surprising, its the experience of thinking in new and unexpected ways. The effort of reading Aristotle can have a dissapointing out come ("I read all of that to learn that the definiciency of courage is cowardness? What sort of person even bothers to take note of that?") Kant on the otherhand forces significant effort on the read but usually pays off with novel insights. The fact that there's no virtue of equity to offset extreme application of law doesn't really become clear until further consideration.

2005-07-11T16:33:00.000-04:00

Postscript to my last post:

One reason that students taking Intro to Ethics diagnose Aristotle as having an unwavering passion for order is that they haven't read Kant yet, they don't know yet know what uncompromising really means.

What would it be like to hang with Aristotle?

2005-07-01T12:54:00.000-04:00

Last night in "Intro to Ethics", we continued our reading of The Nichomachean Ethics. The second half of the class was devoted to intellectual virtue and we finished up with a discussion of the relation of practical wisdom to philosophical wisdom. It turns out that the great heroes of philosophy, Anaxagoras and Thales, had philosophical wisdom but not practical wisdom. In other words, they could uncover the deep mysteries of the cosmos, develop new ways to explain the world, but had trouble walking around without falling into wells and perhaps found the motives of other people somewhat insrutable.

Since Aristotle clearly respects these guys and thinks that this sort of intellectual virtue makes a superior sort of happiness possible, the conversations naturally turned to the character of Aristotle himself. NE is difficult going, in part because the presentation is simultaneously technical and conversational. There are those odds tangents, such as his distinction about adultery for profit compared to adultery for other motives. The section it appears in isn't about adultery and, moreover, Aristotle doesn't seem to be concerned about weighing the two to find one more or less blameworthy than the other, he just wants to make sure that they get properly categorized in the nomenclature of the virtues that he was in the process of constructing at that point. Why would he have done this? Maybe he's in the process of lecturing and he gets distracted by an interesting tributary of the virtues, maybe an enterprising student has noticed that unusual questions can get the professor off onto to strange tangents, so he's decided to toss off a question to get Aristotle off topic for the amusement of the class. Nonetheless, it's a tangent and these tangents are one place where the character of Aristotle sneaks through. I just offer that one as an example, there are other places as well.

Students started offering their impressions of the Stageirite. First off, that he was pretty nerdy, no surprise there. If the obsessive categorizing didn't signal some geeky tendencies, then the whole practical wisdom vs. philosophical wisdom was a dead give away, that part of the book is a defense of nerdy tendencies.

The next step was surprising there was a general agreement that Aristotle was too rigid, that he tended to see things in black and white, too much emphasis on exactitude. We had already discussed the part in Book I where Aristotle asserts that every science must be considered to its own degree of precision, which, in the case of ethics, isn't all that precise. Even more importantly, we had worked our way through his discussion of the moral virtues. "Virtues finds and chooses the mean", and here "the mean" is almost by definition a shade of grey, an indeterminate moderation between two extremes. I also recall sharing this opinion when I was first reading Aristotle, and even after having taken Intro to Philosophy. That was surprising since I'm sure that Tony Celano did not paint Aristotle as a fanatic for order.

When I was reading this time, I was really impressed at the extent to which Aristotle teases out fine distinctions and seeks the moderate position based on a subtle picture of both human nature and common place wisdom. He's certainly got little interest in condeming anyone or establishing exceptionless laws to seperate the worthy from the unworthy, it's all about figuring out how to thrive. This leaves me somewhat confused, why does he come across as such a jerk on first reading but only later as refined and sympathetic?

Acephalous: How to Open an Academic Essay, Part I: Hostile Habilis

2005-06-24T15:50:00.000-04:00

If there are any readers still left around from my writing intensive class last semester, you may want to consider these sage reflections on how to write on academic topics: Acephalous: How to Open an Academic Essay, Part I: Hostile Habilis.

Boing Boing: One puppy, six legs,

2005-06-22T21:49:00.000-04:00

For those who weren't there, today in class we were discussing Aristotle's physics, in particular his four causes and the notion of teleology, the study of natural ends. In that discussion, Aristotle hopes to explain freaks of nature as missing their natural end, much as the phillips head screw drivers in my house still have their purpose, the manipulation of cross-headed screws, even though they're all stripped and not capable of fulfilling that purpose. Aristotle's example of a natural thing that fails to meet its end is a man headed calf. Which immediately suggests the question, when did Aristotle ever see a man-headed calf?

At least for the purposes of illustration, that's no longer necessary to consider since I can now direct your attention to the six legged puppy.

2005-06-04T16:53:00.000-04:00

One nice thing about not having a regular readership is that you never have to apologize for getting lazy about posting.

One goal in keeping this blog was not only to experiment with the pedagogical use of blogs but also to write a pedagogical paper about well this worked. The first thing I've learned is that I have no idea how to write a pedagogical paper. If you're wondering what a pedagogical paper is, I would suggest first asking someone else. If you get a good answer, please be sure to let me know.

I've put together some notes on the topic, but now I need to put them together. Some of them have been appearing in my most recent entries (on anonymity and on attracting traffic through poor spelling).

The blog is a positive step forward over the already established practice of using journals in class. Blogs are more easily publicized, especially to other members of a class. This opens of the possibility of assignments that have all the advantages of personal journals, but also allow for collaborative learning. The responsibility of writing for an audience enforeces a certain discipline on students. Instead of sharing their personal insights, it encourages writing in way that communicates clearly. I think that both of these are useful improvements over the traditional class journal.

The journal already had several advantages, first, it encourages frequent writing. I used journals in tandem with more formal papers. The journals provided a nice opportunity for first drafts of passages and a place to try out ideas before committing to them. The papers then provide a place for more polished, revised prose. Second, this is a single project that can span the entire semster and allow for more integration. (In a writing intensive class, it can provide a single project that integrates all of the reading from the semester. This would allow papers to either focus closely on single text or use material that students have identified themselves.)

Other things I've learned,

1. Students aren't particularly keen on commenting on the work of others. In addition to whatever social pressures might be involved, commenting is simply more work and students aren't really interested in doing this unless they can see what's to be gained by commenting on the works of others.

2. Students are very interesting in receiving comments on their own work. Students learn from feedback in their work, they know this and they tend to value comments made on their work. At least this is my experience.

3. These sorts of projects can become very labor intensive for instructors. Students want interaction with the instructor and they want feedback on their work. Since posts can go up at anytime, this can lead to a constant stream of commenting work by the instructor and writing comments can be very time consuming. I'm beginning to figure out how to make commenting a little easier through the use of rubrics (in essence, grading forms) when grading papers, but I can't this that this would lessen the flood of reading and commenting that constantly updating journals can involve.

So, the challenge for an instructor using blogs in class is to design assignments in such a way that students are encouraged to engage each other's work (perhaps by requiring a certain number of comments per term) and not to expect feedback on everything they write (perhaps by asking them to select their own favorites for grading at the end of the semester, students should definitely be informed of how frequent comments are to expected at the beginning of the semester.)

I'll probably be continuing to reflect on blog experience for the next week or so in this space, then summer school will start and this may fill up with things I'm thinking about that relate to each class (perhaps follow ups to class discussions, links to relevant material etc.) More traditionally blogerific content will be pushed more and more into my other blog.

Strange KSU tidbit of the day

2005-05-27T11:43:00.000-04:00

The following link leads to a discription of Black Vulcan ,one of the most obscure characters in the DC Universe of Superhero characters, and it demonstrates all of the awkwardness that comic book writer's brought to the cause of civil rights in the 1970s. While I know their intentions were good, the results are still somewhat cringe worthy.

Both of the major super hero universes contain many character who function primarily to fill up the background during panoramic views of assembled heros, keeping some of them truly obscure to limit the thrill of recognition to only the most die-hard nerds helps in this regard. Such characters are, obviously, somewhat underdeveloped. Black Vulcan belongs to these group with thought with one detail that is unusual both for it's particularity and its real world reference, he has a teaching degree from Kent State.

OK, here's the link: The Justice League Of America - Character Bios - Black Vulcan

2005-05-09T14:49:00.000-04:00

There have been several times this semester when I have had reason to mention this "Dreben" character, usually when we (in the 20th Century class) were reading some passage or other by Quine.

I had the chance to take a seminar on Wittgenstein with Dreben when I was at BU, though I've seen large lecture sections with fewer people in regular attendance.

My one memorable exchange with Dreben occurred when I asked him about how he would interpret my actions if I were to come into class with a duck strapped to my head. He had been trying to make a point about the difficulty assigning adjectives such as insane or irrational. The duck comments managed to bring him up short for the moment since at that moment as it did seem to be an unambiguously irrational activity.

In any case, there's an interesting discussion of Dreben's influence on
Leiter Reports

Another thing I've learned about blogging

2005-04-28T13:42:00.000-04:00

Since the primary audience of this blog consists of students who are themselves blogging, I'm occasionally going to post about unusual details I've noticed in this process. Outside of kent.edu and rr.edu domains, both of which are probably associated with local readers, most of my traffic seems to come from google searches.

At first, these searches were often driven by unusual mis-spellings, such as "seraches" for searches, in those cases where someone making a google search makes the same mistake as the blogger, Google will tend to connect them up.

Beyond that, there are a few simple phrases which generate a lot of hits for me. In this case, that includes variations on "Illinois Nazis" and "employee tardiness".

The first is a Blues Brother reference, but the Blues Brother's are pre-internet, so any references to catch phrases in that movie will tend to be less common then memorable details from more obscure Southpark episodes. I imagine that many people following the link to me are either wondering on the origin of the phrase, or are looking for some mid-eighties nostalgia. In either case, my blog satisfies. On the otherhand, they may really be looking for information about Nazis in Illinois, in which case, I have nothing of any insight to add.

"employee tardiness" is also a somewhat archaic way of speaking. I imagine that someone following up this phrase will be looking for information about what to do when people keep showing up for work. I have nothing to say about this matter, what's interesting is that none of the sites offering commentary or insight on management practices have anything to say about it either. Or if they do, they're more obscure than this site, at least as measure in google rank. I'm already on the first page returned for "employee tardiness". After this current post, in which the phrase "employee tardiness" is used many times, I'll probably own the phrase "employee tardiness", and yet I have absolutely nothing to say on the topic. I first used the phrase "employee tardiness" here. (note, the quotes are important, the management sites do have something to say about the unquoted form, I'll consider the possibility of a use-mention problem here someday when I'm really really bored.)

The moral, if you're blogging for the first time and you want people to read what you write, regardless of their interest, then mispell words and use outdated phrases.

Anonymous Posting

2005-04-21T13:53:00.000-04:00

As I begin to get more and more familiar with the academic and philosophical parts of the blogosphere, I'm beginning to notice that anonymity seems to be the general rule. Sure, some prominent folks blog with their real names, but the anonymous group is very real.

Me, I even post my picture and pictures of my kids.

One argument for anonymity runs like this. Academics are given a respected position because of their expertise. Any academics expertise is necessarily limited, so the respect granted their opinions should be limited in proportion to their expertise. But, one might assume, academics can generally wrapped themselves in the assumed authority of their degrees and their institutions for added credibility that is not properly deserved. Hence, one should strive not to speak as an authority when asserting conclusions outside of one's specialization. Posting anonymously allows a writer to present arguments in areas related to one's position without assuming undue authority. I don't have any particular concerns about my opinion being taken as authoritative in any sense. Presumably, this is because I am refreshingly free of any illusions about how seriously take the authority of positions of philosophers in general or myself in particular. On the otherhand, I do have a large piece of paper that says I have all "the right and privileges" associated with being a doctor of philosophy. And it may even have been signed by John Silber, though I don't care enough to check that at this moment.

Another argument is that the bloggers are writing as an extension of their academic work, but that they're looking for a freedom of expression that normal academic writing and expression doesn't give. As teachers, academis should respect and nurture the opinions and beliefs of their students. Thus, to preserve the dispassionate position of professing truth, as well as preserving the nature of the teacher-student relationship, anonymous posting can be considered desirable. This is partiuclarly understandable in cases such as The Angry Professor who will occasionally take a moment to mock a student. I find the Angry Prof's discussion quite entertaining and I'm glad that she wrote what she did, her personal voice is engaging and informative, though it may cross some lines when it comes to respecting students. However, her sites is not completely free of identifying information and some students are pretty savvy. There's really no guarantee that this can't find its way into the general discussions of her students. I'm not so sure how much is gained in posting anonymously in this case, but it does provide some level of discretion.

Both of these arguments have the unexpected consequence that "academic freedom" is actually a restriction of the range of expressions one might freely engage in.

Finally, there's the question of academic accountability and evaluation. If you're positing anonymously, then you don't have to worry about the content of your blog being part of the evaluation processes at reappointment or tenure time. Of course, I started this project, in part, as a pedagogical experiment, as a way of expanding and reinforcing class content. As such, anonymous posting would be difficult, since I want my students to be able to find this material and I am going to draw attention to to it during various steps in the evaluation process.

I've certainly made some mistakes during my bloging learning process. My postings from around the time of the election illustrate this. Respect often means holding one's tongue. One thing I learned is that once you start posting, it becomes very easy to slide into material that is not really relevant to one's academic goals. To prevent this from becoming a problem, I started a second blog which I don't house on the university server, it is essentially a personal blog as opposed to this, my academic blog. Of course, I don't post there anonymously either.

To conclude, I see the value of each of the three arguments for anonymous blogging, but I think that they are each out weighed by oppposing arguments or, at least, I have chosen not to blog anonymously, regardless of how foolish that may be. The moral is that once I decided that I was going to use this blog as a pedagogical tool, anonymity became pointless, but so did writing in a typical blog fashion.

examples of naturalized epistemology

2005-04-05T11:42:00.000-04:00

Despite what George Lakoff says, the move towards empirical study of metaphorical and analogical reasoning really are good examples of naturalized epistemology. (Note: he doesn't really say that they isn't, he wants to distinquish his own position from that of Quine.) In any case, there's an accessible introduction to this sort of work at mixing memory. There's a later update on how this work has been applied to understanding Political Analogies

inscrutible reference

2005-03-30T12:02:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Shane, I know now that the thing I was pointing at is called "university seating". For those who weren't in my class yesterday, perhaps because you were sent here by Google, university seating constitutes a fine example of Quine's assertion in "Ontological Relativity" that direct ostension is uncertain. I'm still not sure what I was pointing to, was it a seat, a work area, a segment of a larger piece of furniture? University seating is such an odd object that not only is it very difficult for an observer to figure out what someone means when they point at it, I was unsure what I was point at.

Even after considering the web-site. I'm still not sure if "university seating" refers to the type of furniture to which the object containing the ostensive point of my pointing belonged, or if its a brand name for the parts from which such things are built. Perhaps they should call such constructed furniture "gavagai" because even as the pointer, in this case, I'm not sure if I'm indicating a peice of furniture or a collection of undetached furniture parts.

Reading about Godel

2005-03-29T17:10:00.000-05:00

Here's a link to a review one of the two books on Goedel that I mention in class today. I'm not so sure about the reviewer's comments because she has a tendency to say things like:

The Vienna Circle celebrated empirical science as the basis for those new foundations, but as the ideas of positivism evolved and filtered into such disciplines as literary theory, anthropology and linguistics, science itself became a target of skepticism. Enter, postmodernism. Every form of knowledge came to be analyzed as a set of rules created by flawed human beings whose biases inevitably infected those rules. The relativity, uncertainty and incompleteness of Einstein, Heisenberg and Goedel became metaphors for the unreliability of what we once took to be truth.

Granted that Godel's and Einstein's works have been used to support conclusions outside of science that they don't actually support. But was Darwin's, and Mendel's, and even though I gather that Newton may have had some sympathy for the more esoteric uses of his theories, they've still been put to this use. Scientific theories have been misapplied to advance nonscientific agendas for at least as long as they're have been respectable scientific theories to misapply. Perhaps longer, depending on what you think the Pythagoreans were up to. Einstein and Goedel haven't been particularly abused and postmodernist haven't been uniquely guilty. In fact, the postmodern scepticism of science probably keeps the average post modernist by abusing scientific conclusions too much. (Biographical aside: it was reading Lyotard's Report on the Post-modern Condition while taking a direct study in quantum mechanics that cofirmed my analytic conditions. If memory serves, Lyotard is quite egregious in misapplying Einstein and Goedel.)

But what really gets me about this passage is that it seems to indicate that postivism gave rise to postmodernism. Despite its flaws, positivism was a movement to establish some evidential standards in philosophy. No matter how problematic that might, its really not the same thing as unprincipled scepticism. (As opposed to the sceptical kind that I like.)

Philosophy and Monty Python

2005-03-17T11:51:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Zak for the link. Gary Hardcastle's thought on Philosophy and Monty Python supplement and extend my own in useful ways. Hardcastle's discussion is important because he touches on many of the topics that we'll be covering as we read Quine.