Jon Cogburn's Blog

final version of sunday school lecture notes for now

Posting has been light. I've been really digging into no-luck epistemologies, in particular Keith DeRose's fantastic work. But all my thoughts are going into academic papers with Jeff Roland, and I almost never blog arguments that I'm putting into papers.

One other cool thing- Me and University Presbyterian Church Associate Pastor Clint Mitchell's notes on biblical interpretation and authority are finalized for the remainder of this semester's class and on-line HERE. A few conclusions:

1. Naive inerrancy (I assume some folks at Baylor have a more sophisticated version than the kind my evangelical students imbibe) is really daft. Independent of the clear contradictions, historical falsehoods, lack of surviving original texts, and also what we know about how the material got included- One of the great things about the Bible is how it is first and foremost a long chronicle of human failings. Why think that the same fallible humans who, for example, worshipped a golden calf after being freed from slavery and receiving miraculous food every morning, or who killed Jesus for that matter (and we all had a hand in that) would be competent enough to pen an innerrant text? This tension is actually I think one of the fundamental contradictions in much of the protestant tradition. The reformed tradition that started the doctrine of innerancy (at Princeton seminary) has kept the emphasis on human fallibility and rejected the dogma that scripture is inerrant, but the newer evangelicals have done the opposite
2. The "rule of love" by which a non-loving interpretation of Bible is wrong, is both historically and philosophically defensible. Historically, because the Jesus Seminar type tests for what Jesus actually might have said (involving research into the Q gospel) trace back to sayings about love trumping everything. This actually ties to innerancy- i.e. the written Law being neither sufficient (e.g. it's not good enough just to not committ adultery, or to follow the commandments) nor necessary (e.g. it's O.K. to heal on the sabbath). Philosophically, because Euthyphro dilemma type worries lead to a mystical identification of God with love.
3. After this study I'm even more glad I picked Presbyterianism when I rejoined a Christian spiritual community. The official church documents on authority and interpretation (linked to in Mitchell and me's document) are really very sensible, stressing the reformed traditions' emphasis on human fallibility, showing how PC(USA)  has moved away from inerrancy, as well as stressing the necessity of taking seriously academic research into the Bible.

navel gazing after friends' reports from tour

For all my kind of pseudo-punk rock wingeing, I'm forced to conclude that U2 is one of the handful of big acts who actually are keeping the banner of rock waiving.

Whose it going to be next? Billy Joel? Abba?

Wait a minute, I already decided those guys wrote some pretty good songs.

At least: (1) I still don't like progressive rock (though, disturbingly, two friends whose other aesthetic judgments I put a great deal of creedence in are big fans of the form), and (2) I'm irrationally exuberant about the fact that James Williamson and Iggy Pop have made peace and the former is resuming his rightful place with "Iggy and the Stooges" (to be differentiated from "The Stooges," for whom Ron Asheton, R.I.P., played lead guitar).

New York Dolls - Looking for a Kiss

fun with animals

I wish I'd felt well enough to go to this petting zoo pumpkin sale thingy in Hammond Louisiana with Emily and Thomas yesterday.

Nobody make any jokes about Of Mice and Men or the old cartoon that copied it. This being said, you really do have to teach two year olds not to just grab at animals. Thomas is learning pretty well.

When I was a kid some of our friends in the country had a turkey that was really foul tempered and who liked to chase kids up into the back of a pick-up truck. I don't know if this turkey will have such a lucky fate. According to Emily, he found Thomas as interesting as Thomas found him.

This is why I'm really bummed I could not go. There's really nothing happier then when your kid is excited, full of innocent joy, and interested in the world.

Emily said his second favorite thing was watching piglets eat. It made him jump up and down and laugh uproariously.

To quote Emily's facebook (where I got these photos from) caption for this picture, "But his absolute favorite was the cow. He banged on it, laid down on it, and petted it. The cow didn't seem to notice."

He got a pumpkin at the end which is just big enough for him to lug around and place on different chairs. He's so hyped about the pumpkin that he brought it to bed last night, but he didnt' try to bring to church this morning.

everybody finally keeping food down

Boy last week sucked. Luckily Emily and I took turns having the worst of the stomach virus so one of us could watch Thomas while the other one was incapacitated. Now this week is going to be crazy-busy getting caught up on all the stuff we let slide last week.

Emily felt good enough to take Thomas to a petty zoo, pumpkin sale thing yesterday. I'll put some pictures up in a bit.

Jim Harrison - Larson's Holstein Bull

Death waits inside us for a door to open.
Death is patient as a dead cat.
Death is a doorknob made of flesh.
Death is that angelic farm girl
gored by the bull on her way home
from school, crossing the pasture
for a shortcut. In the seventh grade
she couldn't read or write. She wasn't a virgin.
She was "simpleminded," we all said.
It was May, a time of lilacs and shooting stars.
She's lived in my memory for sixty years.
Death steals everything except our stories.

devil in my pocket youtube playlist

I just figured out how to make a playlist for the weird videos I've been making using public domain content and music from me and Emily's rock band. The playlist is HERE (the one's that work best video-wise are probably Santa Sangre, Zombies, and the Zoo). The general webpage for the band with lots more MP3s of songs  is HERE. I"m decent at playing guitar and writing melodies, barely adequate at singing, bad as a lyricist, and even worse at getting a decent mix and timbre when recording these things on my computer.

When playing live I can keep an audience's attention if I am wearing a wrestling mask. Once it comes off they start drunkenly talking to one another and ignoring me. There's probably some Levinasian reason for this.

Music has mostly been on a hiatus with very young children. During the sabbatical year I could be a decent father to a baby, play music, and write philosophy. When we came back to Baton Rouge and I had to teach again while trying to be a decent father to a toddler it took me a year just to figure out how to write philosophy again (as much as possible do it two hours every morning very, very early- then the rest of the day is grading, teaching, prepping lectures, administrative stuff, helping students, and being a dad). I think it's going to be another year at least before I can work realiably rocking out back into the mix. Other musician friends of mine with full time jobs tell me that when your youngest hits three things open up in a way that gives you one or two hours a day rocking out time without being a bad father.

three cheers for the Associate Baptist Press

Great article by Ken Camp and Robert Marus on the troubling propensity of many conservative Christians to believe and spread patent falsehoods HERE. Camp and Marus discuss a set of these involving Madeleine O Hare, Al Gore, and President Obama.

God bless snopes.com! Exploring it gives you a fascinating tour of America's psychic underbelly.

Denis Dutton on dead sharks jumping the shark

Absolutely fantastic piece by Denis Dutton on conceptual art in today's NYT available HERE (Dutton's book HERE). Interesting fact:

The earliest stone tools are choppers and blades found in Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, from 2.5 million years ago. These unadorned tools remained unchanged for thousands of centuries, until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo ergaster, Homo erectus and other human ancestral groups started doing something new and remarkable. They began shaping single, thin stone blades, sometimes rounded ovals, but often in what to our eyes are arresting symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop forms. Acheulian hand axes (after St.-Acheul in France, a site of 19th-century finds) have been unearthed in their thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa, wherever Homo erectus roamed.

The sheer numbers of hand axes indicate a rate of manufacture beyond needs for butchering animals. Even more curious, unlike other prehistoric stone tools, hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their delicate blade edges, and some are in any case too big for practical use. They are occasionally hewn from colorful stone materials (even with decoratively embedded fossils). Their symmetry, materials and above all meticulous workmanship makes them quite simply beautiful to our eyes. What were these ancient yet somehow familiar artifacts for?

The best available explanation is that they are literally the earliest known works of art — practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and virtuoso craftsmanship.

Clincher:

However, one trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the pleasure we take in admiring skilled performances. From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall — where now and again the Homo erectus hairs stand up on the backs of our necks — human beings have a permanent, innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts.

We ought, then, to stop kidding ourselves that painstakingly developed artistic technique is passé, a value left over from our grandparents’ culture. Evidence is all around us. Even when we have lost contact with the social or religious ideas behind the arts of bygone civilizations, we are still able, as with the great bronzes or temples of Greece or ancient China, to respond directly to craftsmanship. The direct response to skill is what makes it possible to find beauty in many tribal arts even though we often know nothing about the beliefs of the people who created them. There is no place on earth where superlative technique in music and dance is not regarded as beautiful.

The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. That’s why looking through the history of conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes about Cadillac tailfins and early fax machines were once amusing, and the same can be said of conceptual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 declaration that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a definition of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s medicine cabinets. Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.

But that doesn’t mean we need to worry about the future of art. There are plenty of prodigious artists at work in every medium, ready to wow us with surprising skills. And yes, now and again I walk past a jewelry shop window and stop, transfixed by a sparkling, teardrop-shaped precious stone. Our distant ancestors loved that shape, and found beauty in the skill needed to make it — even before they could put their love into words.

If these were planes, where would the unseelie reside?

This is the Gall set of phrenological regions. He thought humans and animals had the first 19, but only humans had the final eight.

1. The instinct of reproduction (located in the cerebellum).
2. The love of one's offspring.
3. Affection and friendship.
4. The instinct of self-defense and courage; the tendency to get into fights.
5. The carnivorous instinct; the tendency to murder.
6. Guile; acuteness; cleverness.
7. The feeling of property; the instinct of stocking up on food (in animals); covetousness; the tendency to steal.
8. Pride; arrogance; haughtiness; love of authority; loftiness.
9. Vanity; ambition; love of glory (a quality "beneficent for the individual and for society").
10. Circumspection; forethought.
11. The memory of things; the memory of facts; educability; perfectibility.
12. The sense of places; of space proportions.
13. The memory of people; the sense of people.
14. The memory of words.
15. The sense of language; of speech.
16. The sense of colours.
17. The sense of sounds; the gift of music.
18. The sense of connectedness between numbers.
19. The sense of mechanics, of construction; the talent for architecture.
20. Comparative sagacity.
21. The sense of metaphysics.
22. The sense of satire; the sense of witticism.
23. The poetical talent.
24. Kindness; benevolence; gentleness; compassion; sensitivity; moral sense.
25. The faculty to imitate; the mimic.
26. The organ of religion.
27. The firmness of purpose; constancy; perseverance; obstinacy.

Actually, the problem is that most interesting monsters that can be represented in terms of this mythology are best represented as mixtures of the above.

Sorry if this is obscure. The challenge is to design worlds where discredited psychological theories are not only true, but implicated in the way magic works. This is a steampunk trope.

Anyhow, the next trick would be to flatten the map and make the distance between regions (the extent to which they are contiguous, or the amount of distinct regions that have to be traversed to get from one region to the next) relevant. Then for example, the unseelie fey could inhabit a set of connected spaces (hopefully keeping the topology the same as Gall's picture of the human skull). Unfortunately, all of the actual maps I've found have all 37 regions, adding the ten that were Spurzheim's contribution to the pseudo-science. That's too many planes.

Maybe we should just use Freud instead.

Alice Cooper - Is It My Body?

hypothesis for why analytic blogosophere is less dysfunctionally vituperative

I think I've figured out why debates in the continental philosophy blogosphere are so much more likely to become vituperative than debates in the analytic blogosophere.

The tenure model in analytic philosophy is overwhelmingly based on number of articles published in a set of journals that generally have from three to fifteen percent acceptance rates (these are actually among the lowest acceptance rates of all academic journals). Say you are perfectly average for a published analytical philosopher. Then you'd have to submit over ten times for every one published article. So nine times out of ten you have to deal with blank rejections or referee reports justifying to an editor why your paper should not be published. And the chance of getting a tenure track job and then tenure depends upon this, so it's a huge emotional issue.

If that is your reality, then people disagreeing with you on the internet is just not that big a deal. You are already used to getting punched down and getting right back up over and over again in the one thing that most determines whether you will be able to follow your bliss. If you don't develop very thick skin the process is too traumatic and you can't do it. But then, as a result, analytic philosophers in blogs can even be fairly dismissive or challenging and it rarely escalates into ever increasing vituperativeness, personal attacks, weird defensiveness, and people being banned.

Of course these are just tendencies, and I would not have a basis for making them if I did not find a lot of the continental blogosophere to be philosophically valuable (check the links to the right).

forthcoming book edited by Levi Bryant that I'm really excited about

HERE is the table of contents.

This is exactly what is needed. With the exception of on-line reading groups, and the occasional post here and there, I'm somewhat disenchanted with the blogosphere as an avenue for development of systematic philosophical theories (as opposed to considering arguments more briefly). The biggest problem is that there is no analog to blind review, and a subsidiary problem is that a whole host of all-too-human psychological dysfunctions (that every human being suffers from) seem to be called forward by the medium itself.

In any case, the book will be an excellent chance for everyone to slow down a bit and reflect on things.

Given the set of authors and the inclusion of author-meets-critic type discussions, I think it will work fantastically well as a Part II to Lee Braver's A Thing of This World. I don't know if I would be able to convince my friends at Perverse Egalitarianism to do a reading group on it next summer though. Actually, I don't even know if that would be a good idea. . . 

Georgious George (hat tip Neal Hebert)

Who knew that Lord Foppington was such a great wrestler?

thoughts about Alabama Philosophical Society conference

(1) The contingent of people associated with Ohio State was really large: Adam Podlaskowski, Eric Carter, Andrew Choi, William Melanson, me, David Merli, Joshua Smith, and Nick Jones. 

(2) Mark Silcox was not there this year, which was a pretty major bummer. When he was at Auburn we used to go to this conference every year and it was a good chance for me and Emily to hang out with him and Heidi.

(3) The sheer ugliness of public architecture in the United States is overwhelming, and even more so when you contrast it to the natural beauty of the ocean. The generic thing in places like Orange Beach, Alabama and Destin, Florida is to have concentric layers from the ocean: beach, condos, pedestrian unfriendly highway, and then strip malls. The hideous strip malls are like a hundred yards from the beach, but you still have to combat traffic in your car to get to them. I wish the whole Seaside thing had caught on. . .

(4) This was my first philosophy conference as a non-drinker. It made taking in more papers during the day easier but socializing at night harder. I'm not really sure why. Maybe professors holding court about various things are just more tolerable when your mind is lubricated? Maybe the sugar in the alcohol just gives you an extra burst of energy after a tiring day of thinking.

(5) At least I am not a vegetarian. A big part of the socialization in these things is eating meals together. Actually a big part of socialization for human beings is eating meals together. [I don't mean to be criticizing other people's lifestyle choices here; I'm just noting that being able to enjoy the good seafood with other philosophy professors was a good-making feature of the conference.]

(6) Presenting a co-written paper is always weird. This time Jeff Roland read the paper and then ended up answering almost all the questions.

(7) I didn't like the format of 25 minutes for the paper, 15 minutes for questions/discussion. Several of the papers were good enough to where that was not enough time for questions/discussion. But I guess the fact that the discussions were that good is a good thing.

(8) Thomas no longer thinks that the beach is metaphysically unacceptable. The last few times we visited my folks in Naples, Florida he'd sometimes stare down at the sand with a kind of horror, as if the Earth's solidity was degenerating. He's much more confident with it now.