For those of you who know me only through my online presence, you should be aware that I did not, in fact, commit suicide out of despondancy over the results of the November 5 elections. Nor have I become a reclusive monk (as much as my tastes may run in that direction). Instead, my weblog has simply been on a prolonged hiatus because of a couple months of nearly non-stop academic work and a blissful bit of reclusive relaxation for the week afterwards.

I just wanted to wish everyone a peaceful and happy holiday season, and to let you know that I shall return to posting more regularly in the very near future (whether this means before the New Year or not will depend on how long it takes me to revise certain essays of mine). In any case—talk to you again soon.

In the meantime, consider this bit of correspondance from Paul Feyerabend to his frequent partner in debates over philosophy of science and methodology:

Dear Imre,

You have powerful allies in this country: Ayn Rand (know her?) is after me. She wrote a long article against a short (three and a half pages) article of mine, and sent copies to 4,000 philosophers in order to prevent American philosophy from deteriorating further. Sample: the author (i.e. me) heralds the retrogression of philosophy to the primordial pre-philosophical rationalism of the jungle . . . But what is innocent and inexplicable in an infant or a savage becomes senile corruption when the snake oil, totem poles, and magic potions are replaced by a computer …

You must admit, she writes much better invective than you.

(from Lakatos, Imre and Paul Feyerabend, For and Against Method: Including Lakatos’s Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondance. Quoted in Gregory R. Johnson and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, "Ayn Rand in the Scholarly Literature," The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 3.1)

This past weekend was fucked up and weird in any number of ways, but one thing which was good about it was my opportunity to attend and present at the annual meeting of the Alabama Philosophical Society in Orange Beach, Alabama. Thanks to the work of the people in APS – especially at Auburn and at the University of South Alabama – the APS is a strong and growing, but still very relaxing and laid-back conference. People from around the area are starting to catch on, and we’re getting submissions not just from ex-pat alumni, but also from folks down in Florida and out in Louisiana. A lot of kudos are do to folks like Kelly Jolley, Roderick Long, and Kevin Meeker who have put a lot of work into building such an enjoyable conference, and for working to create a real community of scholars for philosophers in Alabama.

For my part, I presented a paper from my fellowship work–Are There Worlds Enough and Time?–on modality and temporal logic. The central worry is this: many skeptics, and even some Christians, have accepted an argument that if there is an omniscient God who knows everything that we will do, then we do not have any option to act other than how God knows we will act, and thus, if the Christian God exists, we do not act by free will, but rather by necessity. And since free will is central to our ability to distinguish between acts we perpetrate and events that happen to us, this causes big problems for moral imputability on the Christian picture.

At first blush it seems like this is only a reason for Christians to worry, while we non-Christians either happily consign the debate to the flames, or else hang around out of metaphysical schadenfreude and urge the Christian to give up the incoherent picture of experience that Christianity gives. But arguments from the ancient debates over fatalism show that the same worry present in the foreknowledge argument actually raises its ugly head for everyone. God’s omniscience is one way of ensuring that what you do will be set in advance, but even if there is no-one who has any knowledge about what I will do today, if two people made precisely contradictory predictions about what I will do today, then one of those predictions would have to be true, and one of them would have to be false. Whichever one is true, fixes what I will do before I ever did it. No-one may know which one that is, but the concern here is metaphysics, not epistemology, and not knowing what the fact of the matter is doesn’t keep that fact of the matter from obtaining. So it looks like the Christian and the Aristotelian have found themselves to be allies in the same fight.

The general problem turns out to be a problem with the modality of temporal states of affairs, and the foreknowledge and prediction arguments are just illustrations to point the way. It seems that, if it turns out that S will be the case, then for all of history, it was true that S would be the case–for otherwise, S would not have happened. And if it was true then that S would be the case, then there is no way that S couldn’t be the case. Time itself seems to stop us from acting as we will.

As it turns out, there are two ways to get ourself out of this difficulty, each of which involves rejecting a different hidden premise of the fatalist’s argument. On one account, true predictions do not constrain choice because what they predict actually will happen–but actuality, unlike necessity, does not constrain alternative possibilities. There is only one thing that I will do when the moment of decision comes, but that does not mean that there weren’t other things that I could do instead. Alternatively, one can reject the premise that either of the predictions is true–and claim that predictions about the future simply are not truth-valuable until the event that they predict does or does not come to pass. In this case, the range of choices is not limited at the time of prediction, because there’s nothing to do the limiting in the first place.

Unfortunately, either solution raises thorny logical and metaphysical difficulties. The latter sections of the paper examine these difficulties and draw out the concerns on each side. I will leave the rest of the details in elipsis, however, because I hope to see this paper in published, so for the time being I’m not going to post it here. Not because I don’t love you, gentle reader, but because you aren’t the Harvard Review of Philosophy.

In any case, it was a very relaxing trip and I encourage anyone who has the opportunity to make it in upcoming years, to do so. You’ll get to spend some time on the beach (which is actually quite pleasant when it’s not being bombarded with heat, sun, and annoying people having fun), you’ll get to meet people doing some exciting work in philosophy, and hopefully, you’ll get to think about some new and interesting things.

I’ll be away from the ol’ weblog game for Labor Day weekend (which, for me, extends through Tuesday thanks to a very nice class schedule). In my absence, feel free to enjoy this editorial cartoon from 1925 and this somewhat more contemporary cartoon from Tom Tomorrow.

There is a gargantuan poster hanging in our local movie theatre of Reese Witherspoon looking a bit sassy in a very New York black turtleneck, with the words SWEET HOME ALABAMA stamped across it, advertising the upcoming motion picture from Touchstone Pictures. As soon as I saw it, I thought, Oh Lord, he we go again, another patronizing movie about the wild and wacky local color of the South. I decided not to make my full judgment until I saw the previews, though. Who knows, maybe they were doing something interesting. After all, all you can see on the poster is a huge image of Reese Witherspoon’s head.

Well, OK, I saw the trailer. Apparently this ill-conceived romantic comedy was the product of combining two premises:

1. Intelligence and sophistication are signs of vice.
2. Fortunately, neither of these unhappy characteristics are to be found in the South.

Reese is a stylin’ jet-set New York City fashion designer who has everything that the big city has to offer. She comes back home to her ol’ Alabammy home, surrounded by the requisite cast of crackers, rednecks, and a droopy-faced smell-hound. Along the way we have the required jokes about bugs, Civil War re-enactors, and Yankees cluelessly tramping around trying to understand the curious habits of the savage natives.

So here we go again, with a bunch of folks from New York and L.A. making yet another insulting flick in which my home state is reduced to one big expanse of cartoonish stereotypes of white country bumpkins. From what I can tell, this movie is going to have all the subtle grace and sensitivity towards its subjects as a minstrel show; Rastus and Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima have merely been replaced by Bubba and Lurlynn and Bobby Ray.

(link courtesy of Max [2002/08/15])

One of the things about this crazy postmodern age is the absolutely insufferable number of people who think that they are being clever and naughty but are actually just being stupid and hackneyed.

A case in point is the promotional materials for the upcoming film, The Rules of Attraction. It’s bad enough that it is being made by Roger Avary, and based on a novel by Bret Easton Ellis–virtually guaranteeing it will be too smarmily hip for its own good. But did they really have to make a poster and a trailer which are about nothing at all, other than how naughty they are being?

Here’s a hint boys: you’re not actually "corrupt minds;" you’re just boring little hipsters playing at epater les bourgeoisie, and there is perhaps nothing in the world that is less edgy or interesting than that.