The Spindel Supplement to The Southern Journal of Philosophy edited by Shaun Gallagher with top-notch lineup.
Walker Percy Wednesday 50
Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?
Model of Civility
Aron strikes me as the very model of a responsible intellectual, a social philosopher of intellectual power and prudence who served his society with great courage and considerable style.
— John A. Hall. The Importance of Being Civil: The Struggle for Political Decency, Princeton University Press, 2013, p. 105
Couldn’t put it better. Take a moment to consider the number of public intellectuals whose boldness emanates from, as Taleb might say, because they have no “skin the game“.
Stanley Hoffman gets it:
Throughout his life, Aron had shocked the French by taking unfashionable stands, by flouting the conventional distinction between left and right, not because he liked to be provocative (to be sure, he did not mind it), but because of his passion against myths and prejudices, his need for intellectual lucidity, and his attachment to liberal values.
His greatest influence was teaching them how to think about history, politics, and society—or rather, how to think if one refused all “secular religions,” all philosophies of history that pretend to know the purpose and the march of mankind, that begin by rejecting the world as it is and aim at total revolution.
Main Currents of Sociological Thought (1960–1962) and the first volume of Clausewitz (a masterpiece of close textual analysis, interpretation, and erudition, written when Aron was seventy) are the best examples of his combination of empathy and critical penetration.
Aron’s vision of mankind was tragic . . .
Eighteen with a bullet
This song must rate as one of the greatest of all doo-wop songs and what is interesting is that it’s not American and it comes along a good 25 years after doo-wop’s heyday. Some say it’s a pastiche — it’s only a reflection of the times with more “knowing” lyrics. This said, the ground had already been laid by the late 60s with Zappa and the Mothers releasing Ruben and the Jets. I first fell in love with doo-wop via the bio-pic of Alan Freed but the rather anemic Sha Na Na to their credit, gave me a taster.
Walker Percy’s “Moviegoer” and the Aesthetics of Adversity
Stuart Mitchner in Town Topics
Percy intuits the possibility of a Katrina might seem a given, but what sets his book apart is its fortuitous all but prophetic awareness of something that did not take place until 15 years after his death. It’s as if the book had been created in the shadow of imminent catastrophe by a philosopher/novelist exploring the aesthetics of adversity while posing questions such as why the same man who feels bad in a good environment is “apt to feel good in a very bad environment, say an old hotel on Key Largo during a hurricane.”
WALKER PERCY WEDNESDAY 49
Perhaps this moment more than any other, the moment of his first astonishment, marked the beginning for the engineer of what is called a normal life. From that time forward it was possible to meet him and after a few minutes form a clear notion of what sort of fellow he was and how he would spend the rest of his life.
What is this “new” New Orleans?
During a press conference at last year’s Jazz & Heritage Festival, Mayor Landrieu told me, “There is a way to organize culture without killing it.” Those words are either comforting or alarming, depending upon whom you ask. As David Freedman, the general manager of listener-supported WWOZ-FM (self-proclaimed “Guardians of the Groove”), told me, “An unintended consequence may be the death of spontaneous culture in New Orleans. Some may think this is good for tourism and development, but it is not good for the distinct musical traditions at the core of our identity.”
David Freedman is right. These words are ALARMING. The rationalist as usual thinks that one can “organize” culture. They have little or no appreciation of the power of spontaneous order, jazz being a wonderful instantiation of a spontaneous order. An organized culture is a moribund culture.
Max Beerbohm
The author of Zuleika Dobson, or, an Oxford love story born on this day. Had I a daughter, she’d have been named Zuleika.
The Case for Teaching Ignorance
This in the NYT — H/T to Troy Camplin
In a paper from a few years ago I had a section in a chapter in Hayek and Behavioral Economics that deals with this notion, a curtain-raiser to a more detailed examination.
Taking Ignorance Seriously
As already indicated the other component to thinking about complexity resides in the realm of epistemology. Epistemology in the Plato-Descartes tradition besides being highly individualistic, i.e. individualistic (or internal) in the sense that knowledge relies solely upon the operation of mental states without any appeal to external considerations – is primarily concerned with justification. It therefore has a distinctly positive concern. Ignorance, for want of a better term, by contrast does not play a leading role in epistemology.
The sort of ignorance we are concerned with here is “inevitable ignorance” (Rescher, 2009, p. 2) – the idea marking what we cannot know as opposed to “culpable ignorance” what we don’t know or what we should know but don’t, or as others term it “deliberate or inadvertent neglect, secrecy or suppression, unquestioned tradition (or avoidable) cultural political selectivity” (Proctor, 2008). But neither are we concerned with insolubilia (Rescher, 2009, p. 11). Preeminent examples of insolubilia typically come from the realm of theology, a domain that cannot be considered a proper object of epistemological study.[i]
When Hayek delivered his Nobel Prize Lecture entitled “The Pretence of Knowledge” he might well have had Socrates’ words in the deepest recesses of his mind. Plato in the Apology (29a) has Socrates say:
For this fear of death is indeed the pretence of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is there not here conceit of knowledge, which is a disgraceful sort of ignorance?
Well-known epistemologist Susan Haack opened up a recent talk with the following, now infamous words, from Donald Rumsfeld:
. . . as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
Despite Rumsfeld’s awkward phrasing, Haack saw that it brought to light a serious epistemological point – the idea of the “unknown unknowns.” Haack elucidates what she has previously termed as the “Rumsfeld Problem” (Haack, 2008) as follows.
To assess how good the evidence was that, e.g., Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, U.S. intelligence services needed to know not only where the available evidence [the “knowns”] pointed, and how secure it was, but also how comprehensive it was; and to do that, they needed to know what relevant evidence there might be that they didn’t have [the “unknowns”]. Unfortunately, though they knew what some of the relevant evidence was that they needed but didn’t have [the “known unknowns”], they didn’t realize that other evidence, evidence they also didn’t have, was also relevant [the “unknown unknowns”]. (Haack, 2011).
At first blush does it make any sense to posit the idea of “unknown unknowns”? Were they to be identified as such then surely we’d know something. The idea of “unknown unknowns” is a neglected part of epistemology and cuts across the epistemology of complexity in all its guises including the philosophy of sociality and the philosophy of mind. Hayek (1967, pp. 22-42) certainly thought that epistemological modesty was vital:
It is high time, however, that we take our ignorance more seriously. As Popper and others have pointed out, the more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance.
The perpetual limiting condition is what (to borrow a phrase from Colin McGinn, 1989) I’m terming as cognitive closure. The notion of cognitive closure, though unfashionable and controversial, is hardly an eccentric position; it has a long-standing provenance and can be found in different guises in recent philosophy of mind (McGinn, 1989 and Stoljar, 2006). Despite the aforementioned paradox, neither Hayek nor Simon are saying that scientific or social “progress” is not possible. What they are saying is that one has to be very careful about characterizing progress – progress is not a straightforward linear phenomenon – and that epistemic modesty should be an epistemic virtue.
Notes:
[i] Take the concept of God: the concept does not achieve enough clarity and distinctness to be discussable. When we cite the divine attributes — omniscience, omnipotence, and so on — we don’t have the least purchase on these ideas which generate paradoxes almost immediately.
Chocolate Tasting
Dick Taylor Bolivia — the winner by a mile. Dick Taylor is proving to the most consistently top-notch manufacturer.
Amano Chuao — disappointing given its promotion as top-of-the-line and their bar from the last taste testing was the winner, even beating Dick Taylor. Not bad, but not distinguished.
Pacari Ecuadorian — too sweet.
Ethereal Meltaway — pleasant and distinctive for flavoured chocolate.
Ritual Chocolate Anyetsu Bar — as above, not in the premier league but nicely done. Would be nice finely grated over some good vanilla ice-cream.
manwithoutqualities 