Barry Smith, “the ontology king”, has made freely available his Fall 2013 Ontological Engineering class. There is no better resource than here.
A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 32
Although residing along the Mississippi River [This river is famed in atrocious song and verse; the most prevalent motif is one which attempts to make of the river an ersatz father figure. Actually, the Mississippi River is a treacherous and sinister body of water whose eddies and currents yearly claim many lives. I have never known anyone who would even venture to stick his toe in its polluted waters, which seethe with sewage, industrial waste, and deadly insecticides. Even the fish are dying. Therefore, the Mississippi as Father-God-Moses-Daddy-Phallus-Pops is an altogether false motif began, I would imagine, by that dreary fraud, Mark Twain. This failure to make contact with reality is, however, characteristic of almost all of America’s “art.” Any connection between American art and American nature is purely coincidental, but this is only because the nation as a whole has no contact with reality. That is only one of the reasons why I have always been forced to exist on the fringes of its society, consigned to the Limbo reserved for this who do know reality when they see it.] . . . The only excursion in my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge. In some future installment, a flashback, I shall perhaps recount that pilgrimage through the swamps, a journey into the desert from which I returned broken physically, mentally, and spiritually. New Orleans, is on the other hand, a comfortable metropolis which has a certain apathy and stagnation which I find inoffensive (p. 103).
So All May Eat
This article from The Philanthropic Enterprise. I have come across this idea some 25 years ago in London, a Hampstead restaurant to be precise. I have no idea if they survived. Anyway, if you are looking for intelligent discussion about the role of philanthropy in our society, TPE is the go-to forum. Food and philanthropy – both dear to my heart.
Baron Corvo Centenary
To commemorate the centenary of Corvo’s death (October 25, 1913) I’m pleased to discover that Boo-Hooray Gallery will be marking the event with some style (well at least in Venice) – Corvo might well approve. It’s nice that there are others out there who appreciate the Baron. Some vulgarian referee showed up his ignorance about Corvo’s literary ability (I suspect an English don) for a review essay of mine. Here are my previous references to Corvo that includes the bit from said review.
So if you are in NYC or Venice, have exceptional taste in literature and a taste for the subversive and the decadent, then this event is well worth attending. Not only that but Boo-Hooray are publishing Frederick Rolfe – “Alpha & Omega“. Here is the invite:
To recognize the 100th anniversary of the death of Frederick Rolfe, aka Baron Corvo, Boo-Hooray will have two one-day exhibitions of first editions, rare ephemera, and other material by and about this most remarkable of all authors.
The first will take place in Venice, October 25 at La Casa di Parfait d’Amour. The exhibition will run from 3 to 5 PM. Anyone who wishes to attend should meet at the top of the Rialto Bridge promptly at 2:45 PM where they’ll be escorted to the gallery and drinks will be served.
The New York exhibition will take place on All Saints’ Day, Friday November 1. Drinks & nibbles will be served at 5 PM. To RSVP please email boo-hooray.com/rsvp
Corvo’s grave, San Michele cemetery, Venice
Frank Plumpton Ramsey
Here is David Papineau’s review of PF Ramey’s sister’s memoir. (See also David Mellor, 1998. Ramsey, Frank Plumpton. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge.)
For some geniuses, an early death accelerates the route to canonization. But for Ramsey it had the opposite effect. Ramsey’s death coincided with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge after his reclusive years in the Austrian Alps. The cult surrounding Wittgenstein quickly caught fire, and for the next fifty years dominated philosophy throughout the English-speaking world. By the time it subsided, Ramsey had somehow been relegated to a minor role in history, a footnote to an archaic Cambridge of Russell, Keynes and the Bloomsbury set.
The opening paragraph to Facts and Propositions, Aristotelian Society Supplementary 1927, Volume 7, 153–170.
THE problem with which I propose to deal is the logical analysis of what may be called by any of the terms judgment, belief, or assertion. Suppose I am at this moment judging that Caesar was murdered; then it is natural to distinguish in this fact on the one side either my mind, or my present mental state, or words or images in my mind, which we will call the mental factor or factors, and on the other side either Caesar or Caesar’s murder, or Caesar and murder, or the proposition Caesar was murdered, or the fact that Caesar was murdered, which we will call the objective factor or factors, and to suppose that the fact that I am judging that Caesar was murdered consists in the holding of some relation or relations between these mental and objective factors. The questions that arise are in regard to the nature of the two sets of factors and of the relations between them, the fundamental distinction between these elements being hardly open to question.
Red Beans And Rice-ly Yours
Below is the recipe for Pops’ favourite dish. Here is a recent variation. Pops often signed off his letters with variations of Red Beans And Ricely Yours. No surprise then that there was even an album carrying that title. And after all that gastronomic activity . . . well, you leave it all behind ya.
Daniel Dennett: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers
Two of my pieces are appearing in this volume. I’m very pleased to be in such august company and John has done a terrific job of marshaling a veritable tsunami of Dennettalia. But speaking of exorbitant cover prices the listed price here really is steep, despite factoring in the chunky page count. And even if aimed at libraries, they too have ever shrinking budgets. The economics of publishing befuddles me.
Understanding the Tacit
My chum Steve Turner has a new book out. It has much Oakeshott interest and as many will know Steve has been a longstanding Oakeshott commentator. For me, one of his key articles is “Tradition and Cognitive Science: Oakeshott’s Undoing of the Kantian Mind”, a piece that I reference quite regularly. OK, so the book is ridiculously expensive – just put in a request to your library. Here is an excerpt: Tacitness in Practice Theory Practices Then and Now.
Ignatieff speaks with Isaiah Berlin
Listening to this interview one must surely reevaluate one’s impression of Berlin (I did view this program back in the day but it left me unmoved). Was Oakeshott being scathing (as is often assumed) in describing Berlin as “a Paganini of ideas” (though Oakeshott had a deeply acerbic and brutally cutting streak to him, I’m not sure this works as a put-down). Berlin achieved more in his short technical philosophical career more than most do these days over the course of 20 years – and he was unmistakably a genuine liberal. But he was also a man of action during the War albeit in DC while Oakeshott was in Phantom. But different horses for different courses. Both were outsiders and though Berlin was considered by some to be the ultimate establishment intellectual, this program makes it very clear that he was always the outsider.
Socially Extended Cognition
Another extended mind themed issue from Cognitive Systems Research, the anchor paper being Shaun Gallagher’s The Socially Extended Mind.
Here is an extract from the issue’s Editorial introduction: Socializing the extended mind
by Michele Merritt , Somogy Varga, and Mog Stapleton
Research at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science has been a dynamically evolving and rapidly growing field that has witnessed increased attention over the last decade. A particular debate that has contributed to this growth concerns the role of non-neural, “external” structures in cognition and the idea that the neural, or even organismic, boundary is a merely arbitrary stopping point for the systematic investigation of cognition. This debate is particularly stimulating for researchers across the traditional disciplinary boundaries as it indicates a gradual change in opinion about how the cognitive apparatus is to be studied. Supporters of this approach have, in various ways, opposed the view that cognition is constituted only by computational, representation-manipulating activity that finds place in the head and have argued instead that the study of cognition must acknowledge the non-trivial role of the body and external structures in cognitive processes.
This special issue expands upon the aforementioned discussion by addressing what the editors and contributors see as lacuna among the extended mind debates. The focus in this issue is on the extent to which “extended” frameworks are useful for understanding the role of social structures in cognition. This is an area of research that has until recently received little attention in the philosophy of cognitive science. The title of this special issue, and of the target paper, refers back to one of the most heavily discussed articles in this field, The Extended Mind (Clark & Chalmers, 1998) in which the authors introduce the ‘Hypothesis of Extended Cognition’. In this paper Clark and Chalmers argue that cognitive activity not only often involves the exploitation of the surrounding environment but that sometimes extra-cranial items actually figure as constituents of cognitive processes. That is to say, proper parts of cognition sometimes extend into the environment. Although this hypothesis has provoked a deluge of opponents and defenders, the debate has tended to focus on the two particular kinds of external items which Clark emphasizes in his works: tools in the environment, and actions of the morphological body. Where social cognition has been considered in the debate, it has typically been in terms of the possibility of using another person as some sort of external memory resource, perhaps betraying the prominent influence of the disciplines of artificial intelligence, computer science and robotics upon the philosophy of cognitive science. In the target paper of this volume Shaun Gallagher takes a quite different tack on this theme of cognitive extension and social cognition by arguing that certain social practices, which he calls “mental institutions”, are usefully understood as extending our minds. This proposal could have radical implications for the flow of research between cognitive systems research and the discipline of sociology and pave the way to firmly establishing sociology as one of the cognitive sciences.
Image: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
