Arbitrary Marks

As the time for my move to Austin draws closer, I am starting to sort through all of my books. Well, at least all of the books I have in Chicago–I still have hundreds back at my parent’s place, mostly related to my undergrad degree.

I’ll be in a teeny-tiny efficiency outside of UT, where I’ll have access to the campus library. Sure, it’s great to have books at your fingertips for 3 a.m. use, but while boxing up my books, I’ve begun to wonder if I need so many.

I’ve started a system that I hope will keep the book clutter to a minimum, while not requiring me to sell all of them!

• If I haven’t read/used it in a year and it is not a reference book (dictionary, anthology), I sell it/donate it and write it up in Library Thing as one I’ve owned.
• If I’ve marked it up significantly and it is a text related to my philosophical interests, regardless of whether I’ve looked at it recently, it stays.
• Fiction books I think I would read again (i.e. Hitchhiker’s Guide, Golden Compass, anything by Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson or Umberto Eco), I keep.

Perhaps someday I’ll have a big corner office in my university where I can load as many books as I want into nooks and crannies, and they’ll stay there until my cold, dead emeritus body is taken off campus (I anticipate dying in my office, slouched over a book). Until then, moving books is not fun; feeling overwhelmed by books is not fun; and I’d like to save my book money for plane tickets back to my wife!

How about you? Do you have any rules for book purchases/maintenance?

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• Female masculinity and shame amongst lesbians, by Jessica Gird
  “There is no time like the present to engage oneself in the building of butch positive communities. Even in our present day, the adversity against diversity within the lesbian community is fierce.”
  (tags: GLBT.articles philosophy.gender)
• Neurophilosophy : MRI: What is it good for?
  Neuroimaging is only just moving toward multivariate ananlysis…so we’re still a very long way away from any real understanding of how hundreds or thousands of modules act in parallel and in concert to generate behaviours…
  (tags: philosophy.neuro)
• Politics and the Brain - NY Times Letter to the Editor
  …brain regions are typically engaged by many mental states, and thus a one-to-one mapping between a brain region and a mental state is not possible.
  (tags: philosophy.neuro)
• This Is Your Brain on Politics - NY Times (Iacoboni)
  While in the scanner, the subjects viewed political pictures through a pair of special goggles; first a series of still photos of each candidate was presented in random order, then video excerpts from speeches.
  (tags: philosophy.neuro)

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About Sally Haslinger?

Okay, so that’s not true–I’ve heard her name in various feminist blogger conversations. However, I never once read any of her papers during my master’s degree program. I’m in the middle of her article “What Good are Our Intuitions?” in the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume: Philosophical Analysis and Social Kinds pages 89-118.

Excellent, clear stuff–what I wish I had read before my series on race and emptiness. It confirms, clarifies and challenges my initial thoughts about social constructionism and concept analysis. Thing is, though her discussion is relevant to feminism, gender, etc., it’s also crucial for meta-philosophy, understanding what we’re doing when we analyze concepts! I think that someone should take aside all of the first-year master’s or PhD philosophy students that are female (though the guys should read her, too) and make them read Haslinger and Nussbuam. If nothing else, it will help your writing style and ability to do clear and subtle philosophy.

I wish someone told me years ago that feminists could write like them (and not Judith Butler).

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• Albanian Custom Fades - Woman as Family Man - NYTimes.com
  These women swore to be virgins and live as men, but say they wouldn’t do it today because gender roles are more flexible.
  (tags: glbt.articles ftm.articles)

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No time for a detailed post, but I want to draw your attention to this podcast from Buddhist Geeks. In it, the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche says, in response to questions about the need for Westerners to believe in rebirth, that the concept isn’t necessary for practice, but it doesn’t hurt to assume it’s true. It makes for good living now.

In connection, I recommend Jay Garfield, “Nagarjuna’s Theory of Causality: Implications Sacred and Profane,” Philosophy East and West, Vol 51, No 4, 507-524. The article discusses just to what extent belief in rebirth is necessary, particularly for bodhicittas. The abstract is below:

Nagarjuna, in Mulamadhyamakakarika, defends the emptiness of causation, and a regularist view of dependent arising implicating a sophisticated view about the nature of explanation not only of individual phenomena but of regularities themselves. Perhaps surprisingly, this view has implications for contemporary philosophy of science, in particular conceptions of the relations between different levels of explanation and description, between phenomena described at distinct levels of analysis and between theories developed at distinct levels of analysis. Less surprisingly, it also has implications for Buddhist soteriological theory. But perhaps most surprisingly, it suggests that the most commonly held view about the necessary conditions for the cultivation of Bodhicittathat defended by Dharmakirti and by rJe Tsong Khapa among others–is incorrect, and in fact represents a subtle form of self-grasping and of the reification of causation. I will argue that in both cases Nagarjuna’s analysis corrects prevalent errors.

I may have more to say later, but at least check out the podcast (third in a series of three).

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The year was 2000 and I was just out of college, working for a subdivision of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Scarecrow Education. Many of the other employees were librarians, with degrees in Information Technology and Library Science. The hot topic in the office? Ebooks.

Ebooks were going to change the publishing business. It would take a couple of years, but soon we could transmit our texts electronically to users as they wanted to read them. We could even mark up the books using a stylus on the LCD screen and save the notes to another file. For very little overhead, we could make lots of money–a publisher’s dream, since books have to be printed on the hope that they will sell.

Um, yeah. This revolution never happened. For one thing, the technology (dial-up modems, serial ports and black and green screens) was clunky. The ebooks were heavy and there were competing sales models. Almost ten years later, the revolutionaries are back and heavy-hitting academic publishing companies like Yale are testing the waters.

In the last eight years, we’ve improved the technology of eBook readers: no more ucky black and green screens, faster downloads, lighter and more portable units. But will it be enough to take hold? Will academics–setting aside the general reader for a moment–ever look like the picture of Jean-Luc Picard in his study? Okay, some are already balding… Read the rest of this entry »

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Attention readers viewing Arbitrary Marks through uupdates.net. I’ve asked the moderator of that site to remove me, since 1) I don’t attend a Unitarian Universalist church frequently and–since that doesn’t seem to discount one as a member*–I don’t any longer identify as such**; 2) I rarely post about related topics.

If, though, you enjoy what you read here, I suggest you subscribe to my direct feed to keep updated. And, since I don’t have animosity towards the movement, please feel welcome to contribute and comment here.

*The latest Pew Forum survey found that 22% of Unitarian Univeralists attend church a few times a yearr, 24% ”seldom” and 22% never. So I suppose I could remain a de facto participant by virtue of not participating!

**Probably, if pressed, I might identify Unitarian Universalism as the group with which I have the most in common. Still, I don’t have any particular need to “worship” weekly, to join in with the group socially, etc. And I think of myself more as an agnostic “Buddhish” person, anyway.

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• The Space of Reasons: Quine on Quine (Video Clip)
  (tags: philosophy.language)

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• The Splintered Mind: Self-Blindness?
  Introspection and the possibility of being introspectively blind.
  (tags: philosophy.mind philosophy.neuro)

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While I may not agree with the Churchlands on everything, I do appreciate their interdisciplinary approach to philosophy. I think these quotes, taken from Patricia Churchland’s book, Neurophilosophy, get at why:

“A theoretical value derived from studying neurological cases, therefore, is their potential for dislodging conventional assumptions…Such data seem to me crucially relevant in coming to understand how deficient folk psychology really is and how little we know of the deeper capacities underlying the known cognitive capacities of the brain…”

At the very least, neurological cases ought to be part and parcel of the thought experiments in philosophy of mind (and they are, much more, since the publication of her text). She talks about blindness denial and one philosopher’s argument that if one is conscious, it is impossible to fail to know you are blind. If empirical data seems to contradict this, then we should be perhaps a bit skeptical about arguments from a priori features, even while we continue to examine the data to be sure it’s represented properly.

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