kenodoxia
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Friday, May 10, 2013
Wednesday, May 08, 2013
Public art
After the wonders of the Snowy Farr memorial liquorice torpedoes and the Goth-rock Corpus clock (I can't say enough how very very sorry I am about that last one), here comes another bit of public art to disturb the retinas of the people of Cambridge. To celebrate the fact that Parker's Piece in 1863 saw the first playing of football according to the 'Cambridge Rules', the City Council have commissioned a thing. Here is the initial design as released today. This is not a drill, people.
It is a really big Subbuteo referee standing on a circle on which the rules will be inscribed. Oh yes it is.
Here is the press release, if you can bear it.
And I don't know about you, but when I had a Subbuteo set within days all the players (including my prized England team in their 1982 Admiral kit) looked like this:
It is a really big Subbuteo referee standing on a circle on which the rules will be inscribed. Oh yes it is.
Here is the press release, if you can bear it.
And I don't know about you, but when I had a Subbuteo set within days all the players (including my prized England team in their 1982 Admiral kit) looked like this:
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Adding up in Politics 3.11
At the B Club yesterday, we were discussing an interesting
chunk of Aristotle Politics 3.1, 11281a41–b15. There, Aristotle is offering an argument in
favour of the view that the masses might be given authority in elections and
audits of public officials even if each individual involved is not a good (spoudaios) person.
The idea seems to be that a collection of individuals, each
of whom has some evaluative ability, may, as a group, have overall a greater
evaluative competence than a single expert.
(It is important to note that Aristotle is cautious and does not think
this always happens. It just might
happen sometimes.) So there is some
notion of there being an additive quality of the relevant skill or character
trait. Provided the individuals in the
group are not entirely slavish then you can add them together and sum their
respective competences. This seems odd
just because it is not clear that virtue and wisdom (aretē and phronēsis:
1281b4–5) are the kinds of things that can be summed in this fashion according
to Aristotle. Now it is possible to
claim that what Aristotle means here is that collective decision-making by a
group of individually deficient judges can be effective because the group
itself generates a kind of helpful reflection: each learns from the others and
overall a good decision is reached. Perhaps that is a plausible idea. [1]
Unfortunately, I am not sure this fits very well with the
way the rest of the paragraph is presented and, in particular, the various
analogies that are offered. Aristotle
goes on to claim that a good person brings together in one individual the
relevant skills and competences but these might be scattered and distributed
between a number of individuals, each of whom is worse overall than the good
person, but who when combined are better.
This is not a mere additive notion since the idea here is that the group
comes together as if to form a single agent (1281b5). This also seems to make better sense of the
analogy of the feast at 1281b2–3: many people bring dishes to a meal. The feast is better than a single dish, even
if that single dish is excellent while each of the many dishes in the feast is
not as good as the single dish. This
seems plausible to me only on the assumption that the group of many dishes (deipna) contains a variety of dishes
and, what’s more, that variety is such that for example one is a starter, one a
main course, one a dessert and they combine to make a feast (dapanē 1281b3). It is not obvious (though I can see how
someone might want to argue for it) that a collection of a large number of
mediocre but pleasant chocolate mousses is better than a single really
excellent chocolate mousse. Certainly, I’m not at all convinced that the
collection is better in terms of chocolate mousse-ness. But if each dish brings something different
that contributes to the overall meal as a whole then perhaps the collection may
be better than the single very good item taken on its own.
Incidentally, this notion of adding together complementary
parts into a whole is probably present already at 1281b4–5 where the many
individuals each have a ‘part’ (morion)
of virtue. If we think of the parts not
merely as ‘a certain quantity’ but rather as parts in the sense that each jigsaw
piece is a part of the overall puzzle, then adding together all of these parts
is what is needed for a good whole.
If that is right then thinking in terms of collective
decision making that involves debate, reflection, learning from one another and
so on, might be a more plausible way to defend the idea of the competence of
crowds, but it doesn’t fit well with Aristotle’s analogies which are instead
put in terms of this ’jigsaw pieces and jigsaw-puzzle’ model.
This idea of a sum of the good parts of a collection of
different items, where each item is overall not that great, seems also to be
what Aristotle has in mind in the analogy from aesthetic judgement at
1281b8–10: if each person makes a good judgement about a separate aspect of the
performance (one is good at flute-playing evaluation, another at evaluating
some part of the dancing) then they might add up to a single all-round
excellent judge. It doesn’t matter that
the good flute judge has no idea about choreography because it’s only the
flute-judging jigsaw piece that he provides.
Similarly, at the end of the paragraph Aristotle seems to have in mind
that the collection is a collection of just those positive aspects of each of
the individuals. He compares a single
beautiful person with an combination of a set of different beautiful parts from
different individuals: Clooney’s jawline, Grant’s eyes, etc. etc. (1281b12–15).
But that raises is another worry. It’s just not true that if you bung together a
collection of the best bits of different faces the collection is going to be as
good as if not better than a single beautiful face. Here’s the proof:
[1] I think this is the sort of view favoured in R. Kraut, Aristotle: Political Philosophy (Oxford,
2002), 402–6.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Friday, April 19, 2013
Plato's Philebus, reviewed
An 'untimely (deliberately anachronistic) review' by Ronald de Sousa in Topoi 32 (2013): 125-8. (Link to the pdf here.)
A snippet:
A snippet:
The work is offered in the form of a dialogue—in that respect, at least, it is not ‘‘trendy’’—between Socrates and an interlocutor called Protarchus. The latter defends a position attributed to one Philebus, a curiously ghostly character who unaccountably ‘‘leaves the field’’ on the first page, intervening again only three or our times to reiterate a simple-minded praise of pleasure as the supreme good. That is not the only one of this work’s quirks of style. Its organization is somewhat confusing. Its central pages contain an analysis and classification of pleasures, in the course of which Socrates attempts to persuade his interlocutor that some pleasures are false, but little is done in the dialogue to relate this claim to the work’s announced topic. One is left to assume, I suppose, that falsity might detract from the claim of any conditions to be life’s chief good. In this review, I shall not attempt to deal with the somewhat messy structure of the whole; neither shall I attempt to canvas all the topics that come up only to be desultorily dropped. I shall concentrate instead on the arguments adduced for the claim that pleasures can be false.There untimely reviews are an interesting idea. You can read the editorial here.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Could be another wasted afternoon...
I've ended up this afternoon going back to and fiddling with something I wrote quite a while ago. To be honest, I was looking for another file on my computer and saw this one as I was scrolling down. I remembered spending some time on it and so I opened it up to have a look. I had more or less abandoned it because it was, I came to see, a bit flabby in places and half-baked in others. But I have now spent the afternoon thinking that maybe, just maybe, with a tweak here and a trim there, there might be something worth salvaging. Surely it can't all be hopeless?
Oh dear. I'm not very good at just writing off the work and chalking it up to experience. After all, it would be odd if a significant proportion of what I type out were not in fact pretty useless. But arrogance or sheer bloody-mindedness tells me otherwise.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Epicuro Sulla Natura II
I got to my college pigeon hole today for the first time in a while. Two nice surprises: a book from my friend in Lyon and, entirely unexpected, a copy of Giuliana Leone's new edition of Epicurus' Peri Physeōs Book II (PHerc. 1140/993 and 1783/1691/1010). Thanks! It's a hefty thing, so it will take me quite some time to digest it but it looks very interesting. And it's good to know that it is now available.
Here's a link to order it from amazon.it.
Here's a link to order it from amazon.it.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Cambridge 1944
From the UEA East Anglian Film Archive. You can watch the whole thing here.
Some stills:
Here are some bright young chaps leaving (I think) one of Corpus' staircases in the morning:
And here is a chap off for a bath:
And here is Will Spens, Master of Corpus:
There are also some interesting scenes of the undergraduate ARP services practising out in Trinity's Great Court. And of the Provost of King's, John Tressider Sheppard, lecturing on Homer, the poetry 'of friendship and freedom'.
Some stills:
Here are some bright young chaps leaving (I think) one of Corpus' staircases in the morning:
And here is a chap off for a bath:
And here is Will Spens, Master of Corpus:
There are also some interesting scenes of the undergraduate ARP services practising out in Trinity's Great Court. And of the Provost of King's, John Tressider Sheppard, lecturing on Homer, the poetry 'of friendship and freedom'.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
The pundit's 'for me': a philosophical analysis
It is not clear what the precise force and implications are
of the sports pundit’s qualifier ‘for me’ (hereafter: ‘FOR ME’). It is extremely common in most forms of
pundit-discourse but there is no agreed single account of its force. This is a brief introduction to some of the principal
philosophical options.
Consider the following examples:
1. ‘Rio,
for me, is a world class defender.’
2. ‘For me,
that’s a yellow card at worst.’
3. ‘That
was never a foul, for me.’
Note that in natural language the ‘for me’ qualifier can be
placed within, before, or after the clause it governs. We can nevertheless clarify the three
examples as follows:
4. (FOR ME)
Rio is a world class defender.
5. (FOR ME)
That’s a yellow card at worst.
6. (FOR ME)
That was never a foul.
A popular line of analysis notes that in many—perhaps the
majority of—cases FOR ME is used in evaluative claims. This analysis then offers a deflationary reading
such that FOR ME is either simply redundant or else simply marks what comes
next as being an evaluative claim. FOR
ME in that case makes no independent contribution to the meaning of the clause.
Further, some interpreters take FOR ME to be a marker of the
expressivist nature of such claims. This
is more plausible in some cases than others.
For example, it is at least prima
facie plausible that there is no fact of the matter whether Rio Ferdinand
is a world class defender. In that case
it is sensible to understand §6 above as having the force: ‘Hooray for Rio
Ferdinand’s defensive skill and ability!’
FOR ME, in this case, is an explicit marker of the fact that the clause
it governs is not truth-apt. [1]
Other interpreters find this unsatisfactory since it would
render the many hours of TV punditry in reality no more than a group of men in
bad suits shouting ‘Boo!’ and ‘Hooray!’ to one another. (This is known as the ‘TalkSPORT’ objection.) Attempts to modify the view, such that
punditry expressions may nevertheless stand to one another in familiar logical
relations, ‘Quasi-Punditry’, remain controversial. [2]
Alternatively, if FOR ME claims do have a truth value then
there are further differences of opinion over how best to account for
them. For example, one view begins with
the observation that FOR ME claims are almost always offered in contexts of
dissent. So, ‘§6 (FOR ME) That was never
a foul’ is most likely to be uttered on the occasion of an official having
decided that an offence has occurred.
Assuming something like FIFA-positivism, the official’s blowing his whistle
and indicating a foul is just what it is for a foul to have been
committed. So §6 is false. The view that all such FOR ME locutions are
in fact false is sometimes called the ‘Error Theory’ of punditry or,
alternatively, ‘Shearerism’.
A more extravagant line, associated with some rather extreme
general accounts of punditry, begins from the premise of Pundit Infallibility [3]. Given Pundit Infallibility, if the pundit
utters §1 then it must be true (despite appearances) that Rio Ferdinand is
indeed a world-class defender. But what
if another pundit, sitting at the same time on the same sofa, should then utter
§7 ‘No, for me, he has lost a yard of pace and won’t any more cut it at the
highest level’? We might initially think
that §1 and §7 cannot both be true; but this is just what Pundit Infallibility
requires. In this situation, the FOR ME
qualifier relativises the claim to the respective pundit. So FOR LINEKER Rio is a world-class defender
and FOR LAWRENSON Rio is not a world-class defender. Some critics worry about the plausibility of
this analysis since (1) it again threatens to make it impossible for there to
be genuine agreement or disagreement between pundits; (2) in cases such as §3
above it seems odd to think in any sense that, granted a foul was in fact
awarded, it can be true that there was no foul, FOR WHOMEVER. In response to (1) some critics simply accept
this consequence. In response to (2)
some less parsimonious critics posit that there is in fact some private world
for each pundit such that they can remain infallible. In this case FOR LAWRENSON… has roughly the
force of IN LAWRENSON’S WORLD…
[1] This view is most
commonly ascribed to a line of thought inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment
pundit, Alan Hansen.
[2] Quasi-punditry is
often associated with pundits connected with Blackburn Rovers, a club where, it is
sometimes said, it is possible to ‘have one’s half-time pie and eat it’.
[3] Historically, this view can probably be traced back to
the ancient pundit Jimmy Hill and his claim that ‘The pundit is the measure of
all things: of fouls that are that they are fouls, of offsides that are
not that they are not offsides’. The interpretation
of this claim is, of course, also rather controversial.
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