GedankenTravelExperiment

Tallit Sweater at H&M?

2011-02-16T21:23:00.004-05:00

I don't think H&M realizes what this looks like. Is it my imagination?

Snow angel

2011-01-26T12:06:00.000-05:00

My brand new snow angel on the Brooklyn Heights promenade.

Wedding on the beach?

2010-10-03T14:56:00.002-04:00

I passed by this - apparently Jewish/African American - wedding taking place between the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges in Brooklyn today during my morning run.

Montreal

2010-09-17T10:28:00.002-04:00

"D" and I just got back from a short trip to Montreal. There, we took a quick, but much needed vacation. I feel pretty relaxed and ready to get back to work.

In Montreal we saw the Museum of Science, the Contemporary Art museum, the Cenerobotheque where we saw an interesting documentary "Baghdad Twist". We also found some wonderful cafes and a good bookstore or two. Mostly we relaxed.

I'm back!

2010-09-08T13:50:00.002-04:00

After a year in Iraq I am back to Brooklyn Heights.

. . . the adventure continues.

Posting

2009-07-16T10:32:00.000-04:00

Posting will be light for the next year as I prepare for and eventually deploy. We'll resume when I am a civilian again, but I'll see if I can make some periodic updates.

Philosophy students

2009-06-23T14:33:00.002-04:00

Two philosophy students. One Jewish, one Muslim. Both gave all so that others can breathe freer. HY"D.

Intelligence Officer Training Program in Colleges

2009-06-22T11:11:00.002-04:00

Wow! Had George W. Bush proposed to institute an intelligence officer program in universities in the US we would still be hearing about it. Apparently, Obama has proposed a spy-training with with little fanfare. Not that this isn't a good idea. I have been of the view for a long time that we need a better language training infrastructure in this country and a better infrastructure to gather foreign intelligence.

This should be interesting.

The new black?

2009-06-12T14:11:00.003-04:00

Is Jewish the new black? Ask Charles Taylor, Alysa Stanton, or the Bro Mitzvah kid.

Words to the Left and Words to the Right

2009-06-03T10:07:00.009-04:00

It is claimed by the Left in s c o r e s o f a r t i c l e s that Bill O'reilly is somehow responsible for the shooting death of the abortionist George Tiller. I suppose that the left expects that the religious right now do some soul-searching, take some responsibility, and tone down the rhetoric against doctors that provide abortions.

What they are actually doing is creating a climate in which anti-abortion rhetoric is equated with the murder of people who provide them.

But would the same people who have blamed Bill O'Reilly also start to blame the media and left wing intellectuals for the 9/11 attacks or this recent bit where a man killed two soldiers outside a shopping center in Arkansas? After all, the combined anti-military, anti-America, and anti-war rhetoric equating the Army with the greatest of evils are certainly greater and more widely known than anything Bill O'Reilly said. And how much left-wing anti-Israel rhetoric is blamed for the recent plot to blow up synagogues?

To my mind, murders by individuals should generally be blamed on the individual. So whence the double standard blaming people who kill soldiers on no one and when people kill abortion doctors blame the "right-wing media". I'll also bet that the shooting doesn't make it to the Daily Show, nor will the media make a big deal of it. (Bizarrely, this report from Iran refers to the soldiers "helping to recruit armed forces draftees", as if that were either true or possible. The US has no draftees, and if they did they would not need to be recruited.)

I think that we ought to be grateful that free speech is alive and well here and people can speak out against the US, against abortions, against doctors, against the military, against anyone they want. But to suddenly start blaming the exercise of freedom of speech for murders is disingenuous unless it is done by all, and I can't imagine the Angry Left is going to start examining its own speech too carefully in the near future.

Public concert

2009-06-02T12:39:00.005-04:00

Some adorable kids held a concert in Brooklyn Heights' Boro Hall.

These kids are from PS 192.

Freedom

2009-06-01T22:08:00.003-04:00

As of now I am officially unemployed. I have no jobs, no work, nothing. . . And I can't even blame the economy.

Anthrax

2009-05-30T18:20:00.002-04:00

I just got thre first of many anthrax shots. They suck. Apparently some new law authorizes the government to do this.

Finally

2009-05-28T13:12:00.002-04:00

I am now at my PhD granting ceremony. It is now official.

Back in NY

2009-05-24T18:52:00.001-04:00

Just got back from a nice weekend in Miami. I wish grading was over though.

Car show

2009-05-11T23:47:00.002-04:00

This was somewhere in a Wallmart parking lot in North Carolinia about a week ago.

Finally . . .

2009-05-09T06:28:00.001-04:00

. . . Leaving North Carolinia.

Airlines

2009-05-02T10:25:00.001-04:00

I really hate US Airways. It seems like every time I use them (and this is like my 5th time in the past year) they manage to screw my flight up and otherwide provide consistent mediocre service and give bad information.

What is Chavez's address?

2009-04-20T05:29:00.002-04:00

At the Summit of the Americas Hugo Chavez gave Obama a copy of Galeano'a Open Veins of Latin America. Though I have not read it, the book is, by all accounts, an account of how the capitalists failed to help Latin America, and how they must therefore be the cause of all the world's ills. The book became an instant best seller on Amazon, as anything a big leftist thug endorses publicly will start to fly off the shelves. Chavez did this before with one of Chomsky's books.

Obama replied with some lame joke about thinking that Chavez wrote a book and wanted to give him one of his own books in exchange. At least I think this was a joke.

When I am in uniform I always carry a copy a copy of the US Constitution in my arm-pocket. It reminds me what I swore allegiance too, and why. One likes to believe that any American president always has some snippets of the Federalist Papers running through his head. this is a document that Chavez could learn a lot from. It tells us that there needs to be a balance of power in a state, and that there is a way to make a country work without a dictator and with political liberties.

What Obama should have done is have his people rush to the nearest Barnes and Noble to purchase a deluxe edition of the Federalist Papers to give to Chavez in exchange. As a matter of fact, if I don't hear about Obama doing that, I will.

Communist protest

2009-04-18T13:31:00.001-04:00

There is some sort of big pro-communist protest right outside our madrid hotel.

In Girona

2009-04-15T12:55:00.001-04:00

Commemorating Nachmonides in Girona; in the jewish calle.

Girona

2009-04-14T14:40:00.001-04:00

Today ¨D¨and I visited Girona. It is a beautiful city, like Barcelona. But visiting the tiny mideval section was particulary interesting. We saw some nice famous cathedral and the Jewish Museum. We explored the streets Nachmonides used to walk. We took in the sights of a Jewish community that was there from ancient times through 1492.I would recommend a visit.

Bike tour

2009-04-13T11:15:00.000-04:00

Today ¨D¨ and I took¨a nice bike tour around Barcelona. It was fun, for a bike tour. I´d reccommend it if you want to see all the main attractions without really having to look at them.

In Barcelona

2009-04-12T05:00:00.001-04:00

¨D¨and I have arrived in beautiful Barcelona where everything seems to be on hold for some local holiday. More details to follow. We are doing fine and the plane ride was not that terrible.

Birchat HaChama in Brooklyn Heights

2009-04-08T09:48:00.003-04:00

Today is a peculiar day in the Jewish calendar. It is the day that we recite Birchat Hachama. We commemorate the biblical creation of the Sun by saying some blessings, and singing and dancing in the streets. It is a rare holiday, occurring only once every 28 years on the morning before Passover.

I vividly remember doing this 28 years ago on Ocean Parkway around avenue O with the "Tenker" rebbe (the father, not the son) and his shul, the one we prayed in back then. I remember a big assembly on the roof of Torah Temimah, the Brooklyn school I attended at the time. The assembly was led by the late Rabbi Eli Teitelbaum. School was fairly anticlimactic after the singing and dancing on Ocean Parkway with the synagogue.

Brooklyn's weather was nicer last time, but this time was nice too. Our synagogue celebrated near the windy steps of Boro Hall with our esteemed Boro President Marty Markowitz making a nice short speech and reciting the blessing.

Truth be told, the whole thing does sound very much like some Pagan Sun-worshiping ritual. We do the same for the moon once a month too. But it is still nice, and the rarity of the holiday makes it all the more special. I look forward to doing it again in 2037.

Afikomen story

2009-04-06T15:12:00.002-04:00

Here is a story that is told to little Jewish children when they are in school. It is told of different people, though I remember it told of the Vilna Gaon. It goes as follows: Little Elija (or whoever) stole the afikomen from his father as per the usual custom. When the time came to eat it the father asked for the afikomen back. Little Elija demanded an unusually large ransom in exchange for the return of the afikomen. The father - almost too quickly - agreed to the demands. So the father promises a gift and Little Elija produces the Matzoh.

Everyone is feeling a bit smug when the time comes for the father to distribute the matzoh. But the father refuses to give a piece to Little Elija. The father demands that in exchange for a piece of the afikomen, he be released from his obligation to produce a present. Not one to be outdone, Little Elija then produced a small piece of the original afikomen and declared that he had anticipated this, and broke off a piece before the exchange.

That story is supposed to illustrate how clever the Vilna Gaon was as a child. But there are a number of problems with this. Foremost, Little Elija negotiated in bad faith. The father was negotiating for what he presumed to be the whole afikomen which he left for the child to "steal". But the child was only negotiating for part of the afikomen. Clearly he intended to keep part of it for himself. So he was dishonest from the beginning. Clever, yes. Dishonest, definitely! This kid also clearly grew up in a household where there was no trust between father and son, as the father was also negotiating in bad faith. The usual assumption is that the father will distribute the afikomen to the whole household. But the father demonstrated that he did not intend on doing this unless he was released from his promise.

Was this kind of negotiating normal in the household? Who taught such intense distrust for your own family? Was there some life lesson that they were supposed to be teaching each other?

So we have one of those classic stories that we tell all Jewish children that essentially describes the house that one of our sages grew up in as a den of crooks and theives. Cleverness apparently consists in figuring out how to cheat your father before he cheats you.

What kind of messages are we sending to young Jewish children?

Twin Earths?

2009-03-25T10:27:00.000-04:00

Does Putnam know?

Examined Life

2009-03-18T19:20:00.006-04:00

"D" and I saw "Examined life" the other day. It was so so.

Appiah, Nussbaum and Singer, I thought, came off rather well for philosophers. But they were the only ones. Judith Butler and Sunura Taylor were not making any points except that some people should be more entitled than others because they are worse off, Avital Ronell was fairly incomprehensible (she actually use the word "alterity" as if people were supposed to understand it). Cornell West came off as a bit manic but pointless. And Slavoj Zizek was amusing to watch, though I was unclear about what he was saying about ecology. Michael Hardt was saying something about "the revolution" as if we lived in the 60s and cared.

All this was part of a quest to get at the meaning of life or something. All we actually got was a few people, some of them quite bright, trying to express their core beliefs to a lay audience and pretty much not succeeding.

As a documentary it was pretty uninteresting. People were filmed moving around and talking.

I would generously give the film a C-. Then again, I am a philosopher and perhaps I just don't know how philosophy appears to non-philosophers on film. "D" seemed to get something out of the philosophy, though she was pretty unimpressed with the film as a documentary (and she knows about those things).

Update: Tony Alterman expressed this much better than I, and I think he is, on the whole, absolutely correct.

In training

2009-02-26T23:49:00.003-05:00

If someone were to make a film about what I am doing these few weeks it should be called: "Ahmed: the cultural learnings of Jordan for make the benefit of great friends American soldiers"

In Jordan

2009-02-24T01:43:00.001-05:00

I'm now somewhere at the edge of Jordan doing some Army training about Arabs and Iraqi culture. All in all it is not bad. While I am not discovering much I didn't know, I could see how a lot of people here are learning new things about how Arabs, Sunni Muslim Arabs in particular, think about the world. I suspect that it is a bit too late to send some people for the kind of training we are getting here and hope to change the way Americans are perceived, but it is a start.

Now I'm in . . .

2009-02-21T18:56:00.000-05:00

Bangor, Maine. Fun, fun fun.

In Fayetteville

2009-02-20T23:09:00.001-05:00

Yeah, for real. Thankfully it is just overnight.

Amazing

2009-02-18T23:15:00.001-05:00

It was amazing to be under the same roof as 40 million dollars worth of rare Jewish books. Wow.

Krembo for Voting

2009-02-10T15:04:00.002-05:00

I can't believe no one tried this here. I wish they did this where I was voting.

Happy T"U B'shevat

2009-02-09T08:59:00.001-05:00

Enjoy some fruit. . .

My Job

2009-01-08T08:51:00.002-05:00

Apparently I have the 12th best job in the country. I also seem to have two of the top five most respected jobs in the country.

I am not sure what this does for me though.

Graves in the streets of Brooklyn

2009-01-08T08:34:00.003-05:00

There are a few sites (like streetviewfun, streetviewr, and this post) dedicated to strange and weird stuff that you can find on Google Maps. Here is one that "D" found the other day.

View Larger Map

Reason # 56

2008-12-24T13:38:00.002-05:00

Apparently my contribution to the 56th reason to love New York has so far gone unnoticed.

How do you say "go-bag" in Yiddish?

2008-12-23T20:45:00.008-05:00

For those of you who think that NYC has no love for her native Yiddish speakers, the NYC Office of Emergency Management does have a copy of their emergency preparedness card in Yiddish. Since I could not find it on their site I thought I'd make it available to those of you who only speak Yiddish and are very web-savvy, and don't mind my crappy scanner. (In English Spanish French Chinese Russian.)

(If you liked that, this is going around. Funny stuff.)

Happy Chanukkah

2008-12-23T11:36:00.004-05:00

Posting has been light lately. I have been busy, as usual. For those of you who do not know, I defended my dissertation last week. I am swamped with papers that need to be graded, and I am feverishly working on some writing. So in sum, there is lots going on. I apologize if I have been slow to respond.

I hope you are all having a happy Chanukkah.

Key Food

2008-12-08T09:58:00.003-05:00

Everyone in the neighborhood knows Mamadou Doucoure, or at least they know him as Mohammed the snappy dressed manager at Key Food on Montague Street. He is the nicest and friendliest employee at the Key Food in Brooklyn Heights for at least 15 or 20 years now. In some sense he is a neighborhood institution. I have no doubt that Key Food is screwing him, and they need to get their act together. It is good to see the Times picked up on this story that has been floating around the nabe for a few weeks. Mohammed is the greatest asset Key Food has. Given their high prices, mediocre selection, and the fact that Gristedes recently reopened, they really can't afford to generate any more ill will.

Everyone likes Mohammed. No one really likes Key Food. Do the math.

Jacob and the well

2008-12-07T21:17:00.002-05:00

Thoughts on this week's Torah portion:

This week's parsha had me somewhat annoyed. I was reading something rather annoying about the patriarch Jacob. I hope the following is not reading in to the text too much, but it seems to me to be the surface meaning of the text and I assume I am not the first to notice this. (This seems like something Steven Brams might think up. I should really read his book.)

While Jacob was walking through the land of the people of the east in search of his relatives in Haran, he comes across a bunch of flocks of sheep and their owners surrounding a well. Apparently the group of people who used the well did not trust each other or anyone else very much. So the group devised a clever system for preserving access to their water such that they could all see who is taking what, and also be reasonably certain that no one was taking more than their share and that no stranger took their water.

Here is what they did: they covered the well with a boulder of some sort that was so heavy that it could only be moved by all of them together. So if a stranger came and wanted to take some water himself or water his own flock he could not as it is unlikely he could move the boulder alone. The same holds if one of the members of the group wanted to take some water without the others. The only way one of them can get water was if all the others agreed. That is, they all gathered at the well and moved the boulder together and all saw how much each other took.

It is as if the only way to access a safe that we share in common was for each one of us to have a key, and the safe could only be open when we all insert our key. This way the only way to access the safe is if we all access it together. It is a great system that eliminates the need for trust and presumably allowed some desert people who would otherwise have been fighting over water rights to the well, to share the water.

But then along comes a stranger Jacob who is somehow capable of removing the boulder himself, presumably through brute physical strength. He notices that if he did so he can earn some advantage for himself and his relative, but mostly he would impress some girl who he thought he had a shot at because she is a relative. So he removes the boulder and allows his relative to take water from the well without waiting for the rest of the owners.

If I were one of the shepherds there, I would have been both elated and scared. I get to water my flock early, but on the other hand, I now know that Rachel can water her sheep at any time without the rest of us. She now has access to the water any time, and we still need her, or at the very least, we still need most of the rest of the group. A well has a finite supply of water. If one of the members has unlimited access, and the rest have to ration themselves, the one has a definite advantage and the potential to deprive the rest of water.

Jacob single-handedly broke down the system that enabled trust between the various shepherds, and probably screwed the whole neighborhood.

Naturally Lavan wants Jacob to work for him and tend his sheep. Jacob has access to the water anytime making Lavan no longer dependent on the coalition.

Lavan then invites Jacob to stay with him, which he does for 30 days. Then seemingly out of nowhere Lavan offers to pay Jacob for his services. We were not told that Jacob had begun to work, so it seems to be Lavan's way of asking him to stop freeloading. Lavan then conspired to keep Jacob on for 14 years. This advantage was worth both of Lavan's daughters and two maids.

Jacob became Lavan's shepherd, and there is no reason to think that he did not use his strength advantage for Lavan's flocks. That is why the flock multiplied as much as it did; their flock was able to get more water than all the other flocks - Jacob was able to get as much as he wanted for his flock.

Lavan and Jacob were now conspirators. Rashi claims that when Jacob was first sent word to Lavan that he was around, he alluded to his ability to be Lavan's "brother in deception". Rashi of course meant that Jacob was warning Lavan that he could not be conned, but in reality what Rashi should have intended was that Jacob was saying "you can't con a con man".

And this is exactly what seems to happen. Jacob manages to take possession over a good chunk of Lavan's household. His wife steals stuff from her father's house. Jacob takes his father-in-law's camels and sneaks out of the town, where Lavan is now pretty powerless to do anything.Jacob wins in the end.

Jacob does not seem like the good guy here.

Song in the Key of WTF???

2008-11-19T16:12:00.007-05:00

Erran Baron Cohen (Sacha's brother) just released a bunch of Hanukkah songs and videos. I have to admit I kind of enjoy the new twist on the old tunes, but can someone please explain the following two things:

1) Why are they using an Israeli dreidel in (what I presume is) England?
2) Why are they spray-painting Yeshua (Jesus) on the wall in the background of the video? (Is there another meaning or an inside joke I don't get?)

Moore's paradox (With a(n evil) twist)

2008-11-14T15:16:00.004-05:00

I just thought about the following:

Here is an ethical version of Moore's paradox, or more precisely an ethical instance of Moore's paradox:

Consider the following:

1. P
2. I am morally barred from believing that P
3. If I am aware of P, psychologically, I must (believe P or believe not P)
4. I believe not P (from 2-3)
5. Moore's paradox(from (1) and (4))

(Moore's paradox is what results from saying "P, but I don't believe it.")

The above argument holds with the assumptions (1)-(3). I do not think that they are difficult to argue for. (1) claims that some P is true. Easy enough.

(2) is a bit trickier, and may be where the weak point here is. Are there some facts that are so immoral that one should not believe in them even with evidence?

There are some beliefs X such that if you believe them you are evil. Consider a sentence of the form:

#=Members of race x are all liars in virtue of their being members of race x.

Presumably believing # makes one a racist. Racism, let's say, is evil. So believing # makes you evil. One is morally barred from doing things that make one evil. So one is morally barred from believing #.

(3) is a Jamesian Epistemic-Moral Law of Excluded Middle (JEM-LEM). William James argues, I think convincingly, that as a matter of rational psychology it is impossible to be agnostic about certain things. I take it that there are #-like Ps that are susceptible to the JEM-LEM.

Hence the paradox. Here, we have a case of "P, but I am not allowed to believe it". Can this happen?

Note as an aside that if you deny (4) because you don't accept (2) then you may be committed to cases like the following:

There are also also arguments that I take seriously that claim that there is some knowledge that compel moral action in the same way that some knowledge will compel rational belief. Let us say that you know that your neighbor is dying and with negative effort, cost and risk, you can call an ambulance and save his life. (That is to say that you know that you will be rewarded for doing so after the fact.) It is hard to argue that you are under no moral obligation to help.

So beliefs can compel actions. And if you deny that you may have certain true beliefs P, you can get a situation where you have an action that you are obligated to do (from the fact that P is true and you believe it) but may be barred for moral reasons from doing it because it is immoral.

Yes we can

2008-11-07T12:46:00.003-05:00

I never understood the Shabbatai Zvi phenomena . . . until now.

Elections

2008-11-04T14:16:00.003-05:00

The voting place in my hood was totally run by morons. There were essentially two lines, and zero signs, except for the ones that said "vote aqi". The first line was long and only for people in election district 111. the second line was for all others who did not know which election district they were in. If you were not in 111, you went on the other one, or looked for someone to show you the secret line for people in 112, 113, and 130. There were only two people doing this and they were way overwhelmed. They spent most of their time asking people if they were in Election district 111 or "other". So most people ended up on the 111 line, only to find out that they were on the wrong line and had to talk to someone to find out which election district they were in. A little sign that said "111 - this line, don't know - that line, and all others - inside", would probably have saved the average voter in my election district about 10-15 minutes this morning.

Moreover, at least 20 percent of the people on line, and in the polling building were wearing Obama shirts or buttons. I really thought that was illegal.

Economic regulation

2008-10-30T10:12:00.004-04:00

I am loath to have an opinion about why the recent market crisis happened, as I know little about markets or crises. But it seems to me that the problem does not lie in the fact that the market was too regulated or too unregulated, but rather poorly regulated. I suspect that Richard A. Epstein seems to have gotten it right. In his defense of libertarianism, he suggests something like this (and I may be getting this very wrong): when government subsidizes some loans and guarantees others, who wouldn't want to be a lender or own such a loan? The return is almost guaranteed. And as the law of supply and demand has it, when everyone can now afford to borrow money for homes, the prices will go up. But this is not sustainable for long. How high can prices go, and how many subsidies can be issued? And how long can people live beyond their means? So too many people start defaulting on their loans, the price drops for everyone, and now homes that were bought on the assumption that there was a high demand (and so at a high price) are now worth less because there is now a lower demand. And since the people who buy and sell things like loans are able to spread this risk throughout the system in diversified portfolios, when the mortgage market went bad, lots of portfolios started faltering. When lots of portfolios dip, everyone is scared and pulls their money out of the market. The rest is familiar. Less money in the market, the less business have to work with, and thus the poorer our country and hence investors, become. (How the libertarians get blamed for a problem the government started is beyond me.)

But anyway, it seems to me that the government is not doing a bad job regulating the credit markets, but rather it was undermining the credit markets when it found a way to artificially increase the price of houses temporarily, by making the money used to buy them cheaper and easier to get. So people who could afford less were buying more, and it didn't dawn on too many people that this can only hold up so long because the government seemed to be keeping the money cheap.

Look, we have all had to make sacrifices to get what we want. Modernity generally implies finding ways to do more with fewer sacrifices. The government seemed to think it found a route to home ownership without the sacrifice. It didn't. The government's plan needs work. I hope that we learned a valuable lesson in what sorts of economic policies do not work, so maybe we can get it right next time.

The man who cheats students

2008-10-28T13:48:00.005-04:00

Nick Mamatas is the bane of my teaching existence. He calls himself a writer. I suppose he is entitled. He does write and he does make a living off it. He writes term papers for students who can't write their own. He writes mediocre papers and and sells them to college kids who are desperate enough to pay him some $500, so they can spare themselves the half-hour of reading and five pages of writing.

The first amendment allows him to write what he wants. Any wrong doing that comes from what he does come from the students who submit Mamatas' work as their own, not from Mamatas himself. It is a bit annoying that he gets the $500 for a class I am teaching, and not me, and maybe I should get in tot his business, but that is another story. But what gets me is the arrogant self-righteousness in his article.

Though Mamatas really does not need to defend what he does, he certainly manages to get very defensive. He explains that though he might have felt a bit "skeevy" doing this, the blame really lies with the universities:

The students aren't only cheating themselves. They are being cheated by the schools that take tuition and give nothing in exchange.

Clearly if he is doing their work, the students are not being evaluated and forced to learn.

It is hard to imagine where he gets off saying this. The universities accept all sorts of students. We give them instruction and then we evaluate them. If the students manage to bypass our evaluation schemes, then how is that our failure? And the man who manages to do the bypassing for the students is now blaming the university??? Clearly many students are getting nothing out of their college education - he is the reason why. The students should fail. And I have caught many papers that have been ghostwritten and failed many students. Perhaps I should spend less time teaching and more time coming up with ways to make sure that students do their own work.

Fuck him.

Now they tell me . . .

2008-09-25T14:08:00.003-04:00

Apparently there is a prayer now that gay Jews recite over anonymous one-night stands. The relevant piece of Talmud used to justify this has just been discovered (by me) and I include it here.

Ta Shma: On experiencing unexpected intimacy one makes the beracha "who created passion and wove it throughout creation" as it says [in Genesis] "In the dark, in a strange place, our father Jacob encountered a stranger with whom he grappled all night".

But is not this [verse] talking about an angel or a messenger of god - not interested in gay sex? Yes, but it was a male angel, and male angels are always interested in gay sex. Is this verse not talking about wrestling and not grappling? Yes, but grappling is the same as wrestling, and wrestling is the same as "doing it".

[The bracha] is made by everyone, according to the house of Hillel. The house of Shammai claims it is only for homosexual sex. Both agree that one makes the beracha if both people are Jewish, and Beit Shamai is more stringent claiming that one makes it if he or she is the only Jew in the hook-up. Hillel however agrees that if the sex is so anonymous that you don't know if the other person is Jewish then there is a safek and you don't make the beracha as it is a safek over a d'rabanan. However, if you picked up the other person in a synagogue, in New York, in a bank, or a bookstore, there is a chazakah that he or she is Jewish and even the house of Hillel holds that one makes the beracha. What kind of bookstore does the saying refer to? A New age-bookstore, but not in a bookstore chain.

But did we not learn that Rabbi Dorf says "A one-night stand is officially an act of prostitution in the Jewish tradition"? Yes, but there is no conflict, because in the case of prostitution, if it is good, you would pay for it again, in the case of a one-night stand with someone you met in a bar, you do not want to repeat the experience with the same person because situations like this devolve in to same-sex marriages.

A new low

2008-09-24T21:21:00.002-04:00

When someone invents a new "chumra" or stringency for Orthodox Jews it tends to spread till all Orthodox Jews have to do it and it becomes ingrained as part of the society. This is true for all sorts of bizarre practices. If this new institutionalized Orthodox racism / Ashkenazi supremacy comes to the U.S., I will have a second very good reason never to send any children I may have to a Jewish school. (Institutionalized covered-up child molestation being the first.)

Chai Elul

2008-09-22T12:35:00.002-04:00

Just to make this clear: Chai Elul is not a Jewish holiday.

Unlike Americans, or members of some other countries, who make holidays out of individuals' birthdays, Jews do not do this. We do not honor individuals in this manner. Catholics tend to honor saints like this. I wonder where Habad picked it up.

It is admirable that Hassidim want to assimilate so much that they take on such local and Pagan practices, but when traditional Jews invent holidays, it is to celebrate events, like the events surrounding the Hannukkah story, the Purim story, and perhaps the founding of the state of Israel.

Who wants Peace Now?

2008-09-20T08:46:00.003-04:00

I was reading the headline for this article: Americans for Peace Now: Engage with Iran and I thought, y'know what might work: If the group Iranians For Peace Now demanded that their government engaged in good faith talks with the US. Surely with that kind of pressure from their core constituencies neither Ahemedinejad nor Bush could resist open negotiations with the other.

Then I realized that a) no one cares what Americans for Peace Now thinks. Certainly not mainstream America. b) When the time comes that Iran tolerates an organization called Iran for Peace Now that advocates open dialogue with America, there will be no need for discussion, and as long as there is no such organization, it seems like there is not much we have to say with them.

One thing that these Peace Now-type groups will never seem to get is that when there are two sides and one advocates non-violence and the other advocates wiping the Great Satan from the face of the Earth, it makes little sense to talk. What can they offer each other? Peace on non-violent terms can only begin when both sides understand that there can be some middle ground.

In the case of Iran and the US, I don't see the US moving toward a position where it agrees to partially wipe itself or its allies off the map. So perhaps Iran has to make the first rhetorical move, and show that it has demands and interests that are more in line with what Americans can negotiate with.

Americans for Peace Now will continue to stay irrelevant until they stop smoking all that weed and realize how naive their positions really are.

In the Organic Market

2008-09-11T07:39:00.003-04:00

This was in the organic market in Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn Heights / Downtown Brooklyn last week.

Seriously?

Yeah.

ACLU fights to keep religion in public schools

2008-09-04T09:19:00.005-04:00

The ACLU has a long history of fighting to keep religion out of public schools. Of course, sometimes we should not blame them for failing to do this, they cannot fight every case. But now they are fighting to keep religion in a public school.

Sally Ferrell is an open Quaker. As such, her religion preaches pacifism. And she is taking this religion to a school in North Carolina. In a bizarre twist, the ACLU is citing her right to preach her religion in public school and claiming it as a first amendment issue!

The CNN article is pretty clear about the Quaker roots of Ms. Ferrell's pacifism:

Ferrell knew she would never let their son enlist. Growing up in a Quaker household, she remembered her mother, Anna Schuder, espousing nonviolence.

And again when she looked to a source for pacifism:

She began collecting materials from anti-war groups like the Quaker House in Fayetteville.

So the origin of her fanatical religious views are not in questions.

That is all not to say that the views are not admirable, many religious views are. Take the Jewish sabbath. Who cannot admire a day where one just has to relax and divest themselves of toil, labor, and many of the trappings of modern life. But that is still a religious view, and preaching that in school is unconstitutional and should not be defended by the ACLU. And if a man with a long beard and yarlmuka walked in to a public school and demanded that he have the first amendment right to preach taking a day to unplug from their wiis and X-boxes in a public school, we would accuse him of trying to foist his religious views on our impressionable youth; and rightfully so.

(The same is of course true for Gandhian pacifism. Though he might have had some admirable beliefs about resisting tyranny, Gandhi was a pacifist because he had some bizarre belief about the purity of the soul being diminished by the performance of violence. Clearly these views were pernicious when seen in the light of his exhortation to Jews to merely allow themselves to be killed by Nazis rather than resist.)

When creationism is taught in high school by a fanatical evangelical Christian, no one pretends that the creationism and the Christianity are independent. One can try to argue that their teaching of creationism is motivated by a yearning for finding the truth about human biology completely independent of their biblical beliefs, but no sane person would believe that.

The same is true in the pacifism case. One can try to argue that Ms. Ferrell's views are independent of her religion, but she is pretty open about the source of her Quakerian pacifism, and she should be treated as the religious fanatic that she is. Someone like that should not be allowed in to public schools to force her religion down the throats of the students - and the ACLU should not be defending them.

In Quaker schools it seems appropriate to let them preach their religions there. But in public schools, which are run by the government, perhaps only the government should be allowed to preach. And the government is not allowed to make any law favoring one religion over another. Presumably, there can be little objection to the government promoting agendas favorable to the country in government schools, providing it doesn't unfairly stigmatize a political party that it out of power, or its members.

But one can argue that by allowing the Army in they are favoring non-pacifist religions over pacifist ones like Quakers. And this would of course be true. It would be about as true as saying that since all school lunches are neither kosher nor hallal, they are promoting all other religions over Judaism and Islam. This is of course true, but beside the point. In both cases the government is simply not taking in to account any religious beliefs - not about food or war, it is merely promoting its interest in the absence of any religious input.

So the ACLU should not be defending this. And, as an aside, Ferrell seems to have many complaints about recruiter tactics. However, one should keep in mind that whatever recruiters do to get people to sign up, they are apparently not as bad as the tactics the ACLU uses to get people to donate. (You know something is wrong when even the Village voice is complaining about the ACLU!)

hapy T"U Bav

2008-08-17T12:03:00.001-04:00

I hope everyone had a happy T"U B'Av and Shabbat Nachmu.

In PA

2008-08-12T22:58:00.002-04:00

Posting has been kind of light lately. Sorry. A lot has been keeping me busy over the summer. Now I am in PA doing some useless Army stuff. Lots of reading, writing, and the usual. I feel like lately I just don't have much to say, or the inclination to say it.

Being Aish'd

2008-07-17T13:45:00.001-04:00

It is good that this was finally said out loud.

In Israel

2008-07-10T04:01:00.003-04:00

"D" and I have been getting around a bit. We spent the night with a relative in Pardes Hannah a few days ago. We went to Ein Gedi and did the mud thing, the floating on the Dead Sea thing, some nature walks, and checked out a Talmud-era synagogue. We stopped in Jerusalem on the way back and we are headed to Haifa this afternoon for dinner. So far, so good.

Neo-Naive-Baconianism?

2008-07-10T03:45:00.004-04:00

The philosophy of science has a long history. But it's modern history has it as a goal to understand the underlying logic of science, the scientific method, and scientific discovery.

The modern history of the philosophy of science starts with Francis Bacon. In what has now been dubbed "Naive Baconianism" the theory went that scientists amassed data and a theory somehow emerged about the data.

This was subsequently replaced by Popper's falsificationism where the claim is that scientists ever attempt to falsify their theories by proposing falsifying hypotheses and then testing them, ultimately either offering corroborating evidence or a falsifying instance.

Another competitor for a theory of how science works is Kuhn who said that science works in paradigm shifts. That is, there is a research program and scientists work with it until something better comes along.

Fayerabend also offered an alternative, so did Lakaos.

But what we are seeing now is the emergence of a new way of looking at the logic of science - the petabyte method. We take a massive amount of data - more than we ever could have handled previously and see what data emerges from that. The method allows for all sorts of unorthodox results, and much of it is largely independent of the paradigm that a given science works with. Of course the computer models still make assumptions about the data, but they are able to crunch the numbers in a way that is irrespective of what the numbers mean. It is very "structuralist" or "Hilbertian" in that way. I suspect that philosophers of science will have to start rethinking their views on Bacon, as scientists increasingly rely on huge data sets and computationally intense formulations of results.

More on this to come.

In Tel Aviv

2008-07-06T16:03:00.003-04:00

"D" and I are in Tel Aviv right now. We've taken in some of the beach, some sun, and other things Israeli. Tomorrow we are off to Arad, we think, and then Ein Gedi. So far so good here in Israel.

My 'hood

2008-06-27T15:10:00.006-04:00

I am back home now from a week-and-change in KY, and I took an hour to re-explore Brooklyn Heights. It is still as beautiful as ever. . . . more or less.

Almost every day since the beginning of the summer I noticed that somewhere on Montague Street there are annoying people, usually working in teams of two or more who want to stop you on the street and ask you to sign something, or more likely to contribute to some cause or other. I seem to recall last year when the Turkish restaurant had people on the street harassed people, I was very annoyed, same goes for the time the Jews for Jesus did it a year or two ago, and I think I am at that point now. It is either the Save the Children people, the ACLU, gay activists, DNC, Obamaheads, or some other do-gooder group that will not let me walk down the street unmolested. Is there some way to stop these people? Is this legal or are the police just too scared to enforce the law when it comes to the ACLU?

(Apparently this problem is at least 14 years old.)

Secondly, there are these hideous structures ruining the view from the southern part of the promenade. For months, these ugly scaffolds have been hanging around and I was wondering what they are going to be used for. Now I found out. They are used to pump water from the river in to the river.

There are four things I think worth considering here. First, the environmental impact on extracting metals from the ground, making steel, molding it to scaffolding, transporting it to Brooklyn and Govenors Island etc is non-negligible. In the grand scheme of things it isn't much, but it is something.

Secondly, It also takes electricity to run, and I don't know who is paying for that, but when office buildings are being asked to cut electrical use so that the grid doesn't go down during peak times, what can possibly justify the expenditure on this? Pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water upward takes lots of energy.

Third, the amount of tax-payer funded bureaucracy that went in to approving and planning this is also not negligible. It is not like someone filled out a form and it was approved and that was the whole government expense. I can't imagine how much this must have cost the taxpayers.

Finally, and I think most importantly, the things are useless and pointless. They are supposed to be "waterfalls" but really they look like construction sites without buildings after it rained, with torrents water falling off of them. Ugliest piece of "art" I've seen in a long time. And worse, the only way to really get a good view of them is to be standing in middle of the river. New York is not that desperate for attention or good art that we have to resort to this.

They attract people to the promenade to stare and take pictures of this crap, and that does little help but make parking that much harder around here (though I don't drive) and ups the demand (and hence price) for the restaurants and other stuff in the neighborhood (which I and most of the residents have little financial interest in). They are like tourists, but from here.

I can't wait for them to take down this junk.

KY

2008-06-26T08:23:00.003-04:00

I am now leaving Kentucky where I spent the past week and change in charge of someone else's unit. It was a pretty good experience and I had a lot of fun.

I hope I never have to come to KY again.

I am exhausted.

Wilmington

2008-06-16T22:13:00.003-04:00

Just got back from a friend's wedding in Wilmington, DE. There is nothing to do in that town. The wedding however was absolutely beautiful.

spelling issue

2008-05-27T14:31:00.002-04:00

So here is something that I have been dealing with for a while, and I have to make a decision about, but I am torn. Any thoughts on this matter are appreciated.

Because of the way Yiddish phonology works, my last name is spelled with two ayyins in it (tzadi ayyin resh mem ayyin resh). My grandfather spells his name with two ayyins, as does one of his two sons. However, my generation is somewhat split. Some of us have dropped the ayyins in order to be in line with the Hebrew spelling (tzadi resh mem resh). The name, I believe, derives from a Yiddish word, so it makes sense to keep the Yiddish spelling. Though the Yiddish origins are a bit obscure. But I am not particularly fond of the Yiddish spelling, and when pronounced with ayyins as a Hebrew word, it sounds a bit bizarre. The word in Hebrew would be meaningless.

Keeping one ayyin as a compromise strikes me as a bit dumb, as it is the worst of both worlds.

I have no interest in actually changing the name, but I am torn over keeping or dropping the ayyins. Any thoughts?

. . . speaking of suing

2008-05-21T01:26:00.002-04:00

Not sure how many of you remember the TV show "Sliders", but one scene has been coming to mind a lot lately. The crew lands in a world where some 91% of the population are lawyers and pretty much everyone sues everyone all the time. creepiness ensues.

Given our last post, we thought we had seen it all. But wait. . . middle aged Jewish guy sues thirty-something Asian girlfriend for dumping him. Given the fact that he did this, it is no wonder she left. He was nuts.

What is this world coming to? Obama, a lawyer, apparently believes that the function of the court is to make policy, and not enforce law. Maybe these people are hoping to find a left-wing recently dumped radical feminist judge who will award them money for being pathetic?

Why didn't I think of this

2008-05-15T13:55:00.003-04:00

So a science studies professor freaks out at her students and calls them names because she is unable to convince them that her crazy ideas make sense. So she threatens to sue them.

This is just funny on so many levels. Clearly she is one of those freaks who really believes what she is talking about when she claims that the function of science and technology is to oppress women. She also believes that as an instructor her job is to talk at her students and not to them. She does not seem to believe that there are any standards for making a case, and if her students don't see what she takes to be obvious then they are "fascist demagogues". Clearly she is just nuts, and how she got to teach at Dartmouth is beyond me. And while I don't know that much about teaching, I know that if there is anyone whose job it is to be an adult in the class room - it's the instructor's. Priya Venkatesan has no such belief.

This is so bizarre.

Anyone heard of this John Stuart Mill fellow?

2008-05-10T11:46:00.004-04:00

You would think if there was one publication in the world where the writers should be expected to have an inkling of what goes on in Academic life it would be in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Yet a political scientist there, a director of some center of research at Boston College displays the most complete ignorance of the point of his piece. His article laments the lack of attention that J. S. Mill gets among philosophers.

It is excusable to believe that no one reads Mill anymore. Perhaps he never took a philosophy class, or read a philosophy book. But had he done so, he would realize what a fool he is, as I would venture to say that the overwhelming number of ethics texts published struggle with Mill's ideas about utilitarianism and freedom. The overwhelming number of ethics courses and introductory philosophy courses devote some time to Mill's ideas on liberty, free speech, and utility. The majority of advanced texts and courses on Ethics devote time and space to Mill's ideas as well.

Of course the fact that ignorance is completely excusable does not justify his decision to write about it, or the Chronicle's decision to publish it. Did Alan Wolfe just not bother to ask a philosopher at Boston College if people still read Mill? There are plenty of people there who know Mill's work well.

I certainly hope that he does political science better than he does his public laments. I hear his next piece will talk about how classics don't read Homer, or perhaps how mathematicians no longer know geometry, or Protestants no longer pay attention to biblical texts. No wonder people think academics are out of touch.

In Canada

2008-05-03T01:18:00.001-04:00

I am now in London, Ontario 3/5 of the way through a five day conference. Nice place to visit.

Review of Ladyman's Understanding Philosophy of Science

2008-04-24T14:18:00.003-04:00

James Ladyman's Understanding Philosophy of Science is a pretty good beginning text in the philosophy of science. It is very well organized, and as straight forward as can be. There are two main sections. The first deals with the scientific method, the second deals with the question of realism.

The first section goes through the various stages in the philosophy, especially the question of induction, from the rather naive position of Francis Bacon through falsificationism and the theory of scientific revolutions.

The second section is about the question of realism, especially the problems created by underdetermination, explanation, and inference to the best explanation. There is a very good focus on van Fraassen and the nature of constructive empiricism.

This book is an excellent choice for a first introduction to the main questions in contemporary philosophy of science.

Review of Wesley Salmon's Four Decades of Scientific Explanation

2008-04-09T07:32:00.003-04:00

Four Decades of Scientific Explanation Is an excellent overview of the history of scientific explanation as seen from the standpoint of one of its most significant contributors.

Since the late nineteenth century is is generally agreed that science provides explanations of the phenomena in the natural world. But exactly what does an explanation look like? What form does an explanation take? How do we recognize an explanation and distinguish it from pseudo-explanations and the like?

Salmon's history covers the discussion from Hempel to the state of the art in 1989 when the book was written. He covers all the major theories and all the major questions. The book is highly readable, and definitely a worthwhile investment for those who want to understand this corner of the philosophy of science.

Miami

2008-04-04T11:14:00.002-04:00

Last weekend "D", "L", and "S" and I spent a few days in Miami. It was quite relaxing. I spent most of my time near the pool working. I think now I am suffering from nice weather withdrawal.

I am off playing soldier this weekend, and hopefully I will be able to get back to doing some serious work after that.

Purim

2008-03-21T17:16:00.001-04:00

Wishing the world a happy Purim.

Thinkin 'bout prostitution

2008-03-14T18:23:00.003-04:00

Today I play devil's advocate.

Elliot Spitzer has caused everyone on the planet to start thinking about prostitution. It seems too obvious that it is a victimless crime, and it boggles my mind why it is illegal at all. Clearly it is illegal because there is some taboo against it, and as enlightened as we are as a society, we have not overcome that.

One reason we consider it such a taboo is that prostitutes do something that no one likes, they show us the truth. We always punish those who show us the truth, because the truth is usually unpleasant. We like our illusions. We like believing that sex is romantic. It is something done by two people who are in love and want to give each other pleasure, and procreate and that sort of stuff.

But as anyone who has any familiarity with what we might call more "primitive" cultures knows, or as anyone who has ever paid for an engagement ring knows, or as any Marxist will insist: sex and marriage can usually be understood in much less romantic terms. Sex and marriage can be quite plausibly construed in financial terms.

Prostitution is in the unfortunate position of making it painfully obvious that sex is merely financial, or at least that sex can sometimes be construed as purely a financial matter, where sex is a service which is paid for as any other service would be. Keeping up the illusions of the romance of sex might be worth enforcing a ban on prostitution all by itself.

But although prostitution does not seem to harm or offend anyone, nor does it seem inherently immoral, there are still a few arguments that can be made for its banning.

Keep in mind that I do believe that it should be legalized. But for the sake of the argument I will put forth a few things to mull over. Consider the claim that prostitution, by being kept illegal, provides a benefit to third parties that outweigh the restriction to your rights to private sexual dealings between consenting adults.

I suppose that old-time conservatives might use this argument to argue that all sorts of deviant sex corrupt public morality, and as such provide a harm to third parties, but they are old-fashioned, and the burden rests on them to define public-morality in a non-question-begging way.

But here are the arguments:
First, because of the de facto nature of who and when we prosecute prostitution, society tends to prosecute (or in any case make a big deal out of prosecuting) only those people who would be seriously publicly embarrassed by such prosecution. That is a good thing, as it discourages people from becoming the kind of person who would seriously be embarrassed by such prosecution. For example, people who make themselves the targets or revenge by publicly embarrassing others with frivolous prosecutions. (i.e., if your hands are so dirty that you've screwed so many people, over little things, that they or their friends in turn are willing to prosecute you for sex, you really might deserve it.)

Second, it provides an enforcement mechanism for people who should not be frequenting prostitutes, not to frequent prostitutes. Married men, for example, are presumably contractually obligated (via their marriage contract) not to have sex with prostitutes. So the public prosecution of prostitution provides an enforcement mechanism for an otherwise unenforceable/unenforced breach of contract. That is, at least one type of infidelity becomes known to your spouse. A conviction of solicitation is not nearly as embarrassing if you are not married, and so the argument that it disproportionately punishes married people is quite the point. (Perhaps there is an argument that it should only be a crime for married people. Of course there is also an argument that married men need prostitutes the most, and there is thus a utilitarian argument for allowing them to violate their marriage contracts without repercussions.)

Thirdly, the ability to purchase sex cheaply (or for market value, anyway) makes it difficult for non-prostitute women who generally want to retain a monopoly on sex. That is, during a marriage, women can use the provision of sex, or more or less interesting sex as bargaining leverage in marital negotiations. Unmarried women want to reserve sex as an incentive for men to be in relationships with them.

The ability of non-prostitute majority to retain sex as leverage should outweigh the benefit to the few women who are attempting to put sex on the free-market. So the argument claims that it harms the set of female non-prostitutes.

Then again, one could argue that restaurants do the same thing, by making good food something that is commodified, and mothers and wives and girlfriends no longer have a monopoly. But there are too many disanalogies for this to be worth pursuing.

Again, I think that all the above arguments are not quite good, but I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find the problems.

Review of David Corfield's Toward a Philosophy of Real Mathematics

2008-03-04T11:11:00.005-05:00

(Apology in advance. This may just be a hasty emotional outburst. I think I had a stronger negative reaction to the book then I should have. The author is clearly a very bright guy, and the book is better than I portray it. If you are interested in the philosophy of mathematics, read it.)

Imagine that you were Catholic, or at any rate well versed in Catholicism and Catholic teaching and practice. Now imagine you encountered a philosopher of religion. Would you have the following gripe?: Philosophers of religion don't seem to deal with what is really important to religious people. Philosophers deal with the existence of God, almost to the exclusion of lots of important philosophical problems.

So, because you don't get why the standard problems are oh-so-important you write a book. In it, you spend a chapter insisting that philosophers must look to the history of religion to understand the real problems of religion that bother its real practitioners. What problem faces practitioners? For example, you might say that looking at history, the Catholic mass started out in some language, I assume Greek (or not), and then turned to Latin, then to the vernacular, and now there is a proposal being floated to return to Latin. The history of why and how is long and complicated, and you bog chapter two down with scholarly minutiae of this history. This is a difficult and controversial question with many serious repercussions. Other religions had the same issues. Reform Judaism's split from orthodox Judaism involved the language of prayer, and Islam still is exclusively Arabic. So whatever western religion you are, chances are that the language issue is important. So why the heck do philosophers of religion act as if the only important questions are those about the nature of God, you ask repeatedly. There are serious arguments in favor of a Latin mass, you say. It is traditional, if was more fruitful in producing scholars, it forced congregants to focus on other parts of the religion, it retained an aura of mystery in the religion. . . Your book then picks on other problems that bother religious people, like food habits, concepts of purity, and the nature of fundamentalism. Each issue does contain some specks of philosophy, though few that would seriously interest most philosophers of religion. Naturally religious people like this approach, because sorting through the Ontological Argument is pretty foreign to their religion, but arguing over what language mass out to be said in is quite familiar to them. So you are hailed as a serious philosopher of religion who takes note of Real Religion, not the fake stuff studied by philosophers.

David Corfield performs a similar service for the philosophy of mathematics. He takes questions that are traditionally off the radar of philosophers of mathematics, and faults them for ignoring them. Then he elaborates on the history and nature of mathematics at great length and with serious depth, and attempts to show that there are real philosophical questions there. Are there? Yes. Am I just being conservative and scared of mathematics by thinking that those are not the important questions? I think not.

Corfield's book could be uncharitably described as warmed-over Lakatos. (I wouln't describe it as such, but I can see it.) I presume that Lakatos and his famous book Proofs and Refutations has more fans in mathematicians than in philosophers of mathematics, likely because the book is just one long mathematical problem, discussed from the perspective of the problem's history, and the history of the concepts contained in the objects of the problem. Lakatos makes some interesting philosophical points along the way: namely he tells us that our mathematical concepts change over time. But more on this in a moment.

But philosophers wonder where the important and interesting philosophy is. And that is the difference between him and traditional accounts of the philosophy of mathematics. His recent blog post about two cultures is thus odd. Besides for the fact that I do not know what philosophical problem is meant when he claims that his goal is to understand the rationality of mathematics through the history of its practice, and the fact that he caricatures traditional philosophy of mathematics by claiming that it is reducible to logicism, it misses the point. In reality it is just that there are different sets of questions that can be deemed philosophical. The ones that traditional philosophers think about are different from his, because they are not easily articulated as interesting philosophical problems, answering the traditional questions about epistemology, metaphysics, and methodology. Perhaps if they were articulated as such, they would appeal to more philosophers. As they are, they are phrased as long mathematics discussions, with some nod towards an ill defined philosophical problem.

Chapter one sets up the book and makes a case for looking at the history of mathematics as it has been practiced by real human mathematicians - with all the baggage that comes with it.

Chapter two gives us a lesson on automated theorem proves and suggests that they are so far only as good as the mathematicians that guide them, and that the real philosophical problems in mathematics ought to be what notation mathematicians need to use. You see, some notations are harder to work with and some are easier - hence the philosophical problem. Get it? Right.

Chapter three makes a philosophical problem out of thinking up conjectures. Can computers do it? Probably not so well.

Chapter four discusses the interesting problem of analogy in mathematics. Many branches in mathematics and many problems in mathematics display interesting analogies with other branches and parts of branches of mathematics. Sometimes it only gets interesting when the analogies fail to hold, sometimes a good analogy can make a whole branch of mathematics obsolete, as all of its questions get reduced to other questions.

Chapter five has an account of Bayesianism in mathematics. A Bayeseian approach as it is traditionally understood in the philosophy of science is there to try to solve the problem of induction. It does so by saying that the logic of science is not inductive in any straight forward way, but rather it is probabilistic. (This is a gross oversimplification.) This is clearly not a problem you will have in mathematics. So Corfield's Bayesianism is restricted to the nature of Bayesianism in mathematics given a subjectivist approach, that is measuring mathematicians' subjective assessments of the probabilities that a given theorem is true.

Chapter six gives a few case studies showing that theories of science often rely on their underlying theories of mathematics, or the outstanding mathematical problems, for their solutions. This is not overly newsworthy, though it is good to have a list of case studies and a nice analysis.

Chapter seven begins Corfield's discussion of Lakatos. He is generally critical, and addresses Fefferman's criticism, and also mentions Steiner's. In some sense he really does nitpick Lakatos to death. I say this as a compliment. Lakatos does make some real mistakes, and does not adequately or fairly represent the history of mathematics, even in the very restricted case he gives.

Chapter eight continues the critique of Lakatos, and this time focuses on the question of what the mathematical research program is. This looks a bit more familiar to philosophers of science. This follows the traditions of Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, and Fayerabend in looking for the methodology behind scientific, and in this case mathematical research. Corfield claims, correctly, I think that Lakatos' view of the history of science cannot be simply carried over to the history of mathematics. The study of the methodology of mathematical research programs needs 1) some refinements, and 2) more nuance than has been given so far. This program is probably of some interest to philosophers of science and mathematics. The study started by Kuhn was very much in vogue for a bit, though philosophers of science have tended to loose interest in this in favor of the traditional problems in the philosophy of science. Kuhn and co were certainly more influential in the long run outside philosophy than they were in it.

Chapter nine is about the question of what lead to the acceptance of groupoids as an important field of study.

Chapter ten is perhaps the most disappointing. I say that because it shows the most promise and delivers the least. We are offered that tantalizing suggestion that higher-order algebra has something interesting to offer philosophers. What we are actually given is a description of roughly what higher-order algebra is, and thus suggestion that it is of a higher level of abstraction, and that some of the notation can be done in pictures. (Repeating some other philosophers who unconvincingly tried to show that pictures are philosophically interesting.) The idea of infinitesimals, sets, and modals held real promise as a field of philosophical research, and they panned out because people were able to show that there were questions that philosophers could ask and try to settle about them. I had hoped that we would at least see some real questions or suggestions about higher order category theory or algebra, but we did not. What is it about them that a philosopher might want to know about that is not there with all other branches of mathematics? That is the only thing I want to know. There is no satisfying answer given.

(As a criticism of the book, it is annoying that despite the existence of real criticism of some key ideas that he deals with, they do not appear in the book. For example, the notion of revolutions in mathematics is taken for granted, as is the legitimacy of Lakatos' idea in general. Joseph Dauben, a giant in the history of mathematics, whose essay must be well known to Corfield, famously disagreed with Crowe about the existence of revolutions in mathematics. There are also some very critical reviews of Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations in the literature that are well worth reading that Corfield ignores.)

To be honest, I do find many of the problems discussed in the book interesting, but I fail to see how many of them are philosophical. (I hope the author was not pulling one of those "let me show you a lot of math, therefore I must be right.) Many are really psychological or sociological. The problem with this is that there is a good reason why we do not see mathematics and science papers starting out "Well, first I thought X, then I realized that X was wrong, so I changed Y, and got a proof for Z. Then I had lunch and realized that I can get a proof for W if I only . . ." No one cares what got you to the theorem or the proof. Your personal history of conjectures, subjective probabilities, luncheons, conferences, and the clever insights you used to get you to the proof are not what makes up a philosophy of real mathematics. Real mathematics is what appears in mathematics journals. Everything else is part of a philosophy of real mathematicians. They are a fascinating bunch, but not necessarily a subject of philosophical reflection.

That being said, the structure of mathematical knowledge and discovery probably ought to be a part of the philosophy of mathematics. One wonders however how that could be done. Is there a logic that really describes the whole process for each case? I would doubt it, and perhaps that is what makes the problem so uninteresting - the fact that it is truly intractable.

Corfield may be doing mathematics from the inside, but he is doing philosophy from the outside. He misses the questions that are important to real philosophers. Chapter one approvingly quotes Diderot in an epigraph saying "To speak informatively about bakery you have got to have put your hands in the dough." By this token, Corfield hasn't said much about bakery, but rather he has given us a cookbook of recipes that people rarely use. Let me end with the following challenge to Corfield: Stephen Stich and Adam Morton write

Why is there so little philosophy of mathematics? . . .One explanation might be that mathematics is hard , and philosophy is hard, so the philosophy of mathematics might be doubly hard. . . . But it cannot be the whole story since very sharp and troubling points in the philosophy of mathematics can be made with elementary mathematical examples. One reason why a philosopher of mathematics needs to know some advanced mathematics is to call the bluff of others. Irrelevant by terrifyingly technical exposition is common in second rate work. . .

Corfield writes that

the prospective philosopher of mathematics quickly gathers that some arithmetic, logic, and a smattering of set theory is enough to allow her to ply her trade, and will take some convincing that investing the time in non-commutative geometry or higher-dimensional algebra is worthwhile. One of the main purposes of the book has been to argue against this.

I do not know who is right on this one. But if Corfield is, the burden of proof is still on him (or perhaps he would be magnanimous enough to show us even if it wasn't) to show that there are interesting enough philosophical problems that can only be solved if we are aware of the higher mathematics being done by groupoid theorists, and mathematicians who study higher-order algebras.
We see a few not-so-very-interesting problems, and a lot of fancy modern mathematics, but few clear convincing arguments that the two have met.

On proportionality, again

2008-02-26T08:35:00.002-05:00

As more and more rockets come down on the Israeli town of Sderot, I was thinking about Israel’s response to the rockets a year and a half ago. I remember Israel being charged with having a disproportionate response to the shelling by Israel’s bombing in south Lebanon. I thought at the time that this was an absurd claim, and I still do. Today, Bret Stephens has a column on the proportionality calculus which essentially says that there is no proportional way for Israel to reasonably respond to the rocket attacks.

I agree. I think that there are two connected reasons why the demand for Israel's response to be "proportional" is absurd.

First, it took me about a year to realize the following irony about proportionality. Proportionality is not a value in either Jewish or Islamic notions of just war. So there is an attack by an Islamic group, a response by a Jewish group and these Christian “moral thinkers” telling the Jews that they are not adhering to Christian principles of just war in the engagement.

Does anyone else hear “cultural imperialism”?

Did I miss Augusine’s authorial hand in the Geneva Conventions?

Again, while the light of intuition might claim that some kind of proportionality ought to be a part of any theory of just war, there are more and less reasonable versions of what it can be. The ones claimed last summer were the ridiculous ones. But even so, there is no a priori version of what is to count as proportional and what is not.

Like I mentioned last summer, it is clear that sending a nuclear weapon to solve a minor trade dispute is disproportional. But on the other hand, Israel, for all its shelling, did not achieve the status quo ante, which is the goal of proportionality, to do just enough to rectify the situation. Israel did not get its soldiers back. Assuming that there is a chance that they can somehow accomplish this with enough military action, they have not yet even put up a “proportional” fight. Israel still has way more fighting to go till they hit “proportional”. So there is no clear line that makes it easy to understand what it would be to be proportional.

It seems like legalistic religions like Judaism and Islam don’t have to deal with these line-drawing problems. They have rules telling them how and when they fight. Christianity, which is more (for the lack of a better word) theologico-philosophical, and less legal, has to first answer these questions about what proportionality is before it can come to an understanding of who is in the right on the in bello issues. (And anyone who knows what the phrase “conceptual analysis” means knows that there is no way to figure out what “proportional” is.)

This kind of thinking then just encourages Christian thinkers to work their way backward - first decide who you don’t like. Then draw your line so that the side you are initially prejudiced against looses.

Which takes me to the second reason. What we really see from this is that despite the intuition that we need some sort of proportional response, proportionality is most likely incoherent. There are just too many real cases where a country has no feasible response if it is to act proportionally. Obviously you can't tell a country that it just has to let its citizens get shelled and killed because the country has no options that meet your moral standards.

It also seems obvious that asking some "Christian" European country (or collection thereof) to go in and solve this problem in some way that they deem proportional will not work. After all, it was their colonialist meddling incursions in the Middle East that started these problems in the first place.

So I take it that from a moral perspective, the problem is unsolvable given the Just War paradigm that thinkers who operate in a Christian tradition use. That means that their condemnatory rhetoric is merely that - rhetoric. Rhetoric that agitates against one side for not solving an intractable problem merely reflects a prejudice against that side. Moreover, I see this as an argument for political realism in this case.

Eclipse

2008-02-21T21:46:00.001-05:00

I hope you all caught the lunar eclipse last night. It was awesome!

Review of Moshe Koppel's Meta-Halakhah

2008-02-12T13:17:00.004-05:00

(Note: Normally after reading a book, I would just type out something as an afterthought and post it here. This time is no different, but this time it comes with an apology to the author. This book deserves more than some afterthoughts, I am just not in a position now to write any up right now.)

I think Jewish philosophy took some wrong turns over the years. Let me explain. A significant portion of Jewish philosophy has always been, parasitic, if you will, off all other philosophy. This is not a bad thing. To the contrary. Jewish philosophy, in its good days, took the latest tools from the mainstream philosophers, and applied them to problems of Jewish concern - sometimes integrating them with Jewish thought, or criticizing them from the perspective of Jewish thought, or criticizing Jewish thought thought from the perspective of the most modern pieces of secular philosophy. Some of the most prominent Jewish philosophers did that, and it is mainly because of their ability to do that so well, that we now see them as part of mainstream thinking. When we think of Philo, Maimonides, Gersonides, Mendelssohn, Albo, Krochmal, and many others, this should be readily apparent.

Modern Anglo philosophy broke with European philosophy with the works of Frege and Russell. As the story goes, Russell broke off with Hegelian idealism, and two streams of thought started - one caught on in English-speaking countries, and the other on the
continent. That is not to say that there is not a lot of overlap in the questions they ask, the methodology they employ, or the answers they give. But there are considerable differences between them, and for better or worse, philosophers in the "continental tradition" and philosophers in the Anglo "analytic tradition" do not read each other's works much. The Anglo philosophers tend to see their philosophy through the light of formal logic, whereas the philosophers on the continent tend to see their philosophy through the light of sociology. These are different takes on philosophy.

More modern European Jewish philosophers like Franz Rosenzweig wrote within the tradition of Hegel and the Europeans. The tradition continues with Levinas doing Jewish-like philosophy within a very Franco-European tradition. (Sometimes manifested in works of people like Marc-Alain Ouaknin.)

All of this is not about being territorial. Rather it still about the "wrong turns" I mentioned. J. B. Soloveitchik, perhaps the most important Jewish philosopher in the English-speaking world alive in my lifetime, also took inspiration from much of the
European existentialism in which he was educated. Naturally, an industry grew up studying Soloveitchik. What has failed to happen in Jewish thought was any attempt at analytic Jewish philosophy - that is Jewish philosophy that has emerged using the tools of modern 20th and 21st century Anglo thought. (There are some works that might be classified as exceptions.)

I think that for all I don't like about it, Moshe Koppel's Meta-halakhah might have been the first book that competently employs the tools of modern logic and analysis to Jewish thought. Koppel tackles some of the hardest and trickiest problems that Halakhah (Jewish Law) faces. These are not questions about any particular law, or legal problem, but rather he asks the questions about the foundational issues about the law. Jewish law is notoriously complicated. There are disputes, reconciliations, open questions, and principles of derivation. Some of the toughest moments come when we ask questions like: can all of Jewish Law be derived mechanically from the original Law (at Sinai)? What is the nature of an "interpretation" of Jewish law? How could Moses not have understood the laws being taught in his name by Rabbi Akiba? What does it mean for the Torah to be a "living" document and also be divine? If God has the law up in Heaven that is perfect, why do we consider it a foundations of Jewish Law that the Torah is "not in Heaven"? Why was it so bad to write down the law? Isn't it better, if the law is perfect, to have it down so it does not get changed?

Koppel deals with all these questions, and more using the notions of computability, model, derivability, verifyability, provability, etc. He gives a spirited defense of an understanding of Jewish law that has a two-fold nature. That is there is a level of Jewish law that is intuitive, and a level on which it is logical. He claims that prophets only have intuitions about what the law is, and interpreters of the law are only able to put them in to formal models. Each has its advantages, but both are necessary for the complete functioning and understanding of Jewish Law.

Like I said, because of this book's uniqueness in treating issues of Jewish Law in a sophisticated way it deserves more careful consideration than I am giving it here. I will just say that while I think Koppel's treatment must be on the right track, I am not convinced that it is right. He claims outright that he did not write a scholarly book, and that is correct. He should have. There is some literature that would be useful, and the topic deserves a more extensive treatment. Nonetheless this is a valuable contribution, and the lack of critical reception over the past 10 years since the book came out speaks more of the sorry state of contemporary Orthodox Jewish thought than it does of the book itself.

It should be read by all who want to start understanding the hard questions about Jewish Law.

(PS I'm not sure what the deal with the approbation is. I didn't really understand it. It looked weird.)

Review of A Debate on Jewish Emancipation and Christian Theology in Old Berlin

2008-01-28T09:24:00.000-05:00

I have been reading a lot more lately than I have been writing about, but I wanted to throw in a note about the collection By Richard Crouter and Julie Klassen that I just read.

As soon as Jews had some freedom in Germany during the Enlightenment, they started producing an abundance of scholars and men of letters. Each one staked out his own position on Jews and their relationship to the state. From Mendelssohn and on, they advocated for Jewish emancipation from the prejudicial and anti-Semitic laws of the German state. Mendelssohn argued (on philosophical grounds) for simple equality, and a sort of separation of Church and state. David Friedlander, after a long and what must have seemed like fruitless quest to try to improve the Jews and their situation in Germany, argued for mass fake conversion to Christianity.

What do I mean by "fake"? Well, he thought that Jews really didn't need the ceremonial laws, and he thought that no one would know if Jews didn't believe in Jesus when they converted to Christianity, so he asked the State, in an Open Letter, to accept the mass conversion of Jews who agree to stop outwardly practicing Judaism, and get baptized Protestant without actually believing in Jesus.

If you ask me, that misses the point from the perspective of both religions. And the important protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Abraham Teller both agreed. Both wrote responses to Friedlander's letter. Naturally they agreed that keeping the Jewish rituals was unnecessary, but they thought that a fake conversion was no conversion at all, and moreover has the potential to harm Christianity. Of course, in accordance with Enlightenment values, neither thought that being Jewish should be a bar to getting rights though.

For Jews, especially those of Mendelssohn's ilk, keeping the mitzvot is Judaism (though they definitely argued in favor of the existence of God). For Christians Belief in the divinity of Christ is Christianity.

Crouter and Klassen collect their three documents as well as anonymous satirical polemic asking for rights for Jews. The translation reads well, and it is a valuable set of documents for those interested in this period.

I wish they would have included more of the responses to Friedlander. There were many written in pamphlets and in the popular press. I would love to have seen some of them. Also, I should mention that there is an essay at the end that feels totally out of place. It is mostly a discussion about the situation of the Turks and their problems with emancipation in contemporary Germany. While it is interesting, it just really doesn't belong here. I am not sure who at Hackett publishers agreed to it. It's point is unclear and except in the sense that Turks and Jews are both not considered German and they both have had problems there, I am pretty sure the essay is unrelated to the others.

(Also, there is one minor error, which I am not sure whether I ought to attribute to Teller or to the translators, but on p 135 they use the term "yom Ha'aretz", which literally means "earth day". The word they meant to use was "am ha'aretz" - literally: people of the earth.)

It is about time

2008-01-23T11:21:00.000-05:00

It is good to hear that New York is finally evaluating teachers on their performance. The unions were and still are afraid of any standard that might show how incompetent NYC public school teachers could be. There are some great ones (whom I know personally), but judging from my college students who are graduates of the NYC public school system, most of them must be pretty crappy. Many of my NY students graduate borderline literate. Seriously.

No wonder

Randi Weingarten the union president, said she had grave reservations about the project, and would fight if the city tried to use the information for tenure or formal evaluations or even publicized it.

The union's job is to protect the teachers, not the children from the teachers' incompetence. So who protects the children? I bet Randi Weingarten doesn't care.

Happy T"U B'Shevat

2008-01-22T11:32:00.000-05:00

Remember to eat your new fruits and stuff. Enjoy.

The Ghandis

2008-01-21T17:06:00.000-05:00

Mahatma Gandhi once famously wrote of the Jews:

The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the god fearing, death has no terror.

In other words, if Hitler is killing you, you are better off sitting there and letting yourself be killed rather than fighting because his retarded god would love that more.

His more enlightened grandson Arun Gandhi offers no such advice today to those who are in the position to be harmed by Jews. Rather, the scorn, which the Gandhi family once reserved for Jews who had the audacity to attempt to resist Hitler, is now given to . . . Jews who think that their state's "survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs".

So a few members of the Gandhi family seem to have it in for the Jews.

Despite the fact that he has offered some sort of apology for what he said, he curiously failed to apologize for the thing that actually offended people. He originally said that Jews were following in the footsteps of the Nazis. Clearly one can see how this might offend Jews. He apologized for saying that all Jews were following in the footsteps of the Nazis, when what he meant was that it was only Israel who was following in the footsteps of the Nazis.

If I may return the insult, Arun Gandhi is following in the footsteps of his grandfather, and I assure the Indian people (who now posses a nuclear arsenal) that I would never accuse them of such a miserable thing.

Update: I just discovered that this article says pretty much the same thing.

Another argument against gun control

2008-01-21T16:09:00.000-05:00

So this guy Ivaylo Ivanov, who lives right across the street from me, stockpiled six or seven pipe bombs, a pistol, a rifle, a shotgun, two pellet rifles, a crossbow with arrows, silencers, ammunition, a bulletproof vest and a machete. We then find out that he confessed to the anti-Semitic graffiting of the synagogues in Brooklyn Heights in September. I wonder what he was plotting.

Also, call me cynical, and maybe I'm looking too deeply in to this, but while I can understand someone not being aware that their roommate is amassing a small arsenal, you cannot hide your really strong attitudes for too long no matter how infrequently you interact over a period of six years. That being said, it is no surprise that the roommate is a researcher affiliated with . . . Columbia University.

Update (/22): This just keeps getting stranger. Apparently this guy is Jewish and out on bail.

Update (1/23): Even more weirdness. First, while I might ignore the Rabbi's overemphasis on matrilineal descent (or the rather Christian concept of having a congregation pray for the spiritual wellbeing of someone?), I too am skeptical about this man's Jewishness. Second, who would believe that someone trained by the Mossad would clean their weapon with a round in the chamber, or be that mentally unstable in general. And finally, Ivanov seems to have taken a page right out of the Three Kings playbook. Seriously, explosive footballs? How unoriginal.

An amateurish attempt at Hume scholarship

2008-01-06T20:18:00.001-05:00

I'd like to say at the outset that I have not done much research or thinking about the following and it is based mostly on my own common-sense view of what the answer to this problem is. Perhaps more real scholarship should be done on this, but the question really does seem too trivial for anything more than a blog post.

In part 14 of David Hume's Natural History of Religion we find the following sentence

The least part of the Sadder, as well as of the Pentateuch, consists in precepts of morality; and we may also be assured, that that part was always the least observed and regarded.

The context is unimportant to us for the moment. The question I want to ask is what is this Sadder that Hume refers to?

Beyond the fact that it is likely a book, Hume himself gives us no clues. But the two editions of the text I have each have footnotes to this word. They both assume that it refers to a Jewish book. It is clear that it refers to a religious book of some sort, and we have no reason other than the two editors I cite below that it is a Jewish one.

But let us assume that it is a Jewish book. Which Jewish book is it?

One footnote (I am not sure which editor inserted this, it is a footnote in an anthology by Christopher Hitchens, who is a bit careless with sources. Could it be C.H. himself?) says the following:

Sadder refers to the Seder Eliyyahu, a Jewish book of homilies written between the third and thenth (sic) centuries C. E. The Pentateuch is the first five books of the Old Testament.

Another editor, J. C. A Gaskin, who is well known as a scholar in Early Modern Philosophy, writes (in his 1992 edition) the following as a note on the same word:

almost certainly Hume's spelling for the Seder or Siddur, the Jewish book of prayer or worship.

So which is it, the Seder Eliyyahu or the Siddur?

Are these our only options? I think not. There are likely four options I think we must consider. (1) The Seder Olam, (2) The Passover Seder, (3) The Seder Eliyyahu, and (4) The Siddur. There are many more books that have the word "Seder" in the title, but it is hard to imagine one that is as significant as the above four.

Our approach is as follows: What Jewish books would Hume likely have heard of, and given those, to which did he actually intend to refer? Let us examine the four options one at a time.

The first three options might seem plausible on lexicgraphical evidence. Hume spells the word he is refering to as "Sadder", which is plausibly pronounced (in Hume's time) "say-der" as opposed to "sih-dur". The double "dd" however, does make it plausible that Hume was thinking of a word that sounds like "sah-der". More likely Hume copied this spelling from some other source which is unknown to me (us). So spelling-evidence is so far, unhelpful.

(1) Could Hume have heard of the Seder Olam? The Seder Olam is a (actually two) purported chronology(ies) of the world from creation to the rise of Alexander the Great.

My guess is that Hume might have heard of this book. Remember, that although Hume today is known as an important philosopher, in his time, and in his own mind, he was a historian. He quotes heavily from the classical historians, and was well familiar with historical scholarship. It certainly seems plausible that he would have heard of the Seder Olam. What is less plausible is that he read it. It has not (to my knowledge) been translated to English, Latin, Greek, or French - the languages I believe Hume know well. It is also unlikely that Hume would tell us that the content of a history book contains something about precepts of morality, unless he had some reason for knowing that it was the case. The Seder Olam, to the best of my recollection, does not contain much morality. On that basis, I reject option (1) as a possibility.

(2) Could Hume have been talking about the Seder shel Pesach, or more likely the book about the Passover Seder, namely the Haggadah? The argument in favor of this is that the Haggadah is probably the most widely printed of all Jewish books, and it would not be surprising if Hume had come across one in all his time spent in scholarly pursuits. I do not know if Hume would have had access to an English, French, Latin, or Greek one, but it is certainly possible and I would bet that it existed in one of those languages in Hume's time, or at the very least, someone he read may have referred to it.

But again, why would Hume think it is full of morality precepts? Well, in some sense it is. There are plenty of morality references in the Haggadah. References to the good and wicked sons come to mind. But the references to them are not extensive. It is a collection of prayers, and it is the tale of the exodus, more than a morality play. Moreover, while it can plausibly be called the "seder" it is well known as the "Haggadah" or the "recitation". Also, though it is a prominent Jewish book, in the scheme of the Jewish year, it is read once (or twice) at night as part of the Passover feast, it is not a central document of faith on par with the Pentateuch that Hume cites.

(3) Could it be the Seder Eliyyahu? I seriously doubt it. While the book is not totally obscure, one would have to be fairly well steeped in Jewish midrashic (homiletical) texts to get to know this book. It was available in Hebrew by Hume's time, but not in any other language, and it was probably not a common book to have around. I would doubt Hume encountered it. Moreover, Seder Eliyyahu is actually two works: Seder Eliyyahu Rabbah and Seder Eliyyahu zuta which collectively are known as Tanna Devei Eliyahu. It is not important enough to be known solely as "The Seder". While the book does deal with morality, it is a much more sohisticated book. It is a midrash, and a sort of mystical-cosmography. It would be odd for Hume to have assumed that Jews give this work much credence, even if he had known of its existence. Jews take the book seriously, but only to an extent. To the extent Hume would have known about this book, he would know about the nature of midrashic exegesis. The only reason one would have to think this might be the book Hume meant is that it was names by this unknown editor. I do not know what evidence this editor came up with to get this book.

So that leaves us with (4) Siddur. The "Siddur" does get it's name from the word "seder". Hume would definitely have had access to a siddur. In 1738 someone, probably Abraham Meers, under the Pseudnym Gamaliel Ben Pedahzur wrote a translation of the Jewish prayer book and a lot of commentary, which apparently was directed at introducing the Jewish rituals to Christians. (See here here and here.) It is a work that the Jewish historian Cecil Roth described as a book that gives "exaggerated importance to the least attractive minutia of observance and by an undue insistence upon anything of a scrofulous nature". This sounds like the place Hume could have picked up some cynicism about Jewish Prayer. The sentence prior to the one we quoted with the word "Sadder" in it reads as follows: "It is certain, that, in every religion, however sublime the verbal definition which it gives of its divinity, many of the votaries, perhaps the greatest number, will still seek the divine favour, not by virtue and good morals, which alone can be acceptable to a perfect being, but either by frivolous observances, by intemperate zeal, by rapturous extasies, or by the belief of mysterious and absurd opinions." It would be useful if I had a copy of the Siddur in question to see if he spells it "Sadder" as that would clinch the argument that Hume was referring to the Siddur, and this one in particular. But sadly, I do not have access to a copy.

I think I will throw my hat in with Gaskin's footnote that Hume was referring to the Siddur. The Siddur is a book that Hume would have heard of. The first English edition we just mentioned was published in 1738, when Hume was about 27 years old. It was published in London, where Hume would have soon thereafter had access to it. It is likely that Hume came across this book in his studies on religion. It is a major Jewish text. It is the prayer book Jews use daily. It frequently mentions morality, as part of the prayers, and given the edition that Hume was likely familiar with, it seems it was tailored to reinforce the view that Hume already had of religion.

Review of Taming Democracy

2007-12-21T10:11:00.000-05:00

Harvey Yunis' Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens is a thorough discussion of political rhetoric in Ancient Athens.

Political deliberation was an important feature of democratic Athens, and the methods and goals of that deliberation was obviously of great import. Different rhetors had different approaches to how and why one persuades an audience do adopt a particular suggestion.

Yunis addresses Thucydides' (and Pericles'), rhetoric implicit in the famous funeral oration, Plato's Gorgias, Phaedrus, and Laws, which displays the evolution of his thought on Rhetoric, and Demosthenes more practical approach to mass persuasion.

Thucydides, Plato, and Demostheses played radically different roles in classical Athens and their approaches to mass rhetoric, and also thereby, mass education are readily apparent. Yunis does a good job spelling it all out.

who would've thunk it?

2007-12-19T17:31:00.001-05:00

This is one of the more interesting headlines I've seen in a while.

Engagement

2007-12-14T10:44:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday night, right near the Manhattan Bridge, I asked "D" if she would marry me, and she said "of course". That makes us engaged.

Some philosophy

2007-12-07T10:34:00.000-05:00

It was good to see a piece as sophisticated and clear as Keith Burgess-Jackson's recent piece on torture in the daily press. The world needs more of that. What Burgess-Jackson did for "torture", someone ought to do for "cult" too. While I am not crazy about Romney, or any of the political candidates, for that matter, Romney is plagued with the idea that he belongs to a cult, particularly Mormonism. Perhaps Burgess-Jackson himself would sort this out (he appears to be a fan). Mormonism has had that reputation for a while. Yesterday Romeny had to give a dull speech that seemed to me was designed to placate the right, rather than dispel any myths about his religion.

Discussing whether Mormonism is a cult is akin to discussing whether waterboarding is torture. It depends what you mean by "cult" and it depends on Mormon practices, and all of that is independent of whether or not there is something morally, spiritually, legally, or socially problematic about cults in the first place. A good philosopher would do well to sort this out for the right-wing public.

Look, I recently had a conversation with a (Catholic) friend, M, who was musing why anyone would believe in a religion that someone just made up. I remarked that his sentiment was exactly what my people were thinking when Christianity started.

I am not sure it changed his mind much. And now that I think about it, the inability to change one's mind about religious matters does seem to be the hallmark of cultish behavior. But I got to say, if he ever ran, he'd probably have my vote for president.

Real philosophy in the news

2007-12-05T19:13:00.000-05:00

Keith Burgess-Jackson's piece in today's Wall Street Journal is quite refreshing. It is rare that one sees a competent piece of philosophical analysis in a daily newspaper. The article on torture actually gives no view on what torture is, but expresses the frustration that a lot of thinking people feel when confronted with questions like "is waterboarding torture". The answer, and he expresses it well, is a matter of one's definition of torture. Now, once we have that, we still want to know whether all torture is bad, and if it is always bad, and why. The question is also completely divorced from the legal question of whether this particular form of treatment is legal, and it is further divorced from the question of whether it ought to be legal.

It is nice to see that there is a market for real philosophical analysis out there, and that someone is taking the time to disseminate it.

TBOLC - some misc. notes

2007-11-22T08:42:00.000-05:00

I sporadically took some notes about what life was like in TBOLC. The experience was pretty annoying, and I guess the following reflects that. It mostly seemed like a waste of time, just like BOLC II. The notes were sporadically written, and since I have no interest in thinking about TBOLC again, I have not bothered to edit them. So here they are.

--I finished BOLC II. That means that I now start the final phase of training in my officer basic course. I'm now back in Fort Eustis, Virginia. I drove up here from Fort Benning Georgia.

I stopped off in Charlotte, NC where I met up with "D" and we drove to Virginia Beach. It was a fun trip.

-- I have been in my final phase of officer training. To be honest, it really sucks. I have been sort of hesitant to write about this, but the army wasted most of the past three months of my life. The army's training environment is designed to do something, but I am really unsure what. They more or less keep you here for a while and treat you like a fourth grader, and that somehow makes you an officer.

It sort of makes me lose respect for people who have been through too many of these. I suppose now when I meet a general I will wonder what it was like to go to Army school after Army school and get treated like a child when you are middle aged, or older. I am pretty amazed that there are people who see this as a normal way of life. These schools breed immaturity. Perhaps their function is to keep you in the Army by making it difficult for officers to interact with adult civilians.

--Some stuff you should know: Everyone here cares about football. Not sure why, but they do.

--A typical day is as follows: you wake up at around 0430 or so. Show up at PT at 0520. Salute the flag at 0530. Do PT till about 0630. Shower, eat or do some extra working out till 0750. 0750 show up in the classroom and sing a rather stupid song that was pretty creepy even when I sang it each day when I was here in Fort Eustis as an enlisted soldier. 0800 till about 1130 we stare at power point slides and listen to lecturers of various levels of competence talk about whatever is on the slide he is showing. (Disclaimer: some of the instructors are technically competent, though still boring.) 1130 till about 1300 is lunch, followed by another three to five hours of more boring powerpoint slides. Then we are free for the rest of the day.

(Added note: The song singing stopped after a week or so.)

The tests are pretty easy. Make sure that your notes and the notes they give you are in order. Look them over the night before while you put them in order. Most of the tests are open book, so you just have to make sure you know how to find everything. I'd recommend a good hilighter.

The history assignment is pretty easy, as is the letter/memo writing. The history assignment requires reading an 85 page book and answering some dumb questions. No sweat. The memo and letter writing assignment was designed to show us how to write an Army memo. Of course Army memos are written a thousand different ways, and the FMs are not exactly consistent or up-to-date. My memo was graded by someone who was both annoying and not very adept with the English language.

Whoever it was inserted lots of commas where they didn't belong, and then took off a point for every comma he inserted. What an idiot. The ethics paper (and accompanying brief) at the end of the course was kind of useless too. I happen to know a lot about ethics, and ethics teaching, and I can assure you that the Army does not.

--Lucky dip is one of those team-building exercises. It lasts a day, and is not bad. A bit annoying, but basically there is a bunch of walking, and you have to accomplish some stuff. When you hear an "IED" give medical aid. When you hear "gas gas gas" you put on your masks. . . (test yours the day before, we had someone pass out because her mask did not work right.) These events are all timed. The final obstacle course is actually a bit fun. (It involves some water.) It was weird how the cadre kept telling us how much we needed to be hydrated, and how it will challenge us and stuff. eh. The whole things was actually kinda fun, though the PT was annoying, and so was a lot of the walking around.

--We had a dining in. Personally I thought it sucked. I actually didn't really think this dining in sucked, I just think that dinings in suck in general. Ours seemed fairly tolerable. I thought that a dining in resembled what would pass as a frat dinner of about 100 years ago - an event I certainly would not have wanted to attend. It is just not my thing. I assume that there are a lot of people who enjoy that, but I am not one of them. We put on a skit. I was in it. People laughed. If you like this sort of thing, it wasn't all that bad.

--Everyone with any rank, or anyone that ever had any rank on Fort Eustis thinks they need to give the TBOLC class a speech. They all think they are doing us some big favor, so they get us to class an hour early and give us a speech on leadership or whatever they want to talk about it.

Each and every one of the dozen or so people who have each wasted an hour of our time gave us the identical speech with the same advice that anyone who has been in the army for more than 5 minutes or so already knows - like listen to your PS, and don't walk in to a unit and change everything your first day. . . It is all just a way of boosting the egos of the speakers, making them believe they have some wisdom to pass on to new 2LTs. They don't. They are all so full of it, and themselves.

--We had a few days of some exercise (DDEPEX) that involved planning out a marshalling yard. It was OK. We ended up having to brief an Australian exchange Major who is in charge of something or other here. I am not sure how worthwhile the exercise was, but it was almost fun to do, and the briefing part was fairly painless.

--We had to fill out a stupid survey yesterday. It was a climate survey, so that brass could pretend that they are concerned about what goes on. They made us wait around after class for about two hours so we can spend about 30 seconds filling out a form. For some reason the 1SGT

spent 20 minutes after formation the following day accusing us of not being polite enough when the SSG came in to administer the survey. Apparently we wasted too much of HIS time in that three minutes it took him to give out the survey itself.

I have discovered that here when someone perceives that they are somehow slighted, they cry to their superiors. If someone nods off in class the instructors take it personally. If someone talks out of turn, whoever is in front of the room cries to the 1SGT or the CPT or whomever. The instructors here are quite childish. They mostly have the mentality of six year-olds. It is disappointing to see soldiers who are so incapable of dealing with the world that every perceived slight is grounds for wasting an hour of class time and have a slew of people bitch and whine like little girls. Sad. The Army is training its officers to be less mature, rather than more.

I've taught for years. My students sleep, send text messages, pass notes or whatever. If they ever get disruptive, I ask them to stop. I have had very little trouble. I do not get offended. TRADOC somehow breeds this kind of juvenile behavior.

--We had a class on the MTS system. That is the system that the Army uses to keep track of a lot of their vehicles and stuff. It was a pretty good day and a half of classes. So far the guy who taught it was the best instructor yet. He was genuinely concerned to just teach the material and not waste our time or his. He made sure to teach us everything that was pertinent, and I now have a good idea of how to use all the associated MTS equipment. The class was partly powerpoint and partly hands-on. If only all the classes were this good. I think the course could have been more extensive and had a better segment on using the hand-held scanner.

--Some Chaplain gave us a 4 hour bloc of instruction on combat stress and suicide prevention. It made me give suicide a real thought. It was awful. I am absolutely no better off now than when I started. I have no idea what to do if I have a stressed out or suicidal soldier. I cannot really identify combat stress any better than I was able to before hand, and we got this generic advice like: refer the soldier to a chaplain, or a mental-health counselor. As if that is always possible! The stress management was even worse. We didn't even get generic advice about how to
help soldiers.

Wasting half of my day today was the Army's way of telling soldiers and the public that they are doing something to help soldiers without having to actually do anything. Combat stress, combat fatigue and suicide are real problems, especially now in Iraq. Why can't the Army hire a real psychologist to teach a course on this stuff in a way that will prepare us, someone who can perhaps give real advice? Maybe some role-playing supervised by someone knowledgeable. Maybe tell us a list of things not so say.

I actually do care about my soldiers. I have known some of them for years. I can't believe how cavalier the Army is being about preparing me to take care of their mental health.

--We had a counseling class. It seems like it was one of those things that should be in BOLC II. The point was basically that you should counsel your soldiers. That class could have been streamlined.

--We spent a week on boats. We went to one pier for half of one day and saw a large ship, then the next day we spent at another pier taking a tour of various military ships. Then a third half of a day was spent looking at a motorpool. There was a test at the end of the week. The whole thing was not too bad. Even a bit fun.

This is in direct contrast to the week after that. First someone wasted a whole day of our lives explaining what an OPORDER is. Anyone who does not know that by now, should not be as far as they are in the army. It was dreary and tiresome. The following day some of us had to present an OPORDER with a sand table. More dreariness, especially since we heard the same one four times.

The day after that was even more unbelievable. We had about four SAWs and 240Bs and enough M16A2s. We had a class on how to disassemble them. Wasting our day explaining the M16 to us was another big waste of time. That is three days in a row of torturous redundancy learning things that any private with more than two weeks in the army knows. (Some people actually have not had much practice on the SAW and the 240B, so they did find it a bit useful to get to take it apart. Our civilians were pretty lost though.) The week was wrapped up with dismount drills. We learned how to get off of a truck. Thankfully I missed part of the last day doing something else somewhat Army related, but I was back in time for a written test on the past two weeks worth of stuff. It was a test designed for morons. I assume that the mode grade was 100.

--Last week was spent on Monassas Run. This is a practical field convoy exercise. It was actually somewhat realistic. The people who ran the exercise were somewhat annoying, but it was interesting running a real convoy. The whole experience might have been more useful if we were taught convoy procedures as part of our training here. We were not. So we were left to run these convoys making stuff up as we went along. Some of us followed doctrine and others were . . . more creative.

It is bizarre. We hear the following four phrases about 100 times each day:
1) "Who here knows they are going to Iraq? You know you better learn this, because you'll be needing it soon"
2) "We are not training you to be an expert on this, we are just familiarizing you. You will not be an expert. At your unit, the'll teach you this."

3) "Train as you fight."
4) "We train according to doctrine. Doctrine is very different from the way things actually are."

First, if I am going to Iraq I damned well better be an expert on something. No, I damned well better be an expert on anything I am doing. If TBOLC cut out the crap and stopped wasting my time, I could be an expert on a lot of things. And if there are people leaving for Iraq and Afghanistan next month, which there are, when will they have time to learn this stuff? And reservists and guardsmen certainly will not have time to learn this - ever.

Second, why doesn't doctrine resemble what soldiers are doing in theater?

Just a note: I am still waiting to find someone in this branch of the Army who actually has logistics experience in the field. Almost everyone in charge of anything here tells me that they are really from some other branch - mostly infantry. Why have I not met a 1LT who has recently been in Iraq or Afghanistan who can tell me what things are like? We were promised some repeatedly, but they never showed.

This place is full of people who are full of it.

--Speaking of time wasting, we had three days of out-processing. Out-processing involved spending about 40 minutes running from building to building on post getting signatures from offices whose sole purpose is probably to sign people's out-processing forms. The rest of the time was spend doing our own thing.

I guess wasting time is good for the active duty Army people. After all, it is like a day off.

You do nothing, and you get paid. I too did nothing and I got paid for it, but the Army is not my job and not my life. I really do resent the Army forcing me to do nothing and get paid. The Army I signed up for - the Army Reserve - implicitly promised that it would call me when there is a military need for me to be called, and when there is training that needs to be done. When I am not in training and not in war I want to be back home with my own life and my own job and not in the Army. I don't want to get paid to sit around.

--Bull Run was the main field exercise for TBOLC. It was perhaps the only useful thing we've done so far. After that exercise everything that we learned made sense. That should totally be extended to about a week instead of the three days. Moreover, everyone should have the opportunity to be both an OIC and NCOIC at least once. I happened to have had both, and they were both very useful experiences.

--The final course AAR was kind of a joke. You fill out these forms with the standard dumb questions like "were the course objectives laid out clearly before the course?" I am not sure what the point of questions like that are - and that question in particular. Again, it is the Army's way of showing you that they pretend to care. They don't. No wonder people think this branch sucks.

Graduation

2007-11-20T17:32:00.000-05:00

I am finally done with TBOLC. My brief review is forthcoming. For now I will just say that I am pretty amazed I made it through. It was the worst pedagogical experience of my life.

Remember Remember . . .

2007-11-05T18:07:00.001-05:00

. . .the fifth of November.

Tests and a conference

2007-11-04T03:07:00.001-05:00

Last Thursday I took the Army DLPT in Hebrew. I hope I did well. It was a long and tiring test. I rushed it so I could make it to another test in the T-school here at Fort Eustis.

Then I went to Indiana for the weekend. I never thought I would be in Indiana. I was at a conference in Notre Dame. It was a good conference. It was hard to adjust to being around philosophers again, after being in the Army this long. But before I got used to it I was back in the Army. I then spent the next week in the field. More about that another time.

Worth reading

2007-10-19T19:09:00.001-04:00

This article by Ilan Weinglass is worth reading if you are concerned about the first amendment or terrorism and such.

Read it.

The nature of today's army

2007-10-14T10:45:00.001-04:00

So true.

As long as we are on the topic

2007-10-03T19:45:00.001-04:00

. . . of Jewish animals . . .Who thinks this stuff up?

"Bark Mitzvah"

2007-09-29T11:59:00.001-04:00

But do they count him in a minyan?

I can't believe. . .

2007-09-27T22:36:00.000-04:00

. . . that this happened on my block. Just when you thought your neighborhood was free of losers, they show up.

9/11

2007-09-11T20:02:00.000-04:00

So much has been going on in the past few weeks that I really have not had much time to write. I went from Georgia to Virginia. I am now in TBOLC. I have a lot to say about BOLC II and TBOLC, much of it is not very nice, but I'll save that for another time. There have been ups and downs but now we are getting in to a routine, and we're doing something that can be construed as learning about out actual function in the military.

But today is September 11, and to be honest, I didn't do much to commemorate it. Neither did my neck of the army.

I'll have to write some more soon when I have more time.

Review of Why Johnny Can't Add

2007-08-25T08:29:00.000-04:00

Morri's Kline's Why Johnny Can't Add was written in 1973 as an attempt to change the direction of mathematics education. Mathematics went through a small upheaval at the turn of the century with the foundational "crisis", the Bourbaki program, and related developments.

These developments inspired pedagogical reform that Kline felt made little sense. The book is an extended polemic against the pedagogical reforms that came to be known as "the New Math".

His argument is essentially that the New Math involves teaching abstract mathematics and a whole bunch of other things like set theory, group theory, arbitrary bases, and clock arithmetic, . . . to schoolchildren, at the expense of the basics.

The reforms insisted on abstraction, Kline argued for a more concrete approach to the teaching of mathematics.

For the record I am not convinced that Kline or his opponents were correct. I have no idea how mathematics is taught today, and I am pretty convinced that there are few good theories of education. But he did make a good recommendation. Kline suggests that we really need to treat mathematics education like a real science. That is we have to do real research in to what works in education. This needs to be taken more seriously than it is.

Jewish Services at Fort Benning

2007-08-21T17:04:00.000-04:00

In the Army, Sunday is religion day. Regardless of your religion, you can pray on Sunday. That is when all the services are held. On Fort Benning there were various Christian services in various chapels and one Jewish Service. There was probably some Muslim service and I should assume a Bhuddist one somewhere in the neighborhood.

The Jewish service is held on Sand Hill. Sand Hill is the place on Fort Benning where all the basic training takes place. So if you are going to be in BCT in Benning, you will be spending a lot of time on Sand Hill.

I remember Jewish Services at Fort Knox when I did basic training there four years ago. There, there were usually 8-15 people. About half of them were Jewish. In basic training, most people go to some service just to get away from their barracks. Spiritual comfort is often beside the point. Basic trainees often went to their battle buddy's service, generally because it was something different to do. On Fort Knox, I remember seeing mostly privates in basic training, and one E-4 who took it upon himself to lead services while he was there and a major who spent time with the Chabad Rabbi who came by most Sundays to do part of the service.

On Fort Benning, which is a slightly larger base than Fort Knox, there were at least 75 people at each of the two services I attended. I did not have many free Sundays. I think about 70 of the 75 people were in basic training. There were about five of us who were eihter in OCS, BOLC II or some other school there. I did not meet anyone permanently stationed there.

I would guess (based on nothing more than looking at last names, general intuition, and guessing) that no more than 15 or 20 of the basic trainees there were Jewish.

Though there is a Jewish Chaplain on post, I did not see him. He was out for the two weeks I was there. People say good things about him. I sat next to some kid from Chaim Berlin on a flight who claimed to know him from Atlanta. Instead of the chaplain there were two lay leaders. One led services one week, and another led services the next week. They both did a good job, and they seemed to be very enthusiastic about it.

Though the praying was nice, I suspect that the real reason so many people choose the Jewish service was for the food. There was a nice selection of donoughts, bagles, cream cheese and OJ. If you are in Basic Training in a place like Fort Benning, these things will sound like real treats. They were to me at Fort Knox. One of the lay leaders made some joke about bagles without cream cheese being article 15 actionable.

The actual service lasted about 45 minutes. This was followed by some food, and some people who went outside and gave Hebrew lessons. They got to the first few letters. when I was there. Hebrew lessons are scheduled to follow the service.

Incidentally, I think that at least two of the cadre in my BOLC II company were Jewish. That strikes me as odd for some reason.

That was my experience with Judaism in Fort Benning.