the Timpest

One of the things that we're doing a fair bit of here at the NEH summer institute is playing tennis. 

Yesterday at lunch before our afternoon match, I made the following comment about playing tennis to one of the other institute's participants (who is not among the subset of participants who plays tennis):

"I ought to be more competitive than I am."

It may be trivial for me to say what immediately follows the comma, but I think that this statement is true.  If one reads the 'ought' here as a pragmatic modality, then I think the statement comes out true.  If I were to care more about winning, I'd be more likely to play better.  So in order to play better, I should become more competitive.   There is a large body of psychological and performative literature that supports the pragmatic reading.

But I think that the above statement is also true if one reads the 'ought' as a moral ought.  That is, I take it that my undercompetitiveness is (or at least can be) a moral failing.  My guess is that many of you, like my conversation partner yesterday, will find this to be implausible.  But let me try and motivate the claim, with some qualifications.   

First qualification: if my playing partners were equally noncompetitive, then I think my undercompetativeness would not be a moral failing.  But insofar as my partners care about the game--rather than just, say, the exercise involved--then I think that I'm harming those that I'm playing with (to an admittedly minor degree) by not caring more, and thus not playing better.  Insofar as I ought to care about those relevant things that my partners care about (including playing a good match, winning, etc...), then I ought morally to be more competitive.

Second qualification: if my playing partners are hypercompetitive--that is, competitive to a moral fault, caring about winning more than other things they ought to care about more--then I think I needn't put any moral weight on how much they care about playing--and so I do not have the moral obligation in question.

Finally, let me say that I grant that on the scale of moral failings, this one (if in fact it is one) is a comparatively minor one.  But being a comparative minor moral failing is still a moral failing.

So some of you may be worried that the Salt Lake City air is getting to me.  But this is something that I've thought about for a while now and only finally getting around to putting into pixels.  One of the presenters at the NEH basically made the same point in passing today, which reminded me that I'd never posted on it.

Here's my claim: the arguments for the legitimacy (whether we're thinking legal or moral here, I don't think that it matters) same-sex marriage can also be used to establish the legitimacy of polygamy.  Now, I'm not making a claim about either the strength of the arguments here or the truth of their conclusions; I'm making only a claim about the relationship between two kinds of arguments.

Take any plausible argument for same-sex marriage; for instance, consider the general argumentative strategy that marriage is a civil or legal relationship or contract that consenting adults enter into.  Then simply take that argument and change it from being about qualities of those entering into the relationship to being about the quantity of those entering into the relationship.  If the 'parts' don't matter for such a relationship or contract, I cannot see why the number of consenting adults would matter.  If there is no relevant different between same-sex marriage and polygamy on the basis of social contract or agreement, then arguments for the former can also be used as arguments for the latter.  Sure, there are ways that one could block the move from same-sex marriage to polygamy, but I can't think of any reason why these wouldn't be rather ad hoc and superficial. 

UPDATE: We've actually been asked by the organizers not to blog about the NEH conference.  This request comes from the main NEH office; we'll see how much the request is honored.

I'm back from China, and now up in Salt Lake City for an NEH summer institute on experimental philosophy. More regular and substantive posts should begin.

My guess is that most of you who read the Timpest already know this (I don't know for sure because I don't know who all reads it!), but the Timpe family is moving.  Starting this fall, I'll be an associate professor at Northwest Nazarene University, outside Boise, ID.  We are very excited about the move and the new opportunities that await us.

Despite our excitemen and anticipation, there's also a strong sense of melancholy, a mood that I find myself experiencing perhaps too often.  I spent about two hours this afternoon packing my office, which was quite a saddening experience.  I boxed up the folder of kind emails and notes from students that I keep; I threw away the initial proposal for my first book; I sorted through the folders with all the chapters and articles I read for my dissertation.  I took the 2nd trimester sonogram picture of Jameson off my file cabinet and but it in a box with the fingerpainting my did that hangs in my office.  So very much has changed, both personally and professionally, during the last five years. 

My time at USD has been good to me in many, many ways.  I've had good students that I've learned a lot from, and have a number of wonderful colleagues whom I shall dearly miss.  USD also afforded me many glimpses into the culture of academia that one can't have as a student or grad student (and some of which I'd prefer not to have seen).  As a family, we've enjoyed San Diego, even though it's not the place for us.  We miss seasons and snow and real trees. 

The next few months are going to be crazy for us, and so posting here (and over at JT's blog) will likely be even more sporadic than usual. 

I've been thinking about how best to accomplish projects this summer (especially given the travel the next few months will involve), in part as a result of reading this article in the Chronicle and talking a bit about it with a friend on facebook.  I've come to realize that I'm a philosophical multitasker.  I like to have a number of projects in the works at once, and be able to bounce back and forth between them.  For example, this summer I'm working on (in some stage or other):

1. an annotated bibliography
2. two book reviews
3. expanding and polishing an invited article for a journal
4. a book chapter
5. an article
6. trying to put together an edited volume
7. trying to get a completed article accepted

While much of what I'm working on is related (free will, not surprisingly, is the general topic of quite a few of these), I also like to have a project or two that is different from the rest to serve as a 'working diversion' when I get stuck or burned out on the main set of issues I'm thinking about.  I also try to make sure that the projects are in different stages of the process.  Right now, I'm merely thinking about a few of these, while others are started, and some are in draft stage.  This methodology has worked fairly well for me so far, I have noticed that over the last five years the degree to which I multitask in this way is growing.  That may not be a bad thing (as more projects are intertwined and I'm asked to do some things), but then again it may.* 

I'm curious what the rest of you think, both about my method and what works for you.

OK, enough navel-gazing for now.  Back to working on (5).

----

*NB: On what I think is a related note, Allison sometimes lovingly chastises me for reading multiple books at once. 

Here is a first draft of a review of Crisp and Rea (eds.), Analytic Theology.  If you have an interest in analytic philosophy of realigion, you'll want to read at least Rea's introduction and Wolterstorff's contribution to this volume.

As always, feedback welcome.

Clarke, R. (2003).  Libertarian Accounts of Free Will.

Double, R. (1990).  The Nonreality of Free Will.

Fischer, J.  (2006).  My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility.

Honderich, T. (2002).  How Free are You? 2^nd edition.

Kane, R. (1996).  The Significance of Free Will.

Kane, R. (2005).  A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will.

Kane, R. (ed.). (2005). The Oxford Handbook of Free Will.

Mele, A. (2006).  Free Will and Luck.

Mele, Al. (2009).  Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will.

O'Connor, T. (2000).  Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will.

Pink, T. (2004).  Free Will: A Very Short Introduction. 

Strawson, G. (1991). Freedom and Belief.

van Inwagen, P. (1983).  An Essay on Free Will.

Watson, G. (ed.). (2003). Free Will (Oxford Readings in Philosophy).

Wolf, S. (1990).  Freedom Within Reason.

One of the projects I'm currently working on is an annotated bibliography for a large-scale project by OUP.  The aim of the project, called Oxford Bibliographies Online, is to provide "a starting point for scholarly research" and to be "a selective guide to the best and most useful sources" on a particular topic.  Though I don't know the full range of the project, I think it's going to be a major research tool when it comes out.  While it won't be limited to philosophy, with respect to philosophy it may be as valuable a tool as the SEP. 

Here is an early draft of the entry I'm working on for free will.  Any and all feedback would be appreciate--including ways to better organize, material that should be added, etc....  (The poll I posted about two weeks ago helped me think about setting up some of the middle sections.)  I'm contemplating adding a section on important texts from the history of philosophy--e.g., Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine's On Free Choice of the Will, Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, etc....  One reason I haven't done that yet is that I'm supposed to have eight or fewer entries per section, and I'm not sure which ones I'd include.

Anyway, suggestions for improvement would be greatly appreciated. 

As part of a project I'm working on, I've been reading the work of neuroscientists and psychologists on free will.  Over at the Garden, there has been a series of posts about how bad some of the scientists writing for popular venues are when it comes to discussing free will (for example, see here and here).  Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but a lot of the stuff published in good presses is also bad.  For example, in a paper in this collection, the author simply doesn't understand the different between the thesis of causal determinism, causalism, and predictibility.  And then there is this doozy of a concluding paragraph:

Determinism makes free will possible.  It also makes psychology possible.  If psychological events were not determined--caused--by antecedent events, psychology could make no sense.  We have a lot for which to thank determinism, both as psychologists and as free will-possessing humans.

I also recently read this discussion, based on a book of interviews of academics who serve on funding panels.  According to Lamont:

Philosophy is a problem discipline, and it's defined as such by program officers. Philosophers do not believe that nonphilosophers are qualified to evaluate their work. Perhaps that comes out of the dominance of analytic philosophy, with its stress on logic and rigor. Philosophers think their discipline is more demanding than other fields. Even its practitioners define the discipline as contentious. They don't see that as a problem; argument and dispute are the discipline's defining characteristics.

All that conflict makes it difficult to get consensus on the value of a philosophy proposal -- or to convince people from other disciplines of its merits. The panels I studied are multidisciplinary. Nonphilosophers are often frustrated with the philosophers. They often discounted what philosophers had to say as misplaced intellectual superiority.

After reading some of what I've been plowing through, I'm not completely convinced that this impression, even if true, is misplaced.  One should at least know what is and is not entailed by a technical term one uses in the title of one's articles.

I've mentioned before that I'm taking part in an NEH summer institute on experimental philosophy.  Today I found out part of the summer reading list, which is here.

(Sorry about making you click-through to pictures; I'm having problems posting them directly here.)

I just got finished teaching a course on the Metaphysics of Free Will.  The last three weeks or so of the semester involved reading and discussing Four Views on Free Will (which I reviewed here).  The last assingment for the course involved the students arguing for whichever of these views that they thought was closest to being true.  It was interesting to me to see how the class as a whole responded to these four views.  If you're interested, you can see the results here.

(Sorry Manuel!)

I received word today that the internationally recognized band Hanggai will likely be playing the closing banquet of the conference I'm going to this summer.  Now, I know virtually nothing about music, and even less about Chinese music.  But I will say that Jameson is enthralled with their sound: