TPM

Brandom bags $1.5 million prize

The University of Pittsburgh has $1.5 million to spend on research in philosophy, thanks to Professor Robert Brandom. As one of the winners of this year's Mellon Distinguished Achievement Awards from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, Brandom has the funds at his disposal to spend at his institution.

The awards, now in their third year, are intended to “underscore the decisive contributions the humanities make to the nation's intellectual life” and “honour scholars who have made significant contributions to humanistic inquiry and enable them to teach and do research under especially favourable conditions.”

In a statement, the Andrew W Mellon Foundation said Brandom “is widely regarded as one of the most creative philosophers of language and mind working today. Studied intensively in America and Europe, especially Germany , and appealing to both the Anglo-American and continental schools of philosophical thought, his writings offer a rare combination of detailed and precise argumentation with a broader and more synthetic view. Making it Explicit , his first book, is regarded as a leading contribution to understanding the nature of norms, rules, and commitments in thought and action – one of the most pressing problems in philosophy and in the social sciences – and has been compared to landmark works from the previous generation of philosophers. A forthcoming major work on Hegel is much anticipated, not least for its promise to offer a comprehensive analytic reading of a markedly non-analytic philosopher. Professor Brandom's teaching and supervision of graduate students manifest the same quality and rigour of his own scholarly work.”

Brandom said, “I have spent my entire career in the philosophy department at the University of Pittsburgh – a department that has consistently been recognised as one of the top five in the nation. The challenge is to find ways to use the money not only to further my own research, but the institutions that nurtured it.”

Some of the money will go on cataloguing the papers of Wilfrid Sellars, who worked at Pittsburgh from 1963 until his death in 1989. Brandom calls him “one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. His presence in the philosophy department, more than anything else, marked us as a world-class department.”

 

New exam follows trend of Socrates by stealth

How many students study philosophy in Britain 's schools? Nearly 4,000, if you count only those taking the Philosophy AS level examination. But in fact philosophy has been quietly infiltrating other syllabuses for several years. And a new course – Perspectives on Science: History, Philosophy and Ethics of Science – looks set to continue this trend.

The course is being developed by John Taylor at Rugby School and should be ready to roll out nationwide in 2006. “The course has been under development for the past five years and aims to give students an opportunity to discuss, in an informed, rigorous manner, important and exciting philosophical and ethical questions arising from modern science,” Taylor told TPM . “The aim of the course is to introduce students to some of the elements of philosophical and ethical reasoning, as they apply to science.”

The course will consider questions such as: Is the Big Bang fact or theory? What is the difference between a living and a non-living thing? Is it right to “tamper with nature”?

“A distinctive feature is that the assessment will be by means of a research project and a presentation,” says Taylor . “Students will be expected to construct arguments based on a survey of literature and defend their point of view in a written project and an oral presentation.”

One advisor to the project is Roger Trigg, professor of philosophy at Warwick University and chair of the British Philosophical Association.

“The British Philosophical Association (as well as the Royal Society [the UK national academy of science]) has given this interesting new venture full support,” he says. “Sixth formers are showing increasing interest in philosophy, both as an A and AS level in its own right, and as part of religious studies – which has become more concentrated on philosophy and ethics. This new AS level extends this interest to science, and is one way of bridging the divide between humanities and science, at a relatively early stage.

“The proposed course makes academic sense. The challenge across the country will be finding staff in schools who are able to teach it well.”

Another advisor, professor Peter Lipton, head of Cambridge 's Department of History and Philosophy of Science, says, “This new AS level has the potential to make a significant contribution to the teaching of philosophy in schools. Perspectives on Science will enable students to study epistemology, ethics and the philosophy of science in school, alongside the history of science. It should attract those interested in the sciences and those interested in the humanities in equal measure.

“It is important that we bring more philosophy into schools. Many children are naturally inclined to ask philosophical questions, and we ought to have an educational system that encourages this tendency rather than ignoring or even undermining it.”

As Trigg intimated, philosophy in schools is far from being confined to the philosophy A and AS level examinations. Many religious studies students sit their two examinations on ethics and philosophy of religion, making their course a de facto philosophy programme. There is also now a critical thinking AS level which includes several aspects of philosophical method. And citizenship, which is a compulsory part of the national curriculum in key stages 3 and 4 (11-16 years), frequently has philosophical content.

For more information about Perspectives on Science, contact John Taylor: jlt@rugbyschool.net.

 

Prof thrown out of cyberspace

Only a philosopher could get himself thrown out of a world that doesn't actually exist. That's just what has happened to Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy and linguistics at the University of Michigan .

Ludlow 's avatar Urizenus used to inhabit Alphaville, the virtual city of The Sims Online . This wasn't just a game for Ludlow , but a form of philosophical research. These virtual worlds are a kind of laboratory in which we can see how order emerges – or fails to emerge – from an initial unregulated state of nature. And they also raise questions about what makes something real. For example, the currency of Alphaville, the simolean, is actually exchangeable with the dollar, through the dealing site eBay.

Urizenus/Ludlow reported on events in The Sims Online on his blog, the Alphaville Herald . In the course of its investigations, the Herald also unveiled the seamier side of life in Alphaville: the thieves, money launderers and petty hoodlums. It is also critical of Electronic Arts, the company that owns The Sims Online through its subsidiary Maxis.

One such report was an exposé of prostitution: some game players were exchanging cybersex (sexually graphic discussions) for simoleans. This seemed to be too much for Electronic Arts. They insisted he remove a link to the Alphaville Herald from his online profile. He did, but forgot about a second link in his property description. He was then suspended from the site for three days, but 11 hours into the suspension he was informed his account had been permanently closed.

Ludlow believes that there are real freedom of expression issues at stake here. “Don't believe the drivel that ‘they own the game, so they can do what they want',” he told Gamespot.com. “The phone company owns your phone lines but they don't tell you what you can say. We need to understand that MMORPGs [massively multi-player online role-playing games] are not games per se. They are platforms for lots of levels of human gaming, socialising, and conducting business. As such, the platforms need to be handled in a way that is responsible and in such a way that users are treated with respect.”

The issue of virtual prostitution is certainly no joke. The person behind Evangeline, the prostitute avatar, turns out to be a male minor. And with the simolean effectively an exchangeable currency, it is therefore a case of a minor being involved in verbal sex acts for money. This seems no less serious than a minor running a phone sex service.

 

Italian in US protest

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has cancelled a scheduled semester at New York University in protest at the new US policy of fingerprinting visitors from other countries, calling on other intellectuals and teachers to join his protest.

Explaining his decision in the French newspaper Le Monde , Agamben wrote, “There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to accept practices of control as humane and normal dimensions of our existence that had always been properly considered inhumane and exceptional. Thus, no one is unaware that the control exercised by the state through the use of electronic devices, such as credit cards or cell phones, has reached previously unimaginable levels.”

He adds later, “What is at stake here is nothing less than a new normal bio-political relationship between citizens and the state. This relation no longer has anything to do with free and active participation in the public sphere, but concerns the enrolment and the filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity: the body's biological life.”

Agamben is a major figure in contemporary European philosophy. He is professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona , and teaches at the University of Macerata and the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris . In 2002 he published Remnants of Auschwitz : The Witness and the Archive , a philosophical and ethical examination of the literature of Auschwitz survivors.

His thinking in this book is in part behind his decision to cancel his semester in America . In Le Monde , he wrote, “the tattooing in Auschwitz appeared to be a ‘normal' and economic way to regulate the admission of the deportees to the camp. The bio-political tattooing, which we are forced to undergo today in order to enter the United States, could be the precursor to what we could tomorrow accept as the normal registration of the identity of the good citizen into the mechanisms and machinery of the state. That's why we must oppose it.”