by Thomas R. Wells

Libertarianism does not make sense. It cannot keep its promises. It has nothing to offer. It is an intellectual failure like Marxism or Flat-Earthism – something that might once reasonably have seemed worth pursuing but whose persistence in public let alone academic conversation has become an embarrassment. The only mildly interesting thing about libertarianism anymore is why anyone still takes it seriously.

When evaluating a normative ethical theory we should consider three dimensions: 

1. Is the theory plausible in its own right? I.e. does it make sense or is it an incoherent mess of contradictions?
2. Would the world be better if it was ordered according to the theory? I.e. does the theory promise us anything worth having?
3. Does the theory provide a useful guide to action around here right now? I.e. is it any help at all for addressing the kind of problems that actually appear in our practical moral and political life?

1. Does Libertarianism Make Sense?

Libertarianism is a response to the problem of politics – the sphere of activity concerned with the collective management of our social living arrangements that is complicated, contingent, and refuses to obey the authority of reason. The problem of politics has offended many philosophers from Plato onwards. Libertarians’ particular solution to the problem is what I call eliminative moralism: the reduction of the entire noisome political sphere to its supposed basis in a narrow interpersonal morality of consent. The result has an extraordinary intellectual simplicity and normative minimalism which many find appealing and convenient, yet the very sources of its appeal are its deepest flaws. Read more »

“This is conclusive, and if men are capable of any truth, this is it.”
……………………………………………….…— Blaise Pascal, on his wager 

Blaise’s Place

Blaise’s place is on a sunset strip
sliced razor-straight through desert air
many cul de sacs veer from its hot black path
which is squeezed in a pass between mountains there
west where the day goes down in a blaze

The road’s white line on the northern side
is lit with votive flame-tipped wax
while on its south hot neon in glass tubes glows
glazing the way in pink-lit veneer
as fountains spit from golden taps

The landscape reeks of myrrh & beer
on a highway set with a brilliant trap:
a bet to which Blaise alludes
and away from which skeptics steer

A crooner’s song from a glittery stage
with background bells of dollar slots,
a mix in warp & weft on a nameless loom
with Gregorian chants wrung into gambler’s knots

—priests & players in cassocks, albs,
sequined shirts and denim pants
—Adidas shuffling under slick, chic suits,
heads with miters or baseball caps
—water & booze from an aspergillum
dipped in Byzantine plastic flask and flung,
dots ears and eyes and throbbing sternums
beating for life in which wisdom basks

But (as if in Solomon’s chair),
Blaise calls all bettors there,
throws loaded dice against a wall
that runs from floor
past stratosphere,
past moon, past sun, 
past galaxies in curls of space
to end of time, but
always ends down here
where gamblers grumble
and losers grouse
that the odds (by grace)
are always with the house

by Jim Culleny, 1/29/17
Jim Culleny – Blaises Place – Clyp

by Raji Jayaraman and Peter N Burns*

We both have daughters who are good at math, but opted out of advanced math. In so doing, they effectively closed off entry into math-intensive fields of study at university such as physics, engineering, economics, and computer science. They used to be enthusiastic about math, but as early as grade three this enthusiasm waned, and they weren’t alone. It was a pattern we observed repeatedly in their female friends during those early school years, as boys slowly inched ahead.

This turns out to be something of a statistical regularity. Girls don’t start school hating math or doing worse at it than boys. Then, somewhere in elementary school, this changes for many girls and in some (though not all) countries, a gender gap in math performance appears. The reasons why girls sometimes begin to dislike or slip behind in math are important, wide-ranging and controversial, with scientists, psychologists,  sociologists, and others all weighing in. What often starts as small fissure in test performance in childhood seems to be locked in by the onset of puberty. At this stage kids hit high school where they get to choose their subjects, and the great divergence is set in motion. Girls disproportionately opt out of math-intensive subjects. From there, there’s really no turning back. Girls tend to study subjects, and graduate with degrees in fields, that have lower math requirements. In the U.S., women receive only about a quarter of bachelor’s degrees in physics, engineering and computer science; the pattern persists in graduate school. That there are tragically few women in these professions, is a logical consequence.

What is remarkable about this great divergence is that the size of the initial gender gap in average math performance is itself, pretty unremarkable—typically under a quarter of a standard deviation depending on the country. In fact, in many countries, girls do at least as well as boys on average, and girls are well represented in the top tail of the math performance distribution. In short, girls do well in math by many metrics, both in absolute terms and relative to boys, and yet they opt out of math. Why is that? Read more »

Wu Tsang, boychild. Untitled. 2019.

More here, here, and here.

by Jackson Arn

This could all be circular.
Not self-swallowing like the staircase
from the poster, I mean circular
as in smooth rows of endless smooth stacks
perpendicular to pain, touching on a plane
but only one, so air bubbles
and grains of sand left in the loaf
remember their orders and lend
a noble cause their roughness—
who brings a harp to an island?

I can tell you don’t believe me and
are too polite to wince. Sometimes I wish
I didn’t need your vote. Then I
could drift with purpose instead of at odd hours
between naps and chopping onions. As it is,
we’ll drift together until our vectors
pull us apart or, better, pull the shoreline here
so we can drift in place, chattering
about the blue pond by the blue window,
the pilgrimage between your thumb and me.

by Joseph Shieber

The philosophical world has recently been abuzz about Susanne Bobzien’s argument that Gottlob Frege — often taken to be one of the founding figures of what became 20th century analytic philosophy — plagiarized many of his logical positions from the Stoics.

Bobzien’s charge isn’t merely idle speculation. In her paper, descriptively titled “Frege Plagiarized the Stoics”, Bobzien brings the receipts. In painstaking detail, she demonstrates the ways in which many of Frege’s signature views — previously often thought to have been radical innovations in logic and philosophy of language — mirror almost verbatim the language of the chapter on Stoic logic in Carl Prantl’s influential Geschichte der Logik im Abendland (History of Logic in the West).

In painstaking detail, Bobzien lays out her case that not only was Frege strongly influenced by Stoic ideas, but also that he copied those ideas from one source, Prantl:

First, it is vastly more likely that Frege obtained his knowledge of Stoic logic from one text, rather than from browsing through the dozens of Greek and Latin works with testimonies on Stoic logic that Prantl brings together. (Of the hundreds of Stoic logical works, not one has survived in its entirety and we are almost completely dependent on later ancient sources.) Second, virtually all parallels between Stoics and Frege are present in Prantl, and some important elements of Stoic logic without parallels in Frege are missing in Prantl. … Third, there are several misunderstandings or distortions of Stoic logic in Prantl which do have parallels in Frege.” (pp. 8-9 of Bobzien’s paper linked above)

In one sense, it’s hard to exaggerate the significance of Bobzien’s findings. In the words of Ray Monk, the acclaimed biographer of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, “it is Frege who [of the triumvirate of Frege-Russell-Wittgenstein] is—100 years on from his retirement—held in the greatest esteem by the philosophers of today.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Photo taken two days ago of the main church in the town of Welschnofen in the Eggental valley of the South Tyrol.

by Eric Miller

Flat cap

For my part, the plank staircase angling by rickety twitches cliff-side down to Wreck Beach reminds me of the steps that stagger toward the Whirlpool below Niagara Falls. Each increment here in British Columbia is too short—each increment there, on the frontier of Ontario, too long. Yet a kind of music accompanies treading down both, we play them like a keyboard, the music of inhibition and the music of extension.

I cannot for the longest time glimpse saltwater. Can you see it? I perceive cedars and arbutus, and observe the adjacent protean precipitousness of tumbling rills, ruffled like fern leaves, rippling like otters. These waters don’t have to flex their knees. Every time we think it’s over the creaking flight continues! I have the time to think of Ontario, and to think of how the British conceived of the Niagara River as a part of the Saint Lawrence, and to think of characters I have conceived, members of the British party going upstream to administer the new province of Upper Canada, the year being 1792. Now, like Dante in La Vita Nuova, let me provide a context for the cameo with which I hope to entertain you as, lurching ourselves a little woodenly, imitating thus the boards of hundreds of discrete steps that support our resolve, we bring ourselves, with luck, onto the sea-level reach of Wreck Beach. There is something prosodic and stirring about staircases is there not? They are symbols of so much! To descend a staircase is not necessarily an anticlimax is it?—in spite of etymology. Read more »

by Alexander C. Kafka

The disappointing new film Bliss is maddening in ways both intended and surely unintended. A heady rumination on the nature of reality featuring two bright stars in quirky character roles was an attractive proposition, but it doesn’t pan out.

The film sometimes conveys a real sense of dissociation. The script could have been honed with that goal in mind and become a workable study of two drug-addled down-and-outs, Greg and Isabel (Owen Wilson and Selma Hayek), living in a tent city on the streets of L.A. 

Alternatively, Bliss could have been a pure sci-fi reverie as we learn that the couple’s gritty misadventures are actually a computer-simulated role-playing game devised in another L.A. of affluence, comfort, and ease. In lounges, players access the virtual reality through tubes up their noses connected to large tanks with floating brains. Take that, Xbox! This provocatively reverses the premise of the Matrix franchise, in that rather than being slaves to technological overlords, humanity has been freed by its own digital prowess, revisiting a synthesized street life only as a reminder of the pollution, poverty, and mayhem civilization has overcome.  Read more »