September 22, 2010, UPDATE: The winners have been announced.

September 10, 2010, UPDATE: See list of nine finalists here.

September 9, 2010, UPDATE: Voting round closed. See list of twenty semifinalists here.

September 3, 2010, UPDATE: Nominations are now closed. Go here to see the list of nominees and vote.

Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,

We are very honored and pleased to announce that Professor Akeel Bilgrami has agreed to be the final judge for our 2nd annual prize for the best blog writing in philosophy. (Details of last year's inaugural prize, judged by Professor Daniel C. Dennett, can be found here.) Akeel is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University as well as the Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities there. He has two relatively independent sets of intellectual interests–in the Philosophy of Mind and Language, and in issues of Political Philosophy and Moral Psychology especially as they surface in politics, history, and culture. He teaches courses and seminars regularly in the department on Philosophy of Mind and Language and also in the Committee on Global Thought and Political Science on issues in Politics and Rationality as well as Religion and Politics in Global Context. For the last 17 years, I am proud to say, Akeel has also been my teacher and friend.

As usual, this is the way it will work: the nominating period is now open, and will end at 11:59 pm EDT on August 31, 2010. There will then be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Akeel.

The first place award, called the “Top Quark,” will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with a two hundred dollar prize.

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed.)

Details:

The winners of this philosophy prize will be announced on September 22, 2010. Here's the schedule:

August 21, 2010:

• The nominations are opened. Please nominate your favorite philosophy blog entry by placing the URL for the blog post (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win. (Do NOT nominate a whole blog, just one individual blog post.)
• Blog posts longer than 4,000 words are not eligible.
• Each person can only nominate one blog post.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old. In other words, it must have been written after August 20, 2009.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• Nominations are limited to the first 200 entries.
• Prize money must be claimed within a month of the announcement of winners.

August 31, 2010

• The nominating process will end at 11:59 PM (NYC time) of this date.
• The public voting will be opened soon afterwards.

September 8, 2010

• Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).

September 22, 2010

• The winners are announced.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, post a link on your Facebook profile, Tweet it, or just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Yours,

Abbas

Sughra Raza. Late Afternoon at Imran and Nighat's. February, 2010.

Digital photograph.

NOTE: Please see updates and more info at the bottom of this post.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Quite a few people have been writing to ask me why we don't do the annual 3QD Ball anymore. Well, the main reason is that I moved from New York City to a slightly smaller city in the Italian Alps a couple of years ago, so I wasn't around to arrange it. But given the interest, I have decided to revive our annual party right here in Brixen. And this year, it will be part of a grand two-day event, jointly hosted by 3 Quarks Daily and the well-known Südtirolean artist Hartwig Thaler. The detailed plans are yet to be completely finalized, but I am giving early notice here so that people who want to come can book cheap flights soon. The dates are now carved in stone. Here's what's on the program:

• Thursday, August 26, Evening: Welcoming drinks in beautiful outdoor cafe. Guests get settled in their hotels.
• Friday, August 27, Morning: Two hour hike through the mountains, led by my friend Greg Segraves and me. It is not difficult terrain, and can be done in sneakers or other comfortable walking shoes.
• Friday Afternoon: Time for you to walk around in this 1100 year-old city, look at shops, etc.
• Friday Evening: Art show/Performance arranged by Hartwig Thaler.
• Saturday, August 28, Morning: We go to the Aquarena, the most beautiful and amazing complex of swimming pools and saunas in all of Italy.
• Saturday Evening: 3QD Ball. This means drinks/dancing. There will be a live band and a DJ. Chief event planner for the ball is Margit Oberrauch.

We expect a small but very international crowd. There is a $100 fee (per person) to register for the whole two-day event, and this includes entry to, and free bar at the ball. All other expenses are your own. If you would like to come, and are pretty sure about it, RSVP in the comments section of this post. I particularly urge all our own writers to come!

I myself will be traveling outside of Italy until only just before the event, and am busy immediately afterwards, so will not be available to meet with anyone outside of the times for the event.

I'll be providing more details as they become available. I will also make a list of hotels available soon, ranging from about 30 to 90 Euros per night per person.

In future you can check for updates on this post by clicking the 3QD Ball icon in the right-hand column, just above the “recent comments” section.

Yours,

Abbas

P.S. I took the photo at the top not far from where I live a while ago. It really is quite beautiful around here! And the photo of Hartwig and me is from the opening ceremony of Hartwig's 56 foot X 52 foot sculpture, Flügel der Versöhnung. The 3QD sign for our last ball (3rd photo) was made by Alta Price.

UPDATE, June 21, 2010:

RSVP in the comments area of this post as soon as possible.

Read more »

Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed:

Call it a revival, of sorts. In recent years, anyone interested in contemporary European philosophy has noticed a tendency variously called the religious or theological “turn” (adapting a formulation previously used to describe the “linguistic turn” of the 1960s and '70s). Thinkers have revisited scriptural texts, for example, or traced the logic of seemingly secular concepts, such as political sovereignty, back to their moorings in theology. The list of figures involved would include Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, and Jürgen Habermas — to give a list no longer or more heterogenous than that.

A sampling of recent work done in the wake of this turn can be found in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, a collection just issued by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. One of the editors, Anthony Paul Smith, is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Nottingham and also a research fellow at the Institute for Nature and Culture at DePaul University. The other, Daniel Whistler, is a tutor at the University of Oxford, where he just submitted a dissertation on F.W.J. Schelling's theology of language. I interviewed them about their book by e-mail. A transcript of the discussion follows.

Q: Let’s start with one word in your title — “postsecular.” What do you mean by this? People used to spend an awful lot of energy trying to determine just when modernity ended and postmodernity began. Does “postsecularity” imply any periodization?

APS: In the book we talk about the postsecular event, an obvious nod to the philosophy of Alain Badiou. For a long time in Europe and through its colonial activities our frame of discourse, the way we understood the relationship of politics and religion, was determined by the notion that there is a split between public politics and private religion. This frame of reference broke down. We can locate that break, for the sake of simplicity, in the anti-colonial struggles of the latter half of the 20th century. The most famous example is, of course, the initial thrust of the Iranian Revolution.

It took some time before the implications of this were thought through, and it is difficult to pin down when “postsecularity” came to prominence in the academy, but in the 1990s a number of Christian theologians like John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas, along with non-Christian thinkers like Talal Asad, began to question the typical assumption of philosophy of religion: that religious traditions and religious discourses need to be mediated through a neutral secular discourse in order to make sense. Their critique was simple: the secular is not neutral. Philosophy is intrinsically biased towards the secular. If you follow people like Asad and Tomoko Masuzawa, this means it is biased toward a Christian conception of the secular, and this hinders it from appreciating the thought structures at work in particular religions.

Richard Vinen reviews Jonathan Fenby's The General:Charles de Gaulle and the France he saved and Sudhir Hazareesingh's Le Mythe Gaullien, in the TLS:

Jonathan Fenby tells a revealing story. On May 29, 1958, France seemed on the brink of civil war. The army in Algeria had rebelled against the politicians in Paris. The President (René Coty) had told parliament that the country’s only hope was to “turn towards the most illustrious Frenchman, towards the man who, in the darkest year of our history, was our chief for the reconquest of freedom”. Charles de Gaulle, to whom these remarks referred, left his country house in Colombey-les-deux-Églises to go to Paris. His chauffeur drove so fast that he outran the police escort, which was only able to catch up when the general stopped his car so that he could relieve himself by the side of the road. De Gaulle the myth – the most illustrious Frenchman speeding to the capital to save his country once again – met de Gaulle the man – an elderly, retired soldier with a weak bladder.

Fenby’s book is mainly about the man rather than the myth: he writes movingly about de Gaulle’s relation with his daughter Anne, who had Down’s syndrome. Fenby is writing for an English audience. He explains the context that many French works take for granted and he translates quotations, a considerable achievement given de Gaulle’s often obscure and archaic vocabulary. This work will probably not tell those who have read recent French works, notably those of Éric Roussel, much that they do not know, though it will entertain them with its gripping evocation of the pace and improbability of de Gaulle’s life. It is certainly the best biography of de Gaulle to have been written in English.

Sudhir Hazareesingh has approached de Gaulle from a more oblique angle. Hazareesingh teaches at Oxford, but his study of de Gaulle’s myth is published by the most prestigious of French publishers (Gallimard) and, in many ways, it is a very French book. It is a wide-ranging and personal essay. Like work by Maurice Agulhon or Pierre Nora, it will one day be discussed as part of the myth that it analyses. There is even an autobiographical touch here – reminiscent of Régis Debray’s À Demain de Gaulle. Hazareesingh begins with a discussion of his father’s friendship with the Gaullist Maurice Druon and with his own evolution from youthful admiration for the French Communist Party to mature appreciation of de Gaulle. This is not, however, simply a book about de Gaulle. Rather, it seeks to show how de Gaulle evoked certain, sometimes quasi-religious, images concerned with salvation, liberation, fatherhood and martyrdom.

Robert Worth in the NYT Magazine:

It may be the oldest form of execution in the world, and it is certainly among the most barbaric. In the West, death by stoning is so remote from experience that it is best known through Monty Python skits and lurid fiction like Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.”

Yet two recent real world cases have struck a nerve: a young couple were stoned to death last week in northern Afghanistan for trying to elope, in a grim sign of the Taliban’s resurgence. And last month, an international campaign rose up in defense of an Iranian woman, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who had been sentenced to death by stoning on adultery charges.

Much of the outrage those cases generated — apart from the sheer anachronism of stoning in the 21st century — seems to stem from the gulf between sexual attitudes in the West and parts of the Islamic world, where some radical movements have turned to draconian punishments, and a vision of restoring a long-lost past, in their search for religious authenticity.

The stoning of adulterers was once aimed at preventing illegitimate births that might muddy the male tribal bloodlines of medieval Arabia. But it is now taking place in a world where more and more women demand reproductive freedoms, equal pay and equal status with men — in parts of the Islamic world as well as throughout the West.

Those clashing perspectives became apparent last month when Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, offered to grant asylum to Ms. Ashtiani, the Iranian woman convicted of adultery. His comments made clear that he viewed her as a victim — Brazil is not exactly known for its severe attitudes toward out-of-wedlock sex — and an online petition for her release drew hundreds of thousands of signatures.

From The Boston Globe:

To be single these days is to face a sea of advice about how to attract a partner. Men are attracted to youth and beauty; women are attracted to wealth and prestige. Or are they? There’s no shortage of impassioned opinion about what men and women want, yet there is little real evidence to support it. Even though finding love is one of our primary preoccupations, it has always been shrouded in mystery and guesswork. Adages like “opposites attract” feel comforting, but it would be even better to know what qualities actually entice potential partners in the real world. To really answer the question in a scientific way, we’d need to be able to observe the behavior of thousands of single people and see whom they choose to pursue and whom they pass over. We would need a peephole into the dating world.

As it turns out, for the first time in history such a thing exists: It’s called online dating. Research presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association found that 22 percent of heterosexual couples surveyed met online, and researchers believe the Web could soon eclipse friends as the primary means of finding mates. As dating interactions have moved from the privacy of bars and social gatherings to the digital world of websites and e-mails, they are generating an unprecedented trove of data about how the initial phases of romance unfold. Online profiles contain detailed personal and demographic information about website users, and their interactions are indelibly recorded in digital form. Unlike participants in a dating research study, online daters are behaving candidly, not modifying their behavior for an audience.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

The world could one day be an economically equal place, if the lower-income population have anything to do with it. In an interesting yet disheartening series of socioeconomic experiments, led by a team of UC Berkeley researchers, the findings are that those on the lower-income levels are more likely to give and be charitable than their higher paid counterparts. In one experiment in particular, led by doctoral student, Paul Piff and his researchers, participants completed a questionnaire reporting their socioeconomic status and a few days later were provided with $10 to share anonymously. The findings concluded the more generous of the income brackets were on the lower-income scale. A recent national survey reiterates the results, revealing lower-income people give more of their hard-earned money to charity than the wealthy.

More here.

Timothy Garton Ash in the NYRB blog:

The poet Paul Celan said of his native Czernowitz that it was a place where people and books used to live. Tony Judt was a man for whom books lived, as well as people. His mind, like his apartment on Washington Square, was full of books—and they walked with him, arguing, to the very end.

Critical though he was of French intellectuals, he shared with them a conviction that ideas matter. Being English, he thought facts matter too. As a historian, one of his most distinctive achievements was to integrate the intellectual and political history of twentieth-century Europe—revealing the multiple, sometimes unintended interactions over time of ideas and realities, thoughts and deeds, books and people.

In Postwar, a history of postwar Europe conceived as the continent’s cold war division was crumbling, he performed another great integration. While the two halves of the divided continent were being sewn together politically and economically, in the years after 1989, he brought together their histories. His 1968, for example, was not only Paris, and not only Prague, but rather the whole complex of their simultaneities, contradictions, and malentendus. His was the first major history of contemporary Europe to analyze the stories of Eastern and Western Europe in equally rigorous, nuanced detail, but also as part of a single, larger whole.

Over at The Subversive Copy Editor, an interview with the principal reviser Russell David Harper (via Brainiac over at the Boston Globe):

Russell David Harper is the only person on the planet with all of the following qualifications: He has worked as a manuscript editor for the University of Chicago Press for more than a dozen years, and he contributed to the fifteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. For nearly three years, he kept a finger on the pulse of CMOS readers by serving as editor of the online Q&A. He is a technology wonk (I’m sorry, Russell, but I looked it up to make sure, and you are a wonk), with experience in typesetting, proofreading, and printing. And for good measure, he’s a polymath, a published author, and a kind and generous and funny person whose patience and reliability under pressure are legendary.

Because of his unmatched experience in Chicago practices and his techie leanings, Russell was decided to be a perfect choice to serve as principal reviser for the sixteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. As principal reviser, he was responsible for drafting a detailed outline and summary of the new edition and, in cooperation with the Manuscript Editing Department at the University of Chicago Press and the CMOS Board of Advisors, for writing the manuscript itself and serving as its nominal author through all the stages of publication.

CAROL: So, Russell, tell me: when you were asked to revise CMOS for the sixteenth edition, did you have any fears or reservations, and if so, what were they, and did you get over them?

RUSSELL: Well yes. My first fear was for my family. I knew the Manual well, and I knew what a revision would mean. (They survived.) Next, I worried for my safety. My third-floor office at the time—in the attic of a hundred-year-old house in Ithaca, New York—trembled and swayed whenever a city bus or fire truck passed by (about every twenty minutes). So I resolved to make daily backups of every stage of the manuscript to a variety of off-site servers, leaving passwords and instructions with a close and highly literate family member across the Atlantic.

Also check out their two photo projects Dancers vs. Garbage and Dancers vs. Food, as well.

Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Ever since word got out that a prominent Harvard University researcher was on leave after an investigation into academic wrongdoing, a key question has remained unanswered: What, exactly, did he do?

The researcher himself, Marc D. Hauser, isn't talking. The usually quotable Mr. Hauser, a psychology professor and director of Harvard's Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, is the author of Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (Ecco, 2006) and is at work on a forthcoming book titled “Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad.” He has been voted one of the university's most popular professors.

Harvard has also been taciturn. The public-affairs office did issue a brief written statement last week saying that the university “has taken steps to ensure that the scientific record is corrected in relation to three articles co-authored by Dr. Hauser.” So far, Harvard officials haven't provided details about the problems with those papers. Were they merely errors or something worse?

An internal document, however, sheds light on what was going on in Mr. Hauser's lab.

More here.

UPDATE: Ed Yong has collected a bunch of related links with more info here:

The case of Marc Hauser really erupted this week. The Chronicle published the first direct accusation of wrongdoing from a brave lab member. Harvard Dean Michael Smith published a letter confirming the misconduct, David Dobbs has yet more great analysis (including a discussion on study design) Frans de Waal comments on the implications, and Nicholas Wade has an excellent piece on Hauser, including viewpoints from a veritable who’s who of scientists, such as Hauser’s mentors, Cheney and Seyfarth. The last sentence is tragic.

Cyril Almeida in Dawn:

It didn’t register immediately. That the flood coverage is really about two catastrophes, not one. There is of course the damage caused by the flooding itself, the one Pakistan will take years to recover from. Then there’s the damage of the last 63 years that the floods have uncovered.

By now everyone’s seen them on television screens, the miles-long processions of barely recognisable humanity, the materially dispossessed, the broken and the bowed.

Traumatised, lives shattered, you expect the flood victims to look a certain way. But it’s more than that. The victims are clearly not new acquaintances of adversity. You can hear it in their voices, see it in their eyes, sense it through their leathery skin. The victims of the floods carry the burden of a lifetime of misery.

The second catastrophe: the great floods of 2010 have uncovered 63 years of the great unwashed masses of this country. The people the state has failed in the most terrible of ways, not this week, not last month, but over its entire, sordid history.

More here.

Stephen Budiansky in the New York Times:

Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use.

The result has been all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.

The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus. This is particularly the case with respect to the energy costs of transporting food. One popular and oft-repeated statistic is that it takes 36 (sometimes it’s 97) calories of fossil fuel energy to bring one calorie of iceberg lettuce from California to the East Coast. That’s an apples and oranges (or maybe apples and rocks) comparison to begin with, because you can’t eat petroleum or burn iceberg lettuce.

It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown that whether it’s grown in California or Maine, or whether it’s organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.

It takes about a tablespoon of diesel fuel to move one pound of freight 3,000 miles by rail; that works out to about 100 calories of energy.

More here.