Tuesday, March 16, 2010

“Philosophy: Summary and Explanation of Feminist ... - Associated Content” plus 3 more

“Philosophy: Summary and Explanation of Feminist ... - Associated Content” plus 3 more

Philosophy: Summary and Explanation of Feminist ... - Associated Content

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 02:16 PM PDT

What is Feminist Empiricism?

Perhaps one of the most exciting developments in philosophy over the past twenty or so years has been the development of a strong feminist epistemology. Epistemology in philosophy is the theory and study of knowledge, so feminist epistemology is the study of knowledge from a feminist perspective. This generally means a focus on the way gender, inequality, and sexism influence both what we know and how we know it.

Feminist epistemology has been particularly relevant in the philosophy of science, and feminist empiricism has been an especially critical component of philosophy of science.

In order to understand feminist empiricist, it's first important to note that there has been a long history in science of poorly constructed or erroneous experiments based on sexism and gender bias. A century or so ago, scientists claimed that women's uteruses required extra blood supply and that blood supply to the brain took away from the blood supply to the uterus. Consequently, sending women to college would make them infertile. Other scientists have claimed that women are more animalistic than men, that women are dumber, and that women are for various reasons not fit for public life. Many of these claims were backed with "scientific" studies that have long since been discredited. And many of these studies, sadly, were performed by otherwise respected scientists.

So what went wrong? This is where feminist empiricism comes in. Feminist empiricist argue that sexism and gender can bias the perspective of the observer, thus leading to faulty and poorly constructed scientific experiments. Consequently, sexism harms science and detracts from our ability to obtain scientific knowledge. In contrast to other feminist epistemologists, feminist empiricists do not argue that, for example, the unique standpoint of women is significant but that instead the bias of the researcher leads to poorly constructed experiments and incorrect data.

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Philosophy: Summary, Explanation of Loux - "The ... - Associated Content

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 02:16 PM PDT

Possible Worlds in Philosophy

In "The Necessary and the Possible", Loux argues that the notions of necessity and possibility are critical for metaphysics and addresses the history of the empiricist attack on these concepts. Loux explains, "The notions of the necessary, the possible, the impossible, and the contingent at work here are called modal notions." Empiricists have attacked the concept of modal notions in two ways. First, they have claimed that modal notions cannot be "tracked back to our empirical confrontation with the world." A more recent attack has been on the grounds that philosophical discourse must use extensional language (wherein if terms are replaced with coreferential terms the statement does not lose its truth value). Sentences that use modal languages are not necessarily extensional and therefore do not fit into empiricist ideals for philosophy. When philosophers make a modal claim, they cannot have a firm grasp of precisely what it is they are committing to. Complicating things further is the fact that logicians have worked on developing modal logic, but have determined that it is possible to create different and nonequivalent forms of modal logic which provide different answers to philosophical questions. However, logicians utilized Lebinizian philosophy to create modal logic that appealed to the concept of possible worlds and partially solve the problems of modal logic.

Loux goes on to separate two forms of modality: de dicto modality is "the ascription of the property of necessary truth/falsehood, possible truth/falsehood, or contingent truth/falsehood to a proposition taken as a whole". De re modality "specifies the modal status of a thing's exmplification of some attribute." Loux says that those who defend the "possible worlds framework" claim that de re modality can be explained by reference to the concept of possible worlds.

Loux also addresses the idea of "possible worlds nominalism" :

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Danny Perez Talks Wombs, Angry Mamas, and the ... - Flavorwire

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 10:49 AM PDT

"To me, this was a normal movie, to me this is a movie I'd watch with someone," says director Danny Perez of his first feature film, ODDSAC, a visual album co-created with Animal Collective. "I realize to the average person that it's probably extreme." One scene features a family camping in the woods. "Or out there." The marshmallows expand, oozing viciously from their mouths. "Or weird." A forlorn vampire, like a disfigured beauty-drained Edward Cullen, lurks behind the trees. "Or whatever." He plunges his teeth first into the little boy, a curly-haired redhead.

All this is just five minutes of ODDSAC. But such is the madness that occurs when one is responsible for translating the brain-bursting, spitter spatter electronics of Animal Collective. Currently touring the country with his movie, Danny sat down with us to chat wombs, angry mamas, and cinematic philosophy.

Here he is in his own words:

That whole [camping] scene was my attempt to subvert the nuclear family and eating marshmallows gives it some humor as far as something sugary being something dangerous.

I think we just wanted a visual title, a title that would stand on its own and functions soundwise . . . [ODDSAC] comes off your mouth not super serious but it's kind of ominous, something about that configuration of letters.

I would skip school and shoot the March for Life and make weird montages of bloody baby props and Christians marching in Washington.

I'm a firm believer in the sense that everything has been done before, especially in this medium. At this point, it's a matter of reconfiguring the ingredients.

When a baby is being born, it develops, it goes through these stages and, for a lack of a better word, if you took it out, it would look like a mess. It would look, like, so fucked up. It's design in its most biological means. I don't know what I like about it, that's for the critics to write about.

Something that draws me to those shapes and forms is it being amorphous, like no symmetry. I really dislike symmetry.

When people start talking and there are lines, you're already entering a traditional movie shooting format. You're already entering a means that's not set up to go somewhere different.

A lot of these decisions are probably less impressive or interesting when I get down to it.

That whole scene with the kids, that was a disaster. It fell apart, it was a nightmare. One of the mothers pulled her kid out halfway through the shoot and accused me of being a satanist in front of all the other parents and threatened to sue us if we used any of the dialogue.

It was Dave in the room with all these kids and she was like, 'You're a satanist, this is ritualistic!' I had to sit down with the other parents and explain to them, 'listen here's the deal, I know it seems weird, I'm a nice guy, I love kids.'

I think we generally wanted to exploit that weird gray area. Sometimes you're so overwhelmed, you're so sad that you laugh to become happy. When so you're so happy, you can get depressed really suddenly, or at least I can. That was something I wanted to explore, those surges of emotions, as far as the contrast of something really happy with something really brutal and have them commingle and form something new.

Not the high, not the low, but the medium.

View the trailer below, and click here to find out when ODDSAC is coming to your town. Look for it on DVD on June 29.

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It's altruism as a moral philosophy. "The only good is ... - RedState

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 10:56 AM PDT

While I'm just as "avid" a fan of Glenn Beck as my co-group-blogger Rusty (i.e. only really catch him on the occasional web snippet), I have read the transcript of his "social justice" rant, and I really don't think Beck said what his detractors say he said.

Beck was talking about churches/denominations for whom one of their driving forces is implementing aid to the poor and oppressed via government force, and seem to think that almost every time Jesus opened His mouth He was speaking economics.  (I've seen the parable of the sower turned into one where the birds taking away the seed were priests taking temple tithes and tribute, and the thorns choking out the seed were the Roman tax collectors stealing from these humble farmers.  Jesus said plainly what He meant, but some can still wrangle an economic message out of it they find more palatable.)  The term "social justice" seems to figure prominently in these forms of theology, and Beck was just saying that you should avoid them completely if you see that they do.

What his critics are doing are quoting Bible verses that show we should help the poor.  Thing is, I don't think Beck would disagree, and it doesn't appear at all that he was saying he disagreed.  What he was saying is that churches where the phrases "social justice" and "economic justice" figure prominently are the ones trying to "spread the wealth around" via legislation and are going to bankrupt us in doing so; a political message.  Of the reports so far, only Hannah Siegel, reporting for ABC news, even mentioned this:

Stu Burguiere, executive producer at "The Glenn Beck Radio Program," sought to clarify Beck's comments today.

"Like most Americans, Glenn strongly supports and believes in 'social justice' when it is defined as 'good Christian charity,'" he said. "Glenn strongly opposes when Rev. Wright and other leaders use 'social justice' as a euphemism for their real intention — redistribution of wealth."

So Beck is in favor of the concept of social justice (without the quotes) but against those who use that term to couch ends that he finds immoral.

But the reactions from critics seem to miss this completely.  When Wallis insinuates that Beck is lined up against Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu and Mother Teresa, or National Council of Churches President Rev. Canon Peg Chemberlin says, "Justice is a concept throughout the scriptures", they're both completely misrepresenting what Beck actually said.

Beck does need to clarify, on-air, that he is in favor of the concept of social justice, though, if you fairly read his words, he never once insinuated that he wasn't in favor of giving to the poor; this clarification would be for those who didn't realize that the first time.  I understand that he did just that recently, though I haven't heard or read what he said yet.

Albert Mohler has the most balanced analysis of this issue.  Read the whole thing.  However, I want to quote one bit from it, showing how many Beck critics really missed the point.  Mohler notes that Beck's aims are political.  However…

My concern is very different. As an evangelical Christian, my concern is the primacy of the Gospel of Christ — the Gospel that reveals the power of God in the salvation of sinners through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The church's main message must be that Gospel. The New Testament is stunningly silent on any plan for governmental or social action. The apostles launched no social reform movement. Instead, they preached the Gospel of Christ and planted Gospel churches. Our task is to follow Christ's command and the example of the apostles.

There is more to that story, however. The church is not to adopt a social reform platform as its message, but the faithful church, wherever it is found, is itself a social reform movement precisely because it is populated by redeemed sinners who are called to faithfulness in following Christ. The Gospel is not a message of social salvation, but it does have social implications.

I grew up in the Salvation Army; a social services arm of the Christian church if ever there was one.  But one that stays true to this concept of creating social change by implementing the Gospel, not a government program.

Doug Payton blogs at Considerettes.

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