Bullshit and Philosophy Part 8

G.A. COHEN was educated at McGill and Oxford Universities where he obtained, respectively, the degrees of B.A. in Philosophy and Politics and B. Phil. in Philosophy in 1963. For twenty-two years he was a Lecturer and then a Reader in Philosophy at University College, London. In 1985 he became Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory and a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford. Professor Cohen is the author of Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978; expanded edition, 2000), History, Labour, and Freedom (1988), Self-Owners.h.i.+p, Freedom, and Equality (1995), and If You're an Egalitarian, How come You're So Rich? (2000). Cohen has given lectures all over the world, including the Tanner Lectures at Stanford University in 1991 and the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University in 1996. He was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985. The bulls.h.i.+t that for a short while engulfed him, but from which he escaped, was French bulls.h.i.+t, and in particular, the bulls.h.i.+t of Althusser and the Althusserians.

HEATHER DOUGLAS earned her Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1998. She has since lived in Tacoma, as the Phibbs Professor of Science and Ethics at the University of Puget Sound, and in Knoxville, as a.s.sistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee. Her experience with bulls.h.i.+t began with intense discussions around the Douglas family dinner table. This early training in compet.i.tive discourse laid the foundations for an interest in both philosophy and bulls.h.i.+t. Being a "professional" philosopher these days, she keeps her sanity by discussing issues with her husband, Ted Richards, who is a great bulls.h.i.+t detector, and by hanging out with her large dogs, who are terrible bulls.h.i.+tters, being stunningly honest and forthright creatures. She also likes to grow plants, which do very well with large amounts of fertilizer.

MARK EVANS is currently Senior Lecturer in Politics, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Wales, Swansea. He received his first degree (in Philosophy, Politics and Economics) from Mansfield College, Oxford, and his doctorate-which was on what he still maintains to be a non-bulls.h.i.+tty concept of self-realization in political theory-from St. Antony's College, Oxford. His ire against bulls.h.i.+t was first aroused in the mid-1980s when some of his student contemporaries, looking forward to the wads of cash to be earned in business, started spouting management-bulls.h.i.+t speak. His decision to stay in academia was bolstered by the hope that he wouldn't have to put up with such stuff in his working life. He is therefore mightily p.i.s.sed off that it has now well and truly infected the running of universities, without it even being tinged with the kind of ironic tone that would show that the poor souls at the academic coal-face can't possibly take it seriously.

STEVE FULLER is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, England. He was first exposed to bulls.h.i.+t when he took courses in a.n.a.lytic philosophy as an undergraduate at Columbia University. There he ran across people who bluffly promoted the virtues of content-free forms of reasoning. Over the years, he has come to appreciate the subtle virtues of this most rigorous form of rhetoric, the bulls.h.i.+t that dares not speak its name: to wit, logic. He received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from the University of Pittsburgh, and through a career that has extended over a dozen books on issues relating to social epistemology, he is nowadays a.s.sociated with science and technology studies, a field largely dedicated to demonstrating, if not celebrating, the bulls.h.i.+t behind what pa.s.ses for authoritative knowledge in society these days.

GARY L. HARDCASTLE is a.s.sistant Professor of philosophy at Bloomsburg University in central Pennsylvania, where he teaches philosophy of science, logic, and, if he is asked nicely, introduction to philosophy. His research interests include the philosophy of science, epistemology, and the history of American philosophy in the twentieth century. He is the author of several articles in philosophy of science and the co-editor, with Alan Richardson, of Logical Empiricism in North America (2003) and, with George Reisch, of Monty Python and Philosophy (2005). Although he inhaled deeply the bulls.h.i.+t-rich culture and ethos of 1970s America, his most memorable encounter with bulls.h.i.+t is his father's presentation of the teleological argument for G.o.d's existence as they drove together through the utter wasteland of Youngstown, Ohio, in 1978.

SCOTT KIMBROUGH, a.s.sociate Professor of philosophy at Jacksonville University, holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in philosophy from Southwestern University. His experience growing up in Texas, among Texans who truly believe that their state is superior and greet the presentation of contrary evidence with an astonished blend of incredulity and contempt, convinced him that Frankfurt is wrong to deny that bulls.h.i.+t can be produced unintentionally. His wife Tonia, a professional editor who frequently informs him of how bad most philosophical writing is, has kept him sensitive to what Frankfurt calls "pretentious bulls.h.i.+t."

HANS MAES received his PhD at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and is now affiliated with the University of Kent, England, where he writes on issues in moral theory and aesthetics. He is happily married to Katrien Schaubroeck-no bulls.h.i.+t.

Born in Caracas, Venezuela to an American mother and a Czech father with a Venezuelan pa.s.sport, VANESSA NEUMANN received her B.A. from Columbia University in Economics and Philosophy. After stints in corporate finance and diplomacy, she returned to Columbia University for her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in moral political philosophy under the tutelage of the John Rawls protege, Thomas Pogge. Dr. Neumann is currently Adjunct a.s.sistant Professor of political philosophy at Hunter College, City University of New York and sits on the advisory board of the Inst.i.tute of Latin American Studies (ILAS) at Columbia University.

She also works with political think tanks, including the International Inst.i.tute for Strategic Studies (IISS). Preferring to spend her days mired in horses.h.i.+t rather than bulls.h.i.+t, Dr. Neumann finds galloping across a field on horseback a highly effective strategy for dealing with the stresses of daily life.

CONSUELO PRETI earned a PhD in philosophy from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and is now an a.s.sociate Professor of Philosophy at the College of New Jersey. Her interests run to the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind; she is the author of On Kripke and the co-author of On Fodor, both in the Wadsworth Philosophers Series. She enjoys surfing, yoga, and English bull terriers, and when asked about her most formative bulls.h.i.+t experiences she is too polite to mention her first department meeting (and many subsequent ones).

GEORGE A. REISCH holds the t.i.tle (for eight years now) in the All-Chicagoland Summarize Otto Neurath Compet.i.tion. He received a Ph.D. from the Chicago School of Communist Dance, where he created, produced, and performed in "Fregenstein: Begriffsschrift and the Music of ABBA," to wide accolades. He is also the author of many things concerned with philosophy of science and its history, such as the book How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science (2005). At parties, he impersonates Gary Hardcastle impersonating Ludwig Wittgenstein (call 800GoValidity for bookings). As for bulls.h.i.+t in popular culture, he thinks it all began with The Monkees.

ALAN RICHARDSON likes candlelit dinners, reading Reichenbach to children at the public library, and long walks on the beach in Vancouver, where he is Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished University Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, and is the author, editor, and reader of many things with 'logical empiricism' in the t.i.tle. He wrote Carnap's Construction of the World (1997). This biographical blurb is his most recent encounter with bulls.h.i.+t, although his earliest political memory is that of going to a Nixon rally in Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania, in 1968, escorted by his father, who is, like his mother, a life-long Republican.

KATRIEN SCHAUBROECK is a.s.sistant at the Center for Logic, Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Language at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven where she is writing a dissertation on Harry Frankfurt and the debate on practical reason. Her interests are in moral psychology, meta-ethics, and theories of practical reason.

KENNETH A. TAYLOR is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Stanford University, where he thinks about questions at the intersection of the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind (with an occasional foray into the history of philosophy). He is the author of many papers in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, as well as Meaning and Truth: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language (1998) and Reference and the Rational Mind (2003). With his colleague John Perry he hosts Philosophy Talk (www.philosophytalk.org), a weekly, one-hour radio series that brings the richness of philosophic thought to everyday subjects.

DAVID J. TIETGE is a.s.sistant Professor in English and a.s.sociate Director of Writing at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. He has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and an M.A. in English Literature from Indiana State University. His scholarly interests include rhetoric theory, literary theory and criticism, rhetoric of science, and history and cultural studies, and he is the author of Flash Effect: Science and the Rhetorical Origins of Cold War America (2002). His seminal experience with bulls.h.i.+t occurred before his first memory.

CORNELIS DE WAAL studied Economics and Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He learned to detect bulls.h.i.+t in the trenches while working as an editor and journalist for a glossy engineering magazine in Amsterdam. In 1992 he emigrated to the U.S. to begin a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Miami in Coral Gables. Currently he is a.s.sociate Professor at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, where he also directs the philosophy graduate program. He is one of the editors of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce, a thirty-volume scholarly edition that is being published by Indiana University Press. He is the author of books on Peirce and pragmatism, which he happily typed with two fingers (K is his favorite letter), and he is a culinary adventurer who likes to eat raw fish and red ants.

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Winfrey, Oprah Wittgenstein, Ludwig bulls.h.i.+t in Woolf, Leonard word of mouth advertising Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Zola, emile ALSO FROM OPEN COURT.

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1.

"On Bulls.h.i.+t" first appeared as an essay in The Raritan Review VI:2 (1986), and was then reprinted in Frankfurt's The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 117133. In 2005, "On Bulls.h.i.+t" was published as the book, On Bulls.h.i.+t (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Throughout Bulls.h.i.+t and Philosophy, all references to On Bulls.h.i.+t are to the 2005 edition.

2.

Among the many books critical of the second Bush administration are several by former Was.h.i.+ngton insiders and United Nations officials who offer first-hand accounts of alleged manipulations of intelligence used to promote the Iraq war. There is, for example, Richard A. Clarke's Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004); John W. Dean's Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Little, Brown, 2004); Scott Ritter and Seymour Hersh's Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein (New York: Tauris, 2005); and Hans Blix's Disarming Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2004).

3.

Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 12. Emphasis in original.

4.

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 114.

5.

Wissenschaftliche Weltauffa.s.sung. Der Wiener Kreis. Translated as The Scientific Conception of the World. The Vienna Circle, and reprinted in S. Sarkar, ed., The Emergence of Logical Empiricism from 1900 to the Vienna Circle (New York: Garland, 1996), p. 321.

6.

Rudolf Carnap, "uberwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische a.n.a.lyse der Sprache," Erkenntnis 2 (1932): pp. 219241, translated as "The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical a.n.a.lysis of Language" in A.J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism (New York: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 6081.

7.

Originally published in S. Buss and L. Overton, eds., Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt (Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts: MIT Press), pp. 321339. Reproduced as Chapter 8 of Bulls.h.i.+t and Philosophy. Throughout Bulls.h.i.+t and Philosophy, all references to "Deeper Into Bulls.h.i.+t" are to the work as it appears in this volume.

8.

Frankfurt himself has also replied briefly to Cohen: "Reply to G.A. Cohen," in Contours of Agency, pp. 34044. Here Frankfurt arguably cedes ground to Cohen's critique, but maintains the significance of the intention-oriented bulls.h.i.+t he defined. Truth-indifferent bulls.h.i.+t, Frankfurt insists, much more than the kind of academic obscurity Cohen targets, threatens our "respect for the distinction between the true and the false" on which the very "conduct of civilized life" depends (p. 343).