On Testimony

What is it Like to be a Woman in Philosophy? (hat-tip to Dave Holly).

Bastards, Fellow Travellers And Holy Fools

Yesterday, I heard back about an article I'd submitted to a journal. For the second time, despite both referees recommending revise and resubmit, it was rejected. This'd be less frustrating if the reviewing was better. For example, one of the two referees was unsure the argument of the article was. Presumably then they didn't read the two sentences, one of which began with "[f]irst" and the other with "[s]econd", which followed me saying "Thus, in this paper I try and do two things" towards the end of first paragraph on the second page. Sometimes one wonders exactly whose peers it is that are doing the reviewing, and whether it's a group you'd want to spend your professional life working with.

On The Long And Glorious History Of Aggressive Atheism

The devil has always had all the best tunes.

The Second Time As Farce, Or, And A Pony Please

I'm reading The Hugo Young Papers, whose main feature thus far has been to make you realise how far the terms of political discourse have been shifted to the libertarian right since Young started his journalistic career: the idea of the Tories fighting an election over their right to impose a national incomes policy, as Heath did in '74, is unimaginable now. However, I've now just reached the early eighties and the formation of the SDP and then the Alliance. This is from the interview with Richard Holme in January 1982, who was later to be Lib Dem spokesman in the House of Lords but had then just finished a stint as President of the Liberals. Young asks about the prospect of the Alliance going into coalition with the Tories after the next election and, crucially, how to extract proportional representation from such an arrangement; "how to prevent getting a pledge to PR out of the Tory leader, and then this being ditched by Tory MPs - meanwhile the Alliance being locked into the government and looking stupid":

[G]ive support on the back benches for, say, eighteen months: which would mean that the Alliance would bring down the government, not itself be brought down by Tory backbenchers. This would put the government's survival on their commitment to PR being pushed through the HC - hence a much better tactic than joining the government on a condition not fulfilled.

I Don't Need Hear The Words

The branch of the Gagosian in London, near King's Cross, currently has an exhibition of lateish Picasso, of works from 1945-62. It is, so far as I could see, almost unbelievably bad, not in the sense that it's poorly hung or curated, but in the sense that the vast majority of the work in it lacks any obvious redeeming quality. There are some nicely bold posters, a couple of the characteristic sketches of bulls pared down to essential, pure lines, and a few entertaining ceramics, but the majority of the work is paintings, and terrible paintings. They're muddy, lazily uncomposed, faux naive, as if experiments in how far a reputation'll take you, without purpose even in their purposelessness. There's nothing disconcerting or arresting about them, they're just ugly and placid, the colours mutedly uncomplementary, without either coherence or contradiction, the lines slapdash, unalive, just left lying there. It's been reviewed as showing an intimate, domestic side to Picasso: if that grey formlessness was his domestic life, God help him.

Quality Journalism

Charmingly exposed here.

On Speaking Plainly

I like a bit of over-complication as much as the next man, but certain styles of writing I find very difficult to get on with. To wit, from the introduction to Ashenden and Owen's 'Foucault Contra Habermas':

The first aspect of this criticism is based on an elementary confusion in that, although Foucault's analyses typically operate by focusing on the practices through which relations of knowledge, power and ethics are articulated and focusing on the effects of these practices, that is, the ways in which they structure forms of subjectivity, this does not entail the rejection of hermeneutics per se, since it is through the self-understandings and actions of human agents that these practices have been produced and are maintained or transformed (as Foucault's essay 'The subject and power (1982) as well as the preceding scetion of this introduction makes clear).

Whatever else it may have done, as part of a text whose authors think sentences that long and with that many subclauses are appropriate, it seems unlikely that the preceding section of the introduction will have made much clear1.

1. I am of course aware that the first sentence of the post immediately below is at least as long.