Posted on Saturday, September 16, 2017

Clutter

Civil American, Volume 2, Article 3 (September 16, 2017), https://goo.gl/38wd1m.

| By John Lachs |

When our ancestors lived in caves, every tool was a prized possession. Furs for comfort and drawings to decorate the cave were difficult to come by. They were passed down from generation to generation.

Photo courtesy of Paul Brennan, CC0.

Later, when human productivity made the goods of the world readily available, our grandparents became collectors. Growing control over nature enabled them to stockpile everything imaginable, converting their homes into storage units.

Some claim this was in response to the tough times of the Great Depression. Others attribute it to smart shopping: buying on sale is a great saving, even if you never use the item.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com, CCO.

Photo of a water tower made to look like a "catsup" bottle.

Photo courtesy of Andrew Keith, CC0.

The important idea is that the twenty-eighth sweater and the 5-pound Ketchup bottle are there, ready to be used…if, that is, they can be found. “You never know when it’ll come in handy” is a great justification if what you look for is not lost in the clutter.

We feel it impossible to discard perfectly usable clothing even if we have no intention of ever using it. Surely, there is nothing wrong with keeping food that is only a few months past the expiration date. And though we have no interest in the second treadmill a friend wants to give away, we’ll manage to find a place for it.

Courtesy of Flickr, CCO, some rights reserved.

There is always room for the next coffee table and, after a good sale, the clothes in the closets just have to be compressed a little more. Eventually, the stuff we collect invades all rooms and peaks out from under the beds.

The moment of truth comes when we have to move. The death of a loved one or a divorce reveals the momentousness of the collection. Every item has memories attached, everything cries to be preserved. Discarding anything feels like losing a friend.

Photo courtesy of Dwight Burdette, CCO.

Is there a solution? Only one as radical as surgery is for cancer. Take ten items you cannot live without. Leave everything in place and get a couple of friends to bring their friends to carry away whatever they want. What is left can go to charity.

What we value says a lot about who we are. Look over the ten objects you kept. What do they say about you?

Dr. John Lachs is Centennial Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of The Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA).

Journal Archive

Posted on Friday, September 8, 2017

Call for Papers – UPDATED

CivilAmerican.com

UPDATE: The Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA) recently launched Civil American, our newest venue for public philosophical engagement, as a peer-reviewed digital journal on our Web site. We are now announcing also a benefit to the authors of our first 20 articles, beginning in September of 2017: for each of the next 20 articles published in the journal, author(s) of accepted pieces will be paid an honorarium of $100 per essay (co-authors will split it).

Adobe PDF version of this call for papers.

SOPHIA Trustees Dr. John Shook and Dr. Eric Thomas Weber first envisioned Civil American as a journal targeting general-audiences, a philosophical equivalent to Scientific American. The United States have a rich intellectual tradition, yet much public discourse tends to be sensationalist, rather than civil and philosophical.

Civil American is a place for scholars in philosophy or other fields, students, and SOPHIA members to submit short essays, between 700 and 3,000 words, on topics of importance for living and policy-making, as individuals and communities.

In addition to single essays, we welcome proposals for panels of submissions from groups interested in writing on topics in common. Each piece will be released individually and will then be archived in a yearly volume.

We welcome submissions under 3,000 words (though longer pieces will be considered) and sent by email to: shanecourtland@gmail.com as an MS Word file.

Chief Editor
Shane Courtland (West Virginia University)

Editorial Board

Elizabeth Anderson (University Michigan)
Peter Boghossian (Portland State University)
Thom Brooks (Durham University)
Daniel Brunson (Morgan State University)
Shane Courtland (West Virginia University)
Tommy Curry (Texas A&M University)
Marilyn Fischer (University of Dayton)
William Irwin (King’s College)
Jackie Kegley (California State University Bakersfield)
John Lachs (Vanderbilt University)
Jana Mohr Lone (University Washington)
Christopher P. Long (Michigan State University)
George R. Lucas (University of Notre Dame)
Michael Lynch (University of Connecticut)
Bertha Alvarez Manninen (Arizona State University)
John McDermott (Texas A&M University)
Scott Pratt (University of Oregon)
Gad Saad (Concordia University)
Michael Shermer (Chapman University)
John Shook (Bowie State University)
Peter Singer (Princeton University)
Eric Thomas Weber (University of Kentucky)

For more information and a journal archive, visit CivilAmerican.com.

Posted on Thursday, May 25, 2017

State-Sponsored Hacktivism and “Soft War”

Civil American, Volume 2, Article 2 (May 25, 2017), https://goo.gl/R55J4V.

| By George R. Lucas |

A Moral and Legal Challenge in the Cyber Domain |

Skeptics (e.g., Thomas Rid, 2013) have cast doubt on the notion of authentic cyber warfare. Cyber conflict consists, the skeptics argue, solely of activities which fall well short of full scale warfare: e.g., crime, vandalism, “hacktivism” (political activism by individuals and organizations carried out in the cyber domain), industrial espionage, and military espionage. Talk of cyber “warfare,” they complain, is largely conceptual confusion, coupled with misplaced metaphorical exaggeration.

(U.S. Air Force Photo/Raymond McCoy)

Against such criticisms, I have argued by contrast that there is a distinctive category of cyber conflict that qualifies as warfare – or, more correctly, which rises to the level of the “use, or threat of use, of force by states; or, the equivalent of an armed attack” in international law (Lucas 2017). This new kind of warfare has thus far manifest itself in two distinctive forms:

effects-based weapons (such as Stuxnet) which can be deployed to damage or destroy military targets; and
weapons and attacks in the cyber domain intended to produce political effects similar to those usually sought as the goal or objective of a conventional use of force by states against one another.

I have labeled this second class of cyber hostilities “state-sponsored hacktivism” (SSH). SSH is one of the principle tactics of a wider phenomenon, recently dubbed “soft war,” or unarmed conflict (Gross & Meisels, 2017) [Note]. It qualifies as warfare because it is deployed to compel an adversary to yield to the political aims of the state utilizing it. SSH is perfectly capable of achieving the equivalent of occupying an enemy’s cities, destroying his army, and breaking his will to fight. It is fully capable of moving a political center of gravity from a given posture prior to the attack, to one more in keeping with the attacker’s own political aspirations vis á vis the victim’s in the aftermath. In short, this form of cyber conflict satisfies the classical definition of Clausewitz (1830) regarding war as politics carried out by alternative means.

SSH is not identical to, nor can it be merely reduced to acts of vandalism, crime, or espionage, although it utilizes such components within the framework of an SSH attack. One might say that SSH is either none of the above, or else it involves all of the above “on steroids.” Considerations of scale and magnitude, as well as of ease of access, are important in understanding this category of warfare, much as such considerations have been, in the past, for differentiating between “private” and domestic uses of conventional lethal force (e.g., as criminal acts by individuals or organizations), and those of “public” warfare that are state-sponsored. (more…)

Posted on Tuesday, January 3, 2017

The Illusion of Purely Rational Discussion: A Reply to Courtland’s Reply

Civil American, Volume 2, Article 1 (January 3, 2017), https://goo.gl/izlRgu.

| By Sergia Hay |

Dr. Shane Courtland.

I’d like to thank Shane Courtland for his reply to my response to his original posting, “Faith and Betrayal of the Philosophical Method.” I’m eager to continue this conversation about an important and timely subject: free speech in the classroom, and perhaps more broadly within public discourse. As such, it is also connected to other current debates about the appropriateness of trigger warnings, perceived over-sensitivity of some students and fellow citizens, explicit and implicit censorship, and political correctness. (Editor’s note: Check out SOPHIA’s online symposium on trigger warnings here!).

At the end of his reply, Courtland wrote, “It is for the sake of progress, not in spite of it, therefore, that I champion first and foremost the philosophical method over and above any particular view that has come from it.” I agree that philosophical method should be used as a means for progress, but I don’t believe the method itself is value-free or neutral. On the contrary, I think that philosophical method and the subjects we choose to examine with the method are already biased, even if for good reason.

Most of us who teach philosophy, I would venture to guess, have adopted classroom discussion guidelines that are similar to the ones described by Courtland. Most of us, I trust, have been trained to emphasize the role of reasoning over opining in the construction of arguments, to temporarily suspend judgment to weigh evidence, and to have a basic requirement of civility. I do this because I share John Stuart Mill’s optimistic attitude that “wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument.” Also like Mill, I don’t believe that the argumentative methods of philosophy alone can prompt us to revise our erroneous thinking, but rather “discussion and experience” and further discussion “to show how experience is to be interpreted” are all added together in a complex recipe of genuine and lasting persuasion. Argumentation is but one ingredient along with human relationships, values, identities, our historical circumstances and systems, and our understanding of these things.

These guidelines we choose for classroom discussion are not value neutral since they reflect pre-established commitments such as the view that unsupported, purely emotional and anecdotal responses are not as good as ones that rely on evidence or other more stable forms of justification. The method itself discriminates against and excludes certain kinds of response- and this discrimination goes way beyond the exclusion of hate speech, no matter how narrowly defined. By laying out formal rules of engagement, we indicate correct classroom speech while suppressing and discouraging other kinds of speech. These value laden guidelines are part of what it means for philosophers to be gatekeepers of integrity (from my earlier post).

The central and difficult issue Courtland presents in his response to me has to do with our freedom and responsibility to examine all views. The position Courtland presents, via Mill, is two-fold: 1) if someone holds the correct view and it goes unchallenged, then the view is in danger of becoming dead dogma, and 2) if someone holds the wrong view and it goes unchallenged, then the view cannot be revised. I am certainly not opposed to challenging views, since I agree that is the business of philosophy. However, I am opposed to challenging views just for the sake of challenging them alone without the exercise of proper judgment and an understanding of people and their intentions for participating in discussion in the first place.

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Posted on Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Faith Without Dead Dogma: A Reply to Hay

Civil American, Volume 1, Article 5 (December 21, 2016), https://goo.gl/IywlxM.

| By Shane Courtland |

After reading a thoughtful response from Dr. Hay regarding my previous blog post, I thought it would be helpful to discuss my philosophical pedagogy. Even if you have never taken a philosophy class before, the core elements of my teaching method are still applicable outside of the classroom. Moreover, describing how I teach philosophy should better show what I mean when I say that “Philosophy is a method” and “I worship that method.”

When we discuss various topics, I insist that the class be bound by three rules. Their observance helps facilitate learning of the philosophical method. They are as follow:

In my class, you not entitled to your own beliefs. Everything that you claim to be true in class, you must be able to justify via argumentation. If you get “called-out” to justify your view and you cannot … you must, at least for the time you are in class, give up the claim that others should agree with your view. Obeying this rule means that no one can stop discussion by merely saying, “Well, I have a right to my own opinion.”
If you assert a view, the burden of proof is on you. If you get “called-out” to meet the burden, and you cannot … you must, at least for the time you are in class, give up that view. Obeying this rule means that no one can rebut criticism by merely replying, “Well, show me that I am wrong.”
You must be civil. You cannot use hate speech (narrowly defined, as by law); there can be no threats of violence; there is no interrupting; etc.

With these rules respected, I will entertain any questions or claims pertinent to our class discussion. And, when I mean any, I mean that I will only stop the discussion for pragmatic considerations (e.g., the discussion is too much of a tangent, we are running out of class time, etc.).

(more…)