following the nuke sim with beauty

And after that last, sobering post, here is some more of yesterday’s spring hike in Iowa with family plus dog that I missed due to being far away in Egypt. Maybe others will find these images as refreshing as I did.

good teaching move

We were discussing nuclear proliferation in class today. Using this GOOGLE MAPS NUCLEAR BLAST SIMULATOR, the same one Nina linked to awhile ago, we successively nuked Paris, Cairo, and Chicago. The student reaction was just about what I hoped it would be: terrified, but fascinated rather than offended.

You can choose between Little Boy (Hiroshima, U-235, cannon assembly), Fat Man (Nagasaki, plutonium, implosion assembly), and several larger bombs all the way up to the Soviet Tsar Bomba, a 50-megaton beast tested successfully in Siberia (world’s largest ever). There’s also an asteroid option, though it’s mostly just a gimmick, since that would depend entirely on the size of the asteroid (left unspecified in the app).

Once I went and targeted my tiny hometown of 3,000 souls with the Tsar Bomba, and of course most of the county was destroyed and not just the town.

Anyway, it’s an ingenious app and a fantastic teaching tool, especially when I followed it with YouTube “After” footage of Hiroshima, which actually led to audible gasps in the room.

comments on the last “meme” post

See JON COGBURN’S BLOG for some additional thoughts on my earlier post.

a meme to nip in the bud

I’ve seen a few suggestions in the past six months that the object-oriented model is a kind of “folk ontology,” by analogy with Churchland’s “folk psychology.” However, this is a weak suggestion.

The true folk otnology in Western countries, if there is one, would be materialism. The default model of the universe is one of hard, resistant material bodies on one side and fabricated human realities on the other. (Or as Badiou puts it in Logics of Worlds, “there are bodies and languages.” He should have been more sarcastic about this than he was, but that’s an issue for another time.) Churchland, the great critic of folk psychology, also strikes me as a great champion of folk ontology. Put differently, it seems to me that “eliminative materialism” is a contradiction in terms. If you’re truly committed to elimination, then you can’t also be committed to any particular entity that might survive elimination. Think of how ridiculous it would sound if we called Husserl an “eliminative phenomenologist.”

But if we drop the notion of material objects, and treat objects more generally as whatever has autonomous reality and exists in polarity with its qualities, relations, moments, traits, parts, whatever, then it should be clear that no “folk” known to anthropology has ever been committed to an object-oriented metaphysics.

If you’re going to eliminate objects from your philosophy, I can promise you that you’ll end up embracing something much worse.

As I argued in Bristol (and even a bit in Prince of Networks at the end) all standard “radical” moves in philosophy involve saying the object is “nothing more than X.” It’s nothing but how it manifests itself to humans. Or it’s nothing but a bundle of qualities. Or nothing but its relations with other things. Or nothing but a family resemblance of closely linked sensory bundles across time. Or nothing but hard physical matter with frivolous secondary qualities emanating from that. Or nothing but a derivative encrustation atop some dark and churnign pre-individual realm.

All of these moves, in my opinion, are simply ways of dodging what the mission of philosophy has been since the Meno. “How can I know what qualities virtue has if I don’t first know what it is?” This apparent paradox (that we should be able to know a thing without knowing any of its qualities) is the founding philosophical insight that all o fthe falsely “radical” approaches reject.

If you find yourself saying that the object is nothing more than X or Y, then I believe you are on the wrong track.

more on academic scams

They’re becoming more common lately… In my office today was a congratulations letter for being named “Egypt’s Man of the Year for 2009”.

A great honor, to be sure, but they want $295 for “the honor of representing my country” with an “elegant 8 x 10 inch Wall Plaque, featuring a cherrywood piano finish with a black gloss inset and gold lettering.”

It is explained further that my fee “applies toward the crafting processes” as well as postage and handling.

This company also fails even minimal political correctness standards, not only with the “Man of the Year” designation, but by rubbing it in when they say that they have “recognized men around the world since 1967”. Perhaps Egypt also has a 2009 Woman of the Year, though.