Haslam's "Concept Creep" has a section on "trauma" that might be of interest.

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

> Learn about someone's cool work from a few years ago
> Look up what they're doing now
> Discover that it's completely bonkers

(The first time this happened it was a philosopher of probability turned Holocaust denier. The second, just now, it was a metaethicist turned paranormal researcher.)

the Achilles heel of reactionaries, in this country and elsewhere, has usually been overconfidence and overreach, and it sure feels like that is the case today

Not really obvious, but I definitely pronounced "viscount" and "Givenchy" idiosyncratically until about a year ago.

Glissant and the Middle Passage A reevaluation of Édouard Glissant that centers on the catastrophe of the Middle Passage and creates deep, original theories of trauma and Caribbeanness  W...

www.upress.umn.edu/978151790598...

CFPs — Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World

CFP // Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World, July 24-28 at Illinois Institute of Technology, in Chicago, Illinois. The theme is Resilience. Submissions due by February 7.

For most purposes, you can just think of it as a state description (a logically consistent distribution of truth-values over sentences with referents assigned) that obeys some intuitions about modality. Nothing too spooky there.

Political jiu jitsu is Sharp's phrase for using your enemy's violence against you to discredit them. But that violence has to be morally legible to your enemy or the unaligned for jiu jitsu to work. The question is whether any political violence we can actually provoke is ever legible in this way.

I've emailed the student group to see if there's anything US philosophers can do, but LMK if you have any ideas.

“Un ataque a la educación”: universitarios protestan contra cierre de 64 programas académicos en la UPR Alumnos y profesores recorrieron el Recinto de Río Piedras para exigir que el presidente Luis Ferrao Delgado desista de eliminar oferta académica por baja matrícula

The University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras is planning to close 64 of its bachelor's programs, including philosophy. It's the largest public university campus in Puerto Rico, with 18k students, a number of MA and PhD programs, and one of the top-ranked institutions in Latin America.

Couldn't get a pdf with the original pagination, and the page numbers aren't on the Project Muse page for the article.

Here you go! drive.google.com/file/d/1YYnw...

Super vague, but I'm thinking of things like Weber on disenchantment, Debord on spectacle, or Zuboff on surveillance capitalism. All things that we might want to explain in terms of stuff familiar from pre-modernity, but those explanations break down at some point.

What are the best deep explanations of how the modern world differs from the past? Deep, like it explains stuff in a lot of seemingly unrelated domains, or it requires a lot of theoretical/practical updating to take to heart, or it pervades all of our experiences but takes a lot of work to reveal.

Really helpful! One addition: philosophers sometimes think writing is the only way to get out in the world. But the world of public philosophy is very big. You can teach in prisons/K-12 schools, help run a meetup, do counseling, convene a citizens' assembly, join a think tank... It takes all kinds.

Doing public philosophy in a difficult times. Unfortunately, due to health considerations I'm not as active as I once was but I hope that these tips, which I gained through experience being someone engaged in projects relating to the public good and disseminating philosophy for a big audience 1/

Conversation after dinner:

J: Who's the actor, the guy from Being John Malkovich?
Me: John Cusack?
J: No, the one who was John Malkovich.
Me: ... John Malkovich.

Whatever the truth of Elon's salute, my gut feeling is going after it risks falling into some Resistance 1.0 traps.

The right thinks we’re always yelling nazi and have tuned it out. What kind of indignation/attacks have a chance of being effective? His wealth & power grabbing are 100% unambiguous.

Today, that means focusing on pulling out of the WHO and the Paris agreement, militarizing the border, ending refugee resettlement, & disciplining the federal workforce - not Musk's weird ambiguous gestures, Trump's disgusting personal appearance, or Vance's smarmy, self-satisfied attitude.

*Even if* immaterial, indirect, or symbolic harms are real and consequential, people will already pay more than enough attention to them. It's about the margins.

Material: caused by lasting changes in the physical/economic world or power over the economy/state - wealth transfer, pollution... Direct: not mediated by broader cultural shifts or processes of normalization. Non-symbolic: not just expressing bad attitudes or signaling affiliation with bad groups.

My suggestion: try to focus on what harms people materially, directly, and non-symbolically.

Trump 1 overwhelmed the press and civil society by bombarding it with outrageous but inconsequential things (covfefe, tweeting about celebrities), while also doing a bunch of non-obviously outrageous but more consequential things (the tax bill, court packing) - flooding the zone with shit.

Pismenny and Prinz, "Is love an emotion?" gets it right. (Not thrilled to cite Prinz, a sexual predator, but the idea is really Pismenny's.)

Philosophers of science! Please share widely the latest suite of PSA Office Hours, which includes an awesome career event in April as well as one-on-ones with profs. www.philsci.org/psa_office_h...