12.12.12. philosophy at the end of the world

This year's 'Philosophy in the World' lecture will take place a week before the end of the world, on 12.12.12, becoming LUC's first ever 'Philosophy at the end of the World' lecture.  The first two lectures in this series, by Simon Blackburn and then Raymond Geuss, were great successes.  This one also promises to be a special event that LUC will share with our colleagues from the Honours College in Leiden and the wider public of The Hague.  Hence, the special venue in the city centre: the Nieuwspoort.

All are welcome!

12.12.12 coming soon ...

Remember, the world will end on 21.12 ...

In collaboration with the Political Arts Initiative, the LUC Research Centre brings you the annual 'Philosophy in the World' lecture on 12.12.12.  Prof Chris Goto-Jones, dean of Leiden University College in The Hague, will speak on 'Life at the End of Days: Philosophy and Apocalypse' at 18.00 (venue tbc).  The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.
Please mark the date of the beginning of the end in your diaries, and check back to find out where it will happen ...

Indigenous Heritage and Human Rights by Maarten Jansen

A few weeks ago, some of us had the privilege to listen to Professor Maarten Jansen speak as part of the visiting Lecture series. His lecture on indigenous heritage and human rights was highly interesting, however it provoked some questions.

To give a short summary of his talk, Professor Jansen started his lecture by investigating what exactly was meant by the term “indigenous peoples” before moving on to looking at the various stereotypes that have typified representations of Indigenous groups throughout Central America (i.e. ‘Cannibals’, ‘Human Sacrifice’ and ‘the Noble Savage’). After this introduction, Professor Jansen used these historical points to introduce his opinions on the current situation of indigenous groups and their struggles for rights and recognition in Mesoamerica. He stated that the importance of indigenous ‘participation’ in larger society rather than ‘integration’ was a vital change in policy needed in the struggle for indigenous rights and mentions examples of the changing status of indigenous rights throughout the world (e.g. The 2007 UN declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples). Moving on to the idea of the ‘endangered heritage’ of indigenous people, Jansen mentions the fact that it is estimated that of the 7000 languages currently spoken in the world, six thousand will most likely be lost by the end of the century. Not only that but, most of those six thousand are actually already considered ‘extinct’, or to rephrase Maarten Jansen, it is like a species of animal who, though the last specimen is still alive, has lost the ability to reproduce and is as such ‘extinct’.

Jansen further outlined how since the Spaniards ‘discovered’ the Americas, Ancient artifacts belonging to the Indigenous peoples have been brought to Europe and the ‘western’ world (naming as an example the famous ‘Crown of Moctezuma’ which currently resides in a museum in Vienna). He stated that the indigenous peoples whose culture these artifacts belong to contend that “Why should ‘they’ have all the benefits while it is the work of ‘our’ ancestors?”

Professor Jansen then moved on to his personal work in the field with indigenous communities, using both the returning of artifacts to indigenous groups and the risk of the loss, or ‘extinction’ of culture to validate one project he has been working on, namely the ‘teaching’ of Mixtec culture and language to Mixtec Indigenous peoples. Using his background in Archaeology and in particular, his expertise on the interpretation of Mixtec pictorial manuscripts, Professor Jansen goes to Mixtec Indigenous communities and works together with the people there to ‘interpret’ artifacts of Ancient Mixtec culture in order to maintain the culture and language of the area. Here I must critique his method as serious issues arrive when considering the ‘teaching’ of culture.

Professor Jansen stated that ‘we’, here he meant of course western society and in particular himself, are able to understand, and thus teach about, Mixtec pictorial manuscripts as accurate ‘dictionaries’ exist which provide translations of the pictorial manuscripts. These dictionaries however were written by the Spanish conquerors of the area and as such provide only an interpretation of what the Spanish conquerors thought the meaning of the pictographs were. This of course means that the very translations which Jansen is basing his teachings on are simply the ‘western’ perspective of the meaning of those manuscripts. Thus Jansen is in fact not maintaining the Mixtec culture by instructing Mixtec people about the manuscripts but he is fact influencing their culture by teaching it to them from a western perspective. When I brought up this issue with Professor Jansen, he admitted that this was a cause for concern and his counter argument was that he worked together with the local people in his work in order to improve the accuracy of the translations.
Though I personally believe in the fact that culture must be preserved it must also be taken into consideration that the culture that Jansen instructs about in fact no longer exists because the ancient Mixtec culture of 500 years ago has developed since colonisation to become what it is today. Jansen seem to imply in his lecture that he was ‘reviving’ a culture and language --however he is teaching the history of a culture to its descendants. That is of course a valuable thing to do as knowledge of the history of one’s ancestry is important, but I think that the work that Jansen does in Mixtec communities cannot be seen as the ‘revival’ of a culture, simply the investigation of the history of a culture.

The lecture by Professor Jansen thus brought up a variety of interesting questions in us as an audience. In particular the question as to whether the ‘teaching’ of an indigenous culture to its descendants is useful was an interesting point to contemplate as the question of western involvement in indigenous communities is of course one of great contention.

Jori Nanninga
BA 1

Study Trip Funding & Call for Applications Mini Interviews

Interested in Study Abroad? Need to find extra funding? LUF might be able to help!

The Leiden University Funds (LUF) is designed to fund students at all levels in order to help them pursue their academic goals.
The LISF is a fund set up specifically for students who are planning a study trip abroad. They offer up to 2,000 euro for one trip.
Students who want to apply must fill out the application form (in the LUF link below), and have a clear idea of exactly what/where they want to study abroad, how this trip fits into their academic goals, and why they deserve to be funded in the first place.
There are two more deadlines in 2011:

Monday, October 10
Monday, November 14

There will be more deadlines starting again in February 2012. However, if you are a student who has a strong GPA and CV and already has a firm idea of where and what you would like to study abroad, you should not hesitate to apply this fall.

For more information please check:
http://www.luf.nl/default.asp?paginaID=199

For those of you interested in applying, please
1. go through the LUF website (listed above) and double check the application form/requirements
2. speak to your tutor about your application for the LISF--the application requires a recommendation from your 'study co-ordinator' --your tutor would be the best person to write such a recommendation.
3. contact the Research Centre--we would be only too happy to help you compile your application and make sure it gets off to the LUF committee in time.

Good luck!

II. ACADEMIC SOUNDBYTES: CALL FOR APPLICATIONS FOR MINI-INTERVIEWS

As announced earlier, the LUCRC would like to have students interview (for 5-10 mins) our guest speakers and put the interviews up on our blog. Students are urged to check the LUCRC website for mini-bios of our confirmed speakers for this semester. When you have chosen a speaker who you are interested in, please write to us, in 100 words or less, a question or the motivation behind why you would be the right student to choose. We will notify you a week before the interview--except in the case of Karlijn van der Voort, who is speaking on Wednesday (we apologize for the short notice). If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us at the LUCRC.

Exploring the "Truthies" of a self-proclaimed ignorant mind

(on the occasion of the inaugural LUC-Brill Nijhoff Writing Institute Lecture by Professor Adam Roberts)
Despite the fact that his own head was considerably too large for Dr. Kim's ground-control microphone, Adam Roberts was still able to present a thought-provoking yet arguably ironic, talk on the giant heads of contemporary 'democracy'. Like a tiger being ignorant to hunting, or a fish being ignorant to brine, we are all rotating the motors of democracy in a dark enclosed room, without truly understanding why and without fathoming the effect that it is having on our world. We base our political decisions on 'truthies' and not on truths. We "reckon", we don't believe.

Dr Hyowon Kim introduces Professor Adam Roberts
Following this trail of thought, Adam Roberts explains that in fact we are the body of democracy. We effectively implement democracy despite our complete lack of political expertise. The head resting on our shoulders are the leaders and the experts. They might guide us, but it is still our bodies that carry the head. So what would happen if we were to decapitate democracy? Would all the tiny people building up the body flow out and form an anarchy? According to Roberts not. During his talk he explained how New Model Army was intended to evaluate the merits of a 'complete democracy' where everyone is proficient in all fields, and where there is hence no need for a head. He claimed that he wanted to show that removing the head would not necessarily directly result in an uncontrollable mob, but could in fact be very efficient.

In addition to sharing his personal views on contemporary 'democracy' and the ignorant "truthies" that people commit themselves too, Adam Roberts was also able to capture our attention with his witty remarks. After the talk someone quite rightly commented: "Friday night comedy." It is true that in this way Adam Roberts' lecture was rather different than the majority of the lectures we have attended so far. It struck me that in fact Roberts was not only illustrating the questions which he raises in his book and his personal reflection on democracy, but also his artistic use of language. To put a short story short, it was a Friday evening well spent. So great thanks to Adam Roberts, the LUC writing institute and all those who organised the lecture.

Rosalind Lowe (LUC, 1st yr student), 4 Feb 2011

Albert Hoffstadt of Brill explains the LUC-Brill Nijhoff alliance;
Prof Roberts is pressed for an autograph; and the audience sits entranced.

Armchairs and white coats

Armchairs and white coats: the crisis of the humanities
(on the occasion of the inaugural ‘LUC Philosophy in the World’ lecture by Professor Simon Blackburn

“Philosophers from the 21st century cannot ignore science,” warns the renowned British philosopher Simon Blackburn, “but they should not let themselves be taken over by it.” As technology advances, an increasing number of research domains that have traditionally been located in the sphere of philosophy are being ‘taken over’ by the sciences. With the dawn of fMRI scans and other such instruments, questions about human nature can no longer exclusively be evaluated from within the proverbial philosopher’s armchair – they can be brought into the lab, a research facility with more authority. As a result of this, the gap between the sciences and the humanities is widening at an ever faster pace. “Good for technology,” remarks Blackburn, “bad for science and education.” Reflecting on this crisis of the humanities, Prof. Blackburn points out some fundamental problems with the institutional delivery of science that suggest that science needs input from the humanities.
A problem in today’s physics classroom is that little to no attention is paid to the ontology and metaphysics of science. Illustrating this point, Blackburn tells an amusing – if slightly worrying – anecdote about his daughter who, although able to solve complex equations, did not grasp the concept of ‘energy’. Asking her teacher about this (“what is energy?”), she was simply told to get on and solve the equations. Incidents like this are symptomatic of the widening gap between “ideal science” and the “institutional delivery of science”; the first referring to science as it should be taught and pursued (science as a value or end in itself), the latter referring to the manner in which it is currently taught and pursued. The education of science should not only be about solving equations and ‘mindlessly’ measuring the measureable, it should also provide students with a thorough understanding of what they are doing, of how this is relevant and of how theories are formed. In other words, they should be taught the philosophy of science alongside the content of science, and they should be taught to be critical.
Stressing the importance of being critical, Blackburn points to another problem with the sciences: the often blurred boundary between the ideology of scientists and what they present as scientific fact. This twilight zone between science and opinion is clear especially in claims that pertain to matters like human nature and free will. To illustrate, Blackburn mentions Richard Dawkins’s statement that “we are born selfish.” Presenting this as a scientific fact (without any reservations whatsoever), Dawkins overlooks recent research about human nature that suggests otherwise or at least complicates the claim. “Claims like these,” says Blackburn, “require more philosophical and epistemological thought – they are often a reflection of the spirit of the time.” The spirit of our time, in turn, is influenced by the formation of theories. If we were to accept the views expressed by these scholars as true, we would start acting as if they were true. Statements like “we are born selfish” are dangerous especially because, despite their questionable truth-value, they are presented as facts by people in positions of authority. “A dangerous interface between ideology, science and the humanities,” warns Blackburn.

Prof Chris Goto-Jones challenges Prof Blackburn on his interpretation of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The gap between ideal science and the institutional delivery of science is further widened by the way in which research is presently funded. Researchers (including scientists and scholars from the humanities) are dependent on the findings or results of their publications for their income and research grants. Yet a lot of science that might open up new research domains or science that is just plain ‘boring’ does not appeal to investors. As a result of this, researchers are often forced to conduct research that satisfies the investor. Dependent on the investor’s satisfaction for their next research grant, they may already be biased toward a result that will satisfy the investor (sometimes actively looking for a statistical correlation that may favour the investor in an otherwise insignificant set of data). If anything, “this is an open invitation to junk science,” remarks Blackburn. Yet it is not only the scientists who are affected by such policies. Philosophers, too, are dependent on their output for their income. Where formerly students of philosophy were taught not to say anything unless they actually had something to say, they are now told (if not pushed) to publish as much as they can. According to Blackburn (and I wholeheartedly agree), this is “a complete debasement of the academic exercise.”

Ending his lecture on a more positive note, Blackburn points out that there are ways to get past these institutional perversions. For instance, thanks to more sources of private research funding, scholars in the United States are not as driven by ‘impact’ indicators as those in the United Kingdom. Even so, the humanities remain under threat and Blackburn’s critique of the institutional delivery of science remains valid. Fortunately, he is not alone in expressing his worry about the present role of the humanities in the sciences and the role of research assessment exercises in funding allocation. Throughout his lecture, I could not help but notice that the worries expressed by Prof. Blackburn resonated with some discussions held within our Disciplinarity & Beyond classes – an encouraging development. Whether it means that Prof. Blackburn’s critique is already being internalised remains to be seen, but I am hopeful that his voice (and the voice of many other critics) will be heard. All in all, an inspiring – if worrying – lecture, and from within my comfortable armchair I can wholeheartedly say that Prof. Blackburn has truly changed my life.

Barend de Rooij (LUC, 1st yr student), 4 March 2011