I had the pleasure of attending the First Annual Workshop on Food Justice and Peace this past Friday and Saturday at Michigan State University, and at that workshop I had the pleasure of meeting Mark Navin of Oakland University. My talk offered a defense of local food from a radical participatory democracy perspective (this is often called communitarianism, though I dislike that label myself), while Mark offered a critique of local food from a (maybe) cosmopolitan, (certainly) global justice perspective. So we had plenty to talk about!

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A template for service learning / civic engagement in philosophy of science and science studies courses. Based in significant part on Ilea, Ramona, and Susan Hawthorne. “Beyond Service Learning.” Teaching Philosophy 34, no. 3 (September 2011): 219–240. doi:10.5840/teachphil201134331, with unattributed paraphrasing throughout. Please leave feedback in the comments at the end!

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[Below is my response to this article in my hometown newspaper this morning.]

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(In this series of posts, I’m applying Debra Satz’ account of noxious markets to a specific aspect of commercialized science, the funding effect. In the first post, I summarized Satz’ account. In part two, I explained the funding effect.)

We are now prepared to pose the primary question of this series: In light of the funding effect, is the commodification of scientific research — at least in areas of research where the effect is substantial and well-documented — noxious?

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[I feel like my blog posts tend to be pretty technical and academic. This post is an attempt to write for a broader audience, while still being philosophical.]

Why should we eat local food?

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The basic reason I find the food system so fascinating is the complex and often surprising connections between issues that, at first glance, don’t seem to have much to do with each other.

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This one is really a question for my metaphysician and logician friends. Consider Plantinga’s modal ontological argument:

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In this series of posts, I’m applying Debra Satz’ account of noxious markets to a specific aspect of commercialized science, the funding effect. In the first post, I summarized Satz’ account. In this post, I explain the funding effect.

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Years ago, I was having a lot of trouble writing in proper academic philosophical style. Kristin Shrader-Frechette (fondly known as “KSF” by quite a few students) was helpful enough to meet with me and tell me exactly what I was doing wrong and what I needed to do differently. I just stumbled across the notes I took at that meeting:

• very, very detailed & pedantic & obvious
• cut out summary & lit review in favor of new arguments & claims
• tell people only what they need to know for the set-up of the problem & ruthlessly cut everything else out

The first bullet point was a revelation. I took only a couple of philosophy courses as an undergrad, not even enough for a minor. Notoriously, faculty in grad seminars generally don’t give much feedback on papers. No-one, before this meeting, had ever told me simply and directly how I was expected to write. Consequently, in the preceding several years I had gradually adopted a very “academic” writing style: lots of jargon; no clear thesis; vague references to everything I could think of; and a meandering, structureless approach that took ages (or pages) to make a simple point. KSF has a background in statistics, and told me that writing in philosophy really isn’t different from writing in math. Only, where mathematicians expect to have to do some work to follow a proof, philosophers expect all of the details to be carefully laid out for them. Thus, I simply needed to write like a mathematician — a very, very detailed and pedantic mathematician, one who belabors even the most (seemingly) obvious points.

A few weeks later, I wrote a term paper for a graduate seminar. A few years after that, that term paper was my second publication.

Thanks, Kristin.

There are many convoluted instructions on the Web for restoring an accidentally deleted calendar from the Mac OS Calendar application. Here’s a pretty simple way to do it — several steps, but each is simple, and you don’t have to look through confusing folders or type in obscure commands.

1. If you deleted the calendar from the Calendar application, and you haven’t done anything else yet, go to Edit -> Undo Delete Calendar.
2. Otherwise, I assume you have a relatively recent Time Machine backup. I don’t use iCloud myself, but perhaps it works in a similar way. What’s essential is that you have a backup system that (a) keeps several copies of your backed up files, and (b) can restore individual folders. I also assume you’re using Mac OS Lion or Mountain Lion, though this doesn’t make much of a difference.
3. If you keep your backup on an external hard drive, go ahead and connect to it. However you manage backups, make a fresh backup now.
4. Close Calendar and any other applications that use your system’s calendars (e.g., Reminders).
5. Open a new Finder window. Press Shift-Command-G or go to Go -> Go to Folder …. Type in “~/Library/Calendars” (without the quotes) and press Enter.
6. In the Time Machine menu bar icon, go to Enter Time Machine. Follow the steps to restore a specific folder to take the Calendar folder back to before you deleted the calendar. Leave this Finder window open.
7. Open the Calendar application. It will say “Upgrading Calendars” and give you a little progress bar. When it finishes, you’ll see your deleted calendar is back! If you haven’t done anything else since accidentally deleting your calendar, you’re finished. If you’ve added other appointments to your other calendars, you’ll see that those are missing. But you’re almost finished!
8. Click on the restored calendar. In the File menu or context menu, choose Export …. Save the file to the Desktop or some other easy-to-find place.
9. Close Calendar again and go back to the Calendar folder in Finder. Do what you did in #6 to restore the backup version of the folder, only this time restore the backup you made a few minutes ago in #3.
10. Open Calendar. It’ll do the “Upgrading Calendars” thing again, and then things will look like they did back at the beginning.
11. But now we have the deleted calendar saved to the Desktop. Go to File -> Import -> Import … and select the calendar file you saved in #8. Everything should be restored. Hooray!