When we posted an update about all the new professorial friends you'll be making (and losing) next year, we weren't aware that we had made a grave and conspicuous omission. One recent grad informed us that Cheryl Mendelson, wife of Edward Mendelson, is filling in as "Term Associate Professor" in the Barnard Philosophy Department next semester. Cheryl Mendelson is also the author of such fine books as Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House and Laundry: The Home Comforts Book of Caring for Clothes and Linens, which are 884 and 400 pages, respectively.

Oh, dear.

According to scholarly database Amazon.com, Mendelson has also dabbled in fiction, namely a book called Morningside Heights: A Novel, which Publisher's Weekly described as a "talky, occasionally stilted debut." Apparently, it's about an opera singer and his wife, who turns "domesticity into a deeply creative act" -- kind of like Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House and Laundry: The Home Comforts Book of Caring for Clothes and Linens. (From Home Comforts: "Until now, I have almost entirely concealed this passion for domesticity. No one meeting me for the first time would suspect that I squander my time knitting or my mental reserves remembering household facts such as the date when the carpets and mattresses were last rotated. Without thinking much about it, I knew I would not want this information about me to get around.")

Anyway, Mendelson will be teaching two classes in the fall: Mind and Morals and What is Philosophy?

The depths of procrastination have truly reached a new low: We've taken to Googling our professors on YouTube. An anonymous tipster points us in the direction of "Prolegomena to any Future Numa Numa," which features philosophy professor John David Collins and one of who we believe to be the children of Collins and one of who belongs to philosophy professor Christia Mercer. It's dancey and has nothing whatsoever to do with Kant, making it prime reading week procrastination material.

After the jump, logic professor Achille Varzi weighs in on the 2000 re-count in Florida. It's dated, but very enjoyable for anyone who's ever had class with (or even just spoken to) the wonderful Varzi.

Do you know of any other professorial stars of YouTube? Email Bwog or use the comment thread to post links, and we'll update the post.

In which a Bwogger gets in way over his head.

It is relatively intuitive that the goal of any college student is to attain some sort of meaning from the classes they take, so I thought that Philosophy Professor Akeel Bilgrami's graduate seminar on the topic would be enlightening. I sidled into a Philosophy Hall penthouse this morning with twenty students, all sitting around an enormous oblong wooden table that seemed like it belonged in Bilgrami's Oxford alma mater.

The first few minutes of the class seemed relatively safe, going over administrative business and a brief introduction to the work of the main philosopher being studied, John McDowell. While I knew that my limited Core knowledge of philosophy would be insufficient for any real analysis of Frege's Puzzle or practical reason, Bilgrami's presentation of the concepts seemed dangerously simple and instinctive.

An Explanation of What the Hell a "Work" Issue is About (p.3)

Columbia Undergraduate Philosophy Course Review (p. 4)

How to Live With Yourself (p. 9)

Finding Work as a Philosophy Major (p. 26)

Poems About Mankind's Real "Work" (p. 32)

It's about time the philosophical salon made a comeback: on Tuesday night, a couple dozen List College students gathered in the Mathilde Shechter music room for some laid back Judaically-focused philosophical disputation. The night's topic was the so-called "New Atheism"--the aggressive attack on religion led by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others.

JTS philosophy professor Leonard Levin began by arguing that the "new atheists" do not realize how little science and religion actually disprove one another. While science explains the particulars of the physical universe in ways that religion can't, religion provides the underlying meaning and guidance that science lacks. "Until recently," Levin said, "religious experience is all of human experience." Religion is personally and communally centering, and strives to, and occasionally succeeds in, addressing important, fundamental truths.

Dr. Austin Darcy from the atheist Center for Inquiry spoke partly in defense of the "new atheists"--while he disagreed with their assertion that "religion poisons everything," he said that Hitchens and his ilk are removing religion from its pedestal and giving it the unsparing intellectual analysis it deserves. He deployed a Kantian proof that the logical basis for theism runs similar to justifications for atheism: Kant argued that man believes in a God that will order an unordered world, but since the world is assumed to be unordered, Kant's postulate of practical reason proves that theism is little more than elaborate rationalizing.

The night's arguments were pretty standard, but never trite: Levin, for instance, rebutted the claim that Theists irrationally uphold a solipsistic view of the universe by quoting a 3^rd century Talmudic rabbi's shockingly accurate estimation of the number of stars. Of course we've heard this all before: that theism is scientifically and morally untenable, and that religion is more than just blind belief in something we can't hope to see or interact with. And the arguments had their usual weaknesses: Levin's concession that secular philosophy could provide the same kind of objective morals as religion means that religion is preferable for utilitarian, rather than qualitative reasons--if religion is superior simply because more people can understand Exodus than Locke's First Treatise on Government, how superior is it, really?

Philosophy is a great major if you have deep insights into the metaphysical puzzlements of human existence. The problem is not the scant few undergrads who have deep insights about the metaphysical puzzlements of human existence, but the glut who think they do. Could you tolerate that guy in CC who thought that Kant's Groundwork was "solidly argued, though ultimately, existentially unconvincing"? He's probably a philosophy major.

And the professors—the people who have made careers of claiming special insight about the nature of existence—think it is a mark of their intellectual prowess not to teach undergraduate classes. Or answer e-mails. Or show up to office hours. When your other liberal arts-majoring friends are struggling to decide which of their chummy professor-friends will write their fellowship recommendations, you'll realize you've never taken a seminar.

But at least you get to sound like hot shit at office parties, right? Think you can drop some Deleuze and Derrida and leave them all fawning? Stop it right there, buddy. That's comp lit. Any real philosopher knows that stuff is crap. And don't even get started about the meaning of life here—there's a reason Columbia has lost three renowned political philosophers in under a decade. Face the facts, dilettante-to-be: a philosophy degree won't even make you a moderately competent poseur.

Art History

Art history requires learning a little about a few disparate topics, and the sum is considerably less than its parts. In Greek Art and Architecture, one learns how to date ancient vases, while in a Gothic architecture survey, one reads arguments about which philosophies influenced the design of 13th century French cathedrals. Then you get to the 20th century, where the shit really hits Duchamp's urinal. Mostly, you learn great sound bites to impress nubile MoMA visitors: Picasso was terrified of contracting VD, and may or may not have actually done so, which may or may not be important to understanding his depictions of women; Mondrian's entire career can be understood as an attempt to produce a completely flat picture plane; Robert Rauschenberg's Monogram is a " very ejaculatory" work. Thank you, Professor Krauss.

It's like, art, dude.

Creative Writing

Everyone's a poet. Still more think they're short story writers or, worse, novelists. Far fewer claim to be playwrights or screenwriters, and thank God for that, because there's nothing quite like reading 20 pages of "fictional" dialogue about the death of someone's beloved sheep dog.

Here are five things to expect as a student in the creative writing program—now a major/concentration: (1) Bad writing. (2) Teachers who are, first and foremost, writers themselves. Some of them are decent, but "those who can't do, teach" is a good rule of thumb. They have one objective only: paying the bills. Some will write detailed comments on your work, and once in a while their feedback might even be coherent and helpful, but for the most part, the graduated grad student sitting at the head of the table does not care about you or your bad writing.

He is too busy being bitter about his first book, which went straight to remainders, and his MFA, which—surprise, surprise—is the most useless degree of them all. (3) Outraged students who don't understand why no one can see the brilliance in their bad writing. (4) "Hills Like White Elephants" by Hemingway. In every class. Every single class. It's a great story; we get it, and we never want to read it again. (5) Bad writing. Very, very bad writing.

Computer Science

You walk into Advanced Programming on the first day and you find a half-empty room. The students that did bother to show up are in it for the free wireless, already actively engaged in leveraging competing job offers from Wall Street firms and scary overseas conglomerates.You shuffle into the back row for a lecture recapping the very topic that got you expelled from high school—when you were twelve. You can't hear yourself think over cell phone chatter and the clacking of keys on E-Trade, the Merrill Lynch website, and CareerTrak.

You should have known something was wrong when you found out that the class met in Hamilton. You're a long way from the Gateway Lab. The comfort of painted cinderblock and linoleum tile are a distant memory.

At some point between long, unkempt beards and the development of the DVD burner, computer science turned its back on nerdiness and became the engineer's Investment Banking major in all but name. These slick, pocket-protector-less yuppies-in-training do not play Dungeons and Dragons; they wear Brooks Brothers suits and spend more time in job interviews than in class.

Those of us who grew up thinking of programming as the domain of an elite community of social outcasts were, in hindsight, idiots. The modern computer scientist isn't a hacker, or outsourced to India—more likely, he bought and sold you six times this morning and didn't even get out of bed to do it. His PC did it for him when the Nikkei opened at 4 a.m.

East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALAC)

At Columbia, you can major in many languages: French, German, even Yiddish. But woe betide the eager beaver who chooses a little-known world language like Chinese—these bits of esoterica fall under the auspices of EALAC. If your destiny lies here, you will soon discover it to be an ill-assembled grab-bag of disciplines vaguely pointing—you guessed it—East.

Language? Check. You must take three years of Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, which will just about get you through a language textbook, or a dinner menu. Disciplinary focus? Check. Choose from topics you didn't want to major in like religion, political science, or economics, and learn how they relate to East Asia. Thesis? Check. It's required, and due months before those of other majors. Disquisitions on the hegemonic, phallocentric discourse of post-industrial Japanese gender identities? Double-check. Get used to this stuff, because you're going cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary whether you like it or not. You might just want to major in Chinese, but for once, the Orient is actually going to give you more than you bargained for.

Music

You've declared yourself a music major, have you? I guess that means one of three things: (1) You weren't quite good enough to get into conservatory, but your musical ego wouldn't admit defeat. (2) You actually did get into conservatory but turned them down because your academic ego wouldn't admit defeat. (3) You're one of the elite(ist) Columbia-Juilliard joint-degree students who likes stroking both egos at once. In any event, welcome to the madness.

As a music major you'll be spending a lot of time in Dodge Hall, one of Columbia's most colorful, dysfunctional locales. The entrance is located in the coldest wind-tunnel on campus, but despite the harsh winter weather, there are always three or four music/film grad students in thick-rimmed glasses smoking unfiltered cigarettes outside the door. You'll have every class in the same shitty classroom on the sixth floor, but keep clear of the office at the end of the hall—sleeping monsters dwell within. The powers-that-be guard the key-codes to all the classrooms ruthlessly, so you'll have to find your own devious ways to acquire them if you want a decent space to practice or rehearse. But that's okay—there's no performance requirement. You're not here to play music. You're here to theorize about it.

Noam Chomsky stormed campus yesterday with a lecture double-header. Bwog commences its in-depth coverage with the linguist's more academic engagement. Below, Linguistics major Sara Maria Hasbun reports on deep thoughts.

Noam Chomsky isn't exactly known for his engaging lectures, but even so, he packed the theatre of the Casa Italiana by 2:45 for a 4:00 booking yesterday. His lecture was titled, "The Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden?"; the most entertaining line was the first sentence: "For those of you anxious to hear the punchline, if you have something else to get to, the answer is, 'Everything.'"

The event, sponsored by the Heyman Center for the Humanities, was hyped as a linguistics lecture, though it turned out to be something more closely approximating a history and theory of the academy. Chomsky delivered his remarks straight from a pre-written paper, complete with awkward gaze-shifting from paper to audience. But of course, this was Chomsky. So we made do.

While his political views and loud criticism of the American government have made Chomsky a household name, the Pennsylvania-born academic became famous for developing an entire field of linguistics called "generative grammar", a theory that claims that language is an innate, and uniquely human, ability, as well as claiming that all the languages of the world are inherently based on the same innate syntactic structure.

A gadfly, according to Billy Goldstein (CC' 09), is "some big-ass fly," and also the only non-defunct undergraduate philosophy magazine at Columbia University.

The Gadfly has so far printed one issue with a medley of contributions: a letter of explanation, a few art pieces, a fictional work, a quasi-Socratic dialogue, a lecture review, and--as a centerpiece--interviews with Columbia professors David Albert and Brian Greene. As a magazine rather than a journal, its founders say, it focuses less on academic theses and more on anything that can provoke thought. "It's not a formal magazine, it's mostly just thought-provoking," Goldstein said.

Basically, the magazine stays true to form. It usually provokes thought rather than positing specific opinions, and a couple of the pieces present multiple views without really advocating any in particular. In general, even if you don't find yourself agreeing with it, it raises interesting discussion points, and the articles are long enough to develop the authors' ideas but not so long as to get dragging.

Goldstein's description of the Gadfly's function as "a forum for ideas that people otherwise only talk about with their friends, or when they're stoned" fits perfectly with the fiction piece, by Maddie Boucher (CC '09), which includes the journal of a wandering philosopher/outlaw from which the veracity and meaning of any entry, whether ultimately true or not, is ample fodder for discussion. The interviews with Albert and Greene, while much more formal and scientific, become accessible to the humanities-minded among us through a somewhat meta-philosophical letter. Roberto and Gadfly VP Adam Waksman, who interviewed Greene and Albert, respectively, are as much physics nerds as they are philosophy geeks, and hope to draw in some of both.

Interview with the editors after the jump!

It seems as if Columbia has been having a bit of trouble with Fire Safety lately. Yesterday, two unrelated occurrences confirm that maybe we should be worried about the all-consuming wrath-fire after all.

From Bwog Tipster Addison Anderson, on yesterday's EC fire alarm:

After the alarm from the smoke scare on the 14th floor stopped ringing, everyone went back inside. I was walking down the hallway on 14, when I ran into a bunch of firefighters standing outside the Suite of Carelessness. The following exchange ensued:

Firefighter (annoyed): You know, there's a fire, and one of you kids might get hurt.
Me: So they shouldn't have let us all back inside?
Firefighter: ...No.
Me: Because that's what they did, they said we could...
Firefighter sighs and shakes head mournfully, fed up.

Some EC residents are beginning to feel like maybe the University has it in for them. First the non-working water heaters, then the awful elevators, and now this? It makes you wonder...

Next, a same-day dispatch from Bwog staffer Andrew Flynn.

Today was a bad day for fire alarms. One went off in Milbank during my class with Taylor Carman, professor of Philosophy. Carman was already over-time, but he stopped to assess the situation. Unfortunately, the noise of the alarm was not loud or frequent enough to constitute a significant emergency, he told us. So, as we watched through the glass doors as others streamed out of the building, Carman raised his voice and frantically tried to continue his lecture on Bourdieu over the commotion. A few minutes into this, he stepped back and stoically declared that he was beginning to question the wisdom of our procedure.

I love this man.

Addison Anderson writes in...

just walked into EC, and the security guard has a piece of paper taped on the wall above him with something along the lines of:

The 'I'm Just That Bored' Trivia Question of the Day: What is the full name of the marshmallow man who attacked New York City in the movie Ghostbusters?

The consensus on the bwgossip alias is: Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man.

...in related security guard news, boredom can be cured by Plato:

At the Hartley security desk...

Security Guard: "I'm a philosopher. Philosopher. Not a preacher. Thank God I'm not a preacher. No, preacher is a good job. Actually, I'm a teacher. A teacher without any students."
[Hands ID to student.]
Girl: "OK. Thank you."