Spring 2014 Philosophy of Italian Culture Class Notes 1

Return to Philosophy of Italian Culture

JAN 14

1. Call roll. Brief Student introductions.
2. Introduce 4 units, homework, deadlines (TH)
3. Introduction to Course websites - start at Alfino.org. (MA)
4. Preparing for class. Study questions will be put up after each class
5. Tell us a bit about yourself:

• Name, major and goals for immediate future.
• Motivation for taking this course
• Relevant experiences - past course, travels, etc

Time remaining: Introduction to Girlfriend in a Coma - show clip from la mala italia, distribute file. Answer 4 questions posted on wiki page.

JAN 16

• Initial impressions of the films; question 1 & 2 together

• Group work: Find someone in the class you don't know. Answer questions 3-4

• Transition to historical unit.

• Goal to understand historical origins contemporary fragmentation in Italy
• Congress of Vienna, animation.

JAN 21

Wilson, The Social Conquest of EarthChs. 1-7

• Note on the place of anthropology in the structure of the course.

• Caution: Wilson's view is not biological or evolutionary determinism in any simple sense. Can't nec. tell that from 1st part of reading.

Here's a summary of the key ideas I'd like to focus on in the next half hour. Below this segment, you'll see more extensive notes from when I taught this more slowly.

Key Ideas, Wilson Chs. 1-7

• Chapter 1-2: Comparing two very different eusocial species. Logic of the argument.
• Chapter 3: Preadaptations. What do they explain, if anything? (Watching out for "just so" stories.)
• Chapter 4-5: More pre-adaptations; Gear for the up-to-date paleolithic tribe-hold. Nests.
• Chapter 6: Encephalation, Kin Selection, Multi-Level selection (e.g. learning), Chimps vs. Hominid Eusociality, (for more: Michael Tomasello). Group selection (biological and cultural - example of milk)
• Think about the way that cultures shape terms for agreement and disagreement. What does cooperation mean (demand from us) in different environments and cultures?
• Tribalism

• Determinisms, weak and strong

Wilson, Prologue, Chapters 1 and 2

• Gaugin painting: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?
• 7: Star Wars culture from Stone Age emotions
• Do myths explain origins or do origins explain myths? -- Strong claim for latter position.
• Our evolutionary equipment for survival predates our capacities for self-reflection on that equipment. Claims science can solve the riddle of Gaugin's painting.
• Evolutionary Account:

• pre-human evolutionary lines -- most went extinct
• Dates for invertebrates: 220 million years ago for termites; 150 million for ants; bees 70-80 million years. Stabilized around 65 million years ago.
• Dates for homo sapiens: several 100 thousand years ago; diaspora (out of Africa) 60,000 years ago; neanderthals, homo floresiensis (hobbits!); agriculture 10,000 years ago;

• Eusocial: lives with multiple generations and altruistic; diffs: culture, language, intelligence, empathy, judging intentions, mental maps of social space.
• How to explain differences? large size and low mobility --

Wilson, Chapter 3, The Approach

• Some points to make about evolution (paralleling Wilson a bit): What does it mean to say evolution is "radically contingent" but also involves "design". Concept of "design space" and Wilson's concept of "preadaptation."
• Preadaptation (22): a step in evolution which opens up (or closes off) other possibilities.
• Major pre-adaptations leading to culture:

• Large size and relative immobility
• Large brain
• Emphasis on sight over smell.
• Bipedalism, freeing up the hands. (australopithicenes rock)
• Sweat glands and long distance running (Racing the Antelope)
• Control of fire (not available to insects and aquatic life)

• Big step toward eusociality: camping! Seriously, campsites (what's valuable about a campsite?) cf. hives, nests

Wilson, Chapter 4

• Dietary changes: Australopithecenes were vegetarians, Homo species (Habilis and later, Sapiens) scavenged meat before hunting.
• Changes marking Homo Habilis: facial structure, similar neocortex wrinkling to moderns, Broca and Wernicke areas of brain grow.
• Traditional explanations for growth of Hominins vs. recent speculation: 37-39: "innovation-adaptiveness hypothesis" -- why that favors the variability of grasslands and savannahs; variety of ways to make a living. Limits to hypothesis: Finarelli & Flynn study.
• Meat and hunting. Protein consumption.
• Wilson's emphasis on the "nest" and, for Hominins, the campsite. Defensive architecture and lifestyle in modern culture.
• Importance of nests: division of labor, defense, sharing food, group competition.

Wilson, Chapters 5 & 6

• More lists of "pre-adaptations":

• Land (allowing for fire)
• Large size (allowing for large brain)
• Grasping hands with soft "spatulate" fingers & and free to use (not needed for walking)
• Meat -- cooperation to get it --
• Cooking
• Nest/Camp
• Division of Labor

Wilson, Chapter 6

• More on encephalization: australopithicenes 500-600 cubic centimeters --> Homo Sapiens 1500-1700!
• Kin Selection: Altruism benefits group members proportionally to genetic similarity.

• Note: Wilson believes he and some colleagues have disproven kin selection, but not everyone agrees, and that's an understatement. Distinguishing the part that's mainstream from where he tries to write himself into history).

• Multi-level selection: A broader range of scientists believe in multi-level selection (individual and group), whether they agree that kin selection is true.
• Group Selection: Holds that group competition affects the fitness of individuals.

• Traits such as group size, "tightness" and "cooperativeness" (quality of communication and division of labor) matter.
• Group selection advocates think this is a meaningful question: How do the costs and benefits of membership in a group affect my fitness (ability to pass on genes)?
• 54: If costs (of group membership) exceed benefits (of group membership), defection will increase.

Wilson, Chapter 7

• Tribalism -- examples from Sports
• Research on in-group and out-group judgements (59)
• Is this nurture or nature? "pre-pared learning" (like language, incest, other ev. psycho traits)
• Ethnocentrism -- in experience and in the lab. implicit racism

JAN 23

Basics of Philosophical Marxism

• Hegel, the Young Hegelians, Feuerbach and Marx
• Theory of commodity production

• Commodities have exchange value and use value
• The use value of a commodity in intuitive -- e.g. the value of food or clothing in keeping you alive and warm. But you can also think of it in terms of the "socially necessary labor" to produce it.
• Problem: How do you explain profit?

• Labor theory of value: The value of the worker's labor from the capitalists' perspective is the amount of commodities necessary to keep the worker alive and working effectively. If that is 2 hours a day, then the "necessary labor" of a worker is two hours and the other six hours are "surplus labor"
• Surplus value theory of labor/profit: For Marx profit emerges from the labor in the sense that other capital inputs are "constant" (example: if you buy a machine to make a product, the cost of the machine has to be recovered from the sale of the product, but if the machine makes a worker more productive, the added value (surplus labor) goes to the capitalist. Short version: in an industrial model you only make money from the difference between what you pay the worker and the "actual" value of the worker's labor.
• What's the remedy for this? Elite intellectuals who understand this need to raise the consciousness of workers so that they will revolt. In a just society, labor retains it's surplus value or agrees, democratically, on how it will be used. (More at [1]

• Theory of culture in a nutshell:

• Base and superstructure
• Econonic determinism vs. non-economic determinist marxisms

Crises of Capitalism: 2008 and 1914

• Contemporary Example - Global recession of 2008: | RSA animate - Crises of Capitalism, first 7:30 minutes in class.
• Gramsci's "organic crisis" : crisis which challenges legitimacy of ruling class. Gramsci's distinctive response, in contrast to Lenin's emphasis on resistance as a means of raising the class consciousness of workers, is to promote the idea of the "organic intellectual" (more later).
• Trotsky's analysis of World War I as a capitalist war:

• "“The forces of production which capitalism has evolved have outgrown the limits of nation and state,” Trotsky wrote in the very first sentence of his analysis. “The national state, the present political form, is too narrow for the exploitation of these productive forces. The natural tendency of our economic system, therefore, is to seek to break through the state boundaries. The whole globe, the land and the sea, the surface as well as the interior have become one economic workshop, the different parts of which are inseparably connected with each other.” [War and the International (Colombo: Young Socialist Publications, 1971), p vii.]
• Resolution of the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International held in 1907. “Wars between capitalist states,” the resolution declared, “are as a rule the result of their rivalry for world markets, as every state is not only concerned in consolidating its own market but also in conquering new markets.... Further, these wars arise out of the never-ending armaments race of militarism.... Wars are therefore inherent in the nature of capitalism; they will only cease when the capitalist economy is abolished.” [8] Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (Allen Lane, 1998), p. 31.