Adrian Piper
Encyclopedia
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper (born September 20, 1948) is a first-generation conceptual art
ist and analytic philosopher
who was born in New York City and lived for many years on Cape Cod, Massachusetts before emigrating from the United States. Since 2005 she has lived and worked in Berlin, where she runs the APRA Foundation Berlin and edits The Berlin Journal of Philosophy.
then the New Lincoln School throughout grammar school and high school, and the Art Students’ League
during high school. She began exhibiting her artwork internationally at the age of twenty, and graduated from the School of Visual Arts
in 1969 with an A.A. in Fine Art and a concentration in painting and sculpture. While continuing to produce and exhibit her artwork, Piper received a B.A. Summa Cum Laude with Research Honors in Philosophy and a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Musicology from the City College of New York
in 1974. For graduate school in philosophy she attended Harvard University
, where she received an M.A. in 1977 and a Ph.D. in 1981 under the supervision of John Rawls
. She also studied Kant
and Hegel
with Dieter Henrich
at the University of Heidelberg in 1977-1978. Her formal education lasted a total of 27 years.
, Harvard
, Michigan
, Stanford
, UCSD, and Wellesley College. Following in the steps of trailblazing pioneer Dr. Joyce Mitchell Cook, in 1987 she became the first tenured African American woman professor in the field of philosophy. For her refusal to return to the United States while listed as a Suspicious Traveler on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s Watch List, Wellesley forcibly terminated her tenured full professorship in philosophy in 2008. Her principal philosophical publications are in metaethics, Kant, and the history of ethics.Her two-volume study in Kantian metaethics, Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception and Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception, was accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press in 2008 and has been available since then at her website as an open access e-book. This study critically surveys the major moral theories of the late 20th century, develops a Kantian metaethical theory anchored in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and integrates standard decision theory into classical predicate logic.
Rationality and the Structure of the Self was the culmination of 34 years of work, parts of which were previously published in article form. One early article, "Two Conceptions of the Self" (1985) introduced Piper’s distinction between the Humean and the Kantian conceptions of the self, motivation and rationality. In Rationality and the Structure of the Self, she argues that the second half of the 20th century saw the development in Anglo-American analytic philosophy of a battle for supremacy between these two competing conceptions in ethics. Piper defines the Humean conception as consisting in the belief-desire model of motivation plus the utility-maximizing model of rationality; and the Kantian conception as modeling both motivation and rationality on the canons of deductive and inductive logic. The Kantian conception of the self thereby accords priority to freedom, autonomy and moral obligation over the satisfaction of desire and the maximization of utility. Piper claims that in this competition, both combatants have been handicapped by their own assumptions. In Rationality and the Structure of the Self she surveyed this historical development and proposes solutions to several of the still-unresolved problems it engendered.
Piper examined the Humean conception of the self in depth in Volume I: The Humean Conception. There she acknowledges the impressive historical pedigree of this conception in Hobbes
, Hume
, Bentham
, Mill
, and Sidgwick
; and analyzes the foundations it provides to contemporary utilitarianism, virtue theory and social contract theory in philosophy. Piper also traces the influence of the Humean conception in economics, psychology, and political theory because of its technical formalization in decision theory and neoclassical economics by Ramsey
, Savage, von Neumann
& Morgenstern
, Allais
, and others. She argues that its wide sphere of influence in the social sciences has led late-20th century moral philosophers to presuppose the Humean conception as a given in constructing foundations for their normative moral theories. However, she contends, close analysis of both the belief-desire model of motivation and also the utility-maximizing model of rationality, in both informal and axiomatized versions, reveals that all such formulations are not only either vacuous or internally inconsistent. They also conceal intensional presuppositions that make it impossible to state in what, exactly, the irrationality of a cycle ordering consists; and therefore rob decision theory’s technical apparatus of a viable and formally valid consistency criterion.
Piper criticizes Humean moral philosophers for having displaced these problems onto a straw man: the consequentialist/deontologist debate, rather than confronting them head-on. Consequently, Piper argues, Humean moral philosophers as varied as Rawls, Nagel
, Brandt
, Gewirth
, Baier
, Williams
, Frankfurt
, Gibbard
, Lewis
, Goldman
, Anderson
, Anscombe
and others have appropriated the Humean conception of the self for foundational purposes. Yet they have been at the same time unsuccessful in their attempts to solve the three insoluble metaethical problems that the Humean conception engenders: of moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification. Volume I of Rationality and the Structure of the Self concludes that the Humean conception of the self can be rescued only by embedding it as a special case in a more comprehensive Kantian conception that it implicitly presupposes.
However, Piper also views many Kantian moral philosophers as having also tied their own hands in attempting to formulate an alternative to the Humean conception, by restricting their attention to Kant’s moral philosophy alone. In two earlier articles on Kant-exegesis, "Kant on the Objectivity of the Moral Law" (1994) and "Kant’s Intelligible Standpoint on Action" (2000), she contended that Kant’s own moral theory cannot be properly interpreted without reference to the historically prior Critique of Pure Reason, in which all of the significant technical terms that inform the Groundwork and second Critique are introduced. She suggests that ignoring Kant’s first Critique makes it impossible for contemporary Kantian moral theory to outcompete the Humean conception’s highly refined and systematized formalization of action theory, which proves its success through practical application in the social sciences.
With Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception, Piper aimed to remedy these oversights. She finds in Kant’s first Critique inspiration for proposed alternative models of motivation, rationality, and the self that are constructed on the relatively firm foundation of classical predicate logic – the same foundation on which Kant’s own conception of reason relied. She proposes a way to integrate standard decision-theoretic axiomatizations into this foundation without loss of predictive power, by (1) rendering explicitly the intensionality of preference orderings using classical predicate logic; and (2) extending the Boolean connectives and quantificational notation of that logic to subsentential constituents. In addition, she argues that integrating the Humean belief-desire model of motivation into a Kantian model of reason as motivation implies solutions to the problems of moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification that the Humean conception engendered.
In this second volume, Piper develops a conception of human agency, based on a foundation of logical consistency as literal self-preservation. She proposes two criteria of consistency for the set of concepts that rationally structure the self in the ideal case: horizontal consistency of cognitively operative concepts with one another, which applies the quantified law of non-contradiction to subsentential constituents; and vertical consistency of lower-order concepts with higher-order ones, which applies the quantified law of modus ponens to the inferential relationship among such constituents. Final ends that satisfy these two criteria are rational; substantive moral theories that satisfy them are rationally justified; and actions that are guided by them include those that are morally motivated.
Piper argues that human beings are naturally disposed to preserve at least the appearance of such consistency, both in their cognitions and in their actions, even when the practical reality falls short. This practical shortcoming she refers to as pseudorationality. She argues that this overriding disposition explains how reason can be motivationally effective in the absence of desire, and why it so rarely is in practice. Piper applies this conception of the self and agency, first, to both analyze and also justify the practice of whistle blowing; and second, to an analysis of xenophobia
that implies both its inevitability and also its susceptibility to rational reform. In an early article, "Moral Theory and Moral Alienation" (1987), Piper concluded that the phenomenon of moral alienation that has received so much attention in the metaethical literature is a natural by-product of possessing and exercising our cognitive and rational capacities. She concludes Volume II of Rationality and the Structure of the Self with the further argument that without so-called moral alienation, we would be unable to grasp meaning, forge relationships with others, or act transpersonally in the service of selfless or disinterested moral principles.
in 1967, Piper then embraced the principle of Conceptual art that accords highest priority to the idea or concept that generates a work, and regards different art media – painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, video, installation, soundworks, photo-documentation, etc. – as equally available and valuable instruments for realizing it. Since then, she has maintained this approach to materials in all of her work.
From 1967 to 1970, her early work as a first-generation Conceptual artist brought to bear the techniques and resources of yoga and meditation – what she called the "indexical present," acquired through her personal practice, on the exploration of consciousness, perception, and infinite permutation using maps, diagrams, photographs and descriptive language. Her Hypothesis: Situation series (1968–1970) forged a connection between passive contemplation of objects and the dynamic character of self-conscious agency navigating through time that then led her briefly into unannounced street performance. In the 1970s, Piper introduced issues of xenophobia, race and gender into the vocabulary of Conceptual art with her Catalysis (1970–72) and Mythic Being (1973–75) performance series. She then introduced explicit political content into Minimalism
with her mixed media constructed environment Art for the Art World Surface Pattern (1976).
In the 1980s, Piper sharpened the focus of her artwork, by applying her meditational concept of the indexical present to the interpersonal dynamics of racism and racial stereotyping. Works that explore these themes and strategies include her pencil drawing Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features (1981); her collective performance and video Funk Lessons (1982-4); her unannounced Calling Card interactive performances (1986–1990); her mixed media installation Close to Home (1987); her video installation Cornered (1988); and Vanilla Nightmares (1986–1989), her series of racially and sexually transgressive charcoal drawings on pages of the New York Times. Her first retrospective in 1987 at the Alternative Museum
in New York, Adrian Piper: Reflections 1967-1987, reintroduced the art public and a new generation of viewers to the media, strategies and preoccupations of first-generation Conceptual art. Her mixed media video installation, The Big Four-Oh (1988), won the New York Dance & Performance Award
(the Bessie) for Installation & New Media in 2001.
The 1990s saw Piper extend many of the same concepts and preoccupations to several large-scale, commissioned multi-media works and video installations in the formal tradition of Serial Minimalism. Among these were Vote/Emote (1990), Out of the Corner (1990), What It’s Like, What It Is #1 – 3 (1991-2), and Black Box/ White Box (1992). Piper’s multi-panel photo-text collage series Decide Who You Are (1991–92) combined appropriated photographic imagery with silk-screened drawing and poetically compressed texts, in a sequence of formal permutations on the themes of political self-deception and disingenuity. Her photo-text oil crayon drawing, Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady (1995), continues to shock, outrage and amuse its viewers. Also in 1995, Piper withdrew her work from an important museum exhibition survey of early Conceptual art, in protest against its funding by the Philip Morris Tobacco Company
. To replace it, she created Ashes to Ashes (1995), a photo-text work narrating both of her parents’ deaths from smoking-related diseases. This work exists in both English and Italian versions.
Piper further expanded the vocabulary of Conceptual art to include Vedic
philosophical imagery and concepts in 2000, with her silk-screened graphic permutational Color Wheel Series, which combined Sanskrit text with drawing, photography, and representations of a Vedic divinity. Since then she has extended these concepts into an introspective investigation of loss, desire, detachment and self-transcendence in her video YOU/STOP/WATCH (2002), her open-ended multi-media series Everything (2003- ), her videotaped lecture/performance Shiva Dances with the Art Institute of Chicago (2004), and her PacMan Trilogy (2005-8), a series of three video animations that schematize certain essential human dynamics using PacMan imagery. Her most recent Vanishing Point series (2009- ) consisting in sculptural installations, drawings and collective performance, further sharpens the focus of her investigation into the nature, structure and boundaries of the ego-self.
Adrian Piper’s artwork is in many important collections, including the Museum of Modern Art
, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art
, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
; the Centre Georges Pompidou
, Paris; the Generali Foundation
, Vienna; and the Aomori Museum of Art, Japan. Her sixth traveling retrospective, Adrian Piper since 1965, closed at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona
in 2004. Her two-volume collection, OUT OF ORDER, OUT OF SIGHT: Selected Writings in Meta-Art and Art Criticism 1967–1992 (MIT Press, 1996), is available in paperback.
principles, is vinyasa- and pranayama-based. Her meditation practice is samyama-based and follows the Samkhya
n structure of the 24 Tattvas, but regards these as equivalent to the Five Koshas and the Vedantic Atman as the actual referent of the Samkhyan concept of Purusha.
since 1994. She was a Scholar at the Getty Research Institute
in 1998-1999. She has been awarded Guggenheim
, AVA, NEA
, NEH, Andrew Mellon, Woodrow Wilson, IFK and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Institute for Advanced Study
Research Fellowships, as well as the Skowhegan Medal for Sculptural Installation and the New York Dance & Performance Award (the Bessie) for Installation & New Media.
APRA is maintained as a document of Piper's activities in her three chosen areas of specialization: art, philosophy and yoga. It comprises (1) the archive, housing Piper’s art work, correspondence, manuscripts, documents, family photo and letters archive; book, catalogue and articles library; video and soundwork library; reproductions library; Vedic and Western philosophy library; art library, fiction and poetry library, music collection, video collection; artwork inventory, text inventory; and, eventually, preserved personal living and working space, furnishings, and personal possessions exactly as she designed, built and arranged and/or used them; and (2) the APRA web site, offering professional and biographical information about Piper’s life and work.
In 2009 Piper established APRA as a foundation that also funds the APRA Foundation Multi-Disciplinary Fellowship, a single, annual competitive research grant designed for intellectuals who (i) are proven high achievers in at least two seemingly disparate fields of scholarship and/or the arts simultaneously; and (ii) wish to use APRA’s resources to research the conception, constitution and/or structure of the self in either or both of them. Thus the APRA Foundation Berlin supports research that exemplifies, models, analyzes, and/or theorizes the same creative multi-disciplinary expressions of the self, encouraged by globalization and cross-cultural journeying, that her own work also embodies. The Fellowship picks up where Rationality and the Structure of the Self leaves off. It aims to extend and encourage further investigation into the same broad family of concepts and theories that Piper’s own research in philosophy and art engages. Its goal is to identify the constructive influence of cross-culturation and globalization on the development of divergent modes of creative self-expression; and to illuminate how these, in turn, help one to adapt to and flourish in that panoply of divergent cultures.
Piper founded the Journal while seeking to solve the problem of how to reconcile the conflicting requirements of anti-plagiarism and blind submissions in academic publishing. For those authors who aspire to peer-reviewed publications accepted exclusively on the basis of their quality, or at least to avoid treatment affected by knowledge of the author’s identity, a policy of blind submissions is a necessary supplement to double-blind reviewing: By concealing the author’s identity even from administrators, it guards against information slippage, whether intentional or unintentional, between administrators and referees. For those authors whose publications receive rather more use than mention by their colleagues, a strong and consistent anti-plagiarism policy, of the sort recommended by the Office of Research Integrity, the Committee on Publication Ethics, or the Singapore Statement on Research Integrity is equally important. These two procedures appear to be mutually incompatible: A robust blind submissions policy requires that the author’s identity not be disclosed, even to administrators, until after referees have made a positive decision on the paper; and, if a negative one, not at all. A robust anti-plagiarism policy requires that plagiarism sanctions apply independently of whether or not the paper is accepted for publication; and this, in turn, requires the author’s identity to be known at least to administrators in advance of that decision. Whereas blind submission prohibits author disclosure until after the publication decision, anti-plagiarism necessitates author disclosure before the publication decision. It would seem to be impossible to satisfy the requirements of both simultaneously.
In collaboration with the APRA Foundation Berlin webmaster, Piper developed a fully computerized procedure for submitting scholarly papers for publication in academic journals that reconciles these two desiderata. The procedure, a simple web application template, satisfies the requirements of blind submission and double-blind review, and is also compatible with a robust anti-plagiarism policy. On 7 April 2011, she publicly announced this application and offered it to any journal that might wish to consider it. But in the process of researching the mechanics of the procedure, she was “compelled to conjure in imagination the philosophy journal in which such a procedure could most easily be put to use, and concluded that [she] would have to establish it [her]self.” The result was The Berlin Journal of Philosophy, an innovative experiment that offers a different way of implementing the traditional values of academic research publications.
The Journal is also unusual in several other respects. It appears whenever a paper that meets the requisite quality criteria has been selected. It explicitly solicits specialized paper submissions in all areas of academic philosophy – including the history of non-Western as well as Western philosophy. It rejects the conventional conception of refereeing as an unpaid service to the field that all academics are professionally obligated to render when called. Instead, it requires referees to apply voluntarily for the job and make a contractual commitment, on the reasoning that referees will be more amenable to following rules to which they have voluntarily agreed. It also offers referees a nominal honorarium for each refereed paper that satisfies the terms of the Anonymous Referee Contract, thus explicitly acknowledging the value of their service. The Contract commits referees to specified refereeing practices, including administration of a detailed anti-plagiarism policy. This policy defines the concept of plagiarism not motivationally, but rather behaviorally and gradatim. It is the failure to meet the obligation of bibliographic citation to a source of one’s research itself, not the motive for this failure, which is held to account by the Journal’s anti-plagiarism policy. The Journal’s Anonymous Referee Contract also strictly prohibits referees from disclosing their service as referees for the Journal to anyone, and therefore from listing it on their CVs. This provision effectively protects the referee’s freedom to evaluate a submitted paper solely on its merits, without fear of professional repercussions even in those difficult and painful cases where the paper raises plagiarism issues. The price of this freedom is that the referee must relinquish the professional advantages of being identified as a referee for the Journal.
These are not standard refereeing practices in the field of academic philosophy. Whether or not they are compatible with standard practice, or offer a viable alternative to it, remains to be seen. In either case, The Berlin Journal of Philosophy offers one possible model for academic journals whose sole priority is the quality and originality of the papers submitted to them.
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
ist and analytic philosopher
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
who was born in New York City and lived for many years on Cape Cod, Massachusetts before emigrating from the United States. Since 2005 she has lived and worked in Berlin, where she runs the APRA Foundation Berlin and edits The Berlin Journal of Philosophy.
Education
Piper attended Riverside ChurchRiverside Church
The Riverside Church in the City of New York is an interdenominational church in New York City, famous for its elaborate Neo-Gothic architecture—which includes the world's largest tuned carillon bell...
then the New Lincoln School throughout grammar school and high school, and the Art Students’ League
Art Students League of New York
The Art Students League of New York is an art school located on West 57th Street in New York City. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists, and has maintained for over 130 years a tradition of offering reasonably priced classes on a...
during high school. She began exhibiting her artwork internationally at the age of twenty, and graduated from the School of Visual Arts
School of Visual Arts
The School of Visual Arts , is a proprietary art school located in Manhattan, New York City, and is widely considered to be one of the leading art schools in the United States. It was established in 1947 by co-founders Silas H. Rhodes and Burne Hogarth as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and...
in 1969 with an A.A. in Fine Art and a concentration in painting and sculpture. While continuing to produce and exhibit her artwork, Piper received a B.A. Summa Cum Laude with Research Honors in Philosophy and a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Musicology from the City College of New York
City College of New York
The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...
in 1974. For graduate school in philosophy she attended Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, where she received an M.A. in 1977 and a Ph.D. in 1981 under the supervision of John Rawls
John Rawls
John Bordley Rawls was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University....
. She also studied Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
and Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...
with Dieter Henrich
Dieter Henrich
Dieter Henrich is a German philosopher. A contemporary thinker in the tradition of German Idealism, Henrich is particularly known for the influence of Kant, Hegel and Fichte in his work.-Life:...
at the University of Heidelberg in 1977-1978. Her formal education lasted a total of 27 years.
Contributions in Philosophy
Adrian Piper taught philosophy at GeorgetownGeorgetown University
Georgetown University is a private, Jesuit, research university whose main campus is in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic university in the United States...
, Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
, Stanford
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
, UCSD, and Wellesley College. Following in the steps of trailblazing pioneer Dr. Joyce Mitchell Cook, in 1987 she became the first tenured African American woman professor in the field of philosophy. For her refusal to return to the United States while listed as a Suspicious Traveler on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s Watch List, Wellesley forcibly terminated her tenured full professorship in philosophy in 2008. Her principal philosophical publications are in metaethics, Kant, and the history of ethics.Her two-volume study in Kantian metaethics, Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception and Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception, was accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press in 2008 and has been available since then at her website as an open access e-book. This study critically surveys the major moral theories of the late 20th century, develops a Kantian metaethical theory anchored in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and integrates standard decision theory into classical predicate logic.
Rationality and the Structure of the Self was the culmination of 34 years of work, parts of which were previously published in article form. One early article, "Two Conceptions of the Self" (1985) introduced Piper’s distinction between the Humean and the Kantian conceptions of the self, motivation and rationality. In Rationality and the Structure of the Self, she argues that the second half of the 20th century saw the development in Anglo-American analytic philosophy of a battle for supremacy between these two competing conceptions in ethics. Piper defines the Humean conception as consisting in the belief-desire model of motivation plus the utility-maximizing model of rationality; and the Kantian conception as modeling both motivation and rationality on the canons of deductive and inductive logic. The Kantian conception of the self thereby accords priority to freedom, autonomy and moral obligation over the satisfaction of desire and the maximization of utility. Piper claims that in this competition, both combatants have been handicapped by their own assumptions. In Rationality and the Structure of the Self she surveyed this historical development and proposes solutions to several of the still-unresolved problems it engendered.
Piper examined the Humean conception of the self in depth in Volume I: The Humean Conception. There she acknowledges the impressive historical pedigree of this conception in Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury , in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy...
, Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
, Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism...
, Mill
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of...
, and Sidgwick
Henry Sidgwick
Henry Sidgwick was an English utilitarian philosopher and economist. He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research, a member of the Metaphysical Society, and promoted the higher education of women...
; and analyzes the foundations it provides to contemporary utilitarianism, virtue theory and social contract theory in philosophy. Piper also traces the influence of the Humean conception in economics, psychology, and political theory because of its technical formalization in decision theory and neoclassical economics by Ramsey
Frank P. Ramsey
Frank Plumpton Ramsey was a British mathematician who, in addition to mathematics, made significant and precocious contributions in philosophy and economics before his death at the age of 26...
, Savage, von Neumann
John von Neumann
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis,...
& Morgenstern
Oskar Morgenstern
Oskar Morgenstern was a German-born Austrian-School economist. He, along with John von Neumann, helped found the mathematical field of game theory ....
, Allais
Maurice Allais
Maurice Félix Charles Allais was a French economist, and was the 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources."...
, and others. She argues that its wide sphere of influence in the social sciences has led late-20th century moral philosophers to presuppose the Humean conception as a given in constructing foundations for their normative moral theories. However, she contends, close analysis of both the belief-desire model of motivation and also the utility-maximizing model of rationality, in both informal and axiomatized versions, reveals that all such formulations are not only either vacuous or internally inconsistent. They also conceal intensional presuppositions that make it impossible to state in what, exactly, the irrationality of a cycle ordering consists; and therefore rob decision theory’s technical apparatus of a viable and formally valid consistency criterion.
Piper criticizes Humean moral philosophers for having displaced these problems onto a straw man: the consequentialist/deontologist debate, rather than confronting them head-on. Consequently, Piper argues, Humean moral philosophers as varied as Rawls, Nagel
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics...
, Brandt
Richard Brandt
Richard Booker Brandt was an American philosopher of the utilitarian tradition in moral philosophy. He taught at Swarthmore College before spending the bulk of his career at the University of Michigan, where he taught with Charles Stevenson and William K. Frankena and served as Chairman of the...
, Gewirth
Alan Gewirth
Alan Gewirth was an American philosopher, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, and author of Reason and Morality, , Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications , The Community of Rights , Self-Fulfillment , and numerous other writings in moral philosophy and political...
, Baier
Annette Baier
Annette C. Baier is a well-known moral philosopher and Hume scholar, focusing in particular on Hume's moral psychology. For most of her career she taught in the philosophy department at the University of Pittsburgh, having moved there from Carnegie Mellon University...
, Williams
Bernard Williams
Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams was an English moral philosopher, described by The Times as the most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time. His publications include Problems of the Self , Moral Luck , Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy , and Truth and Truthfulness...
, Frankfurt
Harry Frankfurt
Harry Gordon Frankfurt is an American philosopher. He is professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University and has previously taught at Yale University and Rockefeller University. He obtained his B.A. in 1949 and Ph.D. in 1954 from...
, Gibbard
Allan Gibbard
Allan Gibbard is the Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Allan Gibbard has made several contributions to contemporary ethical theory, in particular metaethics...
, Lewis
David Kellogg Lewis
David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton from 1970 until his death. He is also closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than thirty years...
, Goldman
Alvin Goldman
Alvin Ira Goldman is an American professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He previously taught at the University of Michigan and at the University of Arizona. He earned his PhD from Princeton University and is married to Holly Smith, a well known ethicist, former...
, Anderson
Elizabeth Anderson
Elizabeth Anderson may refer to:* Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, , English physician and feminist, the first woman to gain a medical qualification in Britain*Liz Anderson , American singer-songwriter...
, Anscombe
G. E. M. Anscombe
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe , better known as Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher from Ireland. A student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she became an authority on his work and edited and translated many books drawn from his writings, above all his Philosophical Investigations...
and others have appropriated the Humean conception of the self for foundational purposes. Yet they have been at the same time unsuccessful in their attempts to solve the three insoluble metaethical problems that the Humean conception engenders: of moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification. Volume I of Rationality and the Structure of the Self concludes that the Humean conception of the self can be rescued only by embedding it as a special case in a more comprehensive Kantian conception that it implicitly presupposes.
However, Piper also views many Kantian moral philosophers as having also tied their own hands in attempting to formulate an alternative to the Humean conception, by restricting their attention to Kant’s moral philosophy alone. In two earlier articles on Kant-exegesis, "Kant on the Objectivity of the Moral Law" (1994) and "Kant’s Intelligible Standpoint on Action" (2000), she contended that Kant’s own moral theory cannot be properly interpreted without reference to the historically prior Critique of Pure Reason, in which all of the significant technical terms that inform the Groundwork and second Critique are introduced. She suggests that ignoring Kant’s first Critique makes it impossible for contemporary Kantian moral theory to outcompete the Humean conception’s highly refined and systematized formalization of action theory, which proves its success through practical application in the social sciences.
With Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception, Piper aimed to remedy these oversights. She finds in Kant’s first Critique inspiration for proposed alternative models of motivation, rationality, and the self that are constructed on the relatively firm foundation of classical predicate logic – the same foundation on which Kant’s own conception of reason relied. She proposes a way to integrate standard decision-theoretic axiomatizations into this foundation without loss of predictive power, by (1) rendering explicitly the intensionality of preference orderings using classical predicate logic; and (2) extending the Boolean connectives and quantificational notation of that logic to subsentential constituents. In addition, she argues that integrating the Humean belief-desire model of motivation into a Kantian model of reason as motivation implies solutions to the problems of moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification that the Humean conception engendered.
In this second volume, Piper develops a conception of human agency, based on a foundation of logical consistency as literal self-preservation. She proposes two criteria of consistency for the set of concepts that rationally structure the self in the ideal case: horizontal consistency of cognitively operative concepts with one another, which applies the quantified law of non-contradiction to subsentential constituents; and vertical consistency of lower-order concepts with higher-order ones, which applies the quantified law of modus ponens to the inferential relationship among such constituents. Final ends that satisfy these two criteria are rational; substantive moral theories that satisfy them are rationally justified; and actions that are guided by them include those that are morally motivated.
Piper argues that human beings are naturally disposed to preserve at least the appearance of such consistency, both in their cognitions and in their actions, even when the practical reality falls short. This practical shortcoming she refers to as pseudorationality. She argues that this overriding disposition explains how reason can be motivationally effective in the absence of desire, and why it so rarely is in practice. Piper applies this conception of the self and agency, first, to both analyze and also justify the practice of whistle blowing; and second, to an analysis of xenophobia
Xenophobia
Xenophobia is defined as "an unreasonable fear of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange". It comes from the Greek words ξένος , meaning "stranger," "foreigner" and φόβος , meaning "fear."...
that implies both its inevitability and also its susceptibility to rational reform. In an early article, "Moral Theory and Moral Alienation" (1987), Piper concluded that the phenomenon of moral alienation that has received so much attention in the metaethical literature is a natural by-product of possessing and exercising our cognitive and rational capacities. She concludes Volume II of Rationality and the Structure of the Self with the further argument that without so-called moral alienation, we would be unable to grasp meaning, forge relationships with others, or act transpersonally in the service of selfless or disinterested moral principles.
Contributions in Art
Adrian Piper’s early LSD Paintings of 1965-67, some of which were executed while she was still in high school, were discovered and curated by Robert del Principe, exhibited for the first time in 2002 at Galeria Emi Fontana in Milan, and quickly entered the international canon of psychedelic art. Influenced by the work of Sol LeWittSol LeWitt
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism....
in 1967, Piper then embraced the principle of Conceptual art that accords highest priority to the idea or concept that generates a work, and regards different art media – painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, video, installation, soundworks, photo-documentation, etc. – as equally available and valuable instruments for realizing it. Since then, she has maintained this approach to materials in all of her work.
From 1967 to 1970, her early work as a first-generation Conceptual artist brought to bear the techniques and resources of yoga and meditation – what she called the "indexical present," acquired through her personal practice, on the exploration of consciousness, perception, and infinite permutation using maps, diagrams, photographs and descriptive language. Her Hypothesis: Situation series (1968–1970) forged a connection between passive contemplation of objects and the dynamic character of self-conscious agency navigating through time that then led her briefly into unannounced street performance. In the 1970s, Piper introduced issues of xenophobia, race and gender into the vocabulary of Conceptual art with her Catalysis (1970–72) and Mythic Being (1973–75) performance series. She then introduced explicit political content into Minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
with her mixed media constructed environment Art for the Art World Surface Pattern (1976).
In the 1980s, Piper sharpened the focus of her artwork, by applying her meditational concept of the indexical present to the interpersonal dynamics of racism and racial stereotyping. Works that explore these themes and strategies include her pencil drawing Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features (1981); her collective performance and video Funk Lessons (1982-4); her unannounced Calling Card interactive performances (1986–1990); her mixed media installation Close to Home (1987); her video installation Cornered (1988); and Vanilla Nightmares (1986–1989), her series of racially and sexually transgressive charcoal drawings on pages of the New York Times. Her first retrospective in 1987 at the Alternative Museum
The Alternative Museum
The Alternative Museum was founded in 1975 by artists for artists and the broader New York City community in the United States. Its primary purpose was to present works of art created by artists of conscience through exhibitions of contemporary art, world music concerts, performances and panel...
in New York, Adrian Piper: Reflections 1967-1987, reintroduced the art public and a new generation of viewers to the media, strategies and preoccupations of first-generation Conceptual art. Her mixed media video installation, The Big Four-Oh (1988), won the New York Dance & Performance Award
Bessie Awards
The New York Dance and Performance Awards, informally known as the Bessie Awards in honor of Bessie Schonberg, are awarded annually for innovative achievement in dance and related performances, particularly so-called "downtown" performances...
(the Bessie) for Installation & New Media in 2001.
The 1990s saw Piper extend many of the same concepts and preoccupations to several large-scale, commissioned multi-media works and video installations in the formal tradition of Serial Minimalism. Among these were Vote/Emote (1990), Out of the Corner (1990), What It’s Like, What It Is #1 – 3 (1991-2), and Black Box/ White Box (1992). Piper’s multi-panel photo-text collage series Decide Who You Are (1991–92) combined appropriated photographic imagery with silk-screened drawing and poetically compressed texts, in a sequence of formal permutations on the themes of political self-deception and disingenuity. Her photo-text oil crayon drawing, Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady (1995), continues to shock, outrage and amuse its viewers. Also in 1995, Piper withdrew her work from an important museum exhibition survey of early Conceptual art, in protest against its funding by the Philip Morris Tobacco Company
Philip Morris International
Philip Morris International is an international tobacco company, with products sold in over 160 countries. In 2007, it held a 15.6% share of the international cigarette market outside of the USA and reported revenues net of excise taxes of $22.8 billion and operating income of $8.9 billion.Until...
. To replace it, she created Ashes to Ashes (1995), a photo-text work narrating both of her parents’ deaths from smoking-related diseases. This work exists in both English and Italian versions.
Piper further expanded the vocabulary of Conceptual art to include Vedic
Vedic
Vedic may refer to:* the Vedas, the oldest preserved Indic texts** Vedic Sanskrit, the language of these texts** Vedic period, during which these texts were produced** Vedic pantheon of gods mentioned in Vedas/vedic period...
philosophical imagery and concepts in 2000, with her silk-screened graphic permutational Color Wheel Series, which combined Sanskrit text with drawing, photography, and representations of a Vedic divinity. Since then she has extended these concepts into an introspective investigation of loss, desire, detachment and self-transcendence in her video YOU/STOP/WATCH (2002), her open-ended multi-media series Everything (2003- ), her videotaped lecture/performance Shiva Dances with the Art Institute of Chicago (2004), and her PacMan Trilogy (2005-8), a series of three video animations that schematize certain essential human dynamics using PacMan imagery. Her most recent Vanishing Point series (2009- ) consisting in sculptural installations, drawings and collective performance, further sharpens the focus of her investigation into the nature, structure and boundaries of the ego-self.
Adrian Piper’s artwork is in many important collections, including the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles is a contemporary art museum with three locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near Walt Disney Concert Hall...
; the Centre Georges Pompidou
Centre Georges Pompidou
Centre Georges Pompidou is a complex in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil and the Marais...
, Paris; the Generali Foundation
Generali Foundation
The Generali Foundation was established in 1988 by the Generali Group Austria as a private and non-profit-making art association for the promotion of contemporary art...
, Vienna; and the Aomori Museum of Art, Japan. Her sixth traveling retrospective, Adrian Piper since 1965, closed at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona
Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art
The Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art is situated in the Plaça dels Àngels, in El Raval, Ciutat Vella, Barcelona, Spain. The museum opened to the public on November 28, 1995. Its current director is Bartomeu Marí . Previous directors were Daniel Giralt-Miracle , Miguel Molins , Manuel J...
in 2004. Her two-volume collection, OUT OF ORDER, OUT OF SIGHT: Selected Writings in Meta-Art and Art Criticism 1967–1992 (MIT Press, 1996), is available in paperback.
Yoga Practice
Piper began her study and practice of yoga in 1965 with the Upanishads and Swami Vishnudevananda’s Complete Book of Yoga. She studied with Swami Satchidananda from 1966, became a svanistha in 1971 and a brahmacharin in 1985. Between 1992 and 2000, she studied at Kripalu with Gitanand and with Arthur Kilmurray, Patricia Walden, Chuck Miller, Erich Schiffmann, Leslie Bogart, Richard Freeman, Tim Miller, David Swenson, Gary Kraftsow, Georg Feuerstein, David Frawley, and John Friend. Her asana practice, grounded in IyengarIyengar
Iyengar or Ayyangar is a caste given to Hindu Brahmins of Tamil origin who follow the Visishtadvaita philosophy propounded by Sri Ramanujacharya. They are found mostly in Tamil Nadu as they are generally native to the Tamil Nadu state of the Republic of India...
principles, is vinyasa- and pranayama-based. Her meditation practice is samyama-based and follows the Samkhya
Samkhya
Samkhya, also Sankhya, Sāṃkhya, or Sāṅkhya is one of the six schools of Hindu philosophy and classical Indian philosophy. Sage Kapila is traditionally considered as the founder of the Samkhya school, although no historical verification is possible...
n structure of the 24 Tattvas, but regards these as equivalent to the Five Koshas and the Vedantic Atman as the actual referent of the Samkhyan concept of Purusha.
Fellowships and Awards
Adrian Piper has been a Non-Resident Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York UniversityNew York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
since 1994. She was a Scholar at the Getty Research Institute
Getty Research Institute
The Getty Research Institute , located at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, is "dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts". A program of the J...
in 1998-1999. She has been awarded Guggenheim
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Mr. and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died April 26, 1922...
, AVA, NEA
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
, NEH, Andrew Mellon, Woodrow Wilson, IFK and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Institute for Advanced Study
Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin
The Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin in an interdisciplinary institute created 1981 in Berlin-Grunewald for studies in natural, social sciences for various research projects. It is a member of the group Some Institutes for Advanced Study....
Research Fellowships, as well as the Skowhegan Medal for Sculptural Installation and the New York Dance & Performance Award (the Bessie) for Installation & New Media.
The APRA Foundation Berlin
Adrian Piper founded the Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA) in 2002, after being diagnosed with a chronic, progressive, and incurable medical condition. Although the condition had vanished within two years after she emigrated to Germany in 2005, she continued to develop APRA as a personal and public resource for students, scholars, curators, collectors, writers, and members of the general public who have a constructive curiosity or scholarly or professional interest in her work and life.APRA is maintained as a document of Piper's activities in her three chosen areas of specialization: art, philosophy and yoga. It comprises (1) the archive, housing Piper’s art work, correspondence, manuscripts, documents, family photo and letters archive; book, catalogue and articles library; video and soundwork library; reproductions library; Vedic and Western philosophy library; art library, fiction and poetry library, music collection, video collection; artwork inventory, text inventory; and, eventually, preserved personal living and working space, furnishings, and personal possessions exactly as she designed, built and arranged and/or used them; and (2) the APRA web site, offering professional and biographical information about Piper’s life and work.
In 2009 Piper established APRA as a foundation that also funds the APRA Foundation Multi-Disciplinary Fellowship, a single, annual competitive research grant designed for intellectuals who (i) are proven high achievers in at least two seemingly disparate fields of scholarship and/or the arts simultaneously; and (ii) wish to use APRA’s resources to research the conception, constitution and/or structure of the self in either or both of them. Thus the APRA Foundation Berlin supports research that exemplifies, models, analyzes, and/or theorizes the same creative multi-disciplinary expressions of the self, encouraged by globalization and cross-cultural journeying, that her own work also embodies. The Fellowship picks up where Rationality and the Structure of the Self leaves off. It aims to extend and encourage further investigation into the same broad family of concepts and theories that Piper’s own research in philosophy and art engages. Its goal is to identify the constructive influence of cross-culturation and globalization on the development of divergent modes of creative self-expression; and to illuminate how these, in turn, help one to adapt to and flourish in that panoply of divergent cultures.
The Berlin Journal of Philosophy
Piper founded The Berlin Journal of Philosophy in 2011. The Journal is an English-language blind-submission, double-blind, peer-reviewed, open-access journal that aims to publish articles on all topics in the four traditional major areas of philosophical specialization, namely epistemology & metaphysics, logic, value theory, the history of philosophy, and their established subspecialties. It innovates in adhering strictly to simultaneous policies of blind submissions, double-blind review, and anti-plagiarism. The Journal is copyrighted, administered and published by the APRA Foundation Berlin, an independent research organization unaffiliated with any department, institute, school, college, university, or other academic institution.Piper founded the Journal while seeking to solve the problem of how to reconcile the conflicting requirements of anti-plagiarism and blind submissions in academic publishing. For those authors who aspire to peer-reviewed publications accepted exclusively on the basis of their quality, or at least to avoid treatment affected by knowledge of the author’s identity, a policy of blind submissions is a necessary supplement to double-blind reviewing: By concealing the author’s identity even from administrators, it guards against information slippage, whether intentional or unintentional, between administrators and referees. For those authors whose publications receive rather more use than mention by their colleagues, a strong and consistent anti-plagiarism policy, of the sort recommended by the Office of Research Integrity, the Committee on Publication Ethics, or the Singapore Statement on Research Integrity is equally important. These two procedures appear to be mutually incompatible: A robust blind submissions policy requires that the author’s identity not be disclosed, even to administrators, until after referees have made a positive decision on the paper; and, if a negative one, not at all. A robust anti-plagiarism policy requires that plagiarism sanctions apply independently of whether or not the paper is accepted for publication; and this, in turn, requires the author’s identity to be known at least to administrators in advance of that decision. Whereas blind submission prohibits author disclosure until after the publication decision, anti-plagiarism necessitates author disclosure before the publication decision. It would seem to be impossible to satisfy the requirements of both simultaneously.
In collaboration with the APRA Foundation Berlin webmaster, Piper developed a fully computerized procedure for submitting scholarly papers for publication in academic journals that reconciles these two desiderata. The procedure, a simple web application template, satisfies the requirements of blind submission and double-blind review, and is also compatible with a robust anti-plagiarism policy. On 7 April 2011, she publicly announced this application and offered it to any journal that might wish to consider it. But in the process of researching the mechanics of the procedure, she was “compelled to conjure in imagination the philosophy journal in which such a procedure could most easily be put to use, and concluded that [she] would have to establish it [her]self.” The result was The Berlin Journal of Philosophy, an innovative experiment that offers a different way of implementing the traditional values of academic research publications.
The Journal is also unusual in several other respects. It appears whenever a paper that meets the requisite quality criteria has been selected. It explicitly solicits specialized paper submissions in all areas of academic philosophy – including the history of non-Western as well as Western philosophy. It rejects the conventional conception of refereeing as an unpaid service to the field that all academics are professionally obligated to render when called. Instead, it requires referees to apply voluntarily for the job and make a contractual commitment, on the reasoning that referees will be more amenable to following rules to which they have voluntarily agreed. It also offers referees a nominal honorarium for each refereed paper that satisfies the terms of the Anonymous Referee Contract, thus explicitly acknowledging the value of their service. The Contract commits referees to specified refereeing practices, including administration of a detailed anti-plagiarism policy. This policy defines the concept of plagiarism not motivationally, but rather behaviorally and gradatim. It is the failure to meet the obligation of bibliographic citation to a source of one’s research itself, not the motive for this failure, which is held to account by the Journal’s anti-plagiarism policy. The Journal’s Anonymous Referee Contract also strictly prohibits referees from disclosing their service as referees for the Journal to anyone, and therefore from listing it on their CVs. This provision effectively protects the referee’s freedom to evaluate a submitted paper solely on its merits, without fear of professional repercussions even in those difficult and painful cases where the paper raises plagiarism issues. The price of this freedom is that the referee must relinquish the professional advantages of being identified as a referee for the Journal.
These are not standard refereeing practices in the field of academic philosophy. Whether or not they are compatible with standard practice, or offer a viable alternative to it, remains to be seen. In either case, The Berlin Journal of Philosophy offers one possible model for academic journals whose sole priority is the quality and originality of the papers submitted to them.
External links
- Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin
- Adrian Piper Exhibition at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York
- Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Part I: The Humean Conception and Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Part II: A Kantian Conception
- OUT OF ORDER, OUT OF SIGHT: Selected Writings in Meta-Art and Art Criticism 1967 – 1992 (MIT Press, 1996)