New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Gender and philosophy in the Netherlands (Guest Post)

This is a guest post by Anthonie Meijers. He is professor of philosophy at Eindhoven University of Technology, and a member of the board of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy.

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There is a gender problem in philosophy in the Netherlands, and it is serious. In the 11 departments of philosophy the numbers of permanent staff members are roughly the following:  assistant professors: 110, of which 25 are women; associate professors: 45, of which 5 are women; full professors:  65, of which 7 are women (I have not included part-time professors; this data is based on the websites of the departments).  You may think that this just indicated that women have to work harder to get advanced positions at Dutch universities. But there is sufficient evidence now that a gender bias is built into the system. This implies that men are part of the problem and that they will have to take their responsibility. The solution is not easy though. It requires a package of measures. What can we do?

It always good to raise awareness, but what really helps is to move beyond awareness-raising with a few very simple institutional measures that can be implemented right away. Why not make it a rule that 30% of all invited speakers at conferences are women, or that 30% of the papers in special issues are by female philosophers? The Board of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy (OZSW) will discuss such a measure for activities organized by the OZSW later this year. There may of course be exceptions to this rule, but these exceptions need to be justified. Similarly, we should stick to the rule, formally adopted by many universities, that selection committees should include at least two women.

The Dogs of Istanbul

Spending a short holiday, and of course, seeing all the fabled sights of this fabulous city. 

Back one day from several hours on a cruise up the Bosphorus, Lynne and I settled in to some comfortable sofas in a restaurant called Pallatium (or something like that) with a glass floor that looks down on to an excavated palace and a view of the street. It was the latter that fascinated us an in particular, a bright, intelligent, dog who looks very much like this one:

(Note the tagged ear. See below for explanation.)

Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu

It's very ugly (via many of my Twitter contacts). Go check the whole story, but here's the beginning:

Lots of researchers post PDFs of their own papers on their own web-sites. It’s always been so, because even though technically it’s in breach of the copyright transfer agreements that we blithely sign, everyone knows it’s right and proper. Preventing people from making their own work available would be insane, and the publisher that did it would be committing a PR gaffe of huge proportions.

Enter Elsevier, stage left. Bioinformatician Guy Leonard is just one of several people to have mentioned on Twitter this morning that Academia.edu took down their papers in response to a notice from Elsevier.

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Free Nelson Mandela'

BMoF today could not but honor Nelson Mandela, without a doubt one of the greatest humans in the 20^th century and possibly of all times. There is probably no better way to honor him than with music – a man who once said “it is music and dancing that makes me at peace with the world and at peace with myself”. There is much in common between the place that music occupies in people’s lives in South Africa and in Brazil, and this statement by Mandela encapsulates how many Brazilians feel about life, music and dancing (that's certainly the case for this particular Brazilian…).

I found this 1990 video of the pop band Paralamas do Sucesso performing ‘Free Nelson Mandela’, where they reveal their roots as a ska/reggae band. They appeared in the 1980s, and provided much of the soundtrack for my childhood and early teens. They continue to play and record to this day, despite some set-backs (in particular the ultra-light accident of the band leader Herbert Vianna in the early 2000s, which killed his wife and left him paraplegic).

So let’s all get up and sing for (and with) Mandela, and thank him for all he’s done to make this world a better place. (The music itself starts at 1.10.)

some recent Clancy Martin essays

Here's Clancy Martin's recent Chronicle of Higher Education review of Michael Clune's White Out.  

When googling that for the link I found an earlier London Review of Book essay by Martin that's about as raw as the Neal Young song that he quotes in the Clune review.

For some of the reasons Martin suggests, I find much of the philosophical debates surrounding action theory, autonomy, and akrasia to be nearly inscrutable. I just don't end up having enough of the intuitions that participants in the debates seem to take as shared. . .* but mostly (beyond what can be gleaned from the Neal Young lyrics and melody)** I just find people basically incomprehensible.

As Martin does in his essay and Steve O does in the documentary to right, every person I've known who has  navigated addiction/recovery successfully(i.e. (1) without dying, while (2) managing to recover/sustain a state of basic decency to others) has ended up embracing pretty paradoxical views about volition. At one point in the documentary someone congratulates Steve O for staying clean for over a year, and he just good naturedly deflects the compliment by saying that for all he knows he might get high tomorrow. 

I don't get this at all, because accepting that one has so little control over one's own actions strikes me as absolutely terrifying, but it does seem to be part of the healing process for so many people. I realize that this is all pretty standard AA boilerplate, and that AA should be thought about critically (as Martin begins to explore in the essay). Still, I think there's something true and paradoxical that the AA boilerplate is attempting to give voice to.  

I do know that Martin's own experiences in the international jewelry business profoundly informs his fiction and his philosophical work on deception. Maybe there are some new (over and above the standard higher order belief/desire stuff) philosophical theses to be discovered about autonomy, etc. from the experience of addiction and recovery. 

Tennessee Prepares to Commit Mass Murder

Today, The Tennessean newspaper reported that the state plans to execute 10 people beginning in the new year ("TN makes unprecedented push to execute 10 killers"). This is almost double the number of people executed in Tennessee over the past 40 years. 

While it may seem hyperbolic to describe these planned executions as a form of "mass murder," I believe that the hyperbolic nature of capital punishment warrants such a description.  And the state of Tennessee seems to agree, at least on some level.  The standard way of recording the "manner of death" on an executed prisoner's death certificate in Tennessee is as "homicide."  A homicide committed by the state, and by proxy by the people of Tennessee. 

Over the next few months, I will explore some of the issues raised by state homicide in a series of blog posts on New APPS.  I welcome your constructive and critical feedback.

New Blog: "Philosophical Spaces: Answering questions about how to improve the professional environment of philosophy"

Here's the URL: http://philosophicalspaces.wordpress.com/ The self-description: 

This is a blog that discusses and advises people about how to make the climate in their philosophy department and other professional spaces more hospitable.  Some have argued that the norms of behavior in philosophy departments are part of what explains why Anglophone philosophy is not as diverse as other disciplines in the academy.  We are sympathetic to this hypothesis, but also believe that an inhospitable environment is bad for everyone and does not produce the best philosophy.

Summer School: Mathematical Philosophy for Female Students (MCMP Munich)

The Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy is hosting a pioneer event: a summer school exclusively for female students. Summer schools for female students are now well established in mathematics, but to my knowledge this is the first summer school in philosophy geared explicitly towards female students. (In a similar vein, Rutgers hosts the wonderful Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy.) I am posting below the official announcement that has been circulated today. Please pass on the information to anyone you think may be interested, and do encourage your motivated female students to apply!

Consumer Risk, Producer Risk, and the politics of commercialized science

I thought I would make my inaugural post on NewAPPS a follow-up to Roberta's post about the retraction of the article in Food and Chemical Toxicology.  I don't want to continue the debate about whether the retraction was justified; that debate can continue in the original thread.   Here, I want to discuss one of the reasons why we should be paying vigilant attention to events such as these, and why their importance transcends the narrow confines of the particular scientific hypotheses being considered in the articles in question.  What I worry most about is the extent to which pressures can be applied by commercial interests such as to shift the balance of “inductive risks” from producers to consumers by establishing conventional methodological standards in commercialized scientific research. 

Inductive risk occurs whenever we have to accept or reject a hypothesis in the absence of certainty-conferring evidence.  Suppose, for example, we have some inconclusive evidence for a hypothesis, H.  Should we accept or reject H?   Whether or not we should depends on our balance of inductive risks—on the importance we attach, in the ethical sense, of being right or wrong about H.   In simple terms, if the risk of accepting H and being wrong outweighs the risk of rejecting H and being wrong, then we should reject H.  But these risk are a function not only of the degree of belief we have in H, but also of negative utility we attach to each of those possibilities.   In the appraisal of hypotheses about the safety of drugs, foods, and other consumables, these are sometimes called “consumer risk” (the risk of saying the item is safe and being wrong) and “producer risk” (the risk of saying the item is not safe and being wrong.)

Gender differences in brain connectivity (if any) aren't hard-wired

A headline story this morning, featured in several news outlets, reported on a new study published online in PNAS yesterday that allegedly confirms that there are major brain differences between men and women. In the study Ragini Verma, an associate professor in the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues examined the neural connectivity across the whole brain in 949 individuals (521 females and 428 males) aged 8 to 22 years using diffuse tensor imaging (DTI).

The researchers found that in certain age groups, females had greater inter-hemispheric connectivity in the supratentorial region (the part of the brain above the cerebellum), whereas males exhibited greater intra-hemispheric connectivity as well as greater interhemispheric connectivity in the cerebellum. The cerebellum has been implicated in certain forms of knowledge of action and knowledge-how, interhemispheric connectivity seems crucial for many social skills, and intrahemispheric connectivity in local sensory regions may lead to richer perceptual experiences. So, on the basis of these findings, many news reports concluded that men have a greater perception to action potential, whereas women have a greater potential for communicating and connecting “the analytical and intuition.” Some concluded that gender differences in brain connectivity are hard-wired.

In memoriam: Francesco del Punta

Francesco del Punta, a well-known and much admired scholar of medieval philosophy, sadly passed away yesterday. Upon hearing the news from his former student Luca Gili, I asked Luca to write an obituary for NewAPPS, and here it is.

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After a long and dreadful illness, Francesco Del Punta (1941-2013) passed away yesterday evening. He was a great scholar and a great man, and he will be much missed. Del Punta is well known especially for his edition of Ockham’s commentary on Aristotle’s Sophistici Elenchi (St. Bonaventure, New York, 1978), and for his edition of Paul of Venice’s treatises De veritate et falsitate propositionis  and De significato propositionis (Oxford, 1978).

Tolerance is not a virtue

This is my first foray into newAPPS waters-- and I thank the newAPPS coterie for the invitation!-- so I thought I’d start by tossing out a fairly straightforward philosophical claim:  Tolerance is not a virtue.

When I say that tolerance is not a virtue, to be clear, I don’t mean to imply that tolerance is a vice. No reasonable moral agent, certainly no moral philosopher worth his or her salt, would concede that.  Rather, I only want to point out that “being tolerant” requires at most little if not nothing more than refraining from being vicious.  Not only is it the case that we don’t define any other virtue in this explicitly negative way, but we also don't generally ascribe any particular kind of moral credit to persons who are merely refraining from being vicious.

Discourse representation theory and x-phi

I have recently been working on a paper about some of the testable implications of DRT (discourse representation theory) and related dynamic semantic frameworks. One of the questions I am stuck on is that of how to put the semantics of proper names to the test. The general framework of DRT does not commit us to a special theory of proper names. However, Hans Kamp traditionally treated them as individual constants, which is consistent with the philosophical (and post-semantic) theory that non-empty names stand in causal-historical relations to their referents. In subsequent work Kamp has treated names as predicates but with an anchor to a particular individual satisfying the predicate. This, too, is consistent with a causal-historical constraint.

Survey: philosophy of religion – a qualitative study of motivations and attitudes

[This call has also been spread on Prosblogion, but by posting on NewApps I hope to reach a wider audience]

If you are a professional philosopher of religion (including graduate students), I would be very grateful if you could fill out the following survey: https://surveys.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_4UvmgvHInmoRgkR

Two modes of graduate school writing

Both of these writing modes are essential skills for graduate students to master, but it's hard to get them to even try the "teacher-development" mode, perhaps because it's more difficult. (It's especially important for continental philosophy students to master this, since they will very often be addressing non-CP experts when addressing professional colleagues.)  

When should a journal article be retracted?

The editor of the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT), Dr A. Wallace Hayes, has decided to retract the study by the team of Prof Gilles-Eric Séralini, which found that rats fed a Monsanto genetically modified (GM) maize NK603 and tiny amounts of the Roundup herbicide it is grown with suffered severe toxic effects, including kidney and liver damage and increased rates of tumours and mortality.

But as this article points out, the retraction goes beyond the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), of which FCT is a member.  The guidelines state that the a journal should consider retracting a paper if:

• they have clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabri- cation) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error)
• the findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper crossreferencing, permission or justification (i.e. cases of redundant publication)
• it constitutes plagiarism
• it reports unethical research

But none of these applied to the paper by Séralini et al. The journal found "no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data" but that there " is a legitimate cause for concern regarding both the number of animals in each study group and the particular strain selected."

The donor intent of strategic philanthropic investors must be protected

Quite a morning on Facebook. First, someone posted a link to this NDPR review, which prompted this reflection on my part: 

The choice of doing a review or not on Objectivism entails a bit of a double-bind: "sunlight is the best disinfectant" (or less obnoxiously, "let's let the marketplace of ideas* do its work") vs "recognition lends legitimacy." The choice of reviewer is equally problematic: with a highly polarizing topic the choice of a friend or a foe stacks the deck and neutral observers are difficult to find. The Stanford EP article on Objectivism was discussed critically along those lines a while ago if I'm not mistaken.

Subsequent discussion led me to this Forbes column on (often privately funded) university centers for "free market oriented policy research." 

Aristotle's notion of dialectic as a model for philosophical debate and inquiry

This week, we’ve had a new round of discussions on the ‘combative’ nature of philosophy as currently practiced and its implications, prompted by a remark in a column by Jonathan Wolff on the scarcity of women in the profession. (Recall the last wave of such discussions, then prompted by Rebecca Kukla’s 3AM interview.) Brian Leiter retorted that there’s nothing wrong with combativeness in philosophy (“Insofar as truth is at stake, combat seems the right posture!”). Chris Bertram in turn remarked that this is the case only if “there’s some good reason to believe that combat leads to truth more reliably than some alternative, more co-operative approach”, which he (apparently) does not think there is. Our own John Protevi pointed out the possible effects of individualized grading for the establishment of a competitive culture.

As I argued in a previous post on the topic some months ago, I am of the opinion that adversariality can have a productive, positive effect for philosophical inquiry, but not just any adversariality/combativeness. (In that post, I placed the discussion against the background of gender considerations; I will not do so here, even though there are obvious gender-related implications to be explored.) In fact, what I defend is a form of adversariality which combines adversariality/opposition with a form of cooperation.

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Sua estupidez'

This week I had to deal with a fair amount of emotional stupidity from people who are very dear to me. So I was inevitably reminded of this song, ‘Sua estupidez’, composed by Roberto Carlos and Erasmo Carlos but at its best in this  Gal Costa version (1969), which I listened to a lot around the time that my father died, in 1998 (he was also an example of emotional stupidity of this kind). The key part of the lyrics: “Your stupidity does not let you see that I love you”. Enough said.

UPDATE: This post seems to have gotten some people worried, apologies for that. It's nothing serious, just an argument with someone I'm very close to.

Individualized grading, combative philosophy, and neoliberal subjects

Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber responds to Jonathan Wolff and to Brian Leiter on the question of the combative style in philosophical discussion. Bertram: 

Sometimes combat might be the right stance, but seeing that as the default mode for philosophical discussion leads far too often to destructive Q&A sessions that aim at destroying the opponent and bolstering the amour propre of the aggressor. Where the aim is victory, then all kinds of rhetorical moves can prove effective: there’s no reason to think that truth will emerge as a by-product.

For my part, regarding blood-on-the-floor seminar rooms, I wonder to what extent the practice of awarding individual grades creates the impression among students of a zero-sum game in grades (whether or not a true zero-sum game is in operation*), exacerbating the combativeness aspect: “if I tear down Jones, that’s one less person in the top grade cohort I have to worry about.”

Perhaps more of a reach -- but that's supposed to exceed one's grasp, isn't it? -- is the connection of individualized grades with the neoliberal self-entrepreneur, which Jon discusses below, in relation to Mike Konczal's review of Mirowski.