New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Mellen Press Owner Withholds Nazi Diary.

Brian Leiter has been reporting on the scandalous legal tactics by Mellen Press to silence its critics. It turns out that the owner of the press, Dr. Richardson, may now face his own legal problems [HT David Gordon]. Reuters reports:

When Kempner died in 1993 at age 93, legal disputes about his papers raged for nearly a decade between his children, his former secretary, a local debris removal contractor and the Holocaust museum. The children agreed to give their father's papers to the Holocaust museum, but when officials arrived to retrieve them from his home in 1999, they discovered that many thousands of pages were missing....

the Holocaust museum has gone on to recover more than 150,000 documents, including a trove held by Kempner's former secretary, who by then had moved into the New York state home of an academic named Herbert Richardson.

The Rosenberg diary, however, remained missing.

Early this year, the Holocaust museum and an agent from Homeland Security Investigation tried to locate the missing diary pages. They tracked the diary to Richardson, who was living near Buffalo.

Richardson declined to comment. A government official said more details will be announced at the news conference.

For more on  the story, see this account at the The Buffalo News.

Career Development Advice from the Young to the Young (and the rest of us)

Undoubtedly, there are still blessed people that come out of graduate school and find a job on the strength of letters of recommendation and a forthcoming paper in The Philosophical Review.  Maybe some perfectionists can still attain tenure in a decent place by publishing a beautifully crafted piece every other year (I doubt it). So, for the rest of the young people looking to be hired in places where some research is taken seriously, here's an important bit of unsolicited advice:

"[I]t's critical to have multiple pieces under review at a time, and to be constantly writing while pieces are under review (so that as pieces become accepted, you have more to send out). I also think there's a skill to develop here, because it requires working on more than one project at a time."--Rachel McKinnon (offered in response to this post.)

The Long Road From Dissertation to Print

Some anointed folk publish in top journals during their PhD and spend their lives publishing in the Leiter-top-10. Most of the rest of us presumably have very different experiences. (My only publication ever in the "top 20" is an invited one.) I want to share some of mine to give young people a sense of 'what it's like.'

I am from the generation that was still actively discouraged from publishing while writing my PhD (obtained, 2002). Unfortunately, during my research I falsified the central hypothesis that guided my dissertation, so I was left without a coherent narrative (and, thus, no monograph). I had no idea how to write a journal article (see my tips here; and Cogburn's). Unsurprisingly, my first eight or nine submissions were rejected often with dismissive referee reports (and long delays, of course). I suspect that in addition to my lack of skill in writing articles, journals were not very interested in learning about Adam Smith's philosophy of science. (I even had job-lecture-audiences snicker at the mention of "Adam Smith;" eventually I switched to Hume.)

All four of the core chapters of the dissertation had a very hard time getting into print; they accumulated more than 30 rejections altogether. One (the most a-historical) never got past referees, and I eventually discarded it. One (on Hume and Newton) took eight years and countless rejections (even from journals (!) where the editor-in-chief had asked me to submit it after hearing the material presented) before it appeared in Enlightenment & Dissent, an intellectual history journal--along the way I had inverted my thesis. Another paper, on the methodology of the Wealth of Nations, was regularly savaged by referees (I once received an eighteen-page, typed, single space small font report, which taught me a lot on Smith's digression on silver among other things), and was published in a wonderful, super-niche journal (even by the standards of history of economics [a small, insignificant field in economics])--bless Warren Samuels' soul. Only the fourth, on Smith's proto-Kuhnian philosophy of science, appeared in a respectable philosophy, specialist history journal; it received extremely critical reviews, even from the journal's referees and editor that eventually (after two R&Rs) published it in 2005. It is now my most cited paper; a google scholar search suggests it is the most cited paper in the history of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.

Best advice for graduate students about journal practices

Here are eight bits of advice, some of which I e-mailed to a gifted student last week:

1. You can't submit the same article to more than one place at a time, so to get enough for tenure you need to end up having a lot of different articles submitted to different places at the same time. Everyone has a sweet spot. For example, if I get six things under review at different journals then one of them will get accepted within six months. 
2. The acceptance rate in philosophy is really, really low compared to other fields, so you can't give up if you get a rejection. My highest ranked single-authored publication (Australasian) was rejected by seven other journals before Australasian accepted it. Of course I'd rewritten it a lot (see points 3-5 below). 
3. A revise and resubmit is a very good (and unfortuantely increasingly rare) thing, usually closer to conditional acceptance than the journal says. It's very important to convince the editor and reviewers that you are rewriting the paper according to their suggestions. Almost always this ends up being more fun and rewarding than your initial anxiety will suggest. In addition to rewriting the paper, prepare a separate report telling the editor what you take the reviewer's comments to be and how you incorporated them to improve the paper.
4. The reviewer might be mistaken in particular, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a good reason for them to be caught up at the point they were caught up. Try to charitably figure out why the reviewer got stuck there and adress that in the rewrite  (thanking the anonymous reviewer in a footnote is always a good idea, arguing with the editor that the reviewer was mistaken is always a bad idea). 
5. Sometimes comments really are uncharitable in the extreme. But still, if you get any comments at all, even with a rejection, rewrite the paper to incorporate them. This holds especially for stupid comments. If the comments are idiotic you should still rework the paper so as to idiot-proof it for the next journal you send it to.
6. Don't take too long with the rewriting. Get the damned thing back out there. See comment 1 above about the "sweet spot."
7. Co-write with people. You'll do more and better philosophy and taking turns on successive drafts will help you be a better writer. This being said, co-written papers should not make up more than half your vita, especially if you don't have tenure yet.
8. It's more important early in your career to worry about placement. Though they are really imperfect in lots of ways, there are helpful resources (the Brooks Blog has a good discussion with links to different rankings of journals HERE). You don't have to publish in Mind, Nous, Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, or Philosophy and Phenomenological Research to get a job and tenure at a place that will pay for you to do research. But you will need to have some papers either in generalist journals one tier below these or in first-tier specialist journals (Ethics, Linguistics and Philosophy, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Philosophy and Public Affairs etc.) in your area. It's fine even at an early stage in your career to publish downstream from these, but the best thing you can do to get a job and then get tenure is to have some things on your vita at least from high second-tier generalist journals or first-tier specialty journals.

The first six might only hold for people without great institutional affiliations and who are not supernaturally gifted writers. But since that's most of us, I think they might be pretty helpful. It would be cool if anyone else has any suggestions to add or qualifications about the above. 

I should note that the only one that seems institutionally problematic to me is 8. I don't intend to be defending that. I think in fact that it probably generally substantially crimps philosophical creativity and in particular can do substantial harm to good philosophers who are wacky in various ways. However, it is a widely (albeit not universally) held norm that graduate students should know about.

Elsevier loves lagniappe; or, filtering out the priests

Via Stefan Heßbrüggen on Facebook, an open letter from the UBC mathematician Greg Martin tells of his resignation from the editorial board of the Elsevier production, Journal of Number Theory. In the letter Martin tells of "Elsevier’s new policy that editors would receive $60 for every article they process" for the journal. Commenters react with hilarity, knowing the kind of lagniappe (Louisiana term for "kickback") that this would motivate. 

But Martin's reaction to the apparent "bribery" this looks like brings us to the discussion below between Eric and Catarina on philosophical origin myths: are we priests or are we "knowledge-workers"?

Lost in translation--on publishing philosophy in a non-native language

One more cautionary observation before we begin. The volume is published by Bloomsbury, which has taken over Continuum, the house which apparently had contracted the anthology. A number of the pieces unfortunately contain stylistic and grammatical inadequacies in expression. For some essays this is just distracting, but for others it is extremely frustrating. Clearly the publisher's copy-editing was highly inadequate. We can only hope that this will not become a trend with Bloomsbury. More significantly though, we cannot help but wonder whether it really is such a good thing for English to become the de facto lingua franca of European philosophy. This is perhaps unavoidable today -- not long ago, something called the 'European Science Foundation' produced a ranking of philosophy journals, and publication in languages other than English was initially used to relegate journals to the 'B' or 'C' category. Now, if Anglophone philosophy puts a premium on 'clarity,' as defined by composition models taught in Anglophone universities and less elsewhere, then the obligation to write in English seems to unavoidably place international colleagues in a bad light. In this reviewer's experience, the profession suffers from a pressing need to address this issue.--Hakhamanesh Zangeneh

There are (at least) three issues here:

(i) Especially given the high prices charged for their product, academic presses and journals have a professional obligation to maintain the highest standards of copy-editing. Cost-cutting measures do not inspire confidence. I have no ideological objections against outsourcing, but the recent (apparent) trend toward concentrating copy-editing philosophical texts in Bangladesh and India is not improving the situation. (I am probably not alone in having to correct the copy-editors; as my fellow NewAPPSers can testify, I tend to be the one needing correction!)

Crap one hopes to get done over the summer

One of the two most persistent misunderstandings of university life is that because we are not teaching over the summer, we "get the summer off."Almost every academic I know actually works harder over the summer than the rest of the time, but none of their extended families or non-academic friends seem to understand this.

In an effort to fight this, for the past few years on my own (now defunct) blog, I've hosted a beginning of summer post where people share what they hope to get done in the ensuing summer. Please contribute to this public awareness campaign by sharing (plus, I'm not the only one interested in what you are working on). My summer plans below the fold:

The Psychology of Academic Deceit

About 18 months ago, I did a meta-post on Diederik Stapel, of Tilburg, and before that of Groningen. In that post, I linked to Retraction Watch, which recounted Stapel's misdeeds, a social psychologist who didn't falsify, but outright manufactured, data-sets in numerous scientific papers, 54 of which have now been retracted. Stapel, now known as the Lying Dutchman (see this post by Catarina) was an international star and rose to be Dean of Social and Behavioural Sciences at Tilburg before he was fired for academic fraud.

The New York Times Magazine has now published (28th April) a fascinating story by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee on the man and his career. Here is some of what we learn:

Plagiarism in business ethics (at University of Virginia)

The University of Virginia has a famous honor code. So I was surprised to learn through one of my favorite blogs, Retractionwatch, that one of UVA’s advanced graduate students  in business ethics (in the business school) had to retract a paper from the Journal of Business Ethics (a Springer journal). Retractionwatch quoted the Director of the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics, Andy Wicks, as follows: “we opted to take no additional action beyond extensive internal conversations…it is an isolated incident that was a mistake rather than a calculated effort to plagiarize.” Yet, according to the retraction notice 16% of the paper was plagiarized; this is not a case of a few missing quotation marks. I contacted Professor Wicks, and he wrote me that, “a thorough review of the case was conducted according to school policy. The review process included a panel committee and a forensic review of the student’s work. We cannot discuss individual student matters due to confidentiality and privacy policies.” Fair enough, privacy is important. (I also contacted the graduate student, but received no answer.) In effect, outsiders are being asked to trust the school's judgment.

I was also surprised that in addition to the retraction, the journal did not take further steps against the UVA graduate student. For, in January, Retractionwatch, reported on a case of self-plagiarism that led to a five year ban from Journal of Business Ethics. This involved a case of a scholar re-publishing his own previously published work without acknowledging this. I am no ethicist, but plagiarizing another would seem a far worse offense than plagiarizing oneself--this is why, I think, Retractionwatch tends to use the term "duplication" to refer to the lesser offense. Turns out, alas, that the self-plagiarist teaches at a school in Thailand, while one of the supervisors of the UVA graduate student, is on the editorial board of the journal. As they say in the business world, it can’t hurt to have friends in the right places. (The editor of the Journal of Business Ethics also did not respond to my email.) 

Graham Harman's Lovecraft book reviewed in salon dot com

I mention this with trepidation, since pointing out that one of us gets popular press always seems to be troll bait, but still- Pretty cool!

Salon's repost of the LA Times review is HERE.

This bears some relation to  Helen De Cruz's earlier post today about how one's non-philosophical activities relate to one's philosophy. One very strange convergence happened when the original four speculative realists discovered that, like almost all contemporary horror writers (and philosopher of horror Noel Carroll too), they all shared a reverence for Lovecraft's achievement.

Is PEA Soup going to create an ethics monopoly?

The friendly folks at PEA Soup announced the following:

As die-hard PEA Soupers already know, for a while now we have enjoyed a partnership with Ethics in which, relatively soon after each issue of that journal is published, we have a discussion of a paper from that issue kicked off by a commissioned précis of that paper, often a commitment from the author to respond to questions, and several commentators lined up to help launch the discussion. Each paper that gets commented on at PEA Soup is made publically available to all without a subscription.

We are pleased to announce that we have now started up a somewhat similar partnership with Philosophy and Public Affairs, Philosophers’ Imprint, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and JESP. We are expecting a few more such partnerships to be firmed up shortly. The result will be that there should soon be significantly more critical discussions of first-rate work in ethics, political philosophy, and related matters on PEA Soup. There will be much less “down time” between discussions.

First, it's great that PEA Soup is looking at ways at staying 'live' more frequently. I always enjoy the discussions. So, congratulations are in order! Second, I bet that later generations will wonder, 'what took philosophers so long to develop such partnerships?' Such partnerships are a clever and obvious move in order to develop a forum for (relatively) high quality and highly visible philosophical discussions. 

Even so, I have concerns: I worry about mechanisms in which a relatively narrow group of gate-keepers (however qualified, open-minded, and well-intentioned) will decide for us what is worth our collective attention (a very scarce resource). Given that PEA SOUP Partners (PSPs) are a fantastic group of journals with very high quality 'content,' crowding out of others is quite possible. This is not an idle thought because the post speaks of (a) a 'few more such partnerships' and (b) the web facilitates winner-take-all mechanisms, after all. (Something we have benefited from at NewAPPS!) Anyway, kudos to PEA Soup for being so pro-active. But I do hope some enterprising web-blogs partner with the philosophical alternatives to PSP.

Perhaps the worst thing about co-editing a book on Dungeons and Dragons. . .

is that this guy 

ends up writing your amazon reviews.

By far the best is the one by John Kavaratis, who carefully enumerates our sins, which include (1) using feminine singular pronouns, and (2) apparently being too stupid to know that fantasy and horror are distinct genres. I can't get too het up though. There's a Simpson's comic book guy inside of all of us.

hyperprofessionalism versus the cult of genius

I'm going to abuse my prerogatives as a blogger here and, instead of posting this as a response to Berit's nice meditations and the resulting discussion HERE, start another top level thread.

First let me note that I think the worries about problems caused by hyperproffesionalisation in the commenters are not without basis. However, I have equally valid worries about the romantic cult of genius that seems to me to infect professional philosophy. There are just so many ways that pursuit of the great is the enemy of the good.

Here are four:

Historians of Philosophy serve the undergraduates

'The history of philosophy as practiced by professional philosophers [hereafter HOPPP] is a service to the rest of the profession; HOPPP's scholarly output is primarily geared to facilitate (undergraduate) teaching.' This suspicion [hereafter HOPPPS2P] had lodged in my mind when a few years ago I started to reflect on (a) the extremely low citation rates for journal articles in HOPPP, which suggests that there are no genuine controversies nor classic papers that ground future research; (b) the lack of concern about the proliferation of Handbooks and Companions that are effectively slowing down research in HOPPP; (c) the extreme difficulty of getting a position in HOPPP if one is not working on a canonical figure. (There are, of course, extreme regional differences on (c); in some places there are no positions for HOPPPers; in other places so-called 'systematic' and 'practical' philosophers do not even regard HOPPP as philosophy, but let it exist out of institutional inertia, benign neglect, etc.) But I wondered if I could ground ground HOPPPS2P in hard data.

Luckily, Michael Beaney, the thoughtful editor of British Journal for the History of Philosophy (BJHP), wrote a review of the last 20 years of the BJHP, with some recommendations for the future. Now BJHP is a young journal, but it has become one of the top venues in the sub-field. (In Europe it certainly also helps that it is listed in Thompson's Web of Knowledge/Science index so that publication can count in the right metrics.) Beaney and his team compiled data on the contents of the first twenty years.

"What this shows is that almost half the journal has been devoted to the work of just seven philosophers – the ‘big seven’ of early modern philosophy – and that around two-thirds of the journal has been devoted to the work of just sixteen philosophers, with three more early modern philosophers included as well as Plato and Aristotle from the ancient period and four [Hegel, Mill, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche--ES] nineteenth-century philosophers.

"This book should not have been published."

This review by Jill Vance Buroker concludes with: "This book should not have been published because it adds nothing to the literature. It is difficult to imagine a Kant specialist recommending its publication."

The review looks fair to me because it offers a whole number of arguments for the conclusion. (I have some minor quibbles, but I am no Kant expert.) While I might not have used those exact words, I believe that critical book-reviewing plays an essential role in the discipline's quality control. What do readers think? I prefer signed comments on this one.

Using the technology we have - a new format for books

I was chatting with Rebecca Kukla a couple weeks ago about things we would like to do with a second edition of Yo&Lo and the following general thought occurred to me.  When it comes to books that people are interested in, we have roughly two distinct media forms for philosophical interaction.  We have the printed book itself, and sometimes later printed articles and reviews.  And we have lots of discussions - in conferences, symposia, classes, etc.  The former are permanent, but fixed - non-dialogical.  The latter are interactive and dialogical, but ephemeral. Once they are over, they exist only in the memory of participants.  (And if we make a web-cast of the event, then it flips to the first category.  

The journal reviewing process isn’t anonymous. Did you really think it was? Think again!

You have worked on your paper on this extraordinarily complicated and remarkably interesting solution to the knowability paradox for four years. You finally got it right. After polishing the piece, vetting the ideas at department colloquium talks and workshops and incorporating feedback from cohorts, you submit to a top-ten mainstream journal. Then you patiently, very patiently, wait a year and a half and get a rejection. Hostile referee reports! They HATE the paper.

How to ensure gender balance in edited volumes?

(This came up on a FB thread I happened to lay my eyes on; it does not involve anyone I actually know, so it feels a bit like I’m intruding into other people’s business, but this seems important as a topic. Apologies if I am being intrusive!).

What should you do when you are putting together an edited volume on a given topic, you make a serious effort to have a fair representation of female contributors, and yet you end up with a very unbalanced lineup because the potential female authors you approached all declined the invitation? Do you go ahead as is? Do you put the project off and work further on involving female contributors? (Which potentially can only be achieved if you change a bit the focus of the volume as originally conceived.) Do you call the whole thing off?

There seem to be downsides to all of these options. So this appears to be a real dilemma, and I’d be curious to hear people’s thoughts on this. I’d be particularly curious to hear experiences of volume editors who somehow managed to redress the problem after a difficult start, as this may be useful advice for those editing volumes at the moment.

Baldwin on women publishing in Mind

On January 13^th 2012, a workshop took place in London bringing together the editors of some of the most prestigious philosophy journals as well as others involved in philosophy publishing (such as the area editors for CUP and OUP, among others). Podcasts of the talks and discussions have been made available here, and should be of interest to the NewAPPS readership at large.

One of talks (and accompanying Q&A session) has been quite extensively discussed since yesterday on Facebook and at a post over at the Feminist Philosophers. Thomas Baldwin, the editor of Mind, makes some statements concerning the ratio of women publishing in Mind which are worrisome, to say the least. Here are some passages (more passages transcribed here, courtesy of Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa).

Is Brian Leiter correct about the practical ethics of live tweating conference papers?

Linking to this story, Brian Leiter (here) issues a judgment that strikes me as so curmudgeonly as to be perhaps exaggerated on purpose for comic efffect:

 it's outrageous, and anyone who live-tweets a conference should be immediately disinvited from the event, and any future ones.

Is this in the neighborhood of being correct?

[Full disclosures. (1) I've never tweated anything, but I often do enjoy reading other people's blog descriptions of conferences that I cannot attend.  Some of these are penned in real time as are tweats. (2) I have nothing against curmudgeonliness per se, nor (Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin being my favorite writers) against its use in penning entertaining prose.]

A Public Statement about *Open Court's* Philosophy of Dungeons and Dragons

Mark Silcox and I have received agrieved e-mails from people taking us to be responsible for issues concerning the (possibly) forthcoming Blackwell anthology "Philosophy of Dungeons and Dragons." Because of the weird way search engines are treating this, people falsely believe that we've treated authors badly. Thusfar I've been publicly circumspect about the backstory of this. But one of the philosophers that e-mailed us put up a public blog post on the issue, I need to set the record completely straight.

Silcox and I originally submitted a proposal to Blackwell series editor William Irwin for "Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy" (note that I still have the original proposal and all relevant e-mails from the press editors). Irwin was enthusiastic but the marketing people required us to write a separate marketing justification. This was not hard since every major book store has a dedicated D&D session,  since the marketing plan of Wizards of the Coast requires new editions to be released periodically, and since similar non-fiction books about D&D get floor space and have sold. But, according to Irwin, the Blackwell marketing rejected the project because  there wasn't a "marketable moment" like a film release that they could use to sell the book. Fine, that's the considered judgment of a successful press. Mark and I retooled the proposal and pitched the project to Open Court, who accepted it. Our book is out now. You can purchase it HERE. And the Blackwell marketing people didn't know what they were talking about, as it's currently taking up shelf space on the floor of your local Barnes and Noble. Bully for us.

But then things started to get weird.

CHE article on the con of for-profit publishing

Here is the article.  (h/t to Lynne Tirrell on fb who posted this.)  
I have nothing to add, other than that we ought to get the APA to work on this.

a plea to graduate students submitting papers

Three times this year a bad thing has happened after I've encouraged editors to give a paper "revise and resubmit."

Note that whenever I review a paper and don't recommend immediate acceptance I work really hard trying to help the writer so that their rewrite will to be up to the quality of the journal. Even when I counsel "rejection" I still try to give detailed constructive advice about how the paper could be recast, even suggesting places the author should send the rewritten paper.

So three times this year instead of making the changes I recommended the author resubmitted substantially the same paper and argued with some vehemence that they should not have to change their paper in the ways I suggested. In all three cases the journal editor had given the paper "revise and resubmit," but then rejected the insufficiently rewritten paper. In two of these cases I googled the paper title after this was over and found out that the submitters were graduate students. This is so bad on so many levels.

What's Wrong with an Informal Cartel?

I often find that my views diverge from Eric's. And here we go again!

Publishing in philosophy is a way of getting your work to the readers you want to reach. People in unpopular fields often find that launching a niche journal is the best way to do this. This is the practice Eric calls "journal capture." What exactly is wrong with it? Especially in these days of self-publishing. If I want to get a paper out there, I post it on PhilPapers. With the right keywords, it gets an audience. Completely unrefereed. And that audience is probably just as big as when I publish in a journal. Since this is so, why is refereeing so important in journals where you have to submit to an editor?

Of course, there is a risk. As I have noted elsewhere (following Linsay Waters), universities use publication in prestigious journals as a substitute for serious evaluation.  (This has been going on for a long time: G. E. Moore was denied a job because of a referee report, and the same referee recommended against publication in Mind.) And it would (perhaps) be a bad thing if publication was rigged leading to tenure and promotion on rigged evidence. (Or maybe it would just force universities to be less lazy.)

But what's another reason why refereeing has to be transparent? Editors need advice on what is worth publishing. Why does this advice have to manufactured in some supposed haven of neutrality?

A dialogue with Catarina Dutilh Novaes and Berit Brogaard on co-authoring papers in philosophy

Brit: I just now read on your Facebook page that you just finished a co-authored paper. You seemed quite enthusiastic about co-authoring in general. That made me think about co-authoring papers in philosophy. It's still fairly seldom that you see any co-authored papers in philosophy. In the sciences it's the other way around. Nearly every paper is co-authored. I suppose one main difference is that it takes a lot of people to complete an experiment, whereas it doesn't take more than one philosopher to sit in an armchair :) I have nonetheless co-authored quite a few papers with people in philosophy. Unlike you, I think my overall view is that I don't find it very productive. So I was wondering whether you could tell us a bit about your recent experiences regarding co-authored papers.

Catarina: Well, I have not co-authored that many papers actually; the paper I finished yesterday is only my fourth co-authored paper. In each case, the process has been somewhat different. My first co-authored paper was written with Stephen Read: we realized that we both intended to speak on a very similar topic at a given conference, so he proposed that we do it together. Basically, he wrote his part and I wrote mine, but we were very much in agreement on the basic thesis from the start. My second and third co-authored papers were written with my friend and former colleague Edgar Andrade; the first one started when Edgar (who has a mathematics background) came to me with some results on different semantics for syllogistic and asked what the results meant philosophically. From there on, the process was truly collaborative; it was laborious and time-consuming, but I do think it is one of the best papers I've ever written, and precisely thanks to the collaboration. The other paper with Edgar was actually mostly written by him on the basis of some results we had proved together on Brandom's notions of entailment; I was mostly 'coaching' the writing process. (All papers available on my website.)

Publishing strategies, for those of us not Harvard Bound.

[This post is a follow up to some passing comments in this post, which prompted a few emails from readers.--ES]

"You are publishing too much," said one of my letter writers (while I was preparing for the fourth time on the market), "Harvard will never take you." The preceding year (2004 or so) I had six acceptances. I loooked at him (and edited my words carefully), and responded: "Harvard has had its chance, I need a job!" In graduate school nobody explained how to write a journal article. After the third year out on the job-market I had one publication--a long piece on Adam Smith's obituary of David Hume (that was, despite some kvetchy refereeing,  accepted and significantly shortened under the wise and helpful editorial guidance by Ken Winkler and Elizabeth Radcliffe--bless their souls). It's not like I wasn't trying to get published: a paper sat at Philosophical Review for a year (rejection without comment); another version of that paper was rejected after a year at BJPS (a one paragraph, misleading summary and no further comment). I don't recall the exact details, but another journal (PPR?) was about to stop accepting submissions, etc. Meanwhile, one other paper was getting elaborate referee comments on how I was clearly ignorant of the important work done by George Smith (George, my undergraduate guru, and I have had a paper forthcoming since the late 1990s).

So what changed was this: with the help of senior colleagues at Wesleyan  and, especially, Red Watson at WashU in St. Louis (my first two adjunct positions--yeah, don't cry for me--), I learned how to craft a journal article, and started to send papers to slightly less incrowd journals with reputations for quick turn-around and getting things in print fairly quickly.  Below the fold some of the things I picked up (with room for readers' comments):

Amazon to its Education Customers: Good Enough to Buy from Us, but not Worthy to Trade With

Earlier today, I went to Amazon.com in order to look up a book-title. On the front page I was welcomed by a letter from Jeff Bezos to his customers. Two paragraphs caught my attention:

We want to make it easier for employees to make that choice and pursue their aspirations. It can be difficult in this economy to have the flexibility and financial resources to teach yourself new skills. So, for people who've been with us as little as three years, we're offering to pre-pay 95% of the cost of courses such as aircraft mechanics, computer-aided design, machine tool technologies, medical lab technologies, nursing, and many other fields.

The program is unusual.  Unlike traditional tuition reimbursement programs, we exclusively fund education only in areas that are well-paying and in high demand according to sources like the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we fund those areas regardless of whether those skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. [Emphasis added--ES; see here for details on the program.]

Now, normally I don't get too exercised by paternalistic compensation programs run by large coorporations. But I was struck that a company, which was originally built on (electronic) books and educational materials must have a lot of student and education-related customers at one point or another, would treat the value of education worth paying for as exclusively linked to income  and employment. It turns out that other "aspirations" are not very valued at Amazon.

The Scotch is before you. Please don't drink.

From the American Philosophical Association's "best practices" for journals (available, rather oddly, on Google Docs):

Since many philosophers post their papers on the web prior to submitting them for publication, referees are often able to identify authors by a web search. Referees should not attempt to identify the authors of papers they are refereeing.

Discuss.

A more serious complaint: instead of recommending that authors be allowed to self-archive their work without restriction, the APA comes up with the mealy mouthed: "Journals should make clear to authors what their policies are about post-acceptance and post-publication posting of their own articles." This is, at best, only technically consistent with the earlier exhortation that "journal editors should, in general, be willing to consider articles released to pre-print archives."

There is no reason to take Mark Regnerus' apologists serioiusly

Nice background on his history of Regnerus' almost unbelievably foul misogynistic "research" and punditry HERE. The story's punchline:

What do we need with a retrograde researcher who instructs young women to reorder their lives according to men’s “market value”; who treats women like a uniform mass of economic actors seeking only to turn their relationships into marriage with kids; who can’t quite imagine a world in which women have sex for sexual reasons (once describing female consent as “sexual strategies for making men 'fall in love’”); and who traffics in the mid-century notion that the timing of marriage should be arranged around a woman’s “most fertile years”?  Now that Regnerus has definitively added “provider of ill-conceived research to Focus-On-The-Family types” to his CV, here’s hoping that more news outlets will decide that his isn’t a voice we need at all.

Metaphysics is alive and well and living in Paris (English language mirror site of the Atelier de métaphysique et d'ontologie contemporaines)

[Note: In this rather long-winded post I take way too long to get to the punchline. So let me first just say that my students Mark Ohm and Leah Orth, with help from me and my wife Emily, are putting up an English language mirror site of the Atelier de métaphysique et d'ontologie contemporaines (please check out our translation of the Introduction to the Workshop to get an idea of what's going on). As we post translations of each paper or discussion, I'll do a post here at NewApps linking to it and describing the content. Now on to the long-windedness.]

Readers of this blog know of my worry that two factors systematically distort Americans interaction with non-American philosophy: (1) the effective monolingualism of the overwhelming majority of students in American philosophy classrooms, and (2) the fact that it is books that are translated.