New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

This may be the worst review of 2013

Graham Oppy is "Professor of Philosophy, and Head of the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies (SOPHIS) at Monash." He is "Chair of Council of the Australasian Association of Philosophy" and "elected Fellow of the Australian Academcy [sic] of Humanities in 2009." So, I was very surprised by this unprofessional and self-absorbed review. For, he uses almost 2,000 words (out of a 2100 word review) to offer a taxonomy "not directly addressed anywhere in the work under review" in order to provide us with the mere assertion that, "while not denying that there has been an increase in serious activity in philosophy of religion, I am sceptical that there has been any movement at all in the first kind of project that I have identified." (The first project is "the 'neutral' assessment of competing worldviews in terms of global theoretical virtues -- simplicity, fit with data, explanatory scope, predictive accuracy, and the like.") Oppy then concludes with an entirely gratuitous list of authors who wrote "some outstanding chapters," including one from which he says he "learned many things that I am now pleased to know."

Let's grant that writing a review of (yet another) Handbook is no easy task; one often doesn't have space to even summarize all the chapters and, even if one did, mere summary is not the fundamental aim of any review worth having. Reviews play a crucial role in maintaining standards in a field, for explaining to the community what a book is about and at whom it is (primarily) aimed (a non-trivial issue with Handbooks), and what contributions it makes or should have made, etc. A review of a handbook also allows one to evaluate the 'state of play' in an intellectual community. There is a lot of room for different approaches to reviewing a Handbook, of course. Yet, Oppy's pontificating review does not meet the minimal standards for reviewing.

The review is a disgrace to NDPR.

Is the academic job-market rigged?

I have spent the past academic year applying for lecturer and reader positions in UK philosophy departments. Six years ago, when I applied for seven jobs worldwide, I quickly landed one at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Since then, the length of my CV has roughly tripled and now features 15 articles - most of them in high-ranking journals in the field - and two forthcoming books with prestigious academic publishers....Almost all my research has been produced in the eight years following my PhD: an output well above the average for someone applying for philosophy lectureships, and comparable to that of readers or professors with 15 years of experience....With this CV, I have applied for 16 jobs at top 20 UK universities. I have not been shortlisted for a single interview....

Academics also tend to rely on hunches and gossip about who’s hot and who’s not. Hence they end up making decisions that, to an outsider, seem totally counterintuitive and self-defeating, and that breach any principle of meritocracy or fair competition. This, to me, is irresponsible and will ultimately destroy the credibility of the academy.--István Aranyosi, Times Higher Education. [HT Sandrine Berges]

It is rare that somebody publishes his grievances about the academic job-market in such a prominent place, so this is a good opportunity to open up discussion. My own view (derived from Adam Smith and experience) is that academic hiring has a lot in common with a lottery--with lots of deserving winners, but with plenty more equally deserving non-winners.  I do have some reservations about Aranyosi's argument.

Blog innovations at Brains

Self-consciously following the example of PEA Soup, our friends at Brains ("a group blog on topics in the philosophy and science of mind") have announced a redesigned website as well as "beginning next month, Brains will begin hosting three symposia each year on selected articles from Mind & Language." (Full disclosure: among the first round of commentators is our very own Mohan.) Brains is also introducing a series of Featured Scholars--an idea generously borrowed from the folk at Flickers of Freedom ("an intellectual web community animated by a shared intrigue regarding the fundamental questions of action, agency, and free will.")

Can academics organize around attacks on academia?

Various sorts of attacks on academia have been a theme at Newapps since the beginning: Increasing corporatization of the university, growth of administration, take-over of administration by non-academics, funding cuts, increasing student debt, uses of MOOCS that are contrary to goals of education, increasing use and abuse of adjuncts, hyper-emphasis on "evaluation", anti-intellectualism, federal attacks on academic freedom and research independence, legal attacks on faculty and graduate student organizing, and here's a new one - "outsourcing" grading to Bangalore (coming in a pilot project from a director of business law and ethics studies, as probably was just inevitable.) 

Anyway, I've been saying for some time that I'd start a thread in which we might think collectively about what can be done. Should we work within existing organizations like AAUP and APA, or give them up as hopeless?  Should we take an activist/organizing approach or focus on legislation and lobbying?  Should unionization be a focus - whether legally or not?  Creative new ideas would be most welcome.

On anonymous grading

This semester, I’ve experimented with anonymous grading for the first time. Now that I think about it, it is a mystery why it took me so long to realize the obviousness of it, but better late than not at all, I suppose. As many other countries, the Netherlands does not have a tradition of anonymous grading at all, but I recently found out that in the UK it is fairly common practice, showing that it can be done. This was one of the topics of Jennifer Saul’s recent Aspasia Lecture in Groningen, and I am happy to report that she made such a good case for it that my colleagues in the evaluation board of the Faculty are already looking into adopting anonymous grading systematically.

Why should it be done? Well, for those of you familiar with the literature on implicit biases, the answer will not be hard to find: we inevitably rely on stereotypes and preconceptions to perceive and judge people, which serve as convenient heuristic shortcuts. This can have a negative effect on how we judge members of stigmatized groups (based on gender, ethnicity, class, geographical origin etc.), and it can also unfairly boost our judgment of privileged groups. With grading in particular, it has been noticed that anonymity significantly increases the average grades of members of these stigmatized groups, simply because their work is looked upon more objectively without the association to a particular person. (See this informative report by the British National Union of Students.)

How (not) to address an email to women academics in the U.S.

Shortly after posting concerning my history and philosophy of biology resources page, I received a suggestion for an addition via email.  The suggestion was welcome, but the way it was addressed was not:  Mrs. Millstein.

As the correspondent pointed out to me after I questioned the way I was addressed, this can be a cultural difference that is difficult for people from other cultures to navigate.  In that spirit, I offer the following suggested guidelines, especially given that this is not the first time I have been addressed this way, and no doubt it won't be the last.  Not everyone may agree with my suggestions, but I think they are at least a safe way of addressing that is not likely to offend.  I am suggesting them only for the U.S. because that is the culture I am most familiar with; they may or may not apply elsewhere.

How do non-philosophical interests and activities contribute to philosophical quality?

I read this paper by David MacNaughton on why philosophy is so tedious (recent link at Leiter's blog). Of the many interesting strands in this paper, I'd like to highlight this concern: 

There is now so much to read that “keeping up with the current literature,” could occupy every waking moment. But to what end? Do we really want to create a profession where, to get recognition and to advance one’s career, one has no time to do anything except philosophy? That is not good news for philosophers. It is neither sensible nor humane to encourage this work-centered monomania in anyone … Moreover, it is inimical to one of the traditional justifications of philosophy that sees it as a reflection on life, a discipline that trains you to understand the world in which you live better and so enables you, and others, to live better. But we are in danger of abandoning that conception and leaving professional philosophers no time and no incentive to put that wisdom into practice, to engage in other worthwhile activities. Is philosophical training a preparation for doing philosophy, and nothing more? … Nor is this degree of absorption in philosophy good for philosophy itself. It is (predominantly) a liberal discipline, and the best philosophy (especially in my own subjects, ethics and the philosophy of religion) is enriched by a wide, reflective, and imaginative experience of literature, politics, art, and science (McNaughton, p. 7).

The author here is right: if philosophy is indeed the love of wisdom, and its practice is embedded in a richer social, cultural, artistic, political, etc. context, it would be very strange that the only thing that could contribute to our work as philosophers would be reading papers and books by other philosophers.

Non-philosophical activities and concerns could enrich philosophical practice. By this I mean a wide variety of things, for instance, being a parent, a musician, someone who actively engages with a religious tradition, someone who is involved in political activism, etc. I would like to hear from readers how their non-philosophical activities have influenced and enriched their philosophy. It would be valuable to get an idea of this, as I think there is an increasing pressure, even on people who are not on a tenure track, to work incessantly - as if work alone is something that makes a good philosopher, and where one's personal life is regarded mainly as an impediment to being a blossoming philosopher. This is, of course, not a problem unique to philosophy (it pervades academia), but it does strike me as something our discipline needs to address. 

List of Feminist Philosophers

Wikipedia has numerous pages containing lists of people working in various areas of philosophy. I noticed that the list of feminist philosophers is exceptionally short. Some of you have remarkable and enviable wiki skills. If you fall into this category, could you please help adding to this list. Feel free to leave suggestions in the commet section.

Time 'wasted' with peer-reviewing

Helen has a very interesting post up on the problematic culture of grant-funded research. (Full disclosure: I have been on research grants pretty much for my entire career, and I see many advantages in this system.) She emphasized the fact that grant-writing is a very time-consuming endeavor, and that many researchers spend so much time securing research money for their group that they virtually stop doing research of their own. In this short post, I want to outline yet another way in which this culture entails waste of precious research time: the time it takes panel members and referees to evaluate the huge number of proposals that get written.

This year, I was a member of the panel for one of the grant schemes of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). I can report that carefully reading the big pile of research proposals has taken something like 50 to 60 hours, not including the actual meetings to discuss the proposals and to interview the candidates. All in all, it must have amounted to 2 full weeks of work, during which time I could have written a new paper or worked on my own research more generally. In fact, I have the feeling that the first 3 months of this year were entirely spent on evaluating other people’s work rather than doing my own: besides the work for NWO, I also wrote multiple reports on (other) research proposals and applications, and countless referee reports on papers submitted to journals -- not to mention my work as an editor for the Review of Symbolic Logic (as every journal editor knows, it is very hard to find referees for papers these days, as everyone is already so overburdened). These three months were exceptionally (or so I hope!) busy in this respect, and I’m sure there are many others who do just as much or even more work of this kind. Still, this just seems wrong.

Grant writing, wasted time, and Red Queen effects

I was recently having tea with a philosopher who is the head of an interdisciplinary research group. We talked about grant proposals. My interlocutor said he devoted a lot of his working hours (at least 1/3 in his estimation) to writing grant proposals. He also knew someone personally, who was not a philosopher, but someone from an empirical discipline, who devoted as much as 70% of his time on grant writing. That latter person even said that he can now scarcely keep up with the literature in his highly specialized field - let alone contribute original research. But, given that his research group (comprising many PhD students and postdocs) depended on his ability to secure grants, there was no other option but to devote more and more time to the grant writing process. Since grant schemes often ask for unrealistically elaborate timetables and detailed projected results, many experienced grant writers have turned to this heuristic (they have admitted this freely to me, and are unabashed about it - I haven't tried this for myself, but the practice is widespread):

1. Write a grant proposal that describes the work you have recently done (let's call this research project X).
2. If your proposal gets funded, you start doing the research you really want to do (research project Y)
3. If asked for a report of results, you simply mention the papers that are now in press, undergoing review or are recently published from project X; you do not mention the actual work that is now going on in your centre or lab, project Y.
4. About 1 year off from the completion of your current grant, you start developing a new grant proposal, this time detailing how you will carry out project Y (which, of course, is already about completed), allowing you in the future to pursue project Z.

And so on. This practice illustrates, I believe, that there is something deeply wrong with the grant making process as it is currently practiced.

Some very important teaching advice from a VAP.

Marcus Arvan at the Philosophers' Cocoon has started a new series on What it is like to be a VAP. His first post is well worth a read and resonated with my own (three, very privileged!) years as a VAP.

But what caught my attention is this remark by Arvan:

Slowly, though, things began to change for the better. I attended a teaching workshop which emphasized the "flipped classroom" -- i.e. getting students to do more work in the classroom, rather than being the "sage on the stage." My wife and mother also suggested that instead of working myself into the ground prepping for classes, I should prioritize getting students to work. I did.... It has worked wonders. My student evaluations have soared, and more importantly, my students are improving beyond my wildest dreams. Getting them to work -- to do philosophy themselves, both in the classroom and at home -- works wonders.

Recognizing something akin to this  is crucial, I think, to all great (philosophy) teaching. 

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.

Women working in philosophy of language

As you may have seen over at Feminist Philosophers, Derek Ball has started a list of women working in philosophy of language. It's still very incomplete. Please add suggestions here in the comment section or edit the document online.

Can we please put an end to our elitist biases?

Kukla had an excellent post over at Leiter Reports a few days ago about whether the tendency to pursue an MA before your PhD is a good thing or a bad thing for philosophy as a profession. I think this is an important question but I must admit that I found many of the comments (or unintended implications of the comments) enormously puzzling (if not straightforwardly offensive). At some point during the debate there seemed to be somewhat of a consensus that if you pursue an MA after your bachelor's degree before pursuing a PhD, then your chances of becoming a great philosopher (as opposed to a good philosopher) are greatly diminished. Some commentators did offer reasons for thinking this (whereas others didn't), but I must admit that I didn't quite understand those reasons.

Call for contributions to a list of readings by women philosophers for intro classes

It is still very common that students only get readings by male authors in their introductory classes to philosophy. This contributes to the image of philosophy as a boys only discipline. It would therefore be useful to have a list with readings written by women that are suitable for philosophy courses, such as general introduction to philosophy, philosophy of science, ethics, epistemology.

I would like to invite readers to contribute their favorite pieces, written by women philosophers, to the following Google spreadsheet (please fill out the spreadsheet, rather than using the comment section, except if you experience difficulties with the spreadsheet). 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgJqzL_YyKKxdEwyd1o5c1lubFp2TGpiSlkyTE5jOXc#gid=0

In first instance, the focus would be on papers and book excerpts that are not overtly specialist or technical, suitable for intro-level or intermediate courses. Ideally, they should have made a significant impact on their field. They should be readings you have either already successfully used in class context, or envisage using.

Polemical Reviewing

Quite a few of my posts originate in  my reflections on book reviews. But it was pointed out to me I rarely point to or characterize reviews that I like. So consider this fantastic review by Stephen Read. The volume under review "constitutes a valuable survey and rigorous examination of the categories of being, of the development of metaphysics over two and a half thousand years." Read gives what seems like a fair and critical summary of the volume's contents without sacrificing readability and philosophical informativeness. This is quite an achievement in its own right given the range of material under review. But there is also an unmistakable polemical undertone. Consider the following three passages:

1: "Lagerlund's paper is salutary in revealing the continuity between medieval and early modern theories, which is often overlooked or even denied..."

2: "[G]iven the lack of historical awareness among many analytical philosophers in the twentieth century, it is easy to overlook the influence that medieval thought had right through until the nineteenth century. We need to be reminded, as Peter Simons does..."

Critical Philosophy of Race journal launched

This is a wonderful development, and I hope folks will read and contribute to the journal. And ask their institutional libraries (if they have such!) to subscribe.

Website: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/critical_philosophy_of_race/.

Description: Critical Philosophy of Race will examine issues raised by the concept of race, the practices and mechanisms of racialization, and the persistence of various forms of racism across the world. It opposes racism in all forms; it rejects the pseudosciences of old-fashioned biological racialism; it denies that anti-racism and anti-racialism summarily eliminate race as a meaningful category of analysis. The journal is sponsored by the Rock Ethics Institute at The Pennsylvania State University.

From the Editor's Introduction to the Inaugural Issue: 

Are philosophers more biased than other academics?

As is well known, philosophy is a very male-dominated (and white, straight, etc) field, when compared to all other humanities, social sciences, and even several STEM disciplines. Even if we take into account the difficulties that minorities face in academia, we cannot explain why philosophy does worse than most other academic fields. I'd like to put a slightly controversial idea on the table: there are good reasons to believe that philosophers are less effective than academics from other fields in their ability to counter their own biases, i.e., they exhibit a larger bias blind spot.

Self-restraint in refereeing

Dear author,

I regret to inform you that Awesome Bigname Philosophy Journal cannot accept your paper for publication. After having googled the title of your paper, and failing that, lines from your abstract and paper, our referee discovered your identity. He found that you are a nobody from an lackluster university, without a tenured or tenure track position but only a lowly [adjunct teacher, grad student, postdoc etc], and [a woman, black, non-English speaker etc] to boot. Therefore, after a perfunctory glance at your paper, the referee has decided that your paper is not of high enough quality to be published in ABPJ.

We pass on referees' comments in the hope that they may prove useful. We receive over n submissions each year, and must reject many very competent papers, especially those written by people on the bottom of the academic ladder. We hope that your work will find a home in another journal, though obviously one not as highly regarded as ABPJ.

Best wishes,

The Editor.

Tacit knowledge about academia: how do we figure it out?

There is a very useful thread up at Feminist Philosophers on the unwritten rules of the game of being a professional philosopher, as they apply to publishing, collegiality, teaching etc. A lot of knowledge we acquire as academics is tacit, not systematically taught or collected, and we have to discover it piecemeal over time. Some supervisors and programs help to make some of the tacit knowledge explicit (e.g., by organizing workshops on how to put together a good job application), but many do not. In any case, even if we take that into account, I think most knowledge transmission about academia is still informal. 

Yet such knowledge is vital to thrive as an academic. Is it OK for a grad student to approach a specialist in her field she have never met before to ask for feedback on her unpublished paper? Is it acceptable to use someone else's syllabus as a basis for your own course? When is it appropriate to contact a journal editor to gently remind them about your paper? On the thread is a lot of useful knowing-how information, but next to that there is also a lot of tacit knowing-that information that more experienced academics have.

For instance, as an undergrad I did not appreciate the difference between professors and various forms of adjunct faculty and postdocs. I simply saw them all as professors, cozily tenured until retirement. And this is a common mistake: an author for the Chronicle of Higher Education recounts how students at a liberal arts college thought her title 'visiting assistant professor' meant she was a distinguished tenured philosopher, visiting from another faculty. They assumed after her contract ended she would safely return to her home institution. The bleakness of the job market often only becomes apparent to people in their final years of graduate school. 

The h-index of philosophy journals and their relative prestige

There are several measures to indicate the quality of a journal. In philosophy, there seems to be some degree of consensus on the relative prestige of journals, e.g., most would probably agree that Philosophical Review is a better journal to publish in than Unknown Local Journal of Philosophy. Here is a list for general philosophy that is, I take it, not too controversial. Here is a list of both general and specialist journals. In Google Scholar you can find citation metrics that measure the influence of a journal by counting its citations (see below the fold for the top 10 philosophy journals according to citation count).

Will the web transform philosophical praxis? If so, how?

Let's stipulate an expansive notion of 'technology' such that (a) linguistic, mathematical, and logical developments also count as 'technology' and, thus, (b) a lot of philosophical breakthroughs are  preceded by technological ruptures. (Sometimes they redefine philosophy so much that we do not recognize the successor disciplines as "philosophy.") If so, is the web transforming or about to transform philosophical praxis? I use "praxis" to distinguish this question from the one about to what degree professional philosophy is being transformed by the web.

Let me first say what I do not mean with this question. The web *is* transforming philosophical scholarship by facilitating amazing storage & information retrieval (etc.) capacities. I used to spend huge amount of time in libraries (to look at old books and and to scan journals)--now I am genuinely surprised when I enter a library. There are regular on-line/skype seminars on papers, books, topics, etc. The web brings together distributed audiences previously unknown to each other. Blogs have created dedicated intellectual communities, and spawned philosophical movements and catapulted some echo-chambers to professional prominence. (We are probably living in a new golden age of philosophical correspondence--I bet Leibniz would have adored email.) Citation practices are being influenced by blog communities, phil papers, and google.scholar., etc. All of this is swell, but it does not challenge what we mean by "philosophy." (So here I am also ignoring all the exciting ways the web changes how we teach philosophy, and maybe I shouldn't.)

The ‘stale PhD' issue and post-doc positions

Leiter has a post up on the issue of the ‘stale PhD', which remains an ongoing debate despite the unusually bad job market of the last years. The rationale seems to be that real ‘stars’ will land TT jobs straight out of graduate school, so if someone has been out of graduate school for some time and still does not have a TT job, search committees will infer that there is something ‘wrong’ with the candidate -- otherwise he or she would have already gotten a TT job. The vicious circularity of the process is patent: the reason why you don’t get a TT job is that you didn’t get a TT job in the first place. It is unfair, but yet one of these heuristics that people use to save time and effort in judging and decision-making processes.

My understanding is that the focus on TT job is predominantly a North-American phenomenon, as opposed to how the job market is organized in Europe (especially continental Europe). As some readers outside Europe may already know, academic research in Europe is heavily subsidized by research grants provided by funding agencies such as the European Research Council as well as national agencies (in the Netherlands, the almighty NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) – a structure that Eric Schliesser has voiced quite a few objections to, but one which I see as having many advantages as well. (And I must admit that these people have been pretty generous with me so far, so I can’t complain…)

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.

"Are you gay?"

I was asked the question in the title of this post during the closing moments of an Eastern APA job interview. I  believe I stammered "that's illegal," but maybe I only thought of that response in the bar later. In reality the conversation continued with the Chair of the department  after the interview and that was even less edifying. (I have shared more unprofessional interview moments here.) This by way of calling attention to our friends at Feminist Philosophy, who are having an important discussion about what to do in situations like the one I encountered. Those with wise council (I don't have any, alas) or in need of it should join in there.

A colleague in the discipline had warned me against the department with whom the 'are-you-gay-incident' occurred. (I was, in fact, trying to replace that person, but did not receive an 'on-campus-interview.') Given the deplorable situation on the professional philosophy junior/tenure-track job-market, we often forget that interviews are two-way encounters. Departments should be mindful that they are also 'selling' themselves not just to people desperate for a decent paying job in philosophy, but also to future professional colleagues in the discipline. I sometimes wonder if I will ever bump into the  self-described "philosopher of economics" who asked me the question about my sexual orientation/sense of self. I imagine the conversation starts with, "Actually, we have met before. You may not recall..."

You have to be narcissistic and regularly tap into your inner anger to succeed at blogging. Given that professional philosophy has treated me extremely generously during most of my career, my blogging floats along happily on my narcissism. But sometimes what animates my blogging are the memories of the many unprofessional experiences undergone and witnessed....

Changing our frame of reference from "job market" to "political economy of philosophy instruction"

Th Dec 6, 5 pm CST: I'm moving this post back up as it's received some important comments from Ed Kazarian, in response to a comment I made at Leiter Reports to a post by Amy Ferrer, the Executive Director of the APA. By the way, all of Ferrer's posts at LR deserve reading. 

----

The past month (September 2011) we've had a series of interesting and informative posts on preparing graduate students to enter what is commonly called "the job market." The presupposition here is that the job market in philosophy begins post-PhD. 

I don't want to criticize the content of the posts; as far as I can tell, the advice has been excellent. But I do want to suggest that we change our frame of reference on these matters, and specify that we have been discussing only a small segment of the complete system of employment for philosophy instruction in institutions of higher education. So I'd like to suggest we call the analysis of the complete system "the political economy of philosophy instruction." 

When a killer review turns into a boomerang review.

First, let's stipulate that a "killer review" is a review that ends a philosophical debate (or closes out a tradition, etc.). Presumably such a review would include devastating objections and well-deserved ridicule for its target. For example, sometimes I indulge myself in fantasizing that I could write a killer review that ends discussion of fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God. Second, let's call a "boomerang review" a review that intends to be a "killer review," but that (you guessed it) rebounds on its author (by, say, damaging the author's reputation). Presumably the non-negligible risk of becoming an unwitting author of a boomerang review prevents the proliferation of attempted killer reviews. Perhaps, most reviewers recognize how difficult philosophy is when you start really thinking about it.

There are, of course, many strategies by which killer reviews can be executed. One that had never occurred to me before is by way of praise. In Dutch we have a saying, 'iemand het graf in prijzen' (literally: to praise somebody into his grave), by which we convey an instance of high praise that is intended to produce negative feelings about the objects of praise. (Think about how parents might get rid off their child's intended spouse.) In this review, Mark Sagoff clearly aims to kill off welfare economics by way of praise.

If backlogs in philosophy journals are the problem, are moratoria the solution?

Hypatia, a leading journal in feminist philosophy, has decided to place a moratorium on new submissions until July 2013. There have been moratoria in other journals, for instance in Noûs and PPR, but these are perhaps a bit less problematic, as they are general philosophy journals, and so you could find an alternative home for your paper in epistemology, metaphysics, philsophy of language etc. if there is a moratorium in those journals. By contrast, while Hypatia is not the only venue for feminist philosophy, it is the most prominent one, and it still seems less straightforward to publish feminist philosophy in general philosophy journals (I see no principled reason against this, but it still remains rare). 

Moratoria on new submissions are often motivated by long back logs in the journal's publication, and increases on editors and referees, all caused by an increase in submissions. For Hypatia, the editors attribute the steep rise in submissions to an increased interest in feminist philosophy. For Noûs and PPR, the reason for increased submissions might be that these journals have relatively decent turnaround times in terms of refereeing, combined with an excellent reputation, which leads young researchers to seek these venues, rather than, say Mind, which has a very long average review time (Cullison's journal surveys provide comparative data). It seems to me (although I don't immediately find quantitative data to back this up) that increased submissions by graduate students and other junior philosophers contribute to the problem. 

While the decision of Hypatia's editors is understandable, I think that moratoria, in the long run, are not a good solution. They disadvantage people who are untenured, and require good publications on their CV for jobs or their tenure evaluations. Often they have to get such papers in a relatively tight schedule. If the primary venues for their work happen to have a moratorium, this would be an unacceptable bad luck factor. So what are the alternatives?

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.

Presenter tips for making accessible presentations

This is a guest-post by Teresa Blankmeyer Burke.

Scaliger’s helpful post about making APA presentations visually accessible and appealing reminds me there are also things philosophers can do to make their presentations more accessible to deaf and hard of hearing audience members. Odds are good that at least a few audience members will have hearing loss -- according to the U.S. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, fifteen percent of adults between the ages of 20 and 69 have hearing loss, and this percentage increases with age.  Most of these people rely on residual hearing (amplified or unamplified) and visual cues. This post is focused on making talks more accessible to that population – I’m planning another post on accessibility for those working with sign language interpreters and CART (captioning).