New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Brazilian music on Thursdays: 'O telefone tocou novamente'

I’ve been so focused on the sexual harassment issue that I forgot all about my Brazilian music column of Thursdays today! So this will be a bit brief, but it will be good :)

If you ask me to name my one and only very favorite Brazilian musician of all times, it will be damn hard, of course, but if really pressed, on most occasions I would probably say: Jorge Ben(Jor) (he started out as Jorge Ben and changed his name to Jorge Ben Jor at some point, for somewhat obscure reasons). What he’s done in terms of coming up with a whole new beat is simply awesome: he invented the samba-rock guitar rhythm, which is the swingiest rhythm I’ve ever come across (and I’ve looked very hard!). There’s really nothing like it.

Sexual harassment: the victim's perspective

This week’s post on what to do about sexual harassment by Mark, John and Eric has clearly hit a nerve (it's even been mentioned in Inside Higher Ed). We’ve had many interesting responses, and predictably also some responses questioning the gist of the suggestions put forward in the post (for example, the term 'witch hunting' has been used; if only it were true... Witches don't exist, harassers abound). Many have raised the crucial question of the kind (or level) of epistemic warrant required to set in motion mechanisms of social sanctions, but at least I think we can all agree that, if one witnesses an occurrence of sexual harassment in the making, as a bystander, then it is not too much to say that one has the moral obligation to intervene (although it is by no means easy to do it), just as one would have the moral obligation to intervene in other forms of wrong-doings (e.g. seeing somebody being beaten up). In fact, in the case of sexual harassment, one does not even have the excuse of fear for one’s own safety, as typically the harassment will have a specific target rather than being likely to spread and include other victims.

(Robert Paul Wolff says in comments: "When I was a little boy, my mother told me that if I was ever at a dinner party where someone made an anti-semitic remark, I should speak up. I never got to use that advice, because I never got invited to dinner parties. But the principle remains sound.")

New APPS Interview: Charles Dyke

Today’s New APPS interview is with Charles Dyke, Professor of Philosophy at Temple University.

Hello Chuck, thanks very much for doing this interview with us. Can you tell us about your personal practice of philosophy? 

Well, I’m not sure that’s one of my personal practices.  It’s probably about thirty years since I was in the B section of the library.  I’ve never belonged to the APA.  The only times I’ve been to the APA meetings were when I was on a search committee.  Does that make me a fellow traveler?

Ha! So you have a complicated relation to what goes by the name of philosophy nowadays. How do you do what you do then?

I teach three days a week.  The other days normally have me reading or writing in the morning, very often with music on.  The afternoons are for gardening, maintenance, woodcarving, carpentry – or more reading.  My best thoughts have always come as I was drifting into or out of sleep.  I take siestas to maximize my productivity.

You do a good bit of collaborative work.

bracing NDPR review of the 'embodied empiricism' volume I put together recently w. colleague.

Bracing but pretty fair review of 'ambitious' volume I put together with former colleague. Anglocentrism an interesting criticism given my own work is not very anglocentric. Embodied mind...well I guess I wish I could clone J. Sutton's essay and have more of them be like that...

http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23210

Musings on truth

So last week we had the ‘Truth be Told’ conference in Amsterdam, bringing together top-notch researchers on truth coming both from formal and from philosophical quarters (F. A. Müller wrote a short report of the conference here). Indeed, the main purpose of the conference was really to get these different groups of people to talk to each other, in particular to discuss the potential philosophical significance of the many interesting technical results on axiomatic theories of truth.

I must admit that, as of lately, I had become a bit skeptical concerning the philosophical significance of many of the developments in the field of axiomatic theories of truth. My feeling was that it had become an independent field of mathematical inquiry, as it were, scarcely related to its original target-phenomenon, namely the concept of truth. With Tarski, the connection between the formal and the conceptual level was still very palpable (Tarski was always adamant to formulate clear conditions of material adequacy for his formal theories, which were drawn directly from the conceptual level), but at least since Kripke’s fixed-point constructions, things had become increasingly baroque.

Historical Ontology

In light of the recent spate of posts concerning the role of history in philosophy on this blog (especially Mark's post here and Catarina's here), and especially given Eric’s recent posts on coining concepts (here) and his own concept philosophic prophecy (here), I thought I’d add my concept of historical ontology to the mix. I can’t take credit for coining the phrase ‘historical ontology’. Ian Hacking wrote a book titled Historical Ontology, and Hacking himself got it from an offhand comment Foucault made and yet never fully developed in his “What is Enlightenment?” essay. In the context of my use of the concept in my analysis of Deleuze’s reading of Hume in my book Deleuze’s Hume, and drawing from the work of Bruno Latour as well, historical ontology acquires a broader scope than it has in Hacking’s work. Put briefly, I follow up on claims of Don Garrett, David Owen, and Norman Kemp Smith regarding the inseparability of the belief in external, autonomous objects from the actively engaged propensities of human nature – more precisely, this is the propensity towards easy transitions from one idea to another. Kemp Smith, in particular, argues that the belief in external existence is one of the two forms ‘natural belief’ takes, natural belief being for Kemp Smith a belief to which the mind is committed by Nature [and which]…operates in and through the imagination, and so by way of “fictions”.’ (Kemp Smith 1941, 485-6). On my reading of Hume here, we do not begin with the distinction between a natural world and a subject who reacts to and engages with this world, but rather we begin with a propensity, a process, and the distinction between subject and object, self and the world, are themselves effects that are inseparable from these ongoing propensities and processes. This inseparability of what is from the processes that actualize what is is what I call historical ontology.

Weekly Philo of economics (delayed)

This week's regular philosophy of economics blog post will be delayed until later this week because I will be at the annual conference for the British Society for the History of Philosophy in Sussex. Here I blogged a bit about my methodological session with James Harris here. I am also giving a paper on how if we take Colin MacLaurin's criticisms of Spinoza seriously, we will discern how Spinoza was a critic of mathematical-empirical natural philosophy (rather than some kind of fellow-traveler of the scientific revolution). MacLaurin was the leading Scottish Newtonian of first half of 18th century.

[Punkrockmonday #5] Henry Rollins- What Am I Doing Here; Willie Nelson- Me and Paul; Rainbow Connection (orig. Kermit the Frog)

If I remember right, somewhere Heidegger quotes Novalis to the effect that philosophy is nothing else than homesickeness, an urge to be at home. I don't really understand what that is supposed to mean, and moreover am deeply suspicious of all strains of Romanticism. . . but dangit there really is something to the claim that humans suffer an almost primal sense of feeling out of place, a visceral feeling of "what am I doing here?" even sometimes where the "here" in question is standing in front of a mirror (cf. Leonard Cohen's "Dress Rehearsal Rag"). And Novalis is probably right to the extent that this has some connection with the reason many of us are motivated to try to hear what the philosophy muse will share with us.

And it's certainly a common trope in good music. I've seen live performances of all three of the songs I'm featuring today.

CFP (Post-)Doctoral Workshop: Mandeville, Ghent University, June 28-29.

On June 28-29, 2011, with support of Ghent University's Doctoral School, the Philosophy & Moral Sciences Department at Ghent University, is hosting a (Post-)Doctoral workshop on Mandeville.

What is to be done about sexual harassment in the philosophy profession?

Sexual harassment in the philosophy profession is intolerable, yet all-too-common, as we can see from the important collection of stories at What is it like to be a Woman in Philosophy?.

Moreover, there are many important figures in the profession whom their colleagues and students know to have engaged in various forms of sexual harassment on multiple occasions.   Many of us have heard first-hand accounts of harassment from those who have been harassed; almost all of us have heard second-hand accounts from those who know the harassers or the harassed.  In the case of some of these figures accused of harassment, the allegations come from a wide range of sources, sources who are more than willing to discuss the issue privately.

Institutional mechanisms provide little in the way of redress to the victims of such figures.  Those who have been harassed, or worse, come forward in many cases, put themselves through a long and painful process, and if the figure is prominent it is very unlikely that any meaningful action will be taken.  Given this systematic failure of formal mechanisms, it should not come us a surprise that many women get discouraged and drop out of the discipline along the way.

Thus the natural question is what, if anything, we can do informally.

We believe there are informal sanctions that could make a difference.  The Feminist Philosophers blog recently suggested not inviting serial harassers to conferences.  One could easily extend this to not inviting them to publish, not conversing with them at conferences, advising students to avoid their graduate program, etc.  We can hope that such informal shunning would have a significant effect. Of course, without a naming and shaming mechanism this approach will be limited to folk somehow in the know. 

By and large, however, philosophers have, to date, seemed unwilling to engage in such informal social sanctions.  Of course there are some good reasons for this.  One might not be convinced that the person in question actually did what they are said to have done.  One might be in a vulnerable position and not want to risk reprisal But these explanations for inaction only go so far.  There are many cases in which the behavior is well known to a wide range of people who are tenured and of substantial standing in their own right, and thus immune to immediate job threats.

So in light of this, we ask, what is to be done? It is impermissible to stand by while women – and occasionally men – in our profession are subjected to intolerable behavior.  If the only thing standing in the way of acting is a desire to avoid confrontation, or the intellectual enjoyment of engaging with a smart colleague who is nonetheless a serial harasser, then the individual excuses for not engaging in informal sanctions do not outweigh the benefits to the profession. Moreover, if we do not get our house in order, the societies we inhabit will increasingly question our privileges.

So let us collectively consider what might be the best ways to confront this situation. Comments are open.

Mark Lance
John Protevi
Eric Schliesser

UPDATE: W 30 March 8:21 am, CDT: An article on efforts to fight sexual harassment in the philosophy profession, including reference to this post (which is only part of that campaign), is now online at Inside Higher Education (IHE).

UPDATE: W 30 March 10:05 pm, CDT: We will do a follow-up post next week, but we should also note right now that the "What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?" blog has other categories than that of sexual harassment. So the "good news" and "do try this at home" categories deserve attention too!

UPDATE: M 4 April 1:25 pm, CDT: our follow-up post is here.

Most underrated philosopher of the week: Christina Chimisso

Much of the ongoing history and philosophy of science (say as we find it at Max Planck in Berlin) that tries to avoid taking its cue from the Vienna Cirlce, has its roots in the thought of Nietzsche as re-interpreted or re-oriented by Max Weber, Freud, Léon Brunschvicg, and Durkheim. The crucial philosopher (institutionally and intellectually) is Gaston Bachelard, who stands behind the thought of Kuhn and Foucault. For the usual parochial reasons, Bachelard is still largely ignored among English speaking philosophers. (I am also guilty of this. I suspect Bachelard is only studied among lit crit types.) Yet, one day some ambitious soul must re-think philosophy of science from the ground up, and when s/he traces our roots back, she will encounter Bachelard as one of the crucial figure that needs to be overcome. In doing so, s/he will find a supremely helpful philosophical guide in Christina Chimisso's monograph. Chimisso, who teaches at the Open University in the UK, is this week's most underrated philosopher (see the rules here; I welcome nominations privately and publicly)!

Chimisso follows her own intellectual lodestone. In her works she reveals the high aspirations that once animated history and philosophy of science with a lovely eye for contextual and intellectual detail. She helps reminds us what was once at stake in the distinctions and conceptual moves that are now taken for granted in the sediments on which three year PhDs are built. One of my favorite pieces by Chimisso is this honest assessment of the tragic Helen Metzger. But, perhaps, this piece is the more important one.

Philosophy of economics: Milton Friedman as teacher of the Chicago Boys

One way in which my work on Early Modern philosophy and philosophy of economics hangs together, is that I thematize what I call the "Socratic Problem" in both. (Recall the methodology I advocate here.) One version of it  focuses on how a philosopher or public intellectual is held accountable for the impact of his/her teachings on students and the rest of society. One of my pieces is on Milton Friedman and the Chilean Chicago Boys. In my paper I try to tease out some of the non trivial philosophic and methodological commitments in Friedman's conception of economics and what happens to these when they are applied by ambitious students in the context of dictatorship. The first review of that effort is in:

"In fact only two of the essays in Part I are at all critical of Chicago economics in any form. Eric Schliesser, in his 'Friedman, positive economics, and the Chicago Boys', provides a timely reminder of a long-forgotten piece of state (not state-sponsored) terrorism, the murder of the former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier by Pinochet's secret police, the DINA, in Washington DC on 21 September 1976, just four weeks after he had published an attack on Friedman in Nation and three weeks before Friedman's Nobel Prize was announced. Schliesser's analysis of the relations between Chicago and the Pinochet regime does not make for pleasant reading." J.E. King reviewing  Ross B. Emmett (ed.) The Elgar Companion to the Chicago School of Economics, in History of Economics Review, Summer, 2010.

Read the rest of the review here.

Changes in the Gendered Conference Campaign

Here’s another meta-post on posts over at the Feminist Philosophers’ blog. It may seem like overkill to write blog posts on blog posts, but there have been some new important developments in the Gendered Conference Campaign, which deserve to be discussed in some detail.

The first one (already noted by John Protevi here) is that, on the basis of the results of the poll conducted recently on reasons why women may be declining invitations to speak at conferences more often than men, Jender has drafted a list of practical recommendations on how to avoid a poor gender balance at conferences. Of course, the list is meant for people who are already convinced of the importance of having female keynote speakers at conferences, but we’ve been hearing a lot that some people do try to make sure there is some sort of gender balance at their conferences but still somehow “it does not work out”. With these practical suggestions, however, I firmly believe that the chances of ensuring a reasonable female representation at a conference are significantly increased.

Cary Nelson: time to rethink public education as a public good

Cary Nelson, president of the AAUP, makes the case for public higher education as a public good to be completely funded by tax dollars. That is, to eliminate tuition as a user fee for this public service. This argument for taking into account the political nature of public higher education (citizen formation) rather than an exclusive focus on the vocational model (purchase of certificates for use on the job market) has been my position all along. (UPDATE: It was also made by Adolph Reed in 2001.)

Incremental state funding of public higher education is over.... Public funding is being inexorably replaced by incremental cost shifting from states to students, with tuition revenue and student debt replacing tax dollars.

Only a complete restructuring of the financial model and a redefinition of the social purpose of public higher education will suffice. Higher education must be reconceived as a public good and a human right.

It must be understood as a key component of the social contract that holds a democracy together and makes it credible. It helps produce a citizenry prepared to participate in public life and public debate in an informed and articulate way, capable of evaluating legislative proposals and political rhetoric, aware of the dynamic relationship between historical precedents and current struggles.

Public higher education thus must be altogether publicly funded. The battle must now be over fundamentals, not crumbs.

(Emphasis added.) Read the whole thing here.

We are legion

Richard Seymour at Lenin's Tomb reports on the 500,000 person march in London yesterday, #26March.

                                                                                                         Photo: Richard Seymour

It was something that I haven't really seen en masse before. It was something that some people had written off. They said was a bit old hat, doomed to a slow, dwindling death, if it even really existed. It was the working class. Not the working class in the shitty, nostalgic, culturally regressive sense that people invoke, not the deus ex machina mobilised to berate black people and gays for being too assertive of their legitimate rights. It was the working class as an agent of its own interests; it was a class for itself. It was the labour movement, every bit the multicultural entity that Cameron reviles. And that movement, comprising several millions of people, having lain dormant for years, is now looking decidedly up for a fight. If you're a socialist in one of those workplaces on Monday morning, you should have an easier job arguing for militant strike action now, because people now know what they could not be sure of before: that we are many, and they are few.

Read the rest here. More photos here.

Feminist Philosophers: how to avoid a gendered conference

(This is a post for conference/workshop/summer school organisers, anthology editors, and anyone else who is putting together a collection of philosophers and finding they’re all male.)

So, you’re trying to think of people to invite to your conference, and all the ones who come to mind are male. Well, there was one woman but she said she was too busy. You’ve read (perhaps here, perhaps elsewhere) about the harms this can do in terms of implicit bias and stereotype threat. So you’d like to avoid an all-male conference. How might you do this?

What follows are some suggestions:

Read the post here.

Philosphic prophecy and the history of philosophy

Next week Thursday morning at the British Society for the History of Philosophy I am 'debating' James Harris on the methodology of the history of philosophy [I am substituting for Knud Haakonssen, who will chair the session].  I will argue that the current methodology of contextual philosophy (as promoted by James Harris and, for example, beautifully articulated by our very own Dennis Des Chene earlier this week) has severe limitations. In particular, in being "resolutely antiteleological" (Des Chene) it fails to capture some of the most important aspirations of the figures 'we' tend to study. Earlier in the week I insisted that the task of the philosophic historian is coining concepts. One of these is "philosophic prophecy." This concept is meant to capture the teleological aspirations of philosophers.

What is philosophic prophecy? It's not biblical prophecy, but A) prophecy by philosophers (‘Secular’ prophecy' if you wish). It is not about making predictions. In particular, B) it is intended to help create a possible future. C) It is, thus, a necessary (but not sufficient condition)  for the prophesied future (and, thus, resolutely teleological). It is structurally akin (but not identical) to a self-fulling prophecy. D) It appeals to the imagination; often by way of narrative, history, or mythic history. E) It often consist of claims that are beyond knowable at the time of articulation, but that avoid obvious falsehoods. F) It is, thus, (ultimately) accepted on faith; G) it relies on the obvious idea that texts can have an impact: H) crucially, our present, once unforeseen actions can be the intended outcome of past design. I) One sign that one is dealing with an author that engages this genre, is if s/he articulates a dialectic between "true vs false" philosophers (or teachers). J) To be clear, this is different from the tradition of 'noble lies' or esoteric teaching (familiar from Leo Strauss), although clearly shares some kinship with it.

CFP: The Classical Model of Science II, VU Amsterdam 2-5 August 2011

The Classical Model of Science II
The Axiomatic Method, the Order of Concepts and the Hierarchy of  Sciences from Leibniz to Tarski

August 2-5, 2011  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

It has a neat group of key-note speakers.

Brazilian music on Thursdays: 'Nao me deixe so' - Remix

I left Brazil in 1999, and naturally it has been much harder to keep up with the newest developments in Brazilian music since then. But I go to Brazil regularly, and do my best to stay more or less on top of things. Now, it seems to me that one of the most interesting singers/songwriters to have emerged in the 2000s is Vanessa da Mata. She has released four albums so far (2002, 2004, 2007. 2010), with songs which often hit the singles charts. Her music is pop music alright, but of the imaginative and original sort. Two of her main hits so far are ‘Ai, ai, ai’ (2004) and her duo with Ben Harper, ‘Boa sorte / Good luck’ (2007). I very much like the latter; I used to be a big Ben Harper fan in the 1990s, and the Vanessa da Mata / Ben Harper mix of styles worked out very well.

But rather than posting ‘Boa sorte / Good luck’ today (which was my original idea), I decided to post a drum ‘n’ bass remix of a song from Vanessa’s first album, ‘Não me deixe só’, to illustrate the presence of electronic music in Brazilian contemporary music. One of the main exponents of the mix of Brazilian rhythms with electronic music is Bebel Gilbert (I should post a song by her too at some point) --incidentally the daughter of João Gilberto, one of the founding fathers of Bossa Nova. Bebel recorded a seminal album in the late 1990s, Tanto Tempo, produced by the now legendary Suba. Suba was a Serbian who emigrated to Brazil in the 1990s when he fell in love with Brazilian music. He then became one of the most influential music producers in Brazil until his tragic death in 1999, when his studio caught fire and he died while trying to rescue some newly recorded material. It doesn’t get more emblematic than this… Suba is often seen as the main responsible for the introduction of electronic music into Brazilian music.

Ricardo: advocate of situational knowledge!

This post is a homage to Alison Wylie, who is one of the few philosophers of science who has interesting things to say about evidential arguments used in real science, and the key-note speaker to a workshop organized by the very talented Helen De Cruz. Wylie is also a feminist advocate of situated knowledge and standpoint theory. Now, what follows is stimulated by her presentation as well as the two interesting contributed talks on the origin of the concept of measuring unemployment (by the historian of economics, Peter Rodenberg) and Ricardo's delineation of the economy (by the young philosopher of science, Guus Dix).

In chapter 31 of his Principles, Ricardo argues "That the opinion entertained by the labouring class, that the employment of machinery is frequently detrimental to their interests, is not founded on prejudice and error, but is conformable to the correct principles of political economy." (31.16)

Now this chapter is not ignored: luminaries such as Wicksell (in a paper originally rejected by Keynes) and Samuelson have spilled considerable ink on this claim. But what seems little noticed is that Ricardo vindicates situated knowledge of ordinary folk in that chapter. This is especially striking because a) Ricardo's result here is at tension with some of his other claims and commitments; b) in the chapter, Ricardo seems to have his eye on the significance of structural, involuntary unemployment (due to technological changes); c) Ricardo's clearly allows that the lower classes do adequately understand their interests and the consequences of policy interests--and this may make him the first (?) THEORIST to allow the uneducated, vulgar the status of true understanding (conformable to the correct principles of political economy"); d) even Adam Smith, who is extremely sympathetic to the plight of the labouring classes (and often takes their side), seems to think that workers are too overworked and often too ignorant to adequately understand the remote consequences of such structural changes in the economy.

On c: Ricardo does not claim that they possess their knowledge in virtue of their position. But in context, he acknowledges that because their interests were being violated the laborers recognized the a truth of political economy before anyone else.

New APPS Interview: Steven Shaviro

Today’s New APPS interview is with Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University.

Thanks for doing this interview with us, Steven. Let’s start with your personal practice of scholarly work. What are the pleasures and pains of scholarship for you? How do you experience solitary study and writing, collaborative writing, camaraderie at conferences? 

"Scholarship" or "solitary study and writing," is really something like a need for me. If I am not actually working on something, which means either writing something, or preparing for writing something, then I start feeling bored, restless, listless, and agitated, all at once. Of course, I can avert this feeling if I am very busy with (let's say) non-creative tasks, which are certainly a part, both of simply living and of whatever job one has -- an academic job as much as any other. So there are many times when I am just too busy to write, or even to think about what I might want to write. Also, I can't really write or think about writing when I don't get enough sleep, when I am distressed or depressed for any sort of personal reasons, etc. But if I have the space and time to relax -- then I can't really relax, because it feels empty if I am not engaged in what I perhaps too pretentiously think of as "intellectual work."

What is your daily practice? Do you have a set routine? 

A Janus-faced discipline

[Previous posts on this topic: Pasnau, Novaes, Smith I, Smith II, Lance.]

If the history of philosophy needs defending, the posts listed above ought to persuade anyone persuasible. Rather than add another log to the palisade, I thought it would be useful to try to understand why the question keeps coming up. (There’s ample evidence that it does come up every so often. You’ll find earlier stages of the discussion in Margaret Wilson’s Descartes (which was published, significantly enough, in a series called “Arguments of the Philosophers”), in Bernard Williams’ introduction to his Descartes (and the afterthoughts in A Sense of the past), in Alan Gabbey’s “Arguing with the ungrateful dead”—I can’t find a reference to it, but it circulated in samizdat in the late 1980s—, and Dan Garber’s introduction to Descartes embodied.)

The question keeps coming up, I think, because the history of philosophy has two faces. One looks toward intellectual history, itself a branch of cultural history, and the other toward contemporary philosophy. Call these the East Face and the West Face (that gives me room for two more if I need them…). The East Face thinks of philosophical texts in the manner of a historian: they are remains of the past which happen to be available to us in the Archive (see Foucault’s Archeology), and which we take as indices of past events, notably the acts of thought we take to be evidenced by the texts we study. The task of the intellectual historian (once the basic work of putting together the Archive is done) is to describe accurately and to explain those events. (Putting together the Archive is itself a very difficult and challenging task, I might add—see Thomas Tanselle’s work on editing and textual criticism; or take a look at André Robinet’s edition of Leibniz’s Principes de la nature et de la grâce.) That’s a rather atmospheric way of saying that we look at texts, try to determine the intentions behind the speech acts of their authors, and—having thus understood the phenomena—try to understand why the authors did what they did. The process goes on at the level of phrases (e.g. Descartes’ semel in vita), arguments, whole texts, œuvres, schools. (I should add that in my view every responsible reader does history, at least occasionally. Only in those situations in which everyone understands everyone else so well that “hitches” in understanding—do you mean by ‘essence’ what I mean?—never get in the way will we not be engaged in tasks resembling those of the historian properly speaking. Consider the giants of the 50s—Quine, Carnap—: for today’s graduate student, I suspect, a great deal more needs to be motivated and explicated than when I first encountered them; in the 70s there were plenty of native Quineans and Carnapians from whom one could absorb the requisite understandings without having to crack a book.)

Empirically informed philosophy of social science in Leuven

I am in Leuven today and tomorrow for a workshop, so my philosophy of economics blog will be postponed until later this week. Here's the program  that the very talented philosopher of anthropology/social science, Helen de Cruz, is organizing (and I am co-sponsoring--proving that Leuven and Ghent are not only mortal rivals!).

Two important posts at Feminist Philosophers

There have been two important posts over at the Feminist Philosophers blog in the last couple of days: one with the results of the poll they conducted on reasons that may be leading women to decline conference invitations, and one on a NY Times article reporting on MIT's experience with an active policy to promote gender balance among its faculty, 12 years down the road. Both are very important topics on which I would like to say a lot more, but I'll be having an impossibly busy week (mostly attending an excellent albeit suboptimally gender-balanced conference on truth in Amsterdam), and I did not want to let these two important posts pass unnoticed.

Concerning the results of the poll, what came out as the main reason why women decline invitations was: lack of funding! I was very surprised, if nothing else because I never considered that it technically qualifies as a 'conference invitation' unless the expenses are being paid for by the conference or other sources. Jender correctly points out that women are less likely to have good travel funds available, for a variety of reasons, so this may well be a big obstacle for a considerable number of women. So this translates into an obvious advice to conference organizers seeking to establish a better gender balance: if funding is limited, it may be a good idea to prioritize the women invited as those who will receive financial support.

Another reason that was often mentioned was clash with other obligations. Here the practical advice is to invite women well in advance; it is very plausible that, due to domestic and other kinds of obligations, women have much less flexibility to make travel plans than men. Another practical advice is to let female invitees have a say on possible dates for the event before deciding on the final dates; this is of course good advice concerning both male and female speakers, but it all seems to indicate that it would be particularly important for women.

I will try to find some time to say more on the MIT experience at some point.

Brian Weatherson asks an important question...the answer is an overlooked paper from 1959

In a recent discussion on Leiter's blog, In response to remarks by our very own Catarina, Brian Weatherson writes (first quoting Keynes): "But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back." (Keynes 1936, 383-4)

[Weatherson continues:] "I hope philosophers' intuitions are better than the voices in the head of madmen in authority, but the point Keynes is making generalises. And that is a good reason to trace where contemporary philosophy comes from. Having said that, I suspect the time period that would be most useful to study for this purpose would be the Wittgenstein-Kripke period. Since philosophers' intuitions seemed so different in 1973 to 1953, finding out what changed would be beneficial. But there isn't a huge amount written on the *history* of that period."

Most underrated philosopher of the week: Saul Fisher

I welcome private and public nominations for my weekly, most-underrated philosopher of the week post!  Here are the rules: 1. no dead people; 2. no people currently or about to be employed in a Leiter top 50 (or equivalent) department (even thought these are also filled with underrated folk); 3. no former dissertation advisors, or other teachers from graduate school; 4. no former students; 5. No untenured folk. 6a: Excellence in more than one AOS, or 6b: noticeable public impact. (That is I want to recognize *interesting* philosophers, not just hyperspecialized ones!)

One of the great joys of writing this weekly post is discovering new and interesting facts about folk that  are interesting. For example, I already knew that this week's most underrated philosopher, Saul Fisher (and interim provost at Mercy College), wrote a splendid book on Gassendi (surely one of the most underrated philosophers in history). I admire the book because while Saul clearly knows his sources and intellectual context, he is not afraid to engage Gassendi with (and compare him to) recent philosophic theories. Rather than creating anachronism, Fisher animates Gassendi's philosophic and scientific projects. Saul has also been an early contributor to the now 'very hot' field of early modern life sciences (see here, and here).

Methodological crisis in physics since 1980...and what philosophy of physics (and economics) can do

En Passant, in a discussion on the Leiter blog, David Wallace (a prominent philosopher of physics), makes the following important observation: "Perhaps putting aside post-1980 particle physics as a special case, it's pretty uncontroversial that the methodology of physics is effective at achieving physics' goals, and that the results delivered by physics are basically correct (where "correct", for non-realists in philosophy of science, doesn't have to be read as "true"). The sheer extent of the successes of physics in experimental test and in technological application means that physicists can be fairly uncritical about their methodology...[snip] Economics is not remotely in the same position of methodological security as physics; hence, good economists should probably be a lot more conversant with the history of their discipline than good physicists. (If you believe Paul Krugman, failing to be historically informed is a significant part of what's wrong with Chicago-style modern economics.) And post 1980s particle physics is arguably going through a slow-motion methodological crisis precisely because the strong evidential base that used to ground the subject has largely dried up."

Let me leave aside economics until the last sentence of this pece (for, historical ignorance is a widespread sin in the discipline, not exempting Krugman). Wallace is not alone in his claim about particle physics. I heard John Norton express a similar sentiment in conversation about a year ago; as I reported before here, Eric Curiel has published on this, and (as the eminent Dutch philosopher of physics, Fred Muller, reminded me this morning, Lee Smolin wrote a book about it. The sane parts of what follows is indebted to Muller. I offer two observations.

Nevada keeps on fighting

Deborah Achtenberg of University of Nevada at Reno provides an update: Tomorrow, March 21, 2011, sudents from all branches of Nevada's higher education system will attend a rally at the state legislature in Carson City.  With numerous buses coming from all over the state, two thousand are predicted to attend.  Faculty, community groups, non-profits and unions will attend as well.

question - just question, not challenge - for the contextual historians

Justin, Catarina, and by implication Eric have all talked about the line between history and history of philosophy recently on this blog.  So I have a question that seemed worth a separate thread.

First, I take it no one thinks there is a lack of intrinsic value in the history of anything.  It's a perfectly fine thing to think about any historical question you like.  And let's grant that it is silly to suppose that the only connection of historical study to contemporary philosophy is that it immediately answers the same questions someone is asking now.  It might give us a critical stance on those questions, show us where they come from, provide new concepts, challenge our intuitions, demonstrate the contingency of our social-conceptual constructs, etc.  But anything like that is what you Catarina was calling "instrumental". The philosophical value - the philosophical nature of the project - is in its relation to contemporary philosophy. 

Instrumentalist and intrinsic-value defenses of history of philosophy

The topic of the place of the history of philosophy within philosophy as a discipline has been extensively discussed over the last week, after Leiter’s post on Pasnau’s letter. It is great that the topic has received so much attention lately, and I think some progress has been made towards clarifying the different positions one could take on the matter.

One position that seems to have emerged is what one could refer to as an ‘instrumentalist’ defense of the significance of the history of philosophy, in particular the claim that the study of the history of philosophy allows for better, deeper analyses within contemporary philosophical theorizing. This position encounters resistance from both sides. On the one hand, many contemporary philosophers object to the idea that it is important to take into account the historical development of the problems and issues they deal with, and even hold that a historical focus distracts us from the real issues. On the other hand, many historians feel that a focus on the instrumentality of the history of philosophy for contemporary philosophy only perpetuates the perception of its secondary significance. They argue that the study of the history of philosophy has intrinsic value and needs no external justification on the basis of its significance for enterprises such as contemporary philosophical theorizing.