New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Further thoughts on the 'Climate for Women' survey

In the past week, those who follow philosophy blogs have had massive exposure to discussions on the so-called ‘Pluralist Guide’, and in particular on the section dedicated to the ‘Climate for Women in Philosophy’ (see here and here for NewAPPS posts on the topic). At the risk of contributing to the general fatigue, we add a few thoughts.

We concur with many of the concerns raised here and elsewhere regarding the methodology and potential negative impact of the ‘Climate for Women in Philosophy’ survey as originally presented. General reputational surveys are problematic in many ways. But even if we take into account non-negligible considerations of cost-effectiveness and risk to those queried, it is clearly not the most suitable approach to sketch an accurate picture of the parameter under consideration, i.e. whether a given department offers a welcoming environment for female graduate students. We worry especially that departmental strengths in philosophic feminism have been used as a proxy for general welcoming climate toward women. (Having said that, the undersigned take outright hostility toward philosophic feminism as a negative signal.)

However, to bring the ‘climate’ parameter to the fore as a relevant element is a very laudable initiative. Our impression is that general ‘climate’ considerations (not only for women but for graduate students in general, i.e. whether a given department offers a nurturing, caring environment) are typically not given the significance they deserve, and the PG section on ‘climate’ could be an important step in this direction. 

"I see a humanities degree as nothing less than a rite of passage to intellectual adulthood"

As seen by the folk at Google: "There [is] no surer path to leaping dramatically forward in your career than to earn a Ph.D. in the humanities. Because the thought leaders in our industry are not the ones who plodded dully, step by step, up the career ladder. The leaders are the ones who took chances and developed unique perspectives." (Thank you Christina Rawls for calling my attention to it.)

Bullshit (and probably 'bought') Experts and their fear-mongering friends in the media

This is a very important article; the link comes from the wise Glenn Greenwald.

False flags

Dennis Des Chene

Eric Schliesser has recently responded in no uncertain terms to a post by Justin Smith at Early Modern Experimental Philosophy. Evidently a red flag was raised. On the face of it, their conversation goes like this:

JEHS: The history of philosophy need have no more relation to philosophers’ present concerns than Egyptology to the present concerns of Egyptians.

ES: [—I omit terms of abuse, like “positivist”—] History of philosophy can be used to address our present concerns; “immersing” a past thinker in his or her context prevents our doing so; ergo immersion is to be avoided.

Each of them sounds like, and perhaps wants to sound like, he’s saying something stronger—so that Eric’s reply would in fact be contrary to what Justin proposes. But on close reading, Justin is not denying all relevance to history of philosophy, nor is Eric opposed to bringing context to bear on the understanding of old texts.

Justin, in making a connection between past and present experimental philosophy (that is, the currently trendy X-Phi and the long-ago trendy “experimental Philosophy” of Boyle & co.), argues that the upshot of X-Phi is that the range of evidence that can be brought into philosophical argument has no effective limit. That is quite far from denying relevance to the study of history (as Mark Lance notes in his comment on Eric’s post). The point of invoking Egyptology is rather one of priority, as I said earlier (and even earlier).

The Significance of X-Phi...A reductio of the immersion approach to history of philosophy; or on false opposites

"It is because I am interested in the range of ways people in different times and places have conceptualized the irresolvable problem of the fate of the soul. I specialize in 17th-century Christian European approaches to this mystery, but I could just as easily have been an Egyptologist." These are the words of Justin Smith, who is one of the most interesting young historians of philosophy right now. (Full disclosure: together with Mogens Laerke, we are co-editing a volume for Oxford University Press (to appear in 2012) on the topic of methodology in history-of-philosophy scholarship.) I believe Justin's words are a reductio of all contextual approaches to philosophy, which suffer from a tacit positivism that treats all historical facts alike (as I argued in an earlier exchange on these matters). I return to this below. But first some stage-setting.

In a recent and very interesting post at my friends at Early Modern X-Phi [recall my exchanges with them], Justin defends what we might call the immersion approach to history of philosophy: "we should be attempting to do justice to past thinkers by carefully reconstructing their own world of concerns. In doing so, we shall often have to move beyond the boundaries of what we consider philosophy (and even of what they considered philosophy)." This is why Justin advocates turning history of philosophy into something akin to historical anthropology.

Blame the public...or trusting one's gut

Christina Rawls called my attention to this discussion of a computer science professor at NYU frustrated with cheaters. The original post was removed, but here is the professor's follow up reflection. Apparently, the bad evaluations (which may have been a consequence of his efforts to catch cheaters) were cited in justifying the university's low merit raise. To the author's surprise the blogosphere discussion turned into a referendum on overpaid/whiny professors and lazy students. He was also notified by the university that he probably violating federal privacy laws, and he had to take down his post. Thus far my sympathies were entirely with the aggrieved prof (and against the spineless NYU administrators with an eye toward the bottom line).

The Prof was quoted in insidehigher ed: "Apparently the public is not ready for a civil discussion. This was a post to illustrate the futility of fighting cheating by force. I wanted to start a discussion about plagiarism and how we can design our courses and evaluation strategies to make cheating irrelevant. The discussion was derailed into a finger-pointing flame war, that I did not particularly enjoy. My gut feeling right now is that I will never write about my teaching experiences again."

I would have thought that a better conclusion would be to write more smartly (and less narcissisticly) about plagiarism.

Tipping Point in Ireland; Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny confronts the Vatican about recent round of Horrors

Ireland becomes a truly sovereign republic. On can hope that this reverberates all over the globe wherever the state is not doing enough to constrain the evils that necessarily result from the kind of Pride that will always infect religious institutions. Please watch this.

The Cloyne Report of events from 2010 is available HERE.

[ADDENDUM: New reports show that the Vatican has withdrawin its envoy to Ireland in reaction to Kenny's speech.]

[Full disclosure: Both my parents are converted Roman Catholics. Though I am a committed Presbyterian, I love going to Roman Catholic mass and have immense love for the religion (for many reasons peculiar to me, Thomas Merton is perhaps my favorite saint). But all of us who love Roman Catholicism have a special obligation to support Prime Minister Kenny and all of the other great Roman Catholics such as Andrew Sullivan fighting so hard to root this insidious evil out of their own church, and for the sake of church as much as anything else, to make sure that church and state are in proper balance. There is of course an insidious danger here; us non-Roman Catholics must not succumb to the perhaps universal kind of Pride where you focus on other's evil as a way to excuse and ignore your own. So non-Roman Catholics must also fight twice as hard to be less evil in our own lives and also to help in the continuous reformation our own communities.]

Fitch style proper natural deduction formulation of propositional modal logic K

One of the really fun things I've been doing this summer is working with some really talented students (Graham Bounds, Michael Morrissey, Joel Musser, and Caitlin O Malley) on getting a version of modal logic that both respects the insights of proof theorists from Gentzen to Prawitz to Tennent and Restall and Simpson and that is also very easy to learn and use for students who have only taken an intro logic class and learned a Fitch style system (like the one in Barwise and Etchemendy's book). Alex Simpson's dissertation, which presents intuitionist modal logic in a Prawitz style tree system has made this possible.

Anyhow, I thought I'd share some of this for anyone who is interested. It's not rocket science, but I don't think anyone's done this so far (I might be completely wrong; if someone has, I'll publicize it here). Here I'll just present K and in another post show how one can get T, S4, and S5 by progressively adding inference rules that force accessibility to be reflexive, transitive, and symmetric.

First, some sample key proofs, the characteristic K axiom as well as the interderivability of possibility and necessity in K (as one would expect, one direction involves non-intuitionistic resources).

Prison labor practices as "21st century slavery"

Thursday's post focused on force-feeding of hunger strikers protesting extreme isolation in "Secure Housing Units" at Pelican Bay, but we shouldn't forget "ordinary" issues with the American prison-industrial complex.

Here is an excellent Alternet article on prison labor, touching on the race to the bottom in labor costs (US prison labor undercutting even 3rd World labor), the re-birth of chain gangs, the post-1979 history of deregulation of prison labor, and the relation of our prison system to the history of slavery. Louisiana figures prominently in the article ("Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate of any state in the nation, 70 percent of which are African-American men"); of interest to New APPS readers is something the article doesn't mention, the use of inmate labor at my university.

Excerpts from the Alternet article: 

There is one group of American workers so disenfranchised that corporations are able to get away with paying them wages that rival those of third-world sweatshops. These laborers have been legally stripped of their political, economic and social rights and ultimately relegated to second-class citizens. They are banned from unionizing, violently silenced from speaking out and forced to work for little to no wages. This marginalization renders them practically invisible, as they are kept hidden from society with no available recourse to improve their circumstances or change their plight.

They are the 2.3 million American prisoners locked behind bars where we cannot see or hear them. And they are modern-day slaves of the 21st century.... 

It’s no secret that America imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in history. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, the US currently holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners. In 2008, over 2.3 million Americans were in prison or jail, with one of every 48 working-age men behind bars....

Although black people make up just 13 percent of the overall population, they account for 40 percent of US prisoners. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), black males are incarcerated at a rate more than 6.5 times that of white males and 2.5 that of Hispanic males and black females are incarcerated at approximately three times the rate of white females and twice that of Hispanic females....

There has also been a disturbing reemergence of the debtors’ prison, which should serve as an ominous sign of our dangerous reliance on prisons to manage any and all of society’s problems. According to the Wall Street Journal more than a third of all U.S. states allow borrowers who can't or won't pay to be jailed. They found that judges signed off on more than 5,000 such warrants since the start of 2010 in nine counties. It appears that any act that can be criminalized in the era of private prisons and inmate labor will certainly end in jail time, further increasing the ranks of the captive workforce....

Memorial notice for Margaret Whitford

Margaret Whitford was a noted UK feminist philosopher, most well known for her work on Irigaray, but also very active in organizational work; she was a key founder member of the UK Society for Women in Philosophy. A heart-felt memorial notice is here at Feminist Philosophers.

More Elsevier frolics

This is old news, but philosophers may be amused to know that Elsevier once put out a publication that looked just like a real scholarly journal but was not. It contained only articles reprinted and summarized from elsewhere, most of which were favourable to drugs produced by the pharmaceutical giant, Merck. The journal styled itself the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, and was circulated to doctors, who presumably took it for a real journal.

The story broke in The Australian (a newspaper) in 2009 when it was part of a lawsuit against Merck's Australian subsidiary regarding Vioxx. According to The Scientist

In testimony provided at the trial . . .  George Jelinek, an Australian physician and long-time member of the World Association of Medical Editors, reviewed four issues of the journal that were published from 2003-2004. An "average reader" (presumably a doctor) could easily mistake the publication for a "genuine" peer reviewed medical journal, he said in his testimony. . . [he said].

He also stated that four of the 21 articles featured in the first issue he reviewed referred to Fosamax. In the second issue, nine of the 29 articles related to Vioxx, and another 12 to Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions regarding the MSDA drugs. "I can understand why a pharmaceutical company would collect a number of research papers with results favourable to their products and make these available to doctors," Jelinek said at the trial. "This is straightforward marketing."

Jelinek also pointed out several "review" articles that only cited one or two references. He described one of these articles as "simply a summary of an already published article," and noted that they were authored by "B&J Editorial."

Read more here.

Engendering Dialogue website now active; Bodies of Thought audio available

Here is the description for the Engendering Dialogue project: 

Engendering Dialogue: Feminist Thought and Contemporary Debates in Art, Science, and Education

This project is funded by a Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Network Award for the Arts and Humanities. Its aim is to build links between feminist philosophers, and researchers and practitioners in other key areas of philosophical, cultural and educational debate. By targeting debates in education, the visual arts, and cognitive science (a field in which Scottish HEIs have an internationally recognised expertise), the Network will increase awareness of the significance of gender in key areas of intellectual and cultural activity as well as in the development of educational policies and practices.

Much of the work undertaken in recent feminist thought – on areas such as the body and materiality, representation and power relations, or relational identities and difference – is also relevant to key issues in the philosophy of cognitive science (particularly embodied cognition and extended mind) as well as to the concerns of contemporary artistic and educational practice. The Network aims to make space for greater dialogue in each of these areas. Three Network conferences will bring together established thinkers and practitioners with those in earlier stages of their research or practice, while the Network website will publicise and document these events, house papers, offer links to further resources, and provide an opportunity for building further connections between Network participants.

The Network is organised by Dr Rachel Jones (Philosophy, University of Dundee) together with Project Assistant Carrie Giunta (Doctoral Researcher, Philosophy, University of Dundee). For further information or to be added to the email list for the project, please contact us at: [email protected]

The audio files for the "Bodies of Thought" conference are here. A summary of the conference is reproduced below the fold.

weird thought about aesthetic norms from Ch. 2 of Lance and Kukla's "Yo! and Lo!"

Today is I just finished Chapter 2 of Kukla and Lance's excellent Yo! and Lo!, and while I agree with all of the really cool important philosophical stuff (hope to do a post later this week), the early example from Kant's third critique made me think of a couple of weird aesthetic issues. Kukla and Lance spiel Kant's particularism in the following very helpful way:

The point here is not that no generally valid rules can predict with perfect accuracy which objects will be beautiful, though this is likely to be true too, but that even if we had such rules, inferring the beauty of an object on their basis wouldn't count as an aesthetic judgment of taste at all-what it is to make an aesthetic judgment is to aesthetically respond to a concrete, sensuous encounter with an object (43).

Then Lance and Kukla are able to represent the main dilemma Kant raises in the first half of the third critique quite beautifully in this manner:

Although they [judgments of taste] cannot pass on universal reassertion licenses, they make a universal demand upon others to judge for themselves as I judge should they encounter the same object. In other words, my singular judgment of taste has an agent-neutral output, and it makes the normative claim that others are in error if they disagree with me, thereby 'laying claim' to universal agreement. Judgments of taste are not objective truth-claims, because of the agent-relativity of their input, but they have, as Kant puts it, subjective universal validity. Kantian judgments of taste are structurally agent-neutral in the validity they claim, even as they are structurally agent-relative in their entitlement.

So the "there's no disputing matters of taste" part of the dialectic is handled by having the input be agent relative in the strong Yo! sense, and the other part by the fact that we demand that others have the same experiences, which is characteristic of the agent neutrality of the output of Yo! type judgments.

Though Kukla and Lance are just using the discussion to introduce a certain pragmatic category, and not trying to defend any controversial aesthetic claims, I think a couple of interesting aesthetic issues do arise when we look at a stereotypical way that experience and propositional judgment can come apart with aesthetic judgments.

Hume and Humeans on BBC2

The Hume segment begins at about 14:30 and lasts about 5 minutes.

[punkrockmonday #14] Sesame Street - Sure Shot (orig. Beastie Boys)

Force-feeding of prisoners in California hunger strike protest

The article is here, and the following highlights are essential to understanding the story. Readers familiar with Foucault's work will recognize the toxic combination produced by prison discipline and "biopower" in which the management of life steps to the fore as a target of power-knowledge dispositifs.

[Force-feeding] has been prohibited since 1975 by the Declaration of Tokyo of the World Medical Association provided the prisoner is "capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgment....

[The hunger strike by prisoners at California's Pelican Bay institution is in protest of practices whereby] prisoners in Security Housing Units ("the SHUs") spend 23 hours a day confined in isolation in 6-by-10-foot concrete, windowless, soundproof, cells with artificial lighting and one hour in a concrete exercise yard, ruled by judges to be a form of torture...

[Prisoners have signed DNR orders, which is] a legal order written so that people respect wishes to not undergo CPR or advanced cardiac life support if their heart were to stop or they were to stop breathing. This request is usually made by the patient or health care power of attorney and allows medical teams taking care of them to respect their wishes. 

California Department of Corrections secretary, Matthew Cate, has reported  that he will intervene "to save those inmates’ lives."...

[Responding to the use force-feeding to break a hunger strike at Guantanamo] In March 2006, 250 doctors from seven Western countries published their open letter in the medical journal, The Lancet, warning that participation of any doctor in force-feeding is contrary to World Medical Association rules.

See here for "ten ways to support the Pelican Bay prisoner hunger strike."

Brazilian Music on Thursdays: 'Fora da Ordem'

Readers may recall that this column is officially having a summer break, but I did mention that I might feel the sudden urge to post something, and indeed... I am now at the beautiful Chapada dos Veadeiros national park, and for the drive from Brasilia to here I borrowed a cd I used to like a lot but haven't listened to for many years: Caetano Veloso's Circulado (with a ^ at the last 'o', but this text editor doesn't allow for it), released in 1991. It has many great songs ('Boas vindas', 'Itapua', 'Lindeza') and some weird ones too ('Ela ela', 'O cu do mundo'), but generally speaking it is a coherent, conceptual album. Those familiar with Brazilian music probably know that Caetano Veloso has been one of the most influential, perhaps *the* most influential, Brazilian singer of the last decades. I haven't been following his work very closely in the 2000s, but in the 1990s he recorded some great albuns, and Circulado is one of them (as well as its 'sequel', Circulado ao vivo (live); Caetano is very fond of live albuns).

My very favorite song from this album is without a doubt the first one, 'Fora da ordem'. I remembered it being a cool song, but listening to it yesterday made me realize it is truly fantastic: great lyrics, great percussion, and great singing arrangement -- especially at the end, with the main chorus sung in a bunch of different languages (English, Spanish, French, Japanese). Clearly, this couldn't wait until after the summer break!

Stuart Elden review of Foucault lecture course from 1970-71

Stuart Elden, the subject of a New APPS interview a few months ago, and a blogger too, reviews what promises to be a very interesting book. Here's are some excerpts: 

The course ranges widely in its content and theoretical engagements. Foucault’s inaugural lecture, published as ‘The Order of Discourse’, was delivered on the 2nd December 1970, and this course began the following week. Foucault discusses, among many other things, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the Sophists, Homer’s Iliad, Hesiod, justice and injustice, agrarian crises, the role of the army, money, law and economy in ancient Greece, Oedipus and Nietzsche. The reading of Oedipus, which is explicitly opposed to Freud’s sexual reading, is concerned with the history and politics of truth and knowledge. As Defert perceptively notes, the reading of Oedipus sits in relation to the rest of the course rather as the discussion of Velasquez’s Las Meninas does to The Order of Things: it illustrates the key themes being discussed through a reading of a work of art.

...

It is clear from this course that Foucault’s analysis of power develops out of his work on knowledge; is theoretically enriched by his engagement with Nietzsche; and is born out of his reading of the Greeks. While the first two claims were evident to all careful readers of his work; it is in the last of these that the course’s biggest surprises are to be found. As the back cover of the French edition suggests, “we can no longer read him as before”.

Masked Review vs Blind Review

My better half is a Vitreo-retinal surgeon. Apropos a recent discussion: in her field they prefer to speak of "masked review" (rather than "blind review.") I like the term because it reminds us of the very real and recurrent temptations to look -- or peek from -- behind the mask.

On the demise of the UL Lafayette Cognitive Science program

Istvan Berkeley sends this report on the closure of the cognitive science program at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and the firing of two of his colleagues. As always, cutting of state income taxes for the top bracket is what created much of the phony "crisis" that enables attacks on public education. 

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On The Demise of the UL Cognitive Science Ph.D. Program

Forty years ago, someone might have thought it a prudent move, in fiscally challenging times, to get rid of a program in computer science. Back then, computer science was a relatively obscure and esoteric discipline. Today, we would consider any such judgment to have been a major mistake.  However, hindsight is always 20/20.

Recently, the cognitive science Ph.D. Program at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette was terminated. Given that, as a discipline, cognitive science has only been with us since the mid-1970s, the situation may well be analogous to the one with computer science forty years ago.

Cognitive science is dedicated to understanding how information is processed by cognitive agents, be they human, animal and (perhaps controversially) artificial. It is one of the most interdisciplinary subject areas, employing methods and techniques from psychology, computer science, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics and a host of other disciplines. It is too early to tell whether it will prove as transformative as computer science, but it has great potential to inform education, medicine and many aspects of our lives. 

The situation at UL Lafayette is more dire than this simple recounting of the basic facts suggests, though. First, two tenured faculty members have been issued termination notices. Second, the process by which the program was terminated was far from usual.

Ableist language and philosophical associations

Shelley Tremain sends this report about recent activism.

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ABLEIST LANGUAGE AND PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATIONS

Over the last couple of decades, disability theorists in the humanities have produced work that shows how signifiers of disability employed in literature, art, films, pop culture, the news media, and everyday discourse are paradigmatically and stereotypically oppressive to disabled people: the nasty villain with facial scars, the evil pirate with a prosthetic arm, the wicked witch with one eye, the determined cripple who overcomes all odds and is redeemed, and so on.  One focus of these efforts has been the ways that “blindness” is used as a rhetorical and representational device to signify lack of knowledge, as well as epistemic ignorance or negligence and the moral downfall it implies. 

I first wrote about the use of blindness as a metaphor in 1996.  For the last few years, I have tried to get the APA to remove the phrase “blind review” from its publications and website.  The phrase is demeaning to disabled people because it associates blindness with lack of knowledge and implies that blind people cannot be knowers.  Because the phrase is standardly used in philosophy and other academic CFPs, it should become recognized as a cause for great concern.  In short, use of the phrase amounts to the circulation of language that discriminates.  Philosophers should want to avoid inflicting harm in this way.  Now, one might think that the term “blind review” means, literally, that reviewers cannot “see” the name of an author (or authors) of a given paper.  But consider that under the terms of this form of refereeing, it would be not be acceptable for an editor to verbally communicate the name (or names) of an author (or authors) to a referee, while preventing the referee from seeing the name or names.  Equally, it would not be acceptable if a blind philosopher heard the name (names) read out by her screen-reader software, even though she can’t see them. 

A couple of years ago, I emailed both the Executive Director of the APA and the past President of the CPA (Canadian Phil. Assoc.), explaining to them why the use of the phrase “blind review” in their publicity materials, CFPs, etc. was oppressive and demeaning to disabled people, and I posted these emails in the body of a comment on the Feminist Philosophers blog.  In an email to me, the Executive Director of the APA wrote that this matter had never been brought to his attention in the past and that he would have APA staff act on it immediately.  The President of the CPA made a commitment to me that he would raise the issue at the next meeting of the CPA Board of Directors. 

As a result of these correspondences, the phrase “blind review” was removed for a time from the APA National Office’s publicity materials.  However, the term was still used by at least two divisions in their published materials.  The CPA no longer uses the phrase “blind review” and has replaced it with the phrase “anonymous review”. 

pluralism versus balkanization

In the previous post on pluralism by Mark Lance, he focused on three qualities in assessing the level of departmental pluralism:

1. Historical coverage.  There would be people working in all the main areas of "common" history - ancient, medieval, early modern, Kant, etc. - as well as "both" other histories.  An idea department would have people working specifically on figures in early analytic, history of logic, pragmatists, 20th c French philosophers, post-Kantian German idealism, and more.

2. Integration of multiple historical figures, multiple approaches, multiple styles into work in contemporary philosophy.  The idea department would be stocked with people who are eager to engage with Foucault and with Carnap in their work on epistemology. And so on for all the various areas.  If metaphysics is treated as a uniquely "analytic" (or "continental") field, that is non-ideal.  Same for ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, etc.  Ideal is for the production of philosophy to come from a place of pluralism.

3. Social engagement.  A department with five ghettos that collectively cover everything but with no serious engagement across them, is not ideal.  Not close.  Ideal is a department in which the cognitive scientists talk to the Heidegger experts, in which the NYU educated metaphysician talks regularly with the Deleuze expert, in which the epistemologist from Arizona seeks out the New School social epistemologist.

I think this final point is so incredbily important and one we must operationalize a bit more. The "five ghettos" type balkanization is I think what led to 95% of what has been toxic about the so-called analytic/continental split for the past four decades or so. While balkanization doesn't necessarily lead to rancor/animosity/upheaval/resource competition/philosophical blindness/general idiocy/etc., it is a pretty good precondition for all of these problems. And even when it doesn't lead to these things, it is I think still very bad for students in all sorts of ways, producing even more "party line" students from schools where one would think just the opposite would occur.

Since it is so important, and since a balkanized department can be so incredibly toxic to everyone involved, I'm trying to think of ways to further operationalize the pluralization/balkanization distinction. Here's a first stab at some notable goodmaking features (again, just for pluralism, we're not talking about absolute ranking of depatments!):

1. Individual faculty with publications from diverse AOC and AOSs that cross invidious divides,
2. Faculty who co-write with people with different AOC and AOSs, 
3. Lots of faculty with radically different AOS and AOCs who serve together productively on MA and Ph.D committees of students who go on to thrive,
4. A pluralistic speaker series attended by the whole department where a spirit of good will and collective purpose reigns,
5. Well attended reading groups and classes that focus on thinkers who bridge the gaps (McDowell, Braver, phenomenology cog science work, etc.),
6. Well attended reading groups and classes that involve issues as treated by different traditions (e.g. a Davidson, Putnam, and Derrida versus the Language of Thought, Heidegger and Brandom versus representationalism, etc.)

I realize that examples of (5) and (6) could probably be found very easily with respect to ethics and aesthetics.

Actually, by the above metrics my own department (and I include John Protevi, who's appointment is in French, but who is a humongous resource to philosophical community and education at LSU) is very pluralistic with respect to different appropriations of Heidegger, pretty pluralistic with respect to the philosophy of mind, and a little bit (but still enough to be slightly praiseworthy) pluralistic with respect to metaphysics. On the other hand, we are massively balkanized with respect to ethics and aesthetics (we've got a couple of very good people in diverse traditions, but manifest complete failure with respect to the above tests for issues concerning value theory), and scattershot with respect to everything else.This particular kind of balkanization, (which is probably much hard to fight in a smaller non Ph.D program), certainly explains my inability to come up with better examples for (5) and (6) above.

I think Lance's kind of anti-party line pluralism is a very, very good and important thing, and that by further operationalizing them we can come up with a clearer vision of how to better embody these virtues in our own communities. So any additions either to Lance's initial list or further ways to operationalize the virtues would be much appreciated.

Synthese...some unasked questions?

A few days ago, Mohan reported a case of suppression at Elsevier. It reminded me that during the Synthese affair, Brian Leiter published part of the exchange between some of the General Editors of Synthese and Barbara Forrest. Significantly, the editors of Springer (one of them a facebook friend of mine) were part of the exchange, while John Symons (another general editor of Synthese) was not. At the time, I was intrigued by the fact that Symons was left out; of course, the crucial part of the story was that the folk at Springer were part of the conversation. One wonders what role the Springer lawyers played during the Synthese affair?

On Big European Banks and Politicians that Aid Them...

For those that can read Dutch, my editorial (in Friday's NRC Handelsblad and today's NRC Next) on the Euro-Banking crisis may be of interest:

Philosophers and Procrastinators

In a recent NDPR review, Nomy Arpaly, reviews an edited volume on a topic close to my heart: procrastination. But the main sub-text of the review is quickly revealed: "Since the book's subtitle is "Philosophical Essays on Procrastination," a warning might be in order: strictly speaking, some of the essays are not philosophical, and some appear to sit on the borderline between moral psychology and just plain psychology or economics. Some articles even dabble in (scientifically savvy) self-help. The first part of the book consists mostly of borderline articles. It opens with an article by George Ainslie which I would not call philosophical." So, according to Arpaly some chapters are "clearly within the borders of philosophy," while in others "It can become hard to find the philosophy in these science-oriented articles, though again I sympathize with the authors' and editors' desire to make philosophical discussion of the topic more empirically informed."

Now, I am not against boundary-policing of philosophy by philosophers. (Better by US than by THEM!) But Arpaly, who is a well known and gifted philosopher, never quite explains what she means by "philosophy." From her review it is clear she contrasts philosophy with "science" as well as "self-help," although she appears to commend "one advice-laced article -- by Mark White -- appears to be both more philosophical than others." So, being self-help does not prevent a piece from being philosophical (Stoics & Wittgensteiners among our readers may rest assured!) But...sometimes philosophy masquerades as science (think of political economy, rational choice theory, [put your favorite example here]) or can be found lurking within or (more likely) at the cutting edge of science [e.g., Einstein's conceptual innovations--rewarded with a Schillp volume]. (Note I am not making the historical point that philosophy and science once overlapped considerably.) Now I agree with Arpaly that "equations and diagrams" need not be philosophical, but why not?

Here's my moral: if we engage in philosophical boundary guarding, we should make some effort at a positive definition.

Reviewer follies...

Recently I blogged about a reviewer that refused to name the chapter authors of a volume. NDPR (my favorite philosophy publication) has now published a review by Prof. Kristin Shrader-Frechette, which does not name the targets of criticism. For example, she writes: "Several of the essays resort to preaching, instead of astute analysis. Most readers, for instance, are not interested in repeatedly hearing sermons such as that "These virtues -- love, care, and wisdom -- are the grown-up ones. They are the virtues necessary to accept a role of care-taking, of reducing our own demands on the Earth in order to cultivate the conditions for all human communities" (p. 167). Other chapters in the volume belabor the obvious, as when they claim to "have argued that we are, by our carbon emissions, unjustly dominating posterity" (p. 75)." This device is silly (because it is not so difficult to find out author chapters via, say, Amazon), weirdly disrespectful (the targets are treated as unworthy), and does not promote healthy and equal debate among differing viewpoints. Moreover, if folk really make blunders (see below) then a function of reviews is to hold them accountable (as I have argued here).

But things get really strange when the reviewer writes: "Perhaps worst of all, some essays by internationally distinguished ethicists make false, unsubstantiated, vague, or outdated scientific claims, such as the following: (A) "Electricity generated by photovoltaics is 2-5 times more expensive than electricity currently delivered to residential customers" (p. 23). (B) "If solar energy were to supply the American energy grid with a significant fraction of demand, large areas would have to be covered with photovoltaic cells" (p. 23). (C) "Wind-generated electricity . . . is even approaching the cost of electricity generation from a new, coal-fired power plant" (p. 23)." She then proceeds to spend about half of the review refuting A-C as well as several other claims by this chapter's author, whose name she had mentioned earlier in the review!

Most bizarrely: she castigates the quality of much (?) of the volume (based on her criticism of this sole chapter): "As this quick analysis of claims (A)-(F) reveals, the volume is not only uneven in quality and scientific accuracy, but some of the essays are self defeating. If distinguished ethicists (who appear not to know the relevant science) make egregious errors -- such as (A)-(F) -- in reporting on clean alternatives to fossil fuels, they not only mislead readers but also harm the CC-mitigation efforts they obviously support. They hurt their own cause. The problem of the unevenness of the volume might have been solved by including essays by reputable ethicists who work on CC issues....Their essays are almost certain to have been better than many of the selections that appear in this anthology."

High School Philosophy

Via our friends at BRAINS: this is an initiative to bring philosophy to American high schools. Kudos to Mitch Green (UVA).

Genuinely pluralist - along the A/C dimension - departments

I'm going to follow up on my last post by asking people to nominate departments that they believe to be genuinely pluralist in the sense that I roughly defined in my previous post.  There are some ground rules for this one that will be enforced with draconian precision.

1. Only positive nominations.  If we get a reasonable response here, I may open the list of nominated up for discussion where you will be able to say that the department isn't really pluralist.

2. Only nominations that actually explain and try to justify the claim that the department in question is "reasonably pluralist".  I'm interested in informed and supported claims.  So if you simply want to say "x is obviously pluralist" don't bother.  I don't require a detailed 20 page analysis, but some discussion of the various criteria I lay out below is needed.  Ideally, please note strengths and weaknesses.

3. No discussion of other dimensions of pluralism.  Yes, I know they are important.  I'm eager to help on them.  If anyone wants to start similar discussions along other dimensions I'll be glad to help.  And yes, I acknowledge that from many reasonable perspectives, this is a trivial matter to be worrying about.  No one is required to engage on this issue.  But this is not a meta-thread on whether this is a good thread.  (If you have a positive and serious suggestion for tweaking the methodology, feel free and I will use my discretion in posting that.  But ideally, just note that you are defending a department on slightly different grounds in your defense.) 

4. No comments about Brian Leiter, the PGR, the PR, SPEP, etc.  I'm interested here in positive suggestions of departments that are doing it well, not denunciations.

Suppression at Elsevier?

I was chatting with my friend, Jim Brown, the distinguished philosopher of science, about the possible involvement of the publishers in the Synthese affair. He told me the following story about an unpleasant encounter with Elsevier:

I can well believe that the publishers played a major role and perhaps bullied editors who aren't used to dealing with such issues.

I had a run in with Elsevier a few years ago.  A paper of mine was accepted for a special issue of Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, it was copyedited, etc and ready to go.  Suddenly the publisher intervened and suspended the issue.  Their lawyer had demanded several changes in my article, saying it was libellous.  (It was about the pharmaceutical industry and the corruption of research.)  After much back and forth, eventually I agreed to make the changes provided I could add a paragraph saying I had done so.  Surprisingly, they initially agreed, then later then said they wanted several more changes.  This was after delaying the special issue for more than a year.  Some of the changes they wanted were ridiculous, for instance, they wouldn't let me quote from an article already published in the British Medical Journal.  Eventually I withdrew the article rather that submit to the censorship.  I'm still annoyed.

I feel certain that even those people who thought that the Synthese affair was driven by an North American political agenda will find it hard to condone Elsevier's behaviour above. I think we can say that there is now a trickle of stories of misconduct by commercially published journals.

Is it not time that we gave some thought to this matter as a community?

On the African philosophy/Western philosophy division

Dan Levine posted the following comment on the discussion of queering the analytic/continental distinction.  I thought it was important enough to have it's own thread.  In the first comment I explain a bit of my thinking, but I have very little of substance to add.

Dan Levine wrote:

I hope this isn't a thread-jack, but your post has put me in mind of worries I have about 'sociological' divides beyond the analytic/synthetic one. So, take African philosophy (I suspect similar things apply to things like Native American philosophy, etc. but I'm not familiar with them). As I know Mark knows, I'm off to an African uni for a semester, and I'm bringing with me a stack of books requested for their department - and it turns out what they requested was 95% African philosophy, by which I mean not "philosophy that happens to be written by Africans or African-Americans," but "ditto, plus self-consciously on 'African' themes and with little discussion of European philosophical traditions." In addition, I've been asked by them in my time of contact for advice on Ph.D. programs in the US, which has often been awkward, since they've mostly wanted advice for students who want to study African philosophy (in the same sense), which is not well-represented at most departments I know of.

All of this leads to a similar sort of ghettoization of African philosophy that you talk about for continental (or "continental"). There are a few solid philosophers who just happen to be African (like Appiah) and a few who write mostly on issues that might be "African philosophy" in this sense but are in substantial contact with other traditions (like West), but lots and lots of folks who are writing almost entirely within a proscribed sphere with limited engagement with the broader philosophical community.

On the one hand, I think most of us are going to quickly agree that this is a problematic situation, for everyone involved. On the other, I can see why there would be some impulse from the African philosophy side to maintain it - I was at a conference, in Ghana, with about 90% African attendees, where one session looked like it might come to blows (seriously, like, shouting and making threatening body language) over the speaker's suggestion that Senghor and Nkrumah ought to be read as "real" political philosophers alongside Locke and Rousseau. So I could see, e.g., if I was really into Senghor, mostly wanting to hang out with the other folks into Senghor and not bothering to read much Rawls, let alone try to go talk to the Rawlsians about differences/similarities.

Given my "other hand" concern, I'm not sure what the best approach is for trying to bridge the gap. It seems reasonable to want to build up a sort of in-group of folks who share your concerns and respect for a non-mainstream set of philosophers, to improve your footing when you tilt with folks in the wider world. But it also seems really hard to avoid a sort of entrenchment/ghettoization or relegation of your work to doing a sort of history of philosophy status.

(Granted, I think this is similar but different from the state of continental philosophy in the US/Europe - there's enough weight, both in terms of writing readily available and folks working on it, to make it harder to justify someone wanting to circle the wagons around continental philosophy).