New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

It's a structure, not a crisis

Comments on this thread, which began as a discussion of accusations of tokenism against women graduate students, veered off into discussions of (the perception) of effects of AA on "the job market."

A couple of comments caught my eye. One (#34) was that "Your fellow graduate students are not your competition, they are your colleagues.... Unlike your faculty advisers, your fellow students will know what it's like to be a graduate student at this school at this time, facing this job market. And they will (or should!) also be an important part of your professional network as you do enter into the job market." Another (#37) was that "people born in the 80's already have a (fairly understandable) generational grudge against the baby boomers."

I want to make two points here, about when the post-PhD TT "job market" changed, and who competes against whom.

Sometimes Junior Men are a Part of the Problem, alas.

Our friends at Feminist Philosophers have a depressing post about the contribution of junior men in creating an inhospitable climate to junior women in the profession. I have to admit that I often assume -- or at least hope -- that our discipline's general 'climate' issues are, in part, generational.  But, of course, some younger scholars are clearly responding to signals from senior men about what's tolerated in the discipline, so the generational mores can be easily passed on to future cohorts without conterveiling efforts.

But the culture among PhD students is, in part, also sometimes beyond the grip of supervisors and faculty.  In particular, one should not be blind to the fact that with uncertain job-prospects, other PhD students are also in some respects one's competition for scarce jobs. So, it might appear rational to try to reduce competition for these jobs by discouraging talented peers (even if immoral). Now, one way to discourage this is to make team-spirit among philosophers more rewarding (and to ensure  that non-in-group-males are welcomed on the team).

I welcome other suggestions on how to think about this issue.

Feminist Philosophy Archive Project (FPAP)

The Feminist Philosophy Archive Project project began when the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST) and the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) wanted a way to handle SWIP archives, dating to 1971. While the SWIP archive is the immediate goal, the ultimate goal is an inclusive and international Feminist Philosophy Archive (FPA). 

The coordinators of FPAP are Samantha Noll of Michigan State (email), and Christina Rawls of Duquesne (email); the advisors include Alison Jaggar, Joan Callahan, Ann Garry, and Sandra Harding. A website is in progress but a listserv is already in operation. To join it, please send an email to: [email protected] and in the body of the email include the message Subscribe FPAP .

Is Philosophy turning the corner on gender issues?

After all of this, it may come as a surprise when I say that I am actually very hopeful about the future of gender issues in philosophy. I don’t think we should be at all discouraged by the fact that there are currently serious gender problems in philosophy.  It’s what we should expect, since we (as a profession) have only very recently begun to pay serious and sustained attention to these issues.--Jennifer M. Saul writing in Salon.

Here's the whole piece.

On why even 'mild' harassment is bad

There is much to rejoice in how the ‘McGinn affair’ (apologies for the tabloid-like terminology!) unfolded; in particular, this may well be the first time that a ‘big shot’ philosopher was in fact reprimanded for inadequate behavior of this nature towards a graduate student. (And in my opinion, the central administration as well as the department of philosophy at the University of Miami deserve to be praised for taking the complaint seriously and carrying through with the investigation – something that is by no means a given.) But we’ve also heard some people (as it so happens, mostly senior, male academics) voicing the opinion that the reprimand was disproportionate to what McGinn had actually done. After all, he had ‘only’ sent suggestive emails to the student; he hadn’t even attacked her physically or anything like that. In my opinion, these people severely underestimate the impact that even ‘mild’ forms of harassment can have on their victims, so in this post I hope to be able to provide at least a glimpse of ‘what it’s like’ to be at the receiver end of a harassment episode.

I can’t speak much from personal experience, as luckily I’ve never had to experience the kind of harassment in professional circles that creates a situation of discomfort (or worse). (I have though once been sexually harassed during an intercontinental flight, at age 18, and I remember very well how difficult it is even to muster the courage to complain to whoever is in charge or to the harasser himself.) But I’ve heard enough experiences from others to start having an idea of the devastating effects it can have.

Lockwood on Title IX and retaliation

With thanks to Heidi Howkins Lockwood (see here also) for the clear and thorough analysis and to Brian Leiter for the framing and the generous hosting. 

UPDATE: 5 Aug, 1:05 pm CDT: Additional remarks by Lockwood here at Feminist Philosophers. 

Comment on gender and race imbalance in authorial choices for Oxford Handbooks

At the end of a laudatory* review of The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology the reviewer makes the following point about gender and race imbalance** in authorial choices for Oxford Handbooks:

Second, OHCP contains twenty-eight essays, but only three of them are authored by women. Unfortunately, the low percentage of women contributors (or co-contributors) isn't a peculiarity of this particular volume. After glancing at the table of contents of forty-five Oxford Handbooks in philosophy, I found that fewer than 20% of contributions are either authored or co-authored by women.

Response from Miami

The University of Miami administration has responded (here) to the letter from concerned philosophers (here).

On Patterns of Exclusion when we focus on "Significant Figures"

In his excellent (because informative, generous, yet critical) review, Nick Wiltsher writes:

Thus, though avowedly not a historian's history, this is still a history of sorts: an unabashed example of great-man historiography, and I emphasise the gendered term here. The 16 selected philosophers are all men, and the four-page index of names includes about a dozen women. It might be that all the significant thinkers in European aesthetics in the last 200 years were men. More likely, it might be that conceptualising a history of anything in terms of 'significant figures' leads us too easily into consideration of canonical males. This may seem a dreary complaint, but it is only dreary because it keeps being made, and it keeps being made because it is important. I am not at all accusing Wicks of sexism or misogyny; rather, the invitation is to consider the possibly deleterious effects of apparently innocent approaches, and the alternative effects a different approach might have yielded...Wicks is quite right to choose the philosophers who fit his thematic focus [i.e., "the socio-political uses to which art and aesthetic theory may be put"--ES], and the book is all the better for having such a focus. The problem comes where Wicks selects thinkers who do not obviously have a great deal to say on the theme, and tries to force them to say something about it....It is almost as if Wicks felt compelled to include chapters on these significant philosophers, and then further compelled to fit them to the theme. Again, he writes well about their ideas, but those ideas seem out of place. Conversely, some of the philosophers Wicks includes bear obvious relevance to his theme, but less obvious relevance to the subject of aesthetics."

Further signatories to the Letter from Concerned Philosophers

At Feminist Philosophers.

How to add your signature to the Letter from Concerned Philosophers

UPDATE: 19 July 10:15 am: This message is from the organizers of the letter, not from me; I am only posting it:

Signatories to the Letter of Concern have heard from colleagues who wish to add their signatures in support. This is splendid, and sharing support is important; we are limited by the availability of those with the time to compile supporting signatures, but through Sunday, July 21, we will be checking [email protected] for those of you who wish to send in signatures.

We encourage those with job security and tenure to sign; because of the risks (including retaliation), we'd ask junior people not to sign in support. The letter should be signed by, and was initiated by, senior members of the philosophy profession because, given our privileges, it is one of our chief responsibilities to provide support for the more vulnerable members of our profession.

Leiter on the Letter from Concerned Philosophers

Read Brian Leiter's insightful commentary on the McGinn case and the Letter from Concerned Philosophers (that I co-signed).

Sympathy and the Likeness Principle (with a nod to the Bentley-Newton correspondence)

Inspired by Plato onwards, theories of cosmic, physical, and moral sympathy (συμπάθεια--'fellow feeling') were developed in a variety of contexts (e.g., Galenic medicine, Stoic metaphysics, magnetism, moral psychology, magic, etc.).  For all its variety, in most thinkers and traditions the very possibility of sympathy presupposes that sympathy takes place among things that are in one sense or another alike (sometimes within a single being/unity/organism) to be contrasted with the antipathy (ἀντιπάθεια) of un-alikes. (Here I  just flag the non-trivial moral issues this raises for ethical theories that rely on sympathy/empathy.) Let's call this condition of the possibility of sympathy, "The Likeness Principle" (or TLP). I learned the significance of the TLP in Plotinian and Stoic thought from Eyjólfur  Emilsson, René Brouwer.

Recently, Stewart Duncan has been blogging about sympathy in various contexts (e.g., Margaret Cavendish) including a nice treatment of an important response by Henry More to Marin Mersenne. The context is a debate over what counts as a proper explanation of sympathetic resonance of vibrating strings. [Among historians of science, the best known 17th century discussions (unmentioned by Duncan) occurs in Galileo's treatment of resonating pendula at the end of the first day of the The Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (Galileo avoids using 'sympathy') or  Gilbert's work on the magnet and action at a distance (recall my post).]

A Philosoph-her blog starts with an attempt at a reductio of Paul's Expectant Mary

A blog, Political Philosoph-her, starts with a purported reductio of LA Paul's now famous, "What Mary can’t expect when she’s expecting." [Recall: Catrina Dutilh Novaes, Helen De Cruz, I.]

The problem with this approach is that it will make many if not most of our everyday decisions irrational, since something similar could be said of each experience that we have.  In some sense, each experience that we have is both transformative and unique.  Each experience that we have changes us in some way and is unlike any other experience we have had before it.  While I may have seen red before, I have not seen it on this day, in this particular light, and so on.  While I may have eaten chocolate ice cream before, I have not done it on this day, in this weather, in this mood, and so on.  So, my experience of seeing red or eating chocolate ice cream, or whatever is in a sense unique and transformative.  In turn, it would follow, I cannot project my past experiences of seeing red or eating chocolate to know what it will be like, respectively, to see red or to eat chocolate ice cream on this day, at this time, and in this way.  So, if we take this rebuttal seriously, it would work to rule out rational decision-making in most cases.  It will not only be irrational to choose to have a child but also irrational to choose to see red, to eat chocolate ice cream, to drive your car, to brush your teeth, and so on.  This sort of rebuttal pushes too far, since we do not think that our everyday decisions are irrational.--Meena Krishnamurthy.

Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?

That's the title of this collection of essays forthcoming from OUP in October 2013. Editors: Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins. Blurbed by Sally Haslanger: 

This is a fantastic collection on the gender imbalance in Anglophone philosophy. The essays represent a variety of approaches to the problem of women's underrepresentation. It is especially important that the book not only offers a way for philosophers to learn about psychological and sociological results that have a bearing on how we organize ourselves, but also a way for us to become more reflective about distinctively philosophical aspects of our practice.

TOC below the fold.

Teaching advice from Teacher of the Year

Becko Copenhaver has won teacher of the year at Lewis & Clark College. [HT Dan Kaufman.]  In an interview she comments:

"I realized I was a lousy teacher because I hadn’t approached teaching the same way I approach everything else. I hadn’t approached it as something I could learn from others and get better at... Nick Smith taught me to be confident but open, and to use my personality in the classroom rather than sublimate."--B. Copenhaver [The whole interview is worth reading.]

Georgia State and its 20% proposal

Tim O'Keefe of Georgia State leaves a comment on this post on the GSU project to have 20% of the texts on Intro syllabi in coursed taught by GTAs be authored by women.  O'Keefe writes:

I've ... compiled a list of all of the texts our grad student instructors used in the past year, at http://www2.gsu.edu/~phltso/women-intro-texts.html. At the bottom of the list are links to some additional resources.

So, how did Analysis stack up against Phil Review / JPhi / Mind (1995-8)?

In comments, David Chalmers generously acknowledged that his famous (co-authored) paper ""The Extended Mind" was rejected by J Phil, Phil Review, and Mind before it was finally accepted by Analysis (three years later)." TEM was published in 1998.  So, I decided to compare the editorial performance of the Chalmers top-3 with Analysis between 1995-8 as measured by citation impact fifteen years later. (I used Harzing's Publish and Perish--this includes google.scholar citations, so it captures a lot of citations.)

McGinn: “A superior person is not necessarily arrogant, but just superior.”

Our friends at Feministphilosophers have posted the fire-wall protected Chronicle's follow-up story on Colin McGinn. A choice quote:

Mr. McGinn, who calls himself both a “ladies’ man” and “the most enlightened person in the world,” is not one to hide his belief that modesty is a form of dishonesty. “People sometimes perceive superiority as arrogance,” he says. “A superior person is not necessarily arrogant, but just superior.”

Placement Data and Trends, 2011-2013

By clicking the link posted below you can download an Excel spreadsheet with placement data from the last two years, 2011-2012 and 2012-2013, together with a “how-to” guide for future years of data gathering and analysis. The data is sourced from ProPhilosophy, the link for which you can find here. 

Here are some of the findings:

The Gendered Citation Campaign (GCC2)

For more information, here.

I Have A Theory

My theory, which is mine, is that Steven Pinker's research assistant is playing a joke on him here by intentionally misspelling the name of the addressee and by slipping in the word "activists." Well played, unknown RA, well played.

It's not (just) implicit bias, but real bias(es)!

I understand why the campaigners at the GCC have embraced implicit bias; the existence of implicit bias is a scientifically robust empirical result. It also allows one to avoid moral finger-pointing about past behavior; the 'culprits' of implicit bias can reasonably claim not to have intended the patterns of exclusion that are exhibited. It is, thus, no surprise that the patterns of exclusion in the Healy 500, are being interpreted by our friends at Feministphilosophers as further evidence  for implicit bias and lazy citation habits in the profession. But we should not be blind to the fact that the Healy data (here and here) on citation and co-citation practices in the H4 ("Nous, the Journal of Philosophy, the Philosophical Review, and Mind), also reveal quite a few intentional patterns of exclusion: no Judith Butler, no Habermas, no Foucault, no Deleuze, no Derrida, etc. Okay, that is to be expected; but also, no Martha Nussbaum, Charles Taylor, G.A. Cohen, no Anthony Appiah, or Alisdair MacIntyre--all of whom wrote influential, widely read, widely cited books in the period under discussion. Given that H4 are supposed to be general interest journals, it is worth noting how poorly represented various areas of philosophy -- aesthetics, history, applied ethics, feminism, critical race  theory, etc. -- are in the citation patterns of H4. This should not elicit surprise. Not all of the excluded areas are, of course, equally welcoming to women and other minorities, so I am not suggesting that the explicit patterns of exclusion map onto the exclusion of women, but some might.

One of the most important nuggets in the Healy data is that philosophy papers cite on average fifteen items. This reveals that in the DNA of our collective research practice we just learn to ignore what others say, except if they are high status boys. Perhaps this pattern is more extreme in the H4 because these really are incrowd/in-house journals and until recently they were edited in that fashion, too. Now claims like these are often hard to prove, and initially I thought about writing a satirical post about the B-list of men (no, not Rawls and Lewis) that are well entrenched in the Healy 500, yet no Ruth Barcan Marcus. But rather than making enemies out of everybody in the discipline, the point may be made more suitably (and more paradoxically) by the the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford University, John Hawthorne.

Where Are the Women in Philosophy of Mind Anthologies?

[A scholar submitted the following data and accompanying analysis; I have made minor edits only.--ES]

• Lycan and Prinz, Mind and Cognition: An Anthology (3rd ed., 2008) has three texts by women (one of them co-written with a man) among 56 chapters.
• Heil, Philosophy of Mind: A Guide and Anthology (2004) has five texts by women among 50 chapters.
• Chalmers, Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (2002) has two texts by women among 63 chapters.
• Morton, A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind: Readings with Commentary (2nd ed., 2010) has three texts by women among 40 chapters.
• O'Connor and Robb, Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Readings (2003) has zero texts by women among 28 chapters.
• Bermudez, Philosophy of Psychology: Contemporary Readings (2006) has three texts by women (two of them co-written with men) among 30 chapters.
• Beakley and Ludlow, The Philosophy of Mind: Classical Problems/Contemporary Issues (2nd ed., 2006) has two texts by women (one co-written) among 83 chapters.
• Noe and Thompson, Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception (2002) has one text by a woman among 21 chapters.

Possibly I am missing one or two relevant anthologies, but I am confident that these are representative. Note also that I've not included a few older volumes -- including Block, Flanagan, and Guzeldere's The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (1997), Goldman's Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science (1993), and Block's Readings in Philosophy of Psychology (2 vols., 1980-81) -- but the breakdown in these is no different from the ones listed above. Finally, note that things do seem to be much better in the various Oxford handbooks, but these consist of contributed articles instead of anthologized texts.

The Healy Four in perspective

There is a lot more to be said about patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the Healy Four (H4), but Healy's citation data also suggest that the four most prestigious journals in the discipline may be lagging indicators. I have already hinted at this by calling attention to the reputation for slowness that at least three of the journals had during the period covered by Healy.  Here's some further evidence that H4 is a lagging indicator.

Jonathan Schaffer, who is extremely widely cited, does not crack the Healy 500. Now, what makes Schaffer interesting is that he does publish in the H4 in 'core' areas of philosophy; his papers get picked up and from 2008 (or so onward) cited a lot. (He returned Stateside in 2011.)  I would expect that in the next few years, Schaffer easily cracks a revised Healy 500. Now n=1 (although I have also looked at some other 'high citation, low Healy 500 impact, publishes in H4' e.g., Jonathan Hawthorne, our very own Mohan, etc.). Here's a defeasible moral: while H4 may publish cutting edge research, the citations in h4 reflect this with considerable lag.

More citation data from Healy

[UPDATE JUNE 20: there has been some cleaning up of the data, so the exact numbers reported below have changed a bit, but the overall pattern has not.--ES]

On the (ahum) dominance of David Lewis, and the relative lack of citations of women, here.

The Healy 500 data are raw-citations (not co-citations) in the Healy Four.

First, I stand corrected; the data suggest that Abe Stone was right because analytical philosophy has generated and recognized (via citations) a systematic philosopher: David Lewis.

Second, eighteen out of five hundred items in the Healy-500 are by women (3.6%) [UPDATED to REFLECT ADJUSTMENTS in HEALY's DATA.]

If you want to get published in the Healy Four, cite A few high status men...

Take a discipline racked by deep insecurity about its worth compared to science, which finds its most pleasing self-image in imagining itself continuous with the natural sciences and aspires to their ‘hardness’, throw in a largely male population, add a desperate job market, a culture of uncritical hero worship of its luminaries, mix in a sphere of ostensible academic interaction used instead for preening and strutting and the academic equivalent of mating, and you have, I think, the makings of a domain, which will continue to remain hostile to women.--Samir Chopra

In light of Brit's experience, one striking feature (as Karen pointed out at once) of the Healy co-citation networks is the near absence of women co-citations in "high prestige" journals (see my first attempt at analysis). How bad are things? In Healy's diagram I couldn't find Marcus, Thomson, Kamm, Wilson (neither Margaret nor Catherine), Wolff, Diamond, Anderson, Gilbert, just to name a few. 

Pants on fire. Being turned down is far too easy

“I invited every woman working in the field. They all turned me down.”

This is the typical “excuse” editors and organizers of all- or almost-all-male conferences and volumes present in lieu of a defense. On previous occasions some of us have argued that this is a bad excuse. That the excuse itself could be a lie never occurred to me.

How few women authors are there in intro philosophy courses?

Following up on Catarina's post on Tania Lombrozo's article, one of the reasons offered for why women leave philosophy early on might be the lack of women philosophers in introductory syllabi. So how few women are there? Meghan Masto, assistant professor at Lafayette College, conducted a survey and gave me the opportunity to share her results on NewApps: 

We gathered syllabi from introductory level philosophy courses taught  at the top 40 small liberal arts schools in the country (as ranked by  U.S. World News). The results of this research confirmed our  suspicions. So far we have collected 57 introductory level philosophy syllabi from 22 of the schools contacted. By our count there are a  total of 739 philosophers included on the syllabi and only 60 of these are female. So a mere eight percent of reading covered in introductory level philosophy courses are written by women. Thirty one of the 57 courses include no female authors at all (courses included an average of thirteen philosophers on their syllabi). Further, if we were to exclude the syllabi from the ethics courses and include the syllabi only from the 43 non-ethics courses, the percentage of female  philosophers discussed is even lower. By our count, these non-ethics syllabi include 602 philosophers on the reading lists, with only 36 of these being female—so a mere 6 percent of philosophers discussed in non-ethics courses are female. Twenty-four of the 46 non-ethics courses included no female authors at all.

Why do women leave philosophy, and so early on?

This post by Tania Lombrozo on the causes of the gender imbalance in philosophy has been widely shared and reshared on Facebook and other venues, but (at Tony Chemero's suggestion) I figured it might still be worth posting a link to it here, for those who may have missed it.

Until recently, most of these hypotheses lacked empirical grounding. Collecting relevant data is no easy task, and social scientists weren't exactly lining up for the task. So part of the excitement last Friday — as we waited for a presentation titled "Women and Philosophy: Why is it 'Goodbye' at 'Hello'?" — was the promise of data. The speakers were Toni Adleberg and Morgan Thompson, two master's degree students at Georgia State University, presenting preliminary findings from work with Professor Eddy Nahmias.

One of the conclusions is that "the biggest drop in the proportion of women in the philosophy pipeline seems to be from enrollment in an introductory philosophy class to becoming a philosophy major." If that's the case, one obvious suggestion presents itself: increase the presence of women philosophers in introductory syllabi.

With the support of the Georgia State Department of Philosophy, for example, the researchers will test out one strategy for attracting more women to the major: this fall, graduate student instructors will use course syllabi with 20 percent or more female authors, at least doubling the current proportions.

This is of course an idea that has been put forward many times before, but it will be interesting to see if it will have the desired effect of keeping women on board. We hope it will!

UPDATE: A few months ago Helen had a post up precisely on the topic of suggestions of literature by women for intro classes, including the link for a Google spreadsheet where people could add items.