More on Public Philosophy December 16, 2011

Here.

A growing subset of the discipline is seeking to take a more public stance. These publicly inclined philosophers see a need for government to factor moral and ethical priorities into policy considerations, which they say are too often dominated by economists with their emphasis on quantification.

And, in an age of increasing ideological rigidity, these philosophers argue that their training gives them a unique ability to identify the unexamined assumptions and value systems that can harden political factions. Such a skill is valuable, they say, because problems like climate change are growing more complex at the same time that the public’s ability to think through the implications of possible solutions is diminishing.

“Philosophy could do some good, even a hell of a lot of good,” says John Lachs, a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University, who has spent years exhorting those in his discipline to become more publicly engaged.

And here’s Martha Nussbaum on the lack of interest in philosophers’ input in the US:

Ms. Nussbaum says governments outside the United States have invited her to travel widely to share her ideas on those and other issues. But she and other philosophers have not had the same experience in America, perhaps because their politics are too far to the left, they say.

“If we are not in Washington, that is because a conscious decision has been made not to invite us there,” say Ms. Nussbaum, noting that President Obama has not reached out to her even though he has known her for years. “The problem is with anti-intellectualism and the general nature of media and politics in the U.S., not with philosophers.”

Do you know where your mother is? On advising about sexual health December 15, 2011

First off, the recommendations for pap smear exams have changed. After 65, if you’ve had at least 3 normal exams in ten years, you can stop getting an annual exam. What you should do after that is not clear to me, but an MD behind a major report says she tells her patients that they should have one every five years. (The MD is Dr. Sarah Feldman, a gynecologic oncologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and author of a recent editorial summarizing the expert consensus in The New England Journal of Medicine.)

One thing one notices in public health discussions is that daughters can easily become quite active in health decisions for older women. So it is important to realize that your mother may not be quite like what you think she is, as this anecdote from the same doctor illustrates:

Dr. Feldman was surprised to see an abnormal Pap result in an 80-year-old patient who had been a devoted caregiver for her husband of 55 years, who had dementia. “It seemed like an odd finding,” Dr. Feldman said, until she learned her patient was having an affair with a young man she had met at Starbucks.

“First come to grips with your own mediocrity” December 15, 2011

If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. The first rule is this–You are not extraordinary. It’s all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it’s much more interesting to assume that you wouldn’t and then ask “Why?”

An excellent article from Ta-Nehisi Coates. One that reminds me of one of my first teaching experience, teaching political philosophy at an Ivy League school. To a man (and they were all men), my 20 students insisted that Nozick was right about everything. I asked what they would do if born into Nozick’s perfect society, to a family with no food on the table in a society with no state schools, etc etc. “I could do it” was the reply. I followed up, “Ok, you also have no arms and no legs and there is no health care for you.” No change: “I could do it”.

Query: Pregnant with an on-campus interview December 15, 2011

A reader writes:

I am currently on the job market and am also pregnant with my first child. I am due in the late spring and the timing will be good in terms of starting a new position in August/September–”maternity leave” time will occur over the summer when I will not have teaching duties at my current position.

In terms of interviews, I will be well into and even possibly toward the end of my second trimester by the time flyout season comes along (assuming I have any flyouts!). Given my body shape/size, I suspect I might not appear identifiably pregnant until the bulk of flyouts are over. So my first instinct is to keep the fact that I am pregnant under wraps from search committee members, faculty, deans, etc. while on flyouts to avoid any conscious or unconscious bias.

However, I have to say I was not expecting pregnancy to be so taxing physically. The morning sickness is improving somewhat, but the second-trimester burst of energy I keep hearing about has definitely not happened for me (yet?). Just normal aspects of living (and I am lucky enough to not be teaching currently!) lately have me exhausted by 5 or 6pm.

I also in the last few weeks have started having what my partner calls “the pregnant lady walk.” I don’t know what it looks like from the outside, but internally I know I am walking strangely due to pains in my pelvis which runs down my inner thighs while walking or moving in any way. The pains (which my OB says are normal round ligament pain) get worse as the day goes on, the more walking and moving I do. I don’t mean to complain–they are completely bearable though annoying pains. But I imagine as the pregnancy progresses they will get worse. And in my experience, flyouts are very exhausting–10-12 hour days of interviewing, campus touring, standing while teaching a class, standing while presenting a paper, walking from building to building for meetings, etc. So I imagine myself on a flyout, limping from interview to interview after being dragged about campus on a walking tour and standing during a paper instead of sitting down for fear that sitting down (without explanation of being almost in the 3rd trimester of pregnancy) would create a bad impression. Thus I wonder if I am going to feel like crap on a flyout, if it is best to let the search committee no why I am sitting down or that I would prefer not to take a long tour of the campus and why. (So that I don’t appear uninterested or unprofessional.)

Any advice on what to do in such a situation? Is it better to tell my hosts what the situation is or keep mum and suck it up regarding the tiredness/uncomfortableness?

I haven’t been in the reader’s position, but I have been on a search committee in a similar situation, and like to think that a reasonably good search committee can accommodate the needs of others without  requiring detailed personal disclosure as to the reasons for accommodation.  My search committee chair emailed everyone we interviewed in advance, inviting their information as to accommodations we might provide with respect to our food, lodging, or schedule. (We didn’t ask *why* they might need, e.g., meatless food or a working elevator, we just asked if there were any accommodations they preferred to prearrange.)  One of the short-listed then showed up visibly pregnant, so it wasn’t a mystery why she noted a need for alternatives to caffeine and alcohol at meals, and inquired after the possibility of breaks at two-hour intervals and ready access to a restroom.  She neither hid, nor very much discussed, her reasons for requesting some accommodations, but then, nor did the man wearing the yarmulke or the woman with a cast on her leg.

A call for teaching more Islamic philosophy December 14, 2011

Over at New APPS.

New study: gender math gap is cultural, not biological December 14, 2011

we show here that greater male variability and gender gap in mathematics performance, when present, are both largely arti- facts of a complex variety of sociocultural factors rather than intrinsic differences, co-educational schooling, or specific religious following per se. Importantly, we document that mathematics per- formance for both boys and girls exhibits a strong positive correlation with some measures of gender equity, especially participation rates and salaries of women in the paid labor force relative to m

For more, go here. (Thanks, J!)

The Adjunct Manifesto December 14, 2011

A manifesto by adjunct professors. (For the non-US- based, adjuncts are hired by the course/module. Their positions are poorly paid, and totally lacking in job security and often in benefits such as health insurance.)

We are the non-tenure track faculty who now constitute two-thirds of the instructional workforce at universities and colleges across the nation. We are frequently invisible to administrators, yet we are the first professors and instructors that undergraduate students meet on their journey to becoming engaged learners. We are the majority. We have been silent too long, and it is time for us to reclaim our voices and outline our demands.

Via NewAPPS.

Grants to aid conference accessibility December 14, 2011

Thanks to the great work of Helen Beebee, more and more UK grant-giving philosophical organisations are offering additional funds to help with accessibility of conferences. Two recent examples I noticed are the Society for Applied Philosophy and Analysis. If you know of others, please note them in comments and I’ll add them as updates. And if you have any influence over a grant-giving body, do urge them to follow suit! My experience with the Analysis Committee was that this was immediately adopted without debate.

Open call: Women with Tenure after Bearing Children December 13, 2011

In a comment on a previous post, a reader expressed relief at my second-hand anecdata that I know women who have had babies pre-tenure and even in grad school, yet still got tenure.  It would help if actual women could confirm this: Is it possible to get tenure after children?  I know the answer is yes!  However, the relief of the reader is currently just based on my gesturing toward other women.  The lived experience of those of you who have done it would make much more of a difference.

CFP: Consciousness at the Margins December 13, 2011

Boston University is hosting its fourth annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference on Consciousness (IGCC) on April 13th and 14th 2012. This year’s theme is Consciousness at the Margins. We are particularly interested in papers on issues in implicit bias and subconscious emotions. Psychologist Mahzarin R. Banaji and philosopher Owen Flanagan will be this year’s keynote speakers. The purpose of IGCC is to promote interdisciplinary dialogue in the academic study of consciousness among interested graduate students working in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and other related disciplines. We invite papers between 2000 and 3000 words (suitable for a 30-minute talk).

Multi-authored submissions spanning two or more fields are particularly welcome. Recent graduates and junior-level researchers are encouraged to submit. Submit anonymized papers to consciousgrads@gmail.com by February 15th, 2012. Please see http://www.bu.edu/conscious for details.

Videos of men talking about philosophy December 13, 2011

The NY Times has a series of video interviews here title “Philosophers Speak”. So far, the only philosophers speaking are men.

 

How to make philosophy matter December 13, 2011

A vision is laid out here.

We are saddled with early-20th-century modes of philosophy. In the 20th century, philosophy abandoned its Socratic heritage in favor of a disciplinary model of practice. Rather than engaging citizens in all walks of life on the issues they faced, philosophers spoke mainly to one another about problems of their own invention. In this we are the heirs of Kant. In the Grounding for the Meta­physics of Morals (1785), Kant argued that we must separate the role of the technical philosopher from that of the general philosopher. Philosophy would demonstrate its bona fides by developing a mode of inquiry that only other philosophers could understand. To attempt both philosophic rigor and public engagement would result in “nothing but bungling.”

By the beginning of the 20th century, we had abandoned the public role. Like biologists or economists, we embraced expertise. We burrowed down into ever-smaller niches, coming to know more and more about less and less.

At times it looks disturbingly like a case for the REF Impact measure:

It is time to reclaim the public role of philosophy…

The 20th-century paradigm of philosophy did eventually, reluctantly, make room for a few “applied” philosophers in fields such as bioethics, environmental ethics, business ethics, and the like. But even here, in the vast majority of cases, research consisted in talking about applied ethics rather than actually applying, or better, integrating philosophic insights with problems on the ground.

Applied ethics has been centripetal—scholars mostly go out into the world only long enough to latch onto an issue and then bring it back into the fold of specialized academic journals. Applied ethics is written for other ethicists, rather than for the nonphilosophical audiences who actually wrestle with the problems being discussed—doctors and nurses, lab technicians and computer programmers, corporate toxicologists and managers of fisheries….

For the reasons we noted at the outset, the 20th-century model of philosophy today is politically and economically unsustainable. It is also irresponsible. Philosophers at public univer­sities are state employees, and the rest of us are dependent in various ways on public funds, not to mention on the tuition paid by students and their families.

But what it actually suggests is quite far from Impact, as defined by HEFCE:

Field philosophy, found philosophy, public philosophy, experimental philosophy, philosophy of/as interdisciplinarity—these are all expressions of a growing feeling that change is afoot. We seek to promote this change. We view 20th-century philosophy as an aberration—academically challenging work that forgot half of philosophy’s task. It is time to strike out in new, intellectually exciting, and socially useful directions.

Which all sounds great, when you’re focusing on work that fits that model. But, as Magical Ersatz has noted in the comments here, there’s a lot of inspiring, amazing, important work that doesn’t.

Making Philosophy Matter December 13, 2011

A much-circulated article from the Chronicle. Of course, many of our readers spend a lot of time and effort making philosophy matter.

Unless systemic changes are made within the profession of philosophy over the next several years, we can expect that within a few decades, the entire discipline may be threatened.

Rape in the US military December 13, 2011

A horrific and important story in the Guardian. I was not shocked by the high rates of rape, but I was shocked to learn that the US military differs form other militaries in their handling of rape: other countries turn rape cases over to non-military police. The US handles the cases within the military. The effects are predictable, though their magnitude still shocked me.

Project Unbreakable: survivors of sexual violence December 12, 2011

From a reader:

I wanted to bring to your attention a new project that’s happening online by a 19-year old student named Grace, Project Unbreakable.  She started it by taking photographs of sexual violence survivors holding up signs with what was said during their attack. it’s snowballing because it gives a voice and a way for survivors to take back what happened to them.

Reader Query: How can universities support sexual assault survivors? December 12, 2011

I am a graduate student in philosophy and a survivor of sexual abuse. While universities seem to be becoming more aware of the possibility of rape and abuse on campus, I have found little to no long-term support available. There is a very strong pressure to just “get over it,” and I am afraid that I will be seen as weak and not grad school material for disclosing. In my experience there is some support for the immediate aftermath, but about 6 months to a year out you’re expected to be over it.

Knowing the statistics, I can’t imagine that I am the only woman in academia struggling with this. How can we make our environment supportive not just of the immediate aftermath, but of the long-term success of our survivors?

Mind Association Fellowships December 12, 2011

The Mind Association has asked me to draw your attention to their fellowship schemes, both senior and junior. Find out about them here.

Inside Higher Ed on The Smoker December 12, 2011

Inside Higher Ed has picked up on this blog post from What is it Like.

Lionel McPherson on blacks in philosophy December 12, 2011

He’s guest-blogging over at NewAPPS. Go check it out.

UPDATE: The first comment on this post asks an important question of the sort we value a lot here: Black philosophers, WHY STAY?

Philosophy at Chicago, then and now December 11, 2011

The University of Chicago’s “current students” page is wonderful. Here’s a quote.

Graduate students in philosophy once represented a comparatively homogenous cross-section of American society — as the above photograph of John Dewey and his cohort, taken in 1885 (nine years before Dewey joined the faculty of the University of Chicago and became the Philosophy Department’s first Chairman) helps to make evident. Now almost evenly divided between students from North America and elsewhere, our current cohort of graduate students constitutes an altogether different kind of crew. Look below and see for yourself!

It’s great to see both that they’ve managed to recruit a remarkably diverse bunch of students, and that they’ve found such an elegant way to advertise this. Perhaps we should all spend some time gazing it these counterstereotypical exemplars.

Many thanks to Mike Otsuka for mentioning this in a comment on NewAPPS.