To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.
“We need some gender equity here,” she told HuffPost. “The Virginia senate is about to pass a bill that will require a woman to have totally unnecessary medical procedure at their cost and inconvenience. If we’re going to do that to women, why not do that to men?”
On requiring unnecessary, invasive exams January 31, 2012
CFP: Theorizing the Body, Embodiment, and Body-Practices January 31, 2012
The submission deadline is Feb. 15 for this lovely conference [pdf] of the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy. Details are always available at the C-SWIP homepage as well.
Dissolve the APA? January 31, 2012
I thought readers may want to know that the question as to why the APA ought to continue to exist has been raised; sure, many American philosophers have privately pondered this, but the question is posed and defended in a serious way by a philosopher tasked with exploring ways to keep the APA afloat. Our readers are welcome to comment here, but I recommend reading the original post and the responses at the source.
I should note my own bias: Although I’ve been a dues-paying member for fifteen years, I’ve long considered the end of the APA as a good (that is, likely, perhaps even desirable) possibility.
One More Gender Stereotype Smashed to Bits January 30, 2012
Women are better at parking than men, contrary to common belief.
“Stereotyped views on driving have been shaken after new research that finds women are more efficient parkers than men. The experiment, conducted by UK’s National Car Parks, showed that women’s spatial awareness has been underrated, or perhaps that males’ spatial awareness has been overrated.” More here: Women Top Men in Parking Skills, UK Study Asserts.
Men were, however, happier with their parking job than were women (even though objectively it was worse) and generally more confident about their abilities.
“I never heard of, of rape and a man.” January 30, 2012
Joe Paterno said that, admitting that even if he’d been given more detailed reports of the rapes at Penn State, he wouldn’t have known what to do. There’s a good article here, about widespread lack of understanding of the fact that men may be victims of rape. A nice example for those working on Miranda Fricker’s hermeneutical injustice. Also just something important to remember when teaching or writing about rape. Men are silenced too, and arguably more than women– it wasn’t until this year that the US federal statistics on rape began including male victims.
(Thanks, C!)
Feminist Philosophy of Science Prize January 30, 2012
PSA Women’s Caucus Prize – Call For Nominations
Nominations are now open for the 2012 Philosophy of Science Women’s Caucus Prize. The Prize is awarded biennially for the best book, article, or chapter published in English in the area of feminist philosophy of science within the five years prior to each PSA meeting. The winner will receive a cash award of $500, which will be presented at the November 2012 PSA meeting in San Diego, California.
The deadline for nominations is May 1, 2012. To be considered, works must have been published between May 1, 2007 and May 1, 2012. Articles posted electronically on journal websites in final (accepted) form prior to May 1, 2012 are eligible for consideration. Self-nominations are allowed but are limited to one per person.
To make a nomination, please provide information about the article, book or chapter you are nominating by clicking here.
Femmes et Philosophie au Québec January 29, 2012
Si votre Français est meilleur que le mein, et/ou vous habitez en Montréal ou Québec, this looks well worth getting involved with. Femmes et Philosophie au Québec, who have a Facebook page here, describe themselves as follows:
We are women and pro-feminist men in philosophy (also from psychology, cultural studies, History-society-culture interdisciplinary program, also participants from outside universities, etc.), who have formed a Salon (inspired by the format of 18th century salons in France, one of the only and last places that were feminine but in which men and women engaged in intellectual exchanges, etc.) called “Salon Femmes et philosophie”. We are from all Montréal universities but mostly meet at UQÀM.
We meet once a month, and have many really interesting and creative actions and projects planned for 2012 – to denounce the absence of women in philosophy in Québec, to promote and network between feminist philosophers, to put forward and under the noses of teachers and authorities the works of women in philosophy, to push for more feminine content in classes, and be means to each other’s ends in the individual struggles we face alone, each solo in our seminars, surrounded by men who find that “man” is a generic term, that language, sexist as it is, is fine as it is, and that women do not quite “get” the philosophical mindframe, etc. Notably, we try to bring academia’s attention toward invisible biases, glass ceilings, stereotype effects, etc. that affect the experience of women in philosophy, in academia, and as intellectual authorities in Québec. We are aged 18 – 45, some are parents, some queer, some are activists, some are employed and we are trying to become a diverse yet resolutely pro-feminist group.
In fact, even if your French isn’t above what a Canadian friend calls “cereal box standard”, the Facebook page seems like a useful source of news and views. I like the profile picture.
The Sunday Cat Thinks This Bird Has a Good Idea January 29, 2012
The joy of sledding seems not to be species-specific.
New SAF webpage January 29, 2012
If you are a member of the Society for Analytical Feminism, or just a curious cat, you might want to update your links to the new webpage of Carol Hay’s devising (thanks, Carol!). I’m sure that as we get closer to the big SAF2012 shindig in Vanderbilt in October, conference organizers will post details there as they emerge.
Something to think about this semester… January 26, 2012
Philosophy teachers: What kind of discussion might you aim for in your classes. Here are some comments I’ve heard over several decades:
a. “You know how it is, if you’re going to say anything in a seminar, it has to be brilliant.”
b. “This is the philosophical method: someone puts up a position and everyone tries to knock it down.”
c. A dialogue:
Speaker One: It’s as though you stand on the top of a hill, and say to your students: This is my position, and anyone who wants to have their own position has to knock me off first.
Speaker Two: Yes, that’s what I do best.
First, some obvious things to say: There’s been a lot of discussion of aggressive philosophy and the antagonist philosophical style. But there’s something else that’s more moderate, and that one suspects a lot of us find attractive. That’s the vigorous “exchange of ideas” that is actually carried on with quite a bit of evaluation. If you pursue this as a professor, you might find yourself saying, “Well, that’s not a bad idea, but it isn’t as strong as the first one, and it doesn’t really answer these other questions.” Or,” yes fair point, but most people nowadays have learned that doesn’t cut much philosophical ice.” Students can be very good at summing such remarks up.
Secondly, the less obvious: Research we looked at earlier this week strongly suggests that there’s a danger that such an environment dumbs down some students, and these students form identifiable groups. White women and Hispanics. It really shouldn’t be a surprise that styles in classes can have discriminatory effects, but now we are moving beyond the anecdotal to some ideas about how deeply seated the dumbed down reaction may be.
An opposite strategy: to try to find as much worthwhile in each comment as you can, and leave off evaluating the rest. Should one try something like that? Do the results we reported on before show that those of us who like to stir up a vigorous and challenging debate have obligation to reconsider? What do you think?
Reader Query: Feminist work on education? January 25, 2012
I need your help!
I’m scheduled to teach a graduate course in Education that will be populated with Education graduate students. I taught a graduate seminar in Education within the past year, and it went great. (I am a Philosophy professor.) So I’ve been asked to teach another, and I’m curious to know what you would recommend for this course description, particularly regarding feminist interpretations of education:
Course:
Contemporary Philosophies of Education: Contemporary philosophical approaches to educational problems and issues, including: pragmatist, analytic, existentialist, phenomenological, critical, hermeneutic, postmodern, and feminist.
Any and all help would be welcome, and I’d love to hear from you about feminist interpretations of education as well as the other traditions noted above.
The graduate students will have little background in philosophy, but most of them will have some (from our class together last year) in the history of philosophy regarding education. But other than that, I’m assuming little knowledge about philosophy, since they’re Education graduate students.
CFP: SWIP-UK panel at Joint Sessions, Stirling, July 2012 January 25, 2012
Society for Women In Philosophy (SWIP) UK – Call for Papers
http://www.swipuk.org/
SWIP UK Panel at the Joint Session of the Mind Association and Aristotelian Society, University of Stirling 6-8th July 2012
At the 2012 Joint Session there will be a SWIP UK panel of papers devoted to topics in any area of interest to women in philosophy. We solicit full papers (2000 words) plus 250 word abstract, suitable to be delivered in no more than 20 minutes with a further 10 minutes for discussion. We encourage submissions from graduate students. (As with all the open sessions, papers accepted for this session will not be published in the Supplementary Volume of the Aristotelian Society.)
The closing date for submissions is *1st March 2012*. We expect to confirm which papers have been accepted by the end of March.
Papers that are not accepted for the SWIP panel may be considered for the Open Sessions. You should also indicate when submitting the paper whether you wish the paper to be considered for the Open Sessions.
Please make sure that your submission is suitable for anonymous reviewing and attach a separate document with your name and contact details. Email submissions are preferred; please send your full paper, with an abstract, as either .doc or .pdf attachment to Roxanna Lynch (roxannajesselynch@gmail.com) or send a hard copy to: R. J. Lynch, 81 Andover Road, Newbury, Berkshire, RG14 6JH
To speak at this event you will need to register as a delegate for the Joint Session. Registration will be open from Spring 2012. For more details see here:
http://www.aristoteliansociety.org.uk/jsessions/index.html
Organizers:
Roxanna Lynch, PhD Candidate, College of Human and Health Sciences, Swansea University
Email: roxannajesselynch[AT]@gmail.com
Dr Jules Holroyd, Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham.
Email: Jules.Holroyd[AT]Nottingham.ac.uk
Oscar Nomination: A cat in paris January 24, 2012
We could hardly wait for the Sunday Cat to pick this up.
In case the trailer is unclear, the cat has a double life, one as a cat burglar’s helper and another as the beloved pet of a little girl whose police officer mother is after the man who murdered her husband.
Is reasoning done best in groups? Or: And we thought stereotype threat was bad. January 24, 2012
This idea that we reason better in groups has received recent attention because of the Argumentative Theory. Thus,
People mostly have a problem with the confirmation bias when they reason on their own, when no one is there to argue against their point of view. What has been observed is that often times, when people reason on their own, they’re unable to arrive at a good solution, at a good belief, or to make a good decision because they will only confirm their initial intuition.
On the other hand, when people are able to discuss their ideas with other people who disagree with them, then the confirmation biases of the different participants will balance each other out, and the group will be able to focus on the best solution. Thus, reasoning works much better in groups. When people reason on their own, it’s very likely that they are going to go down a wrong path. But when they’re actually able to reason together, they are much more likely to reach a correct solution.
The thought, which surely has some appeal, is that human reasoning has features that defeat one’s getting to a correct solution. Confirmation bias is an example. That is, we generally sort out evidence to find what shows we’ve been right. Unfortunately, though, the idea that groups provide a solution may itself have a problem.
Recent work by Read Montague’s group suggests that in competitive groups, some people end up doing less well on cognitive tasks even when their IQ scores are the same as better functioning members.
Research led by scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute found that small-group dynamics – such as jury deliberations, collective bargaining sessions, and cocktail parties – can alter the expression of IQ in some susceptible people. “You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well,” said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, who led the study. .
“We started with individuals who were matched for their IQ,” said Montague. “Yet when we placed them in small groups, ranked their performance on cognitive tasks against their peers, and broadcast those rankings to them, we saw dramatic drops in the ability of some study subjects to solve problems. The social feedback had a significant effect.”
“Our study highlights the unexpected and dramatic consequences even subtle social signals in group settings may have on individual cognitive functioning,” said lead author Kenneth Kishida, a research scientist with the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. “And, through neuroimaging, we were able to document the very strong neural responses that those social cues can elicit.” …
There seem to have been at least two very different reactions on the part of the involved researchers. One response is this:
We don’t know how much these effects are present in real-world settings,” Kishida said. “But given the potentially harmful effects of social-status assignments and the correlation with specific neural signals, future research should be devoted to what, exactly, society is selecting for in competitive learning and workplace environments. By placing an emphasis on competition, for example, are we missing a large segment of the talent pool? Further brain imaging research may also offer avenues for developing strategies for people who are susceptible to these kinds of social pressures.”
It looks to me as though Kishida thinks the experiments show us that competitive grouping may cost us in that we may lose a significant portion of the talented population. But Quartz (see below) appears to be saying that who is in the talented population depends on who can perform well in the social situations. Of course, I’m going here just by how he was quoted by a journalist, so we might be tentative about conclusions.
“This study tells us the idea that IQ is something we can reliably measure in isolation without considering how it interacts with social context is essentially flawed,” said coauthor Steven Quartz, a professor of philosophy in the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory of Caltech. “Furthermore, this suggests that the idea of a division between social and cognitive processing in the brain is really pretty artificial. The two deeply interact with each other.”
One remarkable aspect of the work is that it looks as though the number of women who are adversely affected is significantly higher than that of men.
In my experience, women often enough get the not so subtle look. It used to be as bad as “O, isn’t it cute that you are trying to have some confused thought.” Now it is for me more likely to be “What idiot thing does this old woman have to say?” Sometimes it can be quite explicit, as when a young man said after I delivered an invited talk, “I hope you don’t think your little point affects anything Block has to say.” It has always interested me that these sorts of things can affect my performance. Its as though one acts in accord with others expectations. And I think there is some evidence that that is right, but the current research addresses a specific kind of setting very common at least in our version of academia. The article indicated has a quite detailed picture of the mechanisms. And I’m wondering whether a xanax or two might be helpful. Perhaps in that five minute break between talk and questions, one could pop a pill, or have a very quick martini. Any one want to write up a grant proposal on that?
Thanks to fp!
Mandatory philosophy classes in Brazilian schools January 24, 2012
The official rationale for the 2008 law is that philosophy “is necessary for the exercise of citizenship.” The law—the world’s largest-scale attempt to bring philosophy into the public sphere—thus represents an experiment in democracy. Among teachers at least, many share Ribeiro’s hope that philosophy will provide a path to greater civic participation and equality. Can it do even more? Can it teach students to question and challenge the foundations of society itself?
Where do you even begin? January 24, 2012
Sometimes I’m just left speechless. Except for the expletives.
“The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children,” said Marshall, a Republican.
“In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord. There’s a special punishment Christians would suggest.”
(Thanks, C and T. Sorry for delayed posting.)
And here’s the link.
Cynthia Nixon, on choosing to be gay January 24, 2012
I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me.
For more, go here.
Second trimester abortions and health care funding January 24, 2012
There is a useful analysis of the relationship between second trimester abortions and health care funding over at the economics blog, Dollars and Sex.
From “The Economics of Second Trimester Abortions: Market Demand” by Marina Adshade: “Among women who both had second trimester abortions, and would have preferred to have one earlier in the pregnancy, 36% said the delay was caused by a need to raise the enough money to pay for the procedure. The U.S. isn’t the only nation that makes women pay for abortions, but it is the only one, that I know of, in which abortions for low-income women go unsubsidized by governments.”
Dollars and Sex, by the way, is an excellent resource for feminist philosophers. The blog covers economic aspects of dating and marriage, promiscuity, infidelity, risky sexual behavior, the relation between sex and happiness, and markets for sex such as prostitution, pornography, and lap dancing.
APA Prize January 24, 2012
The American Philosophical Association has a number of prizes and awards including the Article Prize, details below:
APA ARTICLE PRIZE
Summary: The APA alternates giving an award to the best article and book published in the previous two years.
Process: Must be nominated by two APA members other than the author. Author must be a “younger scholar.” The winners will be selected by a committee appointed by the Chair of the Committee on Lectures, Publications, and Research, in consultation with LPR committee members.
Frequency: The Article Prize is awarded every other year in even years. Deadline for nominations is March 15, 2012.
Award Amount: $2,000 for the Article Prize
Submission Procedures
Nominations are opened every other spring for the Article Prize for that year (2012, 2014, 2016, etc.). Articles published in the prior two years are eligible. Thus, for 2012, the prize will be awarded to an article published in 2010 or 2011. (Eligibility is governed by the volume year of the journal, regardless of the date on which the issue containing the nominated article actually appeared in print.)
The prize is awarded for an article written by a “younger scholar.” A “younger scholar” means the author was 40 years of age or younger in the year of the volume in which the article appears, or the author received his or her Ph.D. 10 years or less before that year. The winner must be a member in good standing of the APA.
To be considered for the prize, an article must be nominated by two members of the APA other than the author. A member may nominate only one article. Nominations should identify the author, title, journal, volume number, year, and page numbers. The APA will contact nominated authors for assurances of eligibility and to secure copies of the nominated article. Nominations must be received by March 15, 2012 for the 2012 award.
Send nomination letters to:
Linda Nuoffer lnuoffer@udel.edu
The winner of the award will receive $2000 and be presented with the prize at the Eastern Division Meeting of the Association.
France’s psychoanalytic approach to autism: Watch and weep? January 23, 2012
The clip below is actually a documentary that looks at the difference between two kinds of treatment of children diagnosed as autistic. One is receiving “American” interventions and one receiving the standard (in France) psychoanalytic approach.
The film has been the subject of lawsuits, with some analysts interviewed claiming that they are misrepresented. For more, see the NY Times.
When you watch it, don’t miss the alligator as the mother, apparently a la Lacan. The discussion of what the pencil represents is wonderful. One would love a psychoanallytic account of who arrived at the idea of the father’s putting his penis in the alligator’s mouth. Hmmm. New paper: why Freud hated men.
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