I can’t remember now how I came across this, but I’ve been meaning to suggest that you check out the blog of Irshad Manji, a Muslim feminist author and documentary maker.
She’s got fascinating discussions of, for example, misplaced reliance on ‘experts’ about Islam in deciding what books to publish or what’s OK put in a documentary, based in part on ‘expert’ reactions to her own documentary, Faith Without Fear (contrasted with the reactions the film actually received). Really good stuff to read if you’re interested in epistemology, multicuturalism, freedom of expression, etc etc… So if you’re wanting a break from the US Democratic convention, head on over and read Manji!
Irshad Manji August 26, 2008
UK Lesbian and Bisexual Women’s Health July 29, 2008
Stonewall’s report on this important topic is out. Here are their key recommendations to the NHS:
1. Understand lesbian health needs:
Only one in ten lesbian and bisexual women said that healthcare workers have given them information relevant to their health care needs.
2. Train staff:
Only three in ten lesbian and bisexual women said healthcare workers did not make inappropriate comments about their sexual orientation.
3. Don’t make assumptions:
Two in five lesbian and bisexual women said that in the last year healthcare workers had assumed they were heterosexual.
4. Explicit policies:
Only one in eleven say that their GP surgery displayed non-discriminatory policy.
5. Tell lesbians what they need to know:
Three quarters of lesbian and bisexual women think they are not at risk from sexually transmitted infections.
6. Improve monitoring:
One in ten lesbian and bisexual women stated that when they did come out to a healthcare worker they were either ignored, or the healthcare worker continued to assume they were heterosexual.
7. Increase visibility:
Half of young lesbian and bisexual women have self-harmed in the last year. Increased visibility of lesbian and bisexual women will help improve self-esteem and morale.
8. Make confidentiality policies clear:
One in eight lesbian and bisexual women are not sure what their GP’s policy is on confidentiality.
9. Make complaints procedures clear:
Half of lesbian and bisexual women have had a negative experience in the health sector in the last year.
10. Develop tailored services:
Only two per cent of lesbian and bisexual women have attended a service tailored towards their needs.
Lots here that seems to me of interest to those interested in issues at the intersection of politics and epistemology: the importance of not making false assumptions based on prevailing norms, the importance of actively working to facilitate communication on sensitive matters, the importance of actively combatting dangerous false beliefs, the importance of knowing what information is relevant. And yes, put in these terms this stuff is not just about lesbians and bisexuals. These are good general practices, but the particular case of lesbians and bisexuals helps to make clear their importance. (Thanks, Heg!)
Borrow a Person June 25, 2008
The Living Library sounds like an exercise in objectification– volunteers are classified as ‘Gay Person’, ‘Immigrant’, ‘Police Officer’, etc, and customers come in to borrow them for 30 minute chats. In fact, it’s meant to be– and apparently turns out to be– a fascinating, innovative experiment in achieving understanding between people from different sorts of lives. Here’s a bit of Gay Person’s story:
Earlier in the day, Alternative Medicine Therapist… had said to me that she was learning a lot about her own prejudices from readers and her words came flooding back when I found two young black men waiting for me at the desk. As I sat down with them I braced myself for a stream of invective when one them gently asked, “Do you experience homophobia often?” It surprised me to find myself saying yes and we began one of the most fascinating conversations I have had for a long time. They said that they both had often had strongly anti-gay opinions. I said that if I saw them on the top deck of the night bus I’d probably go back downstairs. And once that had broken the ice, the conversation became an exhilarating opening of hearts. It was a shame we didn’t have more time to talk - 30 minutes can pass very quickly - but I left with real hope. If all young people were like this, I felt, the world would soon be a better place.
Of course, there are lots of problems, perhaps foremost amongst them the way it may shore up idea that a single individual can serve as representative of a whole group, or the apparent presupposition that there will be no overlap between groups (e.g. no Gay Immigrant). But it still sounds like a valuable start toward provoking dialogue, and these problematic assumptions can of course be explicitly discussed in the conversations.
Thanks for the link, lydia!
Asylum seekers as valued community members June 16, 2008
Stereotype has it that the British working class is the most likely segment of the population to be racist and anti-immigrant, scapegoating and hating on the asylum seekers. But this heartening article tells a different story.
We had our own little code to warn them it was a dawn raid and to get out. There’s more than one way of getting out of the flats - there’s two staircases and two lifts, so you could play games if you knew how. If we were a thorn in their flesh, then good.”
Sixty-seven-year-old Jean Donnachie flashes a mischievous smile as she describes the tactics she and her neighbours used every day to thwart immigration officers trying to arrest asylum seekers on her estate in Glasgow. A grandmother and former cashier who has lived on the Kingsway for 20 years, she makes an unlikely resistance fighter. But when she talks about how the estate took on the Home Office, there is a gleam of defiance in her eyes.At first sight, the Kingsway seems an unwelcoming place. Wind whips around the 15-storey tower blocks, the windows in the lobby doors are broken, the corridors are gloomy and bare. Remnants of police incident tape flicker from lampposts and prominent surveillance cameras add an air of menace to its pathways. There is little to dispel the sense that this is one of Britain’s forgotten pockets of poverty.
But when hundreds of asylum seekers were placed there to live - often for years - while their cases were processed, they were warmly embraced. “We had been really going downhill - a lot of antisocial families were being put here. But after a year of the asylum seekers coming, the atmosphere became completely different,” Donnachie says. “These people couldn’t do enough for you, and I thought this was wonderful - it was like going back to when I was a child and you could leave the key in the door and if you needed help someone would come round.”
In the UK, people seeking asylum are often kept waiting for verdicts on their cases for years– during which time they are given a place to stay and subsistence, but not allowed to work. As a result, many have thrown themselves into voluntary work in their communities, become valued and much-loved neighbours. And when the government gets around to deciding to throw them out, the communities are fighting back. This is happening across the country, and community efforts are apparently meeting with at least some degree of success.
An important story, and one that goes against the conventional narrative– that’s what happens when you actually talk to people, rather than just accepting the received wisdom.
Via The F-word.
The Analytic/Continental Divide, II May 30, 2008
This morning I was fairly happily going through a big book of essays by analytic philosophers writing on THE philosophy of perception. It turns out, editors Gendler and Hawthorne tell us, that “much contemporary discussion of perceptual experience can be traced to two observations. The first is that perception seems to put us in direct contact with the world around us: …The second is that perceptual experience may fail to provide such knowledge.”
Then I got the table of contents from The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. And I thought perhaps we should revisit Jender’s interesting remarks about analytic and continental.
So here are the essays, followed by reviews. Calcagno’s topic might, I think, been related to the analytic books’ discussion on intentionality, so I looked up “Michel Henry.” And something in David Woods entry make me think I might find that close to analytic, do I went to look at what he had to say. I’ve put the two pages below the lists. I want to suggest, though, that the analytic is far away from, and the continental looks like might get closer to what we might think of as second-stage cognitive neuroscience. So far my favorite short statement comes from Read Montague and Stephen Quarts:
… [E]arly investigators thought that the really important problem was to find the functions or computations being implemented by the brain independent of the specifics of their implementation using biological components. This view is now seen as impoverished because as structures constructed by evolution, most creatures are tightly woven into particular environmental and social niches, and are the ’answers’ to manifold questions posed by their environs. (My stress.)
Roughly, cognitive neuroscience is looking at well-functioning vision where this means vision that is aiding flourishing within one’s niche. Analytic philosophy has a much more static and individualistic interest in the truth-makers of perceptual statements. A hypothesis that might capture the difference is that continental philosophy is likewise more interested at least in the process of life as lived. At least sometimes.
CALCAGNO
Michel Henry’s Non-Intentionality Thesis and Husserl’s Phenomenology
FABIO PRESUTTI
Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze and the ‘Idea of Language’ in the Synthesis
of ‘Being’
BETH LORD
The Virtual and the Ether: Transcendental Empiricism in Kant’s Opus Postumum
JAMES N. McGUIRK
Aletheia and Heidegger’s Transitional Readings of Plato’s Cave Allegory
TRACY COLONY
The Wholly Other: Being and the Last God in Heidegger’s Contributions to
Philosophy
FARHANG ERFANI
Fixing Marx with Machiavelli: Claude Lefort’s Democratic Turn
ND BOOK REVIEWS:
Lars Iyer: Blanchot’s Vigilance: Literature, Phenomenologyand the Ethical,
by Thomas Carl Wall
Jacques Derrida: Sovereignities in Question. The Poetics of Paul Celan, by
Gabrielle Hiltmann
Alan D. Schrift: Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and
Thinkers, by John Mullarkey
José Medina and David Wood: Truth: Engagements Across Philosophical
Traditions, by Paul Grosch
Dennis J. Schmidt: Lyrical and Ethical Subjects: Essays on the Periphery of
the Word, Freedom, and History, by Lars Iyer
———————————–
From:
Summary
Ruud Welten © 2001
Phenomenology and the Prohibition of Images
in Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion
. ………
In the first section of this part, the antagonism between the idol and the icon, as elaborated in Marion’s God without Being, is examined. The idol fixes the gaze, whereas the icon is experienced without subjective fixation. The idol is analysed, in Husserlian language, as a type of intentional fulfillment. Before exploring the notion of the icon as a ‘perfect inversion’ of the intentionality of the idol, the question of visibility and invisibility in relation to art and visual culture is studied. This is studied in relation to a phenomenological interpretation of the ‘norm’ for the icon as given in Colossians 1:15 wherein Christ is described as ‘the image of the invisible God’. The philosophy of Michel Henry offers a framework for considering invisibility phenomenologically. The quest for religious art is elaborated through a comparison of Marion and Henry. Marion’s thinking on invisibility, which is based on the formula given in Colossians, has consequences for his view of the world and its visibility. This view is compared to Heidegger’s thoughts on ‘worldview’ (Weltbild).
Comments by David Wood Interview by William McClure, Sydney, November 2001
WM Would you say that you are obsessed by “time”?
DW Yes, I am. And it is, I suspect, characteristic of everyone’s obsession that it seems to them wholly reasonable to be so obsessed. It is, famously, possible not to think much about time at all. Or, if one does, to be neurotically obsessed, for example, with being ‘on time’, or with the efficient use of time etc. I am not obsessed in that way at all. There are those who are morbidly concerned with their own mortality. Not me. My ‘obsession’ is best described as a reflective fascination with the way time is woven into everything we do and care about. Sometimes this has to do with the way things take time to develop, how things unfurl in time - such a relationship, or the way a child grows up. But time also operates as a constant dimension of virtual existence. The significance of our lives is tied to the ways in which we brood on, or build on the past, and the way we imagine, fear, or plan for the future. And the ways in which, as we say, we ‘live for the present’. To be, like me - obsessively curious about time, and fascinated with time - is to constantly notice the strange shapes of time, its twists and turns, and the poignancy of memory and hope. It is not typically a cause of troubled anxiety, but of repeated delight. You could compare me to a musician who hears sounds everywhere - in the street, in the insects in the trees, creaks in the floorboards - and who enjoys acknowledging and noticing these little sound creatures. And just as it is not hard for a musician to alert his friends to this world of sound, so too the chronophile quickly has people catching on. Captivation with time is infectious.
The “Gentle Lady” Demonstrates Journalistic Integrity May 28, 2008
Katie Couric has had a huge amount of criticism as a lightweight since becoming anchor. Well, she’s the only anchor who demonstrated any journalistic integrity this morning, in a discussion with Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams of whether (!) TV news did its job properly in the run-up to the Iraq war:
While Katie Couric impressively argued that the media did fail to do its job — pointing out that the White House threatened networks which were perceived to be too critical with cutting off access to the war and that anyone who questioned the war was deemed unpatriotic and all of that “affected the level of aggressiveness that was exercised by the media”
And how did Gibson respond?
I think the questions were asked. I respectfully disagree with the gentle lady from the Columbia Broadcasting System [group giggles]. I think the questions were asked. . . .
I genuinely don’t know where to begin with that response to Couric’s excellent points.
Perhaps this is all a nice demonstration of standpoint theorists’ claims that outsiders are more likely to facilitate knowledge-seeking, since they have less of a stake in the status quo. (And yes, I’d say Couric’s treatment has demonstrated that she is in an important sense an outsider.)
When knowing is not enough May 6, 2008
A recent article articulates the experience of being the recipient of masculine condescension to explain that which one already knows. Although two weeks old, its link is still flying around cyberspace, and I have certainly contributed to the collective gasps of recognition. It’s a familiar variety of painful to discover how many women of authoritative knowledge still find ourselves reluctant to correct or contradict “Men Who Explain Things.” Like the article’s author, I feel obligated to observe, at this juncture, that women can be condescending, that genders condescend to their own members, etc. However, the minicareer of, as one lovely coworker put it, “a lifetime of getting patted on the head by men who assume I know nothing,” certainly seems widely shared. Why is knowledge not enough? What further informs our failures to assert that which we know we know? Granted that my explaining-condescender is an ass, why on earth am I struck with self-doubt in the face of confident assery?
Note that early in the article, a friend speaks up on behalf of the all-too-polite author. This experience, I also share, and the fact that we often more easily assert our confidence in other women makes it all the odder that we so often fail ourselves. An excellent method of pursuing epistemic justice is to use what privilege and power we have to call attention to less privileged women with firsthand knowledge, but at some point, we must also improve our skills of self-defense! Further proof, if I needed it, that one can have duties to oneself - - a position which I’ve held for decades, but doubted when a talented man challenged it at a recent conference. (Sheesh!)
Thanks to Angela Johnson for the link!
“We down here have been forgotten.” April 20, 2008
So a 66 year old New Orleans grandmother is quoted as saying in Women in the Wake of the Storm, a report issued last week by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. (An accompanying press release can be found here.)
The extent of the forgetting, described in Ms online, is shameful:
based on interviews with 38 women from ages 19 to 66 and from diverse ethnicities who lived through Katrina. The study showed women’s lack of access to housing, health care, and child care, putting women and children at risk for abuse and exploitation.
Equally troubling is the reason why women’s needs are left out of consideration in the planning being done. NO ONE IS ASKING THEM.
The report states that many women’s voices have gone unheard throughout the recovery process, so women’s needs are not being addressed. There is limited availability of housing, only one domestic violence shelter that survived the storm, and communities have been shattered. The report calls for a gender-informed relief strategy to end the economic and health problems women face. (MY STRESS)
The situation bring out another facet of feminist standpoint theory that Jender referred to in discussing another, but not entirely dissimilar situation. (And, most recently, here.) Standpoint theory draws our attention to the fact that the relatively underprivileged can have important knowledge that the privileged have difficulty discovering themselves. The current situation brings out why it can be hard to discover the knowledge that the other has. The problem is not just that those in charge forget to ask, or don’t think to ask. Rather, underneath that is the fact that disadvantaged women will not be seen as part of the group that possesses knowledge.
Epistemic Privilege: What it isn’t April 20, 2008
Lt Colonel Diane Beaver was a staff judge advocate at Guantanamo Bay. She describes discussions about what “interrogation techniques” to use, in which colleagues took ideas from the TV show 24:
The younger men would get particularly agitated, excited even: “You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas.” A wan smile crossed Beaver’s face. “And I said to myself, you know what, I don’t have a dick to get hard. I can stay detached.”
Then she gave her approval to waterboarding.
[Standpoint theorists have argued for the claim that women or members of other marginalised groups may be able to attain superior positions for acquiring knowledge, at least of particular subject matters. But none of them would ever have endorsed the claim that female anatomy makes one automatically superior in judgments about torture techniques. The privileged standpoint(s) are not meant to be due simply to anatomy, and-- most importantly, but most commonly overlooked by critics-- they're meant to be the product of a lot of hard intellectual work, rather than automatic. For more on standpoint theory, go here.]
Abortion? No such thing April 4, 2008
Try ‘post-conception fertility control’. Women’s Health News writes:
entering “abortion” as a search term in the POPLINE database now returns zero results because of a move by the database personnel to block that search. For background, POPLINE is “the world’s largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues.” The librarian who noted the problem inquired about it, and was informed that it wasn’t a simple technical glitch; the response she received was, “We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a [US] federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.” f you’re not familiar with “stop words,” they are typically words like “a,” “an,” and “the” that are omitted automatically from the search, because they is assumed to have no added value or meaning. Suffice it to say, it’s quite unusual for a word with “real” meaning to be a stop word, especially one so relevant to the resource being searched.
Wow. It is now impossible to get a decent search of POPLINE using ‘abortion’ as a search term. And the way this was accomplished is fascinating: the system was set to treat it like ‘a’ or ‘the’. But there are ways around this block on searching, if you know what you’re doing (which you can check out in the full email correspondence at Crooks and Liars). Here’s one they suggest:
In addition to the terms you’re already using, you could try using ‘Fertility Control, Postconception’.
Now there’s a fabulous euphemism. In case it needs stating: this is quite a stunning situation. A US-government funded reproductive rights database has decided that “for now” it’s best to block people from searches using the word ‘abortion’. Add it to the list of the many ways in which the current US government wants to make accurate reproductive scientific information hard to obtain. Thanks, ProfBigK!
More on the ethics and epistemology of implicit bias March 2, 2008
Via the excellent SGRP blog, I’ve just learned of a really interesting article on implicit bias, by Erica Roedder and Dan Kelly. It deals with lots of the issues that have come up in our discussions here (most recently here), but does so in a much more systematic way. Among other things, they consider the idea that we should, when marking students, increase the marks of those we are likely to be biased against. And that we should do this simply on the basis of the probability of such a bias, since we cannot expect to have introspective knowledge of it. Moreover, they consider the idea that we should do this *even if* there are no studies examining the role of implicit biases in marking (because perhaps we have enough knowledge about such biases in other areas to predict a marking bias). Of course, another option is to do what is increasingly standard in the UK, and mark all work anonymously. (When this came in, it reportedly led to a huge increase in Firsts for women. I haven’t got a good reference for this, but would love to get one!) Anyway, go read the paper– really interesting and important stuff.
The epistemology (and metaphysics, and ethics) of bias February 28, 2008
Edward McClelland has an article on Salon about Obama-McCain voters– generally guys (or “dudes”, as the article puts it), who will vote for Obama if he’s the Democratic candidate but McCain if Clinton gets the Democratic nomination. McClelland started out feeling just this inclination, and then became convinced that all his rationalisations for it were wrong, that it was sexism, and that he should vote for Clinton if she gets the nomination. What interests me is the question of how we should go about deciding in any case, including our own, whether we are motivated by an inappropriate bias or by something more respectable. It might seem obvious that every Obama-McCain voter is motivated by sexism. After all, their politics are extremely far apart (at least as far as the US political spectrum goes), and Clinton’s views are very close to Obama’s. But loads of voters don’t base their votes on detailed knowledge of candidates’ positions, and instead go by some nebulous sense of “character”. “Character” evaluations certainly make it easy for bias to come in, but surely they don’t guarantee it. Mightn’t somebody just *dislike* Clinton for non-sexist reasons, and therefore prefer Obama/McCain? Surely this is possible, and probably there’s at least one person like this. So, even if we grant that many Obama/McCain dudes are motivated by sexism, mightn’t you, or your cousin, be one who isn’t? How would you know? It’s very, very tough. You can’t point to a record of support for other women who have come close to the Presidency, as there haven’t been any. Self-knowledge of this sort is very hard. It’s wrong to expect that if you are influenced by sexist biases you’ll discover the belief “women suck” lurking somewhere in your subconscious. (I think a lot of people do mistakenly assume this picture of sexism, by the way.) If what researchers on unconscious associations and gender schemas tell is correct, *most* of us– even some of those who devote their lives to fighting sexism– are affected by sexist biases. This may be take the form of some inferences being easier than others, or of very slight positive or negative emotions being tied to sex/gender. What McClellan realised about himself was the extent to which he associated masculinity with leadership.
I never said to myself, “I want a man for president.” I said to myself, “I want a leader who can unite the country.” Like a lot of guys who are about to furtively nod their heads, I think of leadership as a masculine quality, so Obama and McCain seemed like the strongest candidates. I was also leery of Clinton’s association with the culture wars — I don’t want to go through that again — but she was a polarizing first lady because she was given power over healthcare before the nation was ready to see a woman in that role. (In 1994, I walked into a religious bookstore and saw an anti-Clinton biography titled “Big Sister Is Watching You.”) Ultimately, it was impossible to separate my reservations about Clinton from the fact that she’s a woman.
But realisations of this sort about oneself are hard to come by (partly because they involve admitting things we don’t want to admit, but partly just because self-knowledge is hard). I think there’s a real epistemic problem here. There are also some interesting issues about how to define a bias, and about how blameworthy people are for biases and actions based on biases. And, of course, these questions and phenomena are by no means confined to sexist biases.
When maths and traditionally feminine crafts meet February 12, 2008
You can get something great:
In 1997 Cornell University mathematician Daina Taimina finally worked out how to make a physical model of hyperbolic space that allows us to feel, and to tactilely explore, the properties of this unique geometry. The method she used was crochet.Dr Taimina’s inspiration was based on a suggestion that had been put forward in the 1970’s by the geometer William Thurston (also now at Cornell). Noting that one of the qualities of hyperbolic space is that as you move away from a point the space around it expands exponentially, Thurston designed a paper model made up of thin cresent-shaped annuli taped together. But Thurston’s model is difficult to make, hard to handle, and inherently fragile. Taimina intuited that the essence of this construction could be implemented with knitting or crochet simply by increasing the number of stitches in each row. As you increase, the surface naturally begins to ruffle and crenellate. Taimina, who grew up in Latvia with a childhood steeped in feminine handicrafts, immediately set about making a model. At first she tried knitting - and you can indeed knit hyperbolic surfaces - but the large number of stitches on the needles quickly becomes unmanageable and Taimina realized that crochet offered the better approach.
The beauty of Taimina’s method is that many of the intrinsic properties of hyperbolic space now become visible to the eye and can be directly experienced by playing with the models. Geodesics – or straight lines – on the hyperbolic surface can be sewn onto the crochet texture for easy examination. Through the yellow lines in the model below look curved, folding along them demonstrably produces a clean straight line.
For more, go here. (Thanks, Jender-Parents!)
The Election: What Do Black Women Think? January 26, 2008
When faced with a choice between Clinton and Obama, what do black women do? Do they vote their race? Do they vote their gender? All the reporters want to know….
So what are African-American women talking about when the cameras aren’t watching or, more importantly, what are we telling the media that is not being fairly reported? African-American women are talking about the issues!We talk about the vision that each candidate has for leading this country. We enthusiastically discuss the possibility that real, positive change will come from this election. We even parse the policy distinctions in the candidates’ positions on education, creating jobs and ending the war in Iraq.
Sometimes, the issues we talk about do deal with aspects of gender and racial identity. We debated Sen. Hillary Clinton’s statement implying that Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement did not fulfill its promise until Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. We argue and marvel at the significant generational divide in the African-American community that is being exposed by this election process.
If you listen closely to the women in the news features at the beauty shops, they are commenting on these issues, even when the voice-over in the same feature is telling you that the women are discussing whether it’s more important to have the first woman or the first black president.
What? Huh? They talk about the issues? If only somebody would listen. (For more, see Danielle Holley-Walker’s column here. Thanks, Jender-Parents, the for the link!)
Philosophy and the Man of Reason November 20, 2007
This post ends with a real question. Please do tell us about the view from your place.
In my early days in feminist philosophy, a lot of women philosophers were talking about how Anglophone philosophy and philosophical writing was still dominated by theories and examples reflecting its monkish past. That is, the conceptions of knowledge in general, knowledge of other minds, rationality and decision-making all positioned their subjects as solitary, with little in the way of demands on their time, and with formal rules or formalizable procedures as the best guides to good outcomes.
Philosopher’s fascination with the apriori encouraged some to take such remarks as merely sociological objections to philosophical substance and, as such, close to irrelevant to their conclusions. That view then provided them with a reason for not reading the actual arguments. However, the feminist texts, once read, are much harder to dismiss. Here one might cite Jenny Lloyd’s The Man of Reason, Lorraine Code’s objection that Gettier was concerned with what is in fact a very restricted kind of knowledge, Helen Longino’s conception of science as social knowledge, and Annette Baier’s description of men’s moral philosophy as largely treating morality as like a system of traffic laws for self-assertors. And many, many others.
Over thirty years later, the traditional conception is still robust in some quarters, but feminist thought has an unexpected ally in much in cognitive neuroscience and naturalized and empirically informed philosophy. While some cognitive psychologists, such as Marc Hauser, are still looking for inborn moral rules, the more dominant idea is that little in living a rational human life is accomplished by reason or rules alone. John Doris, for example, has strong arguments against the idea that rational reflection could underlie human morality.** And as for the demands on one’s time, real human beings evolved to make fast and accurate judgments; epistemically or methodologically downgrading or ignoring all the information carried by the reactions of instinct and the emotions, as has been done for centuries in philosophy, can be vastly impoverishing. Thus Hume, who consigned the most important human mental operations to emotion and instinct, was long regarded as the arch-sceptic, until a losening of the grip of monkish intellectual virtues enabled us to see his genuinely constructive project.
Of course, one might want to, e.g., side with Kant over Hume, or Hauser over Doris and others; the point here is that the dialectic is much more open and congenial to strands in feminist thought that were once widely dismissed.
I and many other feminists can remember floating such ideas in earlier decades. The results were too often not pretty, though positioning the claims as naturalized philosophy could provide some protection. However, as a close friend at a conference pointed out to me, now there are experiments and clinical findings, which have made a lot of difference.
Is the man of reason now just one among many on a the philosophical stage? How does it look to you?
**As far as I know, this work is not yet in print.
Note: Earlier entries on this blog have discussed aspects of the feminist challenges; see, for example, here and here.
Awareness November 1, 2007
Cara has an excellent post on Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Domestic Violence Awareness Month, both October. Yet somehow the breasts get all the attention. And, as Cara points out, it’s not necessarily the right kind of attention.
When was the last time you saw awareness of prostate or testicular cancer accompanied by photos of bulging pant fronts or hot guys in their underwear? Hopefully never. How screwed up are we that we will objectify women’s body parts even when those parts are harboring a grave illness?
She also points out that black women and older women, who are most likely to die from the disease, are not much noticed in these campaigns.
How far gone are we that we will ignore the bulk of victims — black women and women over 50 — to create a marketable story? Do we really only care about women’s health when we get to look at thin young white women while talking about it? How do “ideal” perceptions of sexiness and womanhood permeate even this?
Really useful and interesting reflections on what is reported, which fit nicely into discussions of how knowledge is created.
Bingo! The evolutionary psychology version October 26, 2007
Many thanks for Pandagon’s link to Punkassblog
The Bingo card is larger and clearer on the linked site, but see below for what I could get onto the page here.
Emotion and Cognition October 6, 2007
Jender remarked recently that feminists’ work has been influential in the development of the view that emotion is not the enemy of reason. Recently, Trends in Cognitive Science announced that it will do a series on emotion and cognition.
I do not want to suggest that the series will answer all the issues feminist philosophers have discussed. For example, though I may be pleasantly surprised, I would not expect the series to recognize how contested so many of the terms are. A previous post here mentioned a number of ways in which terms like “rational” and ”knowledge” are less willingly applied to women’s productions in the academic sphere (and others) than to men’s. A similar observation can be located in discussions of reviewing journal submissions. And, from a different perspective, epistemic contextualism strongly suggests that attributions of knowledge can vary for reasons that fall far outside the domain of neuroscience.
Nonetheless, if you follow through to the last paragraph, it is clear that cognitive science may lead to a dismantling of get another binary opposition. There will be important research presented and discussed, as the following except can suggest:
The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote, ‘The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.’ This message – that emotion and cognition are separate systems that seldom interact – has a long history in Western philosophy and science. However, the past two decades have seen a remarkable shift in this view as behavioral and neuroscience data have demonstrated that emotion and cognition not only interact, but that their integrative operation is necessary for adaptive functioning…
[We are starting] new series of articles reviewing recent developments in the study of cognition–emotion. In selecting topics for this series, an emphasis was placed upon representing work demonstrating fundamental aspects of emotion–cognition interactions that either have not yet received much attention or whose recent progress has not been reviewed recently. With this in mind, we focused this series along four broad themes or questions.
First, how is that processes generally considered ‘cognitive’ are altered by ‘affect’ and vice versa? …
Second, how do the neural mechanisms of emotion and cognition interact to allow adaptive learning and choices? …
Third, how might our emerging understanding of the interaction of emotion and cognition be extended to topics that are important outside the laboratory? … an open question is how are emotion–cognition interactions altered in psychopathology? Equally important is the question of how the links between emotion and cognition might be tuned through training and mental practice. In this regard, the power of meditation to combat stress and promote healing has been increasingly documented, and emerging work provides insights into the ways that these effects might involve changes in the neural systems underlying cognition–emotion interactions.
And finally, how should we conceptualize the relationship between emotion and cognition moving forward? Although psychological investigations of emotion and social cognition traditionally have proceeded in parallel, human functional imaging work has increasingly suggested that they depend upon overlapping neural systems. Why should that be the case? What do emotion and social cognition have in common? Part of the answer might be that social cognitive processes play an integral role in emotional appraisal, learning and regulation. That being said, and given our current understanding of the extensive interactions of emotion and cognition more generally, we might ask whether it even makes sense to attempt to distinguish the separate contributions of each in guiding behavior – or whether it is time to move beyond a dual process approach to more detailed models of their interactions.
… we are reminded that Pascal also wrote, ‘We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart’. With any luck, the articles in this series will illustrate emerging truths about how reason and the heart – or cognition and emotion – offer not just different means for knowing, but form an interactive partnership for adaptively guiding behavior.
From:
Emerging perspectives on emotion–cognition interactions. Kevin N. Ochsner, and Elizabeth Phelps. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 11, Issue 8, August 2007, Pages 317-318
It is unfortunate that the journal is probably not available anywhere outside of an institutional library or a private subscription, because the questions raised and issues explored are ones that have impact way outside of academia. Feminist theorists would be well advised to track it down, IMHO. However, given my not wonderfully endowned library makes years of it available on the web to university members, I would expect it won’t be too difficult to find for academic feminists.
Black Women in Philosophy, and forthcoming conference September 28, 2007
See here for details of the forthcoming Inaugural Conference of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers (Oct 19-20th, Vanderbilt University).Recently written about in The Chronicle (here, but subscription only, I’m afraid. I’ll quote, for non-subscribers, specifics that I refer to), Professor Kathryn Gines (who set up CBWP) notes that this offers a rare opportunity for black women philosophers to work in context that does not consist of, as she puts it ‘a sea of graying, white males’: ‘if you’re a black women, you cannot identify with the majority of the people in the profession’.Whilst much has been written about the number and status of women in philosophy (see e.g. here, here, here), but when one comes to think of the number of non-white women in philosophy, the numbers are, well, appalingly small: in the US, ‘fewer than 30 black women are known to hold full-time jobs in the discipline’. The caveat ‘are known’ is needed here, because, there is so little data:
- ‘The American Philosophical Association does not even keep even keep up-to-date figures on how many of North America’s approximately 10,000 philosophers are women or minority group members’
Note, though, that what we’d want to know additionally is how many philosophers are women AND minority group members: the intersection of the two (in philosphy) minorities brings the amplification of problems that have been discussed with repsect to women in philosophy, namely, solo status. Haslanger writes, that for black women philosophers, ‘their scarcity means that [they] are always solo in every context.’The impact of this solo status is manifest in the report of Professor Jaqueline Scott, (Loyola University Chicago) who is quoted:
- ‘I spend a lot of time being the only women and the only black person … Every once in a while it hits me, and I wonder what I’m doing here’
Indeed, the kinds of problems that have been recently discussed - homogeneity of shortlists, deparment members often not noting this; schemas that favour, in hiring, publishing, at teaching evaluations, the majority (white males); the problems of how to respond to this - will, surely, all arise - but perhaps qualitative data should also be gathered; it would be a mistake to suppose that white women’s experiences of being a minority group in the profession can straightfowardly generalise to black women’s experiences, across all cases (such as, noted above, the fact that being a ‘double minority in the field’ ensures that black women are solo in pretty much every context) (see Spelman 1988 on the problems of essentialism in feminist theory).Some, though, are critical of the seeming ’separatism’ of such a conference - Professor Carol Swain, also of Vanderbilt worries about ‘encouraging black people to marginalise themselves’ and, it is written, ’doesn’t believe that ’self-segregation’ is in any scholar’s best interest.But others, such as Professor Allen, endorse what she describes as an ‘opportunity to sit down with 20 African-American philosophers to figure out our place in the discipline and talk about issues that are on our minds’.On a more positive note, though, The Chronicle also reports that concerted efforts to raise the small number of black women philosophers are having a significant effect:
- ‘The philosophy department [at the University of Memphis] has made recruiting black women a top priority. Faculty members and graduate students regularly visit historically black colleges to try to interest undergraduates early on. Since 2003 the department has turned out five black female Ph.D.’s, and seven more are making their way through the program.’
In my online forays, I couldn’t find any stats for the number of non-white women philosophers in UK departments. Any help - has any such data been gathered? (Thanks, Sally, for passing this one on!)
