Men with Identity Problems December 11, 2012

Workshop “Identity and Paradox”

CNRS research unit “Savoirs, Textes, Langage”

http://stl.recherche.univ-lille3.fr/

Lille, France, April 11-12, 2013

Organizers: Giuseppina Ronzitti, Tero Tulenheimo

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Workshop Description

…
The goal of the workshop is to discuss philosophical, logical and linguistic aspects of paradoxes in which the notion of identity plays a role. More specifically, we wish to examine whether the so-called paradoxes of identity really are paradoxes of identity in the sense that their paradoxicality is primarily connected to the concept of identity…

Invited speakers:

Jonathan Lowe (Durham)

and

David Nicolas (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris)

Manuel Rebuschi (Nancy)

Gerhard Schaden (Lille 3)

Submissions are invited.

Male Philosophy and Psychiatry November 19, 2012

In a nice bit of irony (or maybe just grim prophecy. . .), all the invited speakers at Oxford’s upcoming conference ‘Philosophy and Psychiatry: The Next Hundred Years’ are male. They are:

Derek Bolton

John Campbell

Thomas Fuchs

Matthew Ratcliffe

Tim Thornton

 

There’s also a portion of the conference devoted to invited papers, however. See the call for abstracts below. Send your abstracts, ladies!

 

Abstracts are welcome from philosophers and clinicians, scientists and
others with experience of mental health issues. Though there is no
restriction as to seniority, preference may be given to younger academics,
post-docs and graduate students.

Accepted papers should be suitable for a 20-minute presentation. Please
send abstracts of 300 words to conferences@conted.ox.ac.uk by January 31,
2013. We expect to notify authors of accepted papers by the end of February.

Today’s dose of awesome November 18, 2012

Go check out what Dan Sperber said to three conference invitations.

Congratulations to Louise Erdrich and Kather Boo November 16, 2012

Who have respectively won the fiction and non-fiction National Book Cub Awards.

Beating out an unusually competitive field, Louise Erdrich won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday night for “The Round House,” a novel about a teenage boy’s effort to investigate an attack on his mother on a North Dakota reservation, and his struggle to come to terms with the violence in their culture.

Louise Erdrich won the National Book Award for fiction for her novel “The Round House.”

Ms. Erdrich accepted the award in part in her Native American language. She said she wanted to acknowledge “the grace and endurance of native women.”

She added: “This is a book about a huge case of injustice ongoing on reservations. Thank you for giving it a wider audience.”

…

The competition for the fiction prize was considered particularly tight this year. Unlike in recent years, when many little-known authors were nominated, the judges produced a high-profile slate of finalists, including the Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz, who was nominated for “This Is How You Lose Her,” and Dave Eggers, nominated for “A Hologram for the King.”

The nonfiction category was every bit as competitive and featured established authors like the biographer Robert Caro and the late Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Shadid, who wrote for The Washington Post and The New York Times.

It was won by Katherine Boo for “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.” In her book, Ms. Boo tells of the heart-rending struggles of the dwellers of a slum in the shadow of luxury hotels in India.

“If this prize means anything,” she said in her acceptance speech, “it is that small stories in so-called hidden places matter because they implicate and complicate what we consider to be the larger story, which is the story of people who do have political and economic powers.”

This is not the first time women have recently won prestigious literary awards. We can hope that the idea that books by women are just for women is fading. (http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/national-book-critics-circle-awards/)

Men tell you what’s possible November 13, 2012

Men – from a variety of countries and levels of seniority – will be speaking at The Princeton CRNAP Modality Conference. (See the lineup below.) The website says that “the topic is modality very broadly conceived”. Sadly, it doesn’t appear to have been conceived broadly enough to include women. (At least not in the actual world.)

John Burgess, Princeton University

“The Origin of Necessity and the Necessity of Origin”

David Chalmers, Australian National University and NYU

“Two Concepts of Metaphysical Possibility”

Keynote address: Kit Fine, NYU

“Constructing the Impossible”

Antony Eagle, Oxford University

“The Open Future”

Jeffrey Russell, Oxford University

Title TBA

Boris Kment

Title TBA

 

*Update*: A woman has now been added to the program, so the conference is no longer all male.

Men discuss social epistemology November 11, 2012

Next month, at the 5th installment of the Copenhagen Lund Workshops on Social Epistemology.

(For more information on the GCC, see our GCC page and our GCC FAQ page.)

Against Meritocracy October 19, 2012

Geek Feminism has a guest post entitled, “you keep using that word”, which argues, “…a meritocracy is not a real thing. It is a joke.”
(NSFW tag for expletives, including in the quote below.  Also p.s. the homepage of Garann Means is pretty spiffy.)

A meritocracy is not a system for locating and rewarding the best of the best. If it were, the “best of the best” in almost every goddamned industry or group on the planet would not be a clump of white men. I’m having trouble finding good stats on this, but white men are something like 8% of the world’s population. When you go to a fucking conference and you look around at all the white dudes, do you really honestly think, “Wow! What a bizarre fucking statistical anomaly it is that basically everyone with the special magic gift of computer programming happened to be born into a teeny tiny little demographic sliver of the population”? Of course you don’t. You don’t think about it. You focus on telling yourself that you’re supposed to be there, because you’re so fucking smart, and if other people were as smart or, if you prefer, they were “technically inclined,” they could be there just as easily.

 

Obviously the argument is glossing over issues of local demographics, but the point is still interesting even in that respect.  When we talk about department or conference demographics, we implicitly understand that there are parameters likes citizenship, age, formal education, etc. that limit the pool of people we are willing to look at.
Also, the experience of viewing something *as* an anomaly is really interesting   I remember when I first started reading research in psychology last year and I realized that about 40-60% of the stuff I was reading was written by women.  I then glanced over at a stack of philosophy books–ten or so with nine written by men–and for the first time I explicitly thought, “Huh, that’s looks really weird in comparison.”  It’s a powerful feeling when something no longer seems normal, but rather skewed.  Now when I look at philosophy syllabi where it’s all men, that *looks* weird/skewed to me. It’s interesting though that I still haven’t experienced this kind of visceral weirdness when I’ve walked into a philosophy conference where it’s 80-90% white men. That still feels ‘normal’.

Are we returnng to the lawless disenfranchisement of the 1800′s? October 3, 2012

The distinguished reporter and political commentator, Elizaberh Drew, thinks so. Below are the beginning and end of her NYRB piece, which has unrestricted access. Her evidence is worth considering. Also worth thinking about is what women can do. Too many important issues are at stake.

The Republicans’ plan is that if they can’t buy the 2012 election they will steal it…Having covered Watergate and the impeachment of Richard Nixon, and more recently written a biography of Nixon, I believe that the wrongdoing we are seeing in this election is more menacing even than what went on then. Watergate was a struggle over the Constitutional powers and accountability of a president, and, alarmingly, the president and his aides attempted to interfere with the nominating process of the opposition party. But the current voting rights issue is even more serious: it’s a coordinated attempt by a political party to fix the result of a presidential election by restricting the opportunities of members of the opposition party’s constituency—most notably blacks—to exercise a Constitutional right.
This is the worst thing that has happened to our democratic election system since the late nineteenth century, when legislatures in southern states systematically negated the voting rights blacks had won in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Petitioning for Gender Equity at Conferences October 2, 2012

This is a truly exciting time, with hundreds and hundreds of philosophers signing up to pledges supporting, in one way or another, the Gendered Conference Campaign. The NewAPPS one, with very specific demands and commitments is here. Our official one is here. And now there’s a new interdiscplinary one from Virginia Valian and Dan Sperber.

Hopefully this means there’s something for everyone. The outpourings of support for the cause are really amazing me. Maybe things really are beginning to change!

Women Doing Philosophy of Science!

Lots of them, at the British Society for Philosophy of Science.

PROGRAMME OF LONDON MEETINGS 2012-13

Unless otherwise indicated, meetings are held at 5.15pm in room T206, in the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, Lakatos Building, Portugal Street, London WC2 and tea and biscuits are served at 5.00pm in Room T16.

15 October 2012 Elselijn Kingma (KCL) – Disease and Dysfunction
26 November 2012 Emma Tobin (UCL) – Domain Specificity in Protein Classification: A Problem for Monism
28 January 2013 Anna Alexandrova (Cambridge HPS) – Determining what Well-Being is: Psychometrics and Philosophy
11 March 2013 Sabina Leonelli (Exeter) – Integrating Data to Acquire New Knowledge
10 June 2013 Pat Bateson (Cambridge) – Plasticity, Robustness, Development and Evolution