Eric Schliesser on the Boulder situation

As usual, Eric has many thoughtful things to say. Here are just a couple of them.

It is encouraging that after the settlement, the victim has decided to stay in the profession and at Boulder; this suggests to me that there is reason that the majority of our peers at Boulder are, in fact, already (quoting Curtis) “making progress.” Our colleagues at Boulder deserve our respect and support in doing so. It’s not impossible that in doing so they are, in fact, showing the way forward to the rest of us…

As I claimed a few month’s ago, victims’s lawsuits “and the harsh light of publicity are the best means to destroy the culture of silence in the profession and to give everybody incentives to do the right thing (protect victims and to ensure that success goods are not abused). It’s a sad fact that the victims and relative powerless are the ones that are now the best hope for reform and wisdom. But that’s how the situation looks to me now.” The size of the settlement $825,000 at Boulder is of the right order of magnitude to generate the right incentives.

Citations of Women and Ethnic Minorities in SEP, at Splintered Mind

Eric Schwitzgebel counts “27 women on the list: 10% of the total. There is only one woman in the top 50 (Martha Nussbaum, ranked 9th), and seven in the top 100.” [emphasis his]  Among the top 100 most oft-cited, he counts, as far as he can tell, a whopping two who are “other than non-Hispanic and white.”  Schwitzgebel concludes:

 I regard these data as broad confirmation of what we all already knew — perhaps a little more systematic and depressingly specific.At the highest levels of visibility in contemporary mainstream Anglophone analytic philosophy (as measured by citation in the discipline’s leading reference source), men vastly outnumber women, and ethnic minorities are virtually absent.

More at his blog, here.