Pronoun tantrum in Philosophia Mathematica book review

Thanks to reader R for pointing out the following passage from a recent book review in Philosophia Mathematica, an OUP journal.

“The author constantly uses the pronouns ‘her’ and ‘she’ in a gender-neutral setting. This juvenile affectation seems now to be de rigueur among male academic writers. I wonder if it helps them attract women or if it just makes them feel like cool dudes. Maybe they simply enjoy offending people, pour épater les bourgeois.”

I will not tag the book being reviewed, since it is not the book author’s fault that the reviewer has included this bizarre sexist outburst, nor that the editorial process allowed it to be published.

CSWIP 2016 CFP

See the full CFP here.

Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy 2016

Call for Papers

Philosophy and its borders: negotiating interdisciplinarity and traditions

November 4-6, 2016
Mount Allison University

Keynote Address by Susan Sherwin, Dalhousie University (Emerita)

A workshop will also be held on accessibility in the academy, particularly at conferences like CSWIP. Further details to come.

The Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy invites papers and panel proposals from all areas of philosophy and all philosophical approaches, including and not limited to analytic, continental, and historically oriented philosophy.
Philosophy has developed a number of connections with other disciplines, both in an effort to understand the different methods and models employed within the search for knowledge, and to draw upon tools and insights that other disciplines have discovered. Philosophy itself contains a number of different traditions whose conflicts and tensions can be a rich source of creative possibility but also used to police each other. Recent challenges to the discipline have encouraged philosophers to recognize that Western philosophy itself – including analytic, continental, or pragmatist traditions – is just one more collection of approaches alongside Eastern, indigenous, and Africana traditions. Given that feminist philosophy has often been pluralist in drawing together knowledge from different sources and standpoints in an effort to better understand and critique dominant models of thought, this year’s CSWIP is encouraging participants to think through the question of working across borders in philosophy. What does it mean to draw disciplines and traditions together? What does it mean to draw a line around a particular tradition or approach? How do particular traditions and approaches exert power over others? What model or picture of the discipline ought we present to our students as they are first coming to grasp “philosophy”?

Paper and panel topics may therefore include, but are not limited to:
* How have feminist philosophy, critical race theory, disability theory, and other approaches reshaped understandings of the discipline and its subdisciplines, such as bioethics, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy? What successes have there been? What areas of conflict or tension?
* What does it mean to think of philosophy as having “core” areas? How do these relate to its borders?
* Non-western and indigenous philosophies alter assumptions about what counts as philosophy. What challenges are posed by integrating them into disciplinary curricula?
* What does it mean to take the insights and norms of philosophical argumentation and bring them to bear in analyzing work in other disciplines?
* How can different philosophical methodologies be brought together? Do we take our methods with us when we cross borders? Do we weave different methods together?
* Pedagogy and the role of teaching philosophical traditions: what is appropriate when training students new to the discipline?
* What becomes possible, ethically, politically, and scientifically, when we cross borders, especially given that disciplines understand the nature of “borders” in different ways?