In his critique of Posner’s economic analysis of law, the late Ed Baker offers some remarks that might help us to understand current developments in educational policy. Posner defends what we will now recognize as a number of the core commitments of neoliberal policy, in particular the fundamental efficiency of markets and the price mechanism for the optimal allocation of social goods. The more people want something, the more they are willing to pay, and so goods get bought and sold (as they move from those who value them less – sellers – to those who value them more – buyers) until everyone is as happy as they can be, given constraints on resources.
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- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 9): Alienation and Historicity in Logic and Existence
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 8): The Marx of Logic and Existence
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 7): Hegel via Heidegger
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 6): Logic and Existence, Nature and Subject
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 5): Alienation and Dictatorship
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This article in Dissent is a good call for action, focusing on the University of Illinois-Chicago strike last week.
However, one additional factor needs to be put into the equation: undergraduate student-workers, who do lots and lots of service and clerical work: checking books out of the library, answering phones in department offices, and on and on. Marc Bousquet estimates in How the University Works that UG student-workers are the largest labor component, by number, at some big public schools.
Should they be part of the bargaining unit, or should the bargaining unit negotiate their work conditions and limits to the number of them employed relative to full-time clerical workers, is a good question, but one or the other is needed I think.
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As conversations in the discipline concerning the climate for women in philosophy and the role of feminist philosopy in fostering good climate continue, it is worthwhile to pause and honor the good work in feminist philosophy that is being done in various areas in philosophy, such as philosophy of science.
Nominations are now open for the 2014 Philosophy of Science Association 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 an award of $500, which will be presented to the winner at the November 2014 PSA meeting in Chicago, Illinois.
The deadline for nominations is May 1, 2014. To be considered, works must have been published between May 1, 2009 and May 1, 2014. Articles posted electronically on journal websites in final (accepted) form prior to May 1, 2014 are eligible for consideration. Self-nominations are allowed but are limited to one per person. One may nominate more than one paper by someone else.
To make a nomination, please provide information about the article, book or chapter you are nominating by clicking on the link below:
http://websurvey.sfu.ca/survey/163354447The first Prize was awarded in November 2010 at the PSA meeting in Montreal. The co-winners were Elisabeth Lloyd, for her book The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, and Sarah Richardson for her essay "Sexes, species, and genomes: Why males and females are not like humans and chimpanzees".
The 2012 Prize was awarded to Inmaculada de Melo-Martín and Kristen Intemann for their article, "Feminist Resources for Biomedical Research: Lessons from the HPV Vaccines."
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Article in the Daily Northwestern is here.
The student’s attorney, Kevin O’Connor, told The Daily on Friday afternoon the University had provided him additional information regarding the committee, which the original lawsuit says was established to determine disciplinary actions against Ludlow. O’Connor said he recently learned the committee was created to evaluate sanctions the University had already proposed. O’Connor said he plans to amend the lawsuit to indicate the committee’s formal decision did not recommend Ludlow be fired. The change is a technical one, O’Connor said, and he believes the substance of the complaint will remain intact. “At the end of the day, it’s not going to affect the integrity of the lawsuit,” he said.
Read more at Leiter Reports.
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We've had lots of discussions on this blog about how the climate for women in Philosophy compares to other disciplines. Here is, if not some data, at least some anecdote.
What do readers think? Does this provide a foothold for pursuing that discussion? If so, what can we (provisionally) conclude?
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Wow, this is cool. Try it out, especially if you've moved away from your childhood home.
I got Montgomery, Mobile, and Birmingham as my dialectical homes and Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, and Detroit (sorry Jack, sorry Iggy) as the places most dialectically foreign to me.
As a child my father was stationed in Montgomery the most, but the accent is pretty well suppressed at this point. Neat to know that sweet home Alabama is still lurking somewhere in my various language modules and whatnot.
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Recently I read the following story on What’s it like to be a woman in philosophy.
The poster says her partner thought the mother/daughter relationship is not a topic of meaningful or worthy philosophical investigation. She writes “It feels like I have to defend why the female experience is worthy of philosophical analysis. It feels like I am not taken seriously the moment I talk about what I want to talk about. It feels like I need to transform my thoughts into useless philosophical jargon. It feels like my relationship has tension now, because his words hurt my self-perception. It makes me second-guess my recent applications to graduate programs. It feels like I am not a philosopher–like my thoughts, feminine, worthless–will be forever excluded from the realm of the “lofty, the existential, the philosophical”.”
I am sure that this perspective is not unique, that somehow topics about mother-daughter relationships, motherhood, and other female topics are not deemed worthy of philosophical investigation. Yet what recent philosophical essay has received so much mainstream attention than Laurie Paul’s paper on deciding to have a child? And there are many other examples. One of my personal favorate examples is Rebecca Kukla's paper on ethics and advocacy in breastfeeding campaigns. Given the solid scientific evidence for the benefits of breastfeeding, and the tremendous pressure women experience to breastfeed (even while still pregnant), this is surely an important topic, philosophically speaking and otherwise.
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With Robert Brandom (and for recognizably Hegelian reasons) I think that Whig histories are necessary. I also agree with conservative critics that American English departments damaged their own enrollments when the 1980s attacks on the canon led to too sweeping curricular changes. In every field, it's very important for students to master a Whig history that allows them to critically engage with contemporary work and that gives them an analogical jumping off point to apply their knowledge elsewhere. And students know this.
I also agree about 90% with Brandom on how this Whig history should be put together for philosophy. A philosopher must understand Kant, how Kant led to Hegel, how (and hopefully why with respect to the 19th century) Hegel was finally suppressed in the "back to Kant" movement, how phenomenology and logical positivism pushed the neo-Kantian moment to its breaking point, and how contemporary philosophy is a reaction to the agonies and ecstasies of positivism and phenomenology.
But as helpful commentators (Peter Gratton, Robin James, Ed Kazarian, Carl Sachs, James K. Stanescu (AKA Scu), and various anonymous people) pointed out in this thread's discussion, the Brandomian Whig history is populated exclusively by white males, which is extraordinarily problematic for reasons adumbrated there. What to do about this?
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An excellent resource. Click here. See also this form for volunteering.
Thanks to FP! -
According to Brian Leiter, Israel Scheffler died on February 16th at the age of ninety. A very sad event. Scheffler was not a philosopher who cared much about trends. When all around him were scratching their heads about Thomas Kuhn, he wrote a pretty trenchant rejection, Science and Subjectivity (which also took on people like Feyerabend and Hanson). And his fine (but perhaps slightly too didactic) book, The Anatomy of Inquiry ,was perhaps the last good book written on the epistemology of science from an analytic perspective. His passing reminds me that there are issues about which the philosophizing of the mid-twentieth century was simple and right, and far superior to what superseded it.
New APPS 