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    • In philosophy, there should be no male and female (some hard data on the adverse effects of underrepresentation)

      (Many thanks to Bryce Huebner for drawing my attention to this work) – There has been a lot of speculation about whether or not sexual harassment is worse in philosophy than in other disciplines. While there are few hard data on this issue, a new paper by Dana Kabat-Farr and Lilia Cortina throws new light on this problem, looking at the correlations between gender disparity and harassment in a large sample of employees in the military, academia and the court system. Across all these fields, the authors found that a low gender representation for women results in higher levels of gender harassment. Gender harassment is defined as "a broad range of verbal and nonverbal behaviors not aimed at sexual cooperation but that convey insulting, hostile, and degrading attitudes” about people of one’s gender". Concretely, "when comparing a woman who works in a gender-balanced work-group to a woman who works with almost all men, we find that the latter woman is 1.68 times as likely to encounter [gender harassment]." Remarkably, they found no correlation between sexual advance harassment (which we have been hearing a lot about recently) and underrepresentation.

      I think these data are highly relevant for the recent news about harassment in our profession, and that there are things to learn from it for concrete policies.

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    • Rawls on justification

      I have a PhD student working on justification in epistemology. He just got started a few months ago, so for now we are sort of ‘sniffing around’ before we define a more precise focus. (He wrote his Master’s thesis on John Norton and the justification of induction.) Now, by a nice twist of fate, last week I received a Google Scholar citation alert which put us on a very promising track: Rawls’ notion of justification. (My book Formal Languages in Logic was cited in this Pitt dissertation, in the same section where there is a discussion of Rawls on justification. The dissertation, by Thomas V. Cunningham, looks very interesting by the way.)

      Here is the crucial passage as quoted in the dissertation:

      Justification is argument addressed to those who disagree with us, or to ourselves when we are of two minds. It presumes a clash of views between persons or within one person, and seeks to convince others, or ourselves, of the reasonableness of the principles upon which our claims and judgments are founded … justification proceeds from what all parties to the discussion hold in common … thus, mere proof is not justification … proofs become justification once the starting points are mutually recognized, or the conclusions so comprehensive and compelling as to persuade us of the soundness of the conception expressed by their premises…[C]onsensus…is the nature of justification. (Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1999 ed.), 508-509).

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    • Axiomatizations of arithmetic and the first-order/second-order divide

      I'm currently running a series of posts at M-Phi with sections of a paper I'm working on, 'Axiomatizations of arithmetic and the first-order/second-order divide', which may be of interest to at least some of the NewAPPS readership. It focuses on the idea that, when it comes to axiomatizing arithmetic, descriptive power and deductive power cannot be combined: axiomatizations that are categorical (using a highly expressive logical language, typically second-order logic) will typically be intractable, whereas axiomatizations with deductively better-behaved underlying logics (typically, first-order logic) will not be categorical — i.e. will be true of models other than the intended model of the series of the natural numbers. Based on a distinction proposed by Hintikka between the descriptive use and the deductive use of logic in the foundations of mathematics, I discuss what the impossibility of having our arithmetical cake and eating it (i.e. of combining deductive power with expressive power to characterize arithmetic with logical tools) means for the first-order logic vs. second-order logic debate.

      Part I is here, Part II here, and Part III here. I still hope to post Part IV tomorrow, and then the final Part V will have to wait for a while.

    • Student sues Northwestern for alleged failure to act on sexual misconduct finding against a philosophy professor

      [Changed headline and URL from this morning.] See here, here and here for news articles. 3:20 pm, CST, 11 Feb. We are opening comments. We will moderate closely. See our comments policy. From the news stories, we know the following facts:

      1. The student is suing Northwestern, not suing Ludlow.

      2. The lawsuit alleges that the original complaint was upheld by the NU Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention. Their wording is alleged to have been that Ludlow “engaged in unwelcome and inappropriate sexual advances.” [Per the news articles, it is a fact that the lawsuit contains this allegation. It is not a publicly available fact that this was the wording of the OSHP.]

      3. The lawsuit alleges that a disciplinary committee recommended firing Ludlow. [Similarly, it is a fact, per the news articles, that the lawsuit makes this allegation. It is not a public fact that the disciplinary committee made this recommendation.]

      4. The university did not fire Ludlow. [Update, 3:50 pm: it's better to say that Ludlow is teaching courses this term at Northwestern.] [Update, 9 am, 12 Feb: see here for more information on Ludlow's teaching schedule.]

      5. Through his lawyer, Ludlow denies the allegations in the original complaint. 

      6. The university changed its policies in January, claiming that these changes would put it in a position to be in better compliance with Title IX. 

      [Update 9am, 12 Feb: 7. The Chicago Tribue reports: "This was not brought to our attention by either the candidate or his employer," said Rutgers spokesman Greg Trevor. "We are looking into this matter thoroughly, including requesting all relevant information to fully evaluate his candidacy."]

    • Another Gendered Speaker Series

      The Gendered Conference Campaign "aims to raise awareness of the prevalence of all-male conferences (and volumes, and summer schools), of the harm that they do." In keeping with that aim, I call your attention to a (so-far) gendered speaker series that raises awareness for this issue in a different way. The University of California at Merced (disclaimer: my place of work) started a Philosophy Speaker Series this year that has so far organized talks for three speakers, all of whom are women (see the calendar and archive here). This was not intentional, but the fact that it is striking to have this sort of line-up reveals that we have some way to go to reach gender parity. Has anyone else come across conferences, speaker series, or summer schools with all-woman line-ups?

    • Philosophical Climate Survey

      Two of my students just put together a philosophical climate survey. It can be found here. It's primarily intended for philosophy graduate students in PhD programs.

      If you are a PhD student in philosophy, it would be great if you could complete it.

      Hopefully this, together with The Philosophical Gourmet Report and other resources, will help students make informed decisions about which PhD programs to apply to.

    • Can someone please explain the publisher’s blurbs for Heidegger’s Black Notebooks

      Google translate gives me gibberish, but with the possible exception (I can't tell) of comments at the end of both blurbs the gibberish seemed to be downplaying the elephant in the dining room. My German is inexcusably (for someone who lived there for two years as a child) awful, so I'd be really interested to see how the blurb accords with the Derbyshire piece.

      In particular a couple of things seem clear to me:

      1. Contra Faye et. al.'s repeated claims, the substance of Heidegger's pre and early 30's philosophy has absolutely nothing to do with anti-semitism or Nazism,
      2. The fact that Heidegger was not a "crude biological racist" is a dangerous non-sequitur (neither were most Nazi's, who had a metaphysical conception of race rooted in German Romanticism),
      3. Heidegger's middle and late work is tainted by the Nazism just to the extent that the history of being (especially the way it is tied to views of the German language and people and their relation to the Greeks) recapitulates central German Romantic themes that actually were central to blood-and-soil Nazism, and
      4. It's possible that the most interesting thing about the black notebooks is that they make this connection much clearer. 

      Now, 3 and 4 may be completely wrong, or may be the kind of things that informed people of good will can disagree about*. But if the blurbs are written in a way that forecloses 3 and 4, this seems a little bit problematic to me.

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    • Philosopher Jaakko Hintikka reveals love affair between his wife and JFK

      Here.

    • Really just a wonderful performance, and a bit about teaching

      Georgetown, like many Jesuit schools, requires philosophy of all undergrads – two courses.  Since most of these students are not going to go on in philosophy, some of us spend a fair bit of time reflecting on what best to aim for in such a class. I don't really think the first steps of professional training are the goal – and so try more to instill habits of philosophical reflection – the examined life – that might be useful to them in the future. As part of this, a few of us have tried to tailor courses to particular groups of students. For myself, this has meant a philosophy of music course – now in its second iteration. I'm not any kind of expert in the area, but I know a bit of philosophy, have a history in music -I was an orchestral trumpet player, was one course short of a music performance major, and have performed with everything from brass quintets to rock bands to professional orchestras – and I'm a thoughtful guy, so I figured I could fake it. 

      For the first assignment in this course, I ask them to select a performance of a piece of music to analyze in Aristotelian terms – a piece that generates an understanding conducive collective emotional reaction in the audience by way of the integration of all the elements, in such a way that nothing is superfluous.  

      Well, really I have nothing to say in this post.  I just wanted to offer you this performance, by one GU student, that was selected by another as the topic of his analysis for the assignment.  

    • But What about the Children?

      It is not very difficult to give undergraduates advice about where they might pursue graduate study without egregiously insulting large numbers of your professional colleagues. 

      But then how to explain the ubiquity things like this not unrepresentative post by Spiros?*

      In the context of a very nice post about an exceptional department, Professor Leiter claims: "The term 'pluralism'** has, alas, been debased to the point that everyone now knows it is usually a code word for 'crappy philosophy is welcome here'."

      That's accurate, but a little too generous! For one thing, it understates the self-congratulation with which the term is deployed, and well as the ways in which it is wielded in order to deceive those most vulnerable in our profession.

      I realize that many of our judgments of concerning philosophical work are somewhere between full-bore cognitive judgments and Kantian judgments of taste rather than judgments of things you happen to find agreeable. I mean, my distaste for a philosophical view or text is not the same as my distaste for bitter vegetables. And that's fine!

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