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    • Has Elsevier jumped the shark?

      As many of you will have seen by now, it looks like Elsevier — not content with taking down papers from academia.edu — is now also issuing takedown notices to individual universities. Nicole Wyatt, chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Calgary, reported on having received such a notice in comments here. The Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blog, from which I had learned about the academia.edu takedown, also reported on the note received by the University of Calgary and passed on to all their staff. (Btw, did they go after other universities as well? Or is it a case of ‘pilot harassment’, as well described by the SV-POW site? So far I only know of occurrences with Calgary.)

      If anyone was still looking for reasons to boycott Elsevier, this is clearly a good one. Of course, it is not too difficult for most philosophers to boycott Elsevier, who does not publish major philosophy journals. But Elsevier is very strong in some adjacent areas, psychology in particular; it publishes for example the flagship journal Cognition, where a number of philosophers have published.

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    • Eileen Joy on uncharitable reading

      Very nice meditation on the "necessary of generous reading" by Joy HERE. I'm happy to let Joy have the last word* on the latest imbroglio over Nathan Brown's attempted polemic.** I found Joy's post to manifest what it preaches, but to be helpful to people like me who so often fall short of the explicated norms, and to be intellectually interesting in in its own right (especially given that many of the citations will be new to philosophy professors).

      *Along with David Wallace.

      **Which as a genre is generally imbecilic independent of Brown's attempt at engaging in it. I should say that my greatest professional regret involves the overly polemical nature of a couple of my earliest publications, and that I have friends with much better CVs than me that have the same feeling with respect to earlier pieces of their own. In a future blog post I'll expand on the imbecility of all polemic without mentioning any of the examples under current consideration.

    • If I worked at The University of Kansas, this post might get me fired

      Why? Well, because this post is about the Kansas Regents' decision to pass a new social media policy, which states that:

      the chief executive officer of a state university has the authority to suspend, dismiss or terminate any faculty or staff member who makes improper use of social media.

      Improper use means making a communication that:

      — Directly incites violence or other immediate breach of the peace;

      — Is made pursuant to the employee’s official duties and is contrary to the best interests of the university;

      — Discloses confidential student information, protected health care information, personnel records, personal financial information, or confidential research data; or

      — Impairs discipline by superiors or harmony among co-workers, has a detrimental impact on close working relationships, impedes the performance of the speaker’s official duties, interferes with the regular operation of the university, or otherwise adversely affects the university’s ability to efficiently provide services.

      Reading this, I'd feel compelled to say that it 1) seemed like an effort to stifle criticism of the University, 2) veered periliously close to making it impossible for colleagues to disagree publicly, especially over matters of instiutional practice, policy, or pedagogy, and 3) similarly put anyone considering discussing his or her experience with, say, discrimination or harassment on notice that doing so could be harmful to his or her carreer.  Even better, this transparent attempt to initmidate and constrain faculty speech in public fora was imposed by fiat without prior consultation with the faculty, though–in a clear effort to satisfy some of Protevi's likely objections–faculty were told that "the board would welcome input over the next several months."

      Presumably, this input shouldn't be on social media, however, especially if it were critical or the process by which this policy were imposed, or its content.

      Update: Scott Jaschik now has a story up at Inside Higher Ed that adds a few new details, including comments from the chair of the AAUP's Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure. 

      Update 2: KU Law and Economics Professor Bill Black has written an analysis of the policy here, and been interviewed by the Kansas City Pitch here [h/t William Pannapacker]. Black pretty much confirms (and even extends) the worst case scenario interpretations of this policy that have been floating around. 

    • Should I Try to Fly, Just on the Off-Chance That This Might Be a Dreambody?

      I don’t often attempt to fly when walking across campus, but yesterday I gave it a try. I was going to the science library to retrieve some books on dreaming. About halfway there, in the wide-open mostly-empty quad, I spread my arms, looked at the sky, and added a leap to one of my steps.

      My thinking was this: I was almost certainly awake — but only almost certainly! As I’ve argued, I think it’s hard to justify much more than 99.9% confidence that one is awake, once one considers the dubitability of all the empirical theories and philosophical arguments against dream doubt. And when one’s confidence is imperfect, it will sometimes be reasonable to act on the off-chance that one is mistaken — whenever the benefits of acting on that off-chance are sufficiently high and the costs sufficiently low.

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    • My Dad went to LSU, and all I got was this lousy pee-cup

      Marijuana-mexico-posterA few days ago, while trying to open the interwebs thingy to allow me to start entering my grades, I was prevented from doing so by a pop-up menu that referenced LSU's Policy Statement 67. The text included unsubstantiated and highly dubious claims such as that most workplace problems are the result of drugs and alcohol abuse by workers. And this was only a few weeks after all of the chairs at LSU had to provide verification that every single faculty member had read a hysterical message from our staff and administrative overlords that justified expanding the extension of pee-tested employees at LSU to now include faculty. The wretched communiqué justified pee-testing faculty because of new evidence showing that marijuana is harmful to 13 year olds.*

      Anyhow, when I scrolled to the bottom of the popup, I had to click a button saying not only that I read the document but also that I "agreed" with it. 

      I honestly don't get this. Are my beliefs a condition of employment at LSU? There was no button that said I read it but didn't agree with it.

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    • Is there any consensus on the proper behavior of invited speakers?

      Earlier this year at the Translating Realism  conference I was pretty blown away by Adrian Johnston. Part of it was his talk (which, with the Q&A, lasted two hours but seemed like fifteen minutes), but a lot of it was just his behavior as an invited speaker. He went to every talk in the conference, participated helpfully in discussion throughout, and every single evening ate dinner with graduate students and other non-keynoters. 

      As I've been thinking about it these last few months, it occurred to me that maybe there's something wrong with a discipline where I and others found Johnston's behavior so surprising.

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    • The Heidegger Affair, part 356

      Report by Jonathan Derbyshire here.

      This decade's eructation is the official publication of Heidegger's Schwarzen Hefte. The earlier story at Le Nouvel Observateur is here. The French article is interesting because it notes that Heidegger specified the release dates of all this stuff, including these notebooks, right before his death. It also describes Hadrian France-Lanord, of a recent French Heidegger dictionary, who after seeing the notebooks has publicly retracted his previous claim that Heidegger never wrote anything anti-semitic.

      From the entire Observateur article I confidently predict that Heidegger's defenders will once again recycle the grossly ignorant canard that since Heidegger did not have a biological concept of race,* he was somehow undermining the Nazis.  

      In any case, I'm not clear about what the stakes are supposed to be here.

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    • Fighting fire with fire

      I like the result of the NYU graduate student unionization election (I would like to say, "obviously," but as too many profs use the "in principle I like unions, but …" line when it comes to grad student organizing I guess I can't). But I don't think the subhead of this column ("An important victory over the corporatization of the university"*) is right. Unionizing isn't a victory over the corporatization of the university, it's a recognition that admins using corporatized universties for rent-extraction** is the reality of the university***; hence, unionization is a means of fighting fire with fire.

      * I know that authors don't compose subheads or "deks" (thanks to Sean Carroll below in comments for correcting me on previously using "lede"); I'm objecting to the frame this one gives the column.

      ** This NYT story about sweetheart financing for summer homes for NYU "stars" deserves wide circulation.

      *** The connection of the university and the corporation is not so simple …

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    • A plea to end informal interviews at the APA reception

      Republishing this post from 14 December 2011, as it's that time of year again.

      —-

      There has been a fair bit of discussion lately about the practice of APA interviews.  A growing body of empirical work suggests that implicit biases play a large role in interviews, especially shorter interviews in unusual social situations.  Some take this as sufficient grounds to endorse eliminating this part of the search process, while others are unconvinced. 

      But there is a practice that goes on frequently at the APA that is vastly worse in all relevant respects: the practice of informal follow-up interviews at the giant reception (aka “smoker”). Both New APPS and Leiter Reports recently linked to a post on What Is It Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy? about one specific dimension of this practice. 

      The point of this post is to be a bit more systematic. 

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    • Germanic and Carthaginian Republicanism

      Philosophical discussion of liberty and republicanism going back at least as far as Philip Pettit’s Republicanism (1997) have very much revolved around antiquity, when considering a historical dimension. We can take this back to Hannah Arendt’s work on Athenian liberty, which is not as nostalgic and uncritical as some claim, but certainly takes Athens as a starting point. Historical work by Quentin Skinner, J.G.A. Pocock and others has considered the evolution of liberty since the Renaissance Italian republics, which looked back to antiquity, in ways we are familiar with through Machiavelli. Pettit’s work, which shares broad historical presuppositions with Skinner and Pocock, advances a Neo-Roman theory of liberty, as superior to Arendt’s Athenian orientation. Even Michel Foucault sometimes seems as if he was inclined to classicism in political thought. 

       Despite the predominance of debates about antique models, and their early modern reception, there is a lot of republican theory, which is not Roman or Athenian, or certainly not purely so. Charles de Secondat, better known as Montesquieu, serves as a primary reference here, since in his view modern liberty is mainly the product of the republicanism of ancient German tribes. Though they had kings, Montesquieu regards these tribes as republics since the kings and aristocrats were answerable to the people. It is their conquest of Roman lands in the west in the Fifth Century, which introduced milder laws more compatible with liberty, partly because they emphasise compensation over punishment. Montesquieu’s view of the ancient German tribes is heavily reliant on Tacitus, so raising questions about how far he is using a Roman conception of liberty projected onto the German tribes. To some degree Montesquieu himself sees the very earliest forms of the Greek and Roman republics in the German tribes, but preceding those republics as we know them from anything resembling reliable history. While we cannot make a very clear distinction between the reality of the German tribes and Tacitus’s Roman interest, there is a distinction to be made between how Tacitus regarded these ‘barbarians’ with fragmented political communities in the forest and nostalgia within the great Roman state of laws and fixed institutions. 

       It is not just the Germans who Montesquieu takes up as a republican alternative to the Romans, and Greeks. He admires the Carthaginian republic, which like Rome achieved an imperial extent, as more commercial and even as escaping from the Mediterranean world into the European and African Atlantic coasts, in a triumph of commercial liberty. It is the real precursor of the commercial world of modern monarchies and republics, or republic-monarchies like Britain, much more so than the Roman world. He also thinks of ancient German law as more suited to commerce than Roman law. As Montesquieu discusses in some detail, Germanic law becomes merged with revived Roman in the Middle Ages, but not to the extent to losing an underlying influence of Germanic republican liberty in modern ‘moderate’ states.