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    • Assessing inductive risk in the Williams and Ceci studies

      In their series that could be titled "Academic sexism is a myth", Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci have a newest installment: on the basis of fictive scenarios, faculty members in STEM disciplines had to make decisions about hiring particular male or female candidates. I'm not going to talk in detail about the methodology – which involved presenting faculty members fictitious scenarios about the on campus interviews of female and male candidates – but about the problem of inductive risk whenever we investigate biases against women and other underrepresented groups, such as African Americans, people with disabilities, etc.

      Inductive risk is the chance that one is wrong accepting or rejecting a scientific hypothesis. For instance, a food additive that poses a serious health risk is wrongly concluded to be safe, or conversely, a food additive that has no health risk is wrongly concluded to be carcinogenic. Both false negatives and false positives can potentially pose inductive risks. Heather Douglas has argued that inductive risk is one way to let values play a role in science. Because scientists are in an epistemic position to assess the risks and benefits of their work, they should assess the non-epistemic consequences (in policy, public perception, health hazards etc) of publishing particular research findings. How does this concept apply to the research by Williams and Ceci?

      When we investigate sexist biases against women in academia, there are two types of inductive risk: (1) There are no biases against women (indeed women are now being preferred as candidates for some positions in some fields). (2) There are in fact biases against women, but Williams and Ceci failed to detect it.

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    • In Memoriam, Pleshette DeArmitt

      Our discipline suffered a terrible loss yesterday with the sudden and untimely passing of Pleshette DeArmitt, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at University of Memphis. We here at NewAPPS extend our deepest condolences to her family, her colleagues and her considerable network of friends.

      From the University of Memphis’s announcement:

      Prof. DeArmitt's research and teaching interests included contemporary continental philosophy, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and social and political thought. She regularly taught undergraduate courses in feminist theory and 19th- and 20th-century continental philosophy. She taught graduate courses on Rousseau’s moral psychology, Freud’s metapsychology, Kristeva's philosophy of bios, and themes in contemporary continental philosophy.

      Prof. DeArmitt published scholarly articles on Derrida, Kofman, and Kristeva in journals such as Mosaic, Parallax, Philosophy Today, Research in Phenomenology, and The Southern Journal of Philosophy. She was the author of The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-possible Self-Love (Fordham University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Sarah Kofman’s Corpus (SUNY Press, 2008).

      She is survived by her husband, Kas Saghafi, also Associate Professor of Philosophy, and her beloved daughter Seraphine. Memorial announcements will follow.

      On a more personal note, I want to add that Pleshette was a dear friend, colleague and inspiration to me for many years. What has been lost in her passing far exceeds the summary of Pleshette’s scholarly production and academic accomplishments. For those who didn’t know her, Pleshette’s was an incredibly rare sort of gentle, unpretentious, amiable and warm-hearted disposition. She was quick to laugh, quicker to smile, and hilariously (often subversively) funny herself. She was generous to a fault. Often, in conversation, Pleshette would reach out, seemingly reflexively, and put a hand on your arm, as if to reassure you that she was there, engaged, attentively listening. There was never any doubt that she was all of those things. Pleshette was one of the most “present” people I’ve ever known.

      She was also, of course, an imaginative, critical, and whip-smart thinker, deeply invested in Philosophy as a discipline, a profession and a way of life. She was just as committed to its preservation as she was to its diversification. On that last point, I cannot emphasize enough how important Pleshette was as a role model, mentor, friend and colleague to so many women in Philosophy. Only a few months ago, at a dinner table where the “status of the discipline” was being discussed, I remember Pleshette leaning over and whispering in my ear: “you and I could fix this, if they’d let us.” I laughed, nodded, shrugged my shoulders. Then, Pleshette added, with that sly smile of hers: “I can’t see any reason to wait for them to let us, though.”

      Right on, Pleshette.

      I’ll miss her, Memphis will miss her, and I know so many others will, too. For the last several months, Pleshette has been organizing an Alumni Conference to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Philosophy PhD program at the University of Memphis, which will take place in just a few weeks. Without doubt, hers will be an unbearable absence at that event.

    • Why is this philosophy?

      By Roberta Millstein

      Most philosophers of science have been on the receiving end of this question at one time or another. A friend of mine recently called it a type of hate speech. I think my friend was joking. But maybe not. Philosophers of science struggle to get into grad programs, to obtain jobs, to earn promotion and tenure, to be perceived as "central" and important figures in the field, all because their work is not seen as philosophical. So, while it may not be hate speech, it is speech that does genuine harm.

      This isn't a new issue and it's one that others have touched before. But a number of recent events have brought the issue to mind for me and emphasized the importance of continuing to discuss it. One in particular was a conversation with a colleague whose opinion I value and whose good faith I have utter confidence in. And yet this colleague had doubts about an essay being philosophical even as I could see that it fell squarely within the domain of philosophy of science. The colleague was willing to take my word for it, but the fact that such a well meaning person had doubts really brought home to me the fact that this is (at least in some case) simply a lack of awareness about philosophy of science. Thus this post. I can't hope to fully convince anyone in a blog post length entry, but I can at least point to some of the other events that have got me thinking about this topic again.

      The second event was the excellent essay "Philosophical Enough" by Subrena Smith, a recent Featured Philosop-her. Smith rightly points out:

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    • Aristotle’s definition of the syllogism — a dialogical interpretation

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      (Cross-posted at M-Phi)

      (I am currently finishing a paper on the definition of the syllogism according to Aristotle, Ockham, and Buridan. I post below the section where I present a dialogical interpretation of Aristotle's definition.)

      Aristotle’s definition of ‘syllogismos’ in Prior Analytics (APri)  24b18-22 is among one of the most commented-upon passages of the Aristotelian corpus, by ancient as well as (Arabic and Latin) medieval commentators. He offers very similar definitions of syllogismos in the Topics, Sophistical Refutations, and the Rhetoric, but the one in APri is the one having received most attention from commentators. In the recent Striker (2009) translation, it goes like this (emphasis added):

      A ‘syllogismos’ is an argument (logos) in which, (i) certain things being posited (tethentôn), (ii) something other than what was laid down (keimenôn) (iii) results by necessity (eks anagkês sumbainei)(iv) because these things are so. By ‘because these things are so’ I mean that it results through these, and by ‘resulting through these’ I mean that no term is required from outside for the necessity to come about.

      It became customary among commentators to take ‘syllogismos’ as belonging to the genus ‘logos’ (discourse, argument), and as characterized by four (sometimes five) differentiae:

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    • Lon Fuller On The Inability Of The Judiciary To Police The Police

      By: Samir Chopra

      In The Morality of Law: Revised Edition (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1969), Lon Fuller writes:

      In this country it is chiefly to the judiciary that is entrusted the task of preventing a discrepancy between the law as declared and as actually administered. This allocation of function has the advantage of placing the responsibility in practiced hands, subjecting its discharge to public scrutiny, and dramatizing the integrity of the law. There are, however, serious disadvantages in any system  that looks to the courts as a bulwark against the lawless administration of the law. It makes the correction of abuses dependent upon the willingness and financial ability of the affected party to take his case to legislation. It has proved relatively ineffective in controlling lawless conduct by the police, this evil being in fact compounded by the tendency of lower courts to identify their mission with that of maintaining the morale of the police force. [pp. 81-82]

      There is little need to emphasize the topicality or relevance of these words, originally uttered in 1964 by Fuller, during the delivery of the Storrs Lectures on Jurisprudence at Yale Law School. Still, one is almost unavoidably drawn to the last sentence of the excerpt above. The considerations raised there are especially worth revisiting. (Fuller's larger project, of course, is to argue that law-abiding behavior is better ensured by a consideration of the moral weight attached to any injunction of the law.)

      In the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, both of which resulted in acquittals and failures to indict the police officers, it was transparent to most dispassionate observers that the judiciary did not see its work as upholding the law, as much as it saw it as supporting the police force, a 'partner' in the work it was engaged in elsewhere. Prosecutors and district attorneys work with police forces to enforce the law; they were not interested in bringing any of their 'co-workers' to justice, to subjecting them to the same standards employed on other legal subjects.

      These facts are worth keeping mind when we think about the developments in the latest case of murderous policemen: the shooting, in South Carolina, of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, supposedly for grabbing an officer's stun gun. The police officer, Michael T. Slager, who shot him in the back as he ran away–and then planted evidence, the allegedly stolen stun gun, next to Scott's body–is now facing murder charges. My first reaction to this story dipped deep into a constantly replenished well of cynicism:

      My guess is, the new strategy is go ahead and indict, and avoid the fuss that will be made if you don't. You can always acquit later with the right kind of jury.

      Hours have passed since I wrote the comment and I see no reason to reconsider. Video evidence–the kind that led to the formulation and pressing of the initial murder charges–has never been considered probative when it comes to assaults on black men by police. And as always, the enduring and transient members of the judiciary–like the jury–will, in all likelihood, worry more about the hit the morale of the good police officers of South Carolina, and perhaps nationwide will take. Such dangerous work, such little reward; surely these men in the line of duty, standing shoulder to shoulder with us in the administration of the law, should be forgiven their minor transgressions?

      Note: This post was originally published–under the same title–at samirchopra.com.

    • Bakhtin’s Europe and the Greek Novel

      Recent reading largely devoted to philosophical aesthetic questions about the form of the novel, have also led me into some thoughts about the idea of Europe. There is of course a very familiar idea of the novel as something that evolves from epic, beginning with Homer, and tied up with the history of Europe. I alluded to this in my last post on ‘Homer and the a-Ambiguities of Europe’. Some reading of Bakthin, as in Mikhail Bakthin (1895-1975) a name well known in literary theory, not quite so much in philosophical aesthetic of a Continental European tendency, but know, and little known outside those circles and maybe some overlapping circles. 

       So in brief, Bakhtin was a Russian who wrote about philosophy of language and literary history during the Soviet Socialist period, with amazing originality and depth by any standards, and it is an even more extraordinary achievement  given that Bakhtin lived through the height of Stalinist terror as art of decades of state enforced conformity in all spheres of thought. He is best know for Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Rabelais and His World , and four essays (‘Epic and Novel’, ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotype in the Novel’, ‘Discourse in the Novel’) collected in The Dialogic Imagination on the basis of a much bigger collection of essays in Russian.

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    • The philosophy of internet shaming

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      In recent times there has been quite some discussion on the phenomenon of internet shaming. Two important recent events were the (admirable, brave) TED talk by Monica Lewinsky, and the publication of Jon Ronson’s book So you’ve been publicly shamed. Lewinsky’s plight mostly pre-dates the current all-pervasiveness of the internet in people’s lives, but she was arguably one of the first victims of this new form of shaming: shaming that takes world-wide(-web) proportions, no longer confined to the locality of a village or a city. Pre-internet, people could move to a different city, if need be to a different country, and start over again. Now, only changing your name would do, to avoid being ‘googled down’ by every new person or employer you meet.

      As described in Ronson’s book (excerpt here, interview with Ronson here), lives can be literally destroyed by an internet shaming campaign (the main vehicle for that seems to be Twitter, judging from his stories). Justine Sacco, formerly a successful senior director of corporate communications at a big company, had her life turned upside down as a result of one (possibly quite unfortunate, though in a sense also possibly making an anti-racist point) tweet: ““Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” From there on, her life became a tragedy of Kafkaesque proportions, and she’s only one of the many people having faced similar misfortunes discussed in Ronson’s book. Clearly, people truly delight in denouncing someone as ‘racist’, as in Sacco’s case; it probably makes them feel like they are making a contribution (albeit a small one) to a cause they feel strongly about. But along the way, for the sake of ‘justice’, they drag through the dirt someone whose sole ‘crime’ was to post a joke of debatable tastefulness on Twitter. But who has never said anything unfortunate, which they later came to regret, on the internet? 

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    • Foucault And Kripke On Names And Rigid Designators

      By: Samir Chopra

      In 'What is An Author', Michel Foucault writes:

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    • Findings from the survey on an OA philosophy book press

      Earlier this month, Andrew Cullison, Jonathan Jacobs, Mark Lance, Kevin Timpe and I launched a survey to gauge interest for an open access philosophy book press. Following the successful launch of open access philosophy journals like Ergo and Philosopher’s Imprint we wanted to see if there was sufficient interest for a book publisher that worked on a non-profit, open-access model.

      A total of 416 philosophers took our survey. Of these, 223 respondents left their contact details, saying they’d be interested to help as advisory board members or area editors. Here’s the breakdown in % of how our respondents thought about an AO philosophy book press. 85.4% said they would definitely or probably be willing to serve as a referee (without renumeration), 66.7% would definitely or probably submit as an author, 64.8% would definitely or probably be willing to serve on an Advisory Board, and 59% would definitely or probably be willing to serve as an Area Editor (see below the fold for more detailed results and a selection of comments).

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    • Parrhesia (Part 3): On Heidegger

      Unlike Derrida, with whom he had frequent, highly public polemics, Foucault says relatively little about Heidegger.  Much of that is incidental: in a 1983 interview, for example, while talking about the postwar influence of Sartre, he notes parenthetically that “the roots of Sartre, after all, are Husserl and Heidegger, who were hardly public dancers” (Aesthetics, 452).  In his 1982 lecture on the “Political Technology of Individuals,” Heidegger’s name shows up in a list of those who are in the “field of the historical reflection on ourselves” (Power, 402).  But, in a late interview, he says that “my entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger” (see the discussion here).  He makes a comparable remark in one of the Hermeneutics of the Subject lectures; in response to a question, he names Heidegger and Lacan as the two 20c thinkers who have dealt with the subject and truth, and says that “I have tried to reflect on all this from the side of Heidegger and starting from Heidegger” (p. 189).  What are we to make of this?

      The limited point I wish to make here is that there is also evidence in Foucault’s last lecture course, The Courage of Truth (CT), of an engagement with Heidegger.  I suggested in an earlier post that there was a specific “parting shot” at Derrida; the evidence for engagement with Heidegger is along the same lines: he doesn’t name names, but it’s pretty clear what he’s talking about.  The references matter because they some of the luster off the idea that Foucault continued to get that much out of Heidegger.  At the same time, I think they establish that Foucault is not only interested in Heidegger as an existentialist.  Aret Karademir  makes that case, aligning an existentialist reading of Heidegger with an existentialist account of the late Foucault, specifically aligning the two of them on the idea that the sort of creation of oneself as a work of art in late Foucault strongly parallels Heideggerian authenticity.  The argument here is specific to the post-Kehre Heidegger.  I’ll argue that Foucault’s Cynic would get the Heideggerian stamp of approval in this post, but then that this indicates Foucault’s disapproval in the next.

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