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    • An Open Letter to Prospective Evaluators for the 2014-2015 Philosophical Gourmet Report (A guest post by Mitchell Aboulafia).

      This is a guest post by Mitchell Aboulafia.  It's a bit long, but it's worth reading in its entirety.  I don't necessarily endorse any particular part of it, but I think it makes some excellent points, especially about lack of transparency.  This feature in particular is, in my view, not tolerable given the enormous influence the report has; an influence that is aided, in no small part, by the very cooperation of the group of evaluators that the letter is addressed to.

      Mtichell's post comes, in its entirety, after the break:

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    • The swan song of the Philosophy Metablog

      …
      Lingered to provide a place to comment freely, 
      Let fall upon its back the scorn of other bloggers, 
      Deleted a few comments, tried to repel the creeps,  
      But seeing that it had really turned to crap, 
      Made one last post, turned out the lights, and fell asleep.
       
       

    • A Rankings Tale (That Might Rankle)

      By: Samir Chopra

      This is a story about rankings. Not of philosophy departments but of law schools. It is only tangentially relevant to the current, ongoing debate in the discipline about the Philosophical Gourmet Report. Still, some might find it of interest. So, without further ado, here goes.

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    • What does it take to be the official supervisor of your PhD students in the Netherlands?

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      You have to be a full professor, that’s what it takes. This is an entirely absurd, obsolete system – in particular in view of the fact that many PhD studentships are financed by external funding obtained by researchers who cannot be the official supervisors of these students (and who in practice do all the supervising work). The system is not only unfair; it is also nefarious for the functioning of academia in the Netherlands as a whole. (See a statement (in Dutch) by three philosophers and members of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences – Ingrid Robeyns, Arianna Betti and Peter-Paul Verbeek – with nine objections to the current system.)

      Reinhard Muskens, a very distinguished logician-linguist-philosopher at the University of Tilburg, has started a petition asking the board of his university to revise this policy and extend the rights to be the official supervisor of a PhD thesis to non-full professors. Muskens himself has attracted very large amounts of external funding in his long and fruitful career as a researcher, has de facto supervised a number of PhD students, but still does not have what is referred to as ‘promotion rights’ around here. 

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    • Health Informatics, Negative Spaces, and Corporate Privacy

      by Gordon Hull

      Judge Richard Posner’s well-known application of law and economics to privacy yields results that appear, well, ideological.  First, he considers what individuals do with informational privacy. What is an interest in privacy of information, he asks?  Well, it’s an interest in enforcing an information asymmetry in markets.  Information asymmetry is presumptively bad because it causes distortion in the price mechanism; the price mechanism is in turn the reason that markets can claim to be both epistemically and normatively justified.  They are epistemically justified because market price signals the social value of something much better than any sort of centralized planning process would do, and it does so without introducing all the inefficiencies of an enormous state apparatus.  The price mechanism is normatively justified because it presents no special intrusion into the lives of individuals: we are all free to do what we want and signal (with our willingness to pay) what is important to us.  In the case of privacy, for example, if I present myself or some good I am selling to you, “privacy” basically means that I’m trying to withhold relevant information about that good from you.  If I apply for a job and hide a criminal record, then I’m trying to get you to overvalue me as a potential employee by keeping you ignorant of my past.  Accordingly, the law should not protect such refusals to disclose, and in some cases ought to compel disclosure.  Thus the first part of Posner’s article.

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    • Why I Will Be Contributing Rankings to the Gourmet Report

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      I have been asked to be an evaluator for the 2014-2015 edition of the Philosophical Gourmet Report. Contrary to what seems to be the general (but not universal) sentiment of New APPS contributors and commenters, I support the rankings and will participate.

      The PGR rankings have at least three related downsides:

      1. They perpetuate privilege, including the privilege of people with social power in the discipline, the privilege of people in PhD-granting institutions over other types of institutions, and the general privilege of Anglophone philosophy and philosophers.
      2. They reinforce mainstream (“Gourmet ecology“) valuations of topics and approaches, in a discipline where the mainstream needs no help and it would probably be productive to push against the mainstream.
      3. They risk blurring the distinction between second-hand impressions about reputation (especially outside evaluators’ own subareas) and genuine quality.

      In light of these downsides, I understand people’s hesitation to support the enterprise.

      I view the rankings as an exercise in the sociology of philosophy. The rankings are valuable insofar as they reveal sociological facts about how departments, and to some extent individuals (especially in the specialty rankings) are viewed by the social elite in Anglophone philosophy — by the people who publish articles in journals like Nous and Philosophical Review, by the people who write and are written about in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries, by the people who teach at renowned British and U.S. universities like Oxford, Harvard, and Berkeley. As a part-time sociologist of philosophy interested in patterns of esteem, I am curious how people in this social group view the field, and I regard the PGR as an important source of data.

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    • Street harassment caught on camera

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      Related to my post on the invisibility of sexual harassment earlier this week, here’s a video that has been making the rounds on the Internet, and rightly so: a woman walks on the streets of NYC, and a hidden camera captures the unsolicited comments and aggressive attempts at making contact by numerous men she runs into. Now, that’s a good way to make (street) harassment more visible!

       

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    • An open letter from Jonathan Ichikawa to Berit Brogaard regarding her invitation to be a PGR evaluator

      Posted on Facebook and reposted here with his consent and encouragement (if I understand correctly)

       

      Dear Berit,
      Thanks for this invitation. While the interest in my opinion about my colleagues is flattering, I don't feel able to participate, for three reasons.
       
      First, as I think you know, I have signed on to the 'September Statement', which is a commitment to declining to provide volunteer work for the PGR while under Brian Leiter's control. While I'm aware that he's appointed you as a co-editor and announced an intention to step down after this year's PGR, it is unclear to me how much control he retains in his position as co-editor. And since the reason his control was relevant in the first place was his social power as a result of the general perception of his control, and the current unclarity will allow that perception to continue, I don't consider it consistent with the September Statement to participate. (Other signatories may well make contrary decisions for themselves about this point.)
       
      Second, I remain deeply ambivalent about the PGR itself. While it unquestionably does good for many prospective philosophy students, it also, in my opinion, unquestionably does harm to the structure of the discipline of philosophy on the whole. I just haven't been able to make up my mind about whether I would support a PGR, even if totally divorced from Brian Leiter. I really don't know whether it would count as a service or as a harm to the profession; under such moral uncertainty, I'm inclined to decline to participate.
       
      Third, I very much doubt that I would be able to provide anything like reliable judgments of philosophical quality based on the names of individuals in faculties, without spending an enormous amount of time reading people's work. Although I've been in professional philosophy for nearly ten years, and have gained at least some familiarity with a large number of philosophers, I think I know next to nothing about a large majority of the philosophers whose departments you'd be asking me to rate. At a minimum, I might be able to find and skim the CV of every member of a department in half an hour or so, but to employ any of my own philosophical skill to give anything like an expert opinion, I'd have to read and engage with people's work. Since we're talking about roughly a hundred departments, this represents a daunting task to say the least. (Even just skimming CVs, at 30 minutes per department, would take some 50 hours.) Or I could skip most departments, limiting my attention to those containing my friends and those colleagues I've interacted with enough to have an opinion about already; but I'd worry about selection bias, and even those departments are made up mostly of people I don't know. I'm just not comfortable contributing a meaningful opinion about the quality of someone's work without spending orders of magnitude more time than I could offer if I wanted to.
       
      I'd be happy to discuss any of these considerations with you further if you're interested.
      Best wishes,
      Jonathan

    • Enlightenment Ethics as Critique of Progress

      I don't think I've got anything surprising to say for anyone whose read Enlightenment texts concerned with ethics texts at all attentively, at least in terms of pointing out what is obviously there, but what I'm discussing as far as I can see is underplayed in most discussion, and certainly in the 'average understanding' that circulates prior to any close reading of texts.

      The obvious exception is Rousseau who gets understood as the back to 'natural man' nostalgic. Some recent work on Smith and Rousseau (e.g. Dennis Rasmussen) maybe gets to some degree at Smith's concerns about the 'progress' of commercial society, and there is a discussion in Foucault of the relation between the subject of eighteenth century political economy and the 'savage', though that is not so much about endorsement of 'savage' ethics as bringing out a supposed persistent 'natural' person. Given that Vico was already criticising any tendency to read legally defined rights back into 'natural' humanity in the early eighteenth century, we should be careful about simply attributing a brute identification of individual rights in commercial society with 'natural or 'savage' humanity on the part of all Enlightenment advocates of commerce and legalism.

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    • What is the (recent) history of the term ‘intuitions’ in philosophy?

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      As reported a few weeks ago, I’ve been working on a paper with my student Leon Geerdink (for a volume on the history of early analytic philosophy being edited by Chris Pincock and Sandra Lapointe) where we elaborate on a hypothesis that I first presented in a blog post more than 3 years ago: that the history of analytic philosophy can to a large extent be understood as the often uneasy interplay between Russellianism and Mooreanism, in particular with respect to their respective stances on the role of common sense for philosophical inquiry. In the first part of the paper, we present an (admittedly superficial and selective) overview of some recent debates on the role of intuitions and common sense in philosophical methodology; in the second part we discuss Moore and Russell specifically; and in the third part we discuss what we take to be another prominent instantiation of the opposition between Russellianism and Mooreanism: the debate between Carnap and Strawson on the notion of explication.

      The paper is now almost ready (and we’d be happy to share the draft if anyone is interested), but one puzzle remains: when and how did the term ‘intuitions’ begin to be used in the philosophical literature in its current sense(s)? (As argued by C.S.I Jenkins, the term seems to be used in different senses in the current debates.) As established by Leon, Russell and Moore do not use the term ‘intuitions’ in any of these senses (and in particular, not in the sense of common sense and folk beliefs); instead, they use the term in the technical, largely Kantian, sense of immediate knowledge. We have not found occurrences of the term in the Carnap/Strawson debate either.

      Does anyone know the answer to this pressing question? The SEP entry on intuitions is silent on the history of the terminology, and I haven’t found any discussions of this issue in the recent papers I’ve been reading for this project (maybe I’m missing something?). Not much hinges on this matter for the purposes of my paper with Leon, but it did make us curious. Perhaps our knowledgeable readers know the answer? We hope so!