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    • Change The Face Of Philosophy; Fund PIKSI!

      By: Samir Chopra

      Folks, there is a new initiative underway to 'change the face of philosophy.' (It was brought to my attention by my Brooklyn College colleague, Serene Khader.) I urge all of us to get behind it.

      For nine years, PIKSI, or the Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute, has been helping students from underrepresented groups develop the skills, confidence, and community needed to pursue graduate study in philosophy. Our students include women, people of color, LGBT individuals, individuals with disabilities, and people from economically disadvantaged communities. 

      PIKSI aims to change philosophy's status as the least diverse in the humanities. Only 16% of full-time academic philosophers are women. Of the 13,000 professional philosophers in the United States, only 156 are black. The experiences of members of diverse groups can cast new light on traditional philosophical questions as well as raise new ones.

      PIKSI needs funding: 

      PIKSI has traditionally received two sources of funding. The program is housed at the Pennsylvania State University’s Rock Ethics Institute, who together with Pennsylvania State University School of Liberal Arts, have pledged to continue their partial financing of PIKSI, conditional upon funding from a partner organization. Until recently the American Philosophical Association (APA) has co-funded PIKSI, but beginning 2014, this is no longer funding we can count on.

      Please, pitch in!

       

       

    • Once More: ‘Intellectual Property’ Breeds Confusion; Drop it

      By: Samir Chopra

      Rarely, if ever, does the term 'intellectual property' add clarity to any debate of substance–very often, this is because it includes the term 'property' and thus offers an invitation to some dubious theorizing. This post by Alex Rosenberg at Daily Nous is a good example of this claim:

      Locke famously offered an account of the justification of private property, one that Nozick brought to our attention in Anarchy, State and Utopia. The account worked like this: morally permissible private property begins with original acquisition, and that happens when you mix your labor with nature, and leave as good and as much for others. Alas, this “Lockean” proviso is impossible to satisfy. Or at least it is in every original acquisition other than the case of intellectual property. Here one mixes one mental labor with nature—empirical facts about reality, including social reality. Since there are an infinite number of good ideas, the creator of intellectual property leaves as much and as good for others, and therefore has an unqualified right to what he has created.

      Brian Leiter’s ownership of the PGR satisfies the most stringent test of private property I know. It’s his creation and he excluded no one else from mixing his or her labor with nature to produce a substitute for or for that matter a complement to his creation.

      In light of this fact, the effort to separate him from his intellectual property owing to disapproval of his emails and posts seems rather preposterous.

      It has often been proposed–most notably by Richard Stallman, free software's most fiery proponent-that the term 'intellectual property' be junked in favor of more precise usage. That is, when you are tempted to use the term 'intellectual property' use 'copyright,' 'patents,' 'trademarks,' or 'trade secrets' instead. Doing this would enable immediate grappling with the precise nature of the issue at hand–in each named domain there are separable legal and policy issues at play.

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    • Internet shaming

      By: Eric Winsberg

      The question is inevitably arising as to whether there is, at present, a phenomenon of internet shaming going on on the various blogs and other social media.   I think we should take seriously the concern that there is.   That's one thing I like a lot about this post by Simon Cabulea May.    He makes it perfectly clear what are and what aren't the issues that are worthy topics of discussion.     I would go further and say that nobody in the profession's moral character should be a topic of public discussion.*   What is a suitable topic for discussion is whether or not the profession as a whole believes it is being well-served by having Brian Leiter as its de facto spokesperson and the orchestrator of its de facto official ranking system. Or whether, contrarily, those things are harming the profession.  Whether or not he would admit it, Professor Leiter chose to fuse together for himself the roles of editing the PGR and being the de facto spokesperson for the profession.   And we members of the profession have the right to try to remove him from that role if we think it is harming the profession.  No viable theory of academic freedom guarantees him the right to maintain that role.   But we do all of ourselves a dis-service if we let the discussion wander away from that narrow topic and engage online in activities that legimate a concern about internet shaming.  

      *In cases, such as the ones we have seen recently, where members of the profession have been alleged to have acted in ways that would provide obvious evidence of bad character, my claim holds so long as bad acts that they are alleged to have engaged in are being addressed by the relevant agents in their relevant institutions.   I agree with Professor Leiter on this issue that not much is gained when the community piles on after the fact. 

       

    • Forgotten Republics of Political Theory

      The emergence of republicanism as a major stream in political theory and philosophy, as well as history of political ideas, since I suppose the 1980s, but since the late nineties for political philosophy in the normative Rawlsian style, is a highly welcome phenomenon from my point of view. That does not mean I have no criticisms. For example, it seems to me that much of it has gone a bit far in the direction of equating the active liberty of the citizen in republics of the past with a very equality oriented sense of distributive justice. Despite the historical consciousness that republicanism has helped to bring more into theoretical discussions, some areas of historically oriented relevant discussion have not been dealt with adequately so far. This particularly applies to Foucault, and his discussions of antiquity, which is a strange omission in that Quentin Skinner claims to have taken inspiration from Foucault, at least in questions of method.

      However, in the present post, I will focus on another issue, which is the narrow range of republics considered. The standard range is ancient Athens (sometimes compared with Sparta), Ancient Rome, Renaissance Florence (maybe compared with Venice), England in the era of the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth,  the political awakening of the British colonies in America, incorporating the foundation of the United States, and finally the French Revolution though that tends to be given less attention than the Anglo-American revolutions. Interest in Spinoza's political theory has not in my experience led to much consideration of the Dutch Revolt and the Dutch Republic, though the republican impulse has probably led to a bit more attention being paid than would otherwise be the case. 

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    • How much ranking do we (and our prospective students) really need?

      By: Eric Winsberg

       

      Here's how students in other disciplines apparently choose a PhD program (h/t Bryce Huebner)

      http://www.andyfugard.info/choose-a-phd-programme

       

      This strikes me as extremely good advice, and in the modern age of the information overload, a perfectly adequate method once a prospective graduate student knows where to start.   That suggests to me that all we really need, by way of "rankings," is a list of departments that have strengths in each of the sub-disciplines in philosophy.  (And perhaps, for some subdisciplines that seem to be badly fractured, like continental philosophy, there could be a separate list for each movement within the subdiscipline.)   Such a list could either be generated by a representative panel for each sub-discipline without too much fuss.  Or it could even be a wiki where departments could list themselves in any category they like.   On the second method, it might become necessary, for some of the more highly represented areas, for a panel to cull the list down to a manageable size, or to split it into two or three tiers.    What prospective graduate students really need, it seems to me, and not much more, is help generating a list of 12-15 schools to research given a particular area of interest.   They really do not need ordinal rankings.

       

      UPDATE:  In response to comments below, I concede that the link I provided does not provide terribly useful advice (in its details!) for American prospective students.   It does seem much more tailored for the UK.    Having said that, I think my main point still stands.    In the cases in which I have advised students on finding a graduate program, the PGR has primarily played the following sort of role:  we use it to collect a list of programs that are strong in the area the student is interested in, and then I give them several "homework assignments" on how to do futher research.   I tell them to look at placement; to read papers by the people who work in the area that they are interested in; to look at citati0n metrics; I give them a list of journals and presses that I think are strong in the area that they are interested in, and I tell them to look at CVs of scholars in their area of interest and to look for those presses and journals etc.   To the extent that ordinal rankings play any role in my advice, it is mostly as a predictor of how difficult it will be to get into the program in question–but I take it that's a feature of the PGR that is mostly self-fulfilling.

    • Placement Data News (Update)

      by Carolyn Dicey Jennings

      Over the past three years I have collected and reported on placement data for positions in academic philosophy. (Interested readers can find past posts here at New APPS under the "placement data" category, two of which have been updated with the new data, several posts at ProPhilosophy, or the very first post on placement at the Philosophy Smoker.) This year, placement data will be gathered, organized, and reported on by the following committee of volunteers (listed in alphabetical order):

      –Colin Cmiel 

      –Carolyn Dicey Jennings 

      –Jackson Kernion

      –Justin J. Lillge 

      –Justin Vlasits

      Over the next academic year, we aim to create a website, which will be parked at placementdata.com. This website will include a form for gathering data, a searchable database, and reports on placement data. Until that time, I am suspending updates to the Excel spreadsheet, which contains much of the data used in the past few years, plus the updates I have received over the past few months. (Many thanks to Justin Lillge for incorporating the bulk of these updates into the spreadsheet!) When the website is ready, departments will be able to update their placement data through an embeddable form. Stay tuned for these links in the coming months!

      Update:

      Marcus Arvan, of The Philosophers' Cocoon, had the idea of running a graduate student survey. This was something that the five of us had already talked about (and Justin Lillge had some preliminary work on this), so we have invited Marcus to join us in this project. He has posted s0me initial ideas here. Please do contribute to the discussion if you have insight!

    • Leiter “Fracas” in the Chronicle

      By: Eric Winsberg

      The story about Leiter and the PGR is covered in the CHE here.  I certainly hope that those who have been putting pressure on Leiter to step down from his Editorship of the PGR will find the remedy he proposes in the article insufficient and will keep up the pressure on him to step down.    

    • Attention and Conscious Perception

      by Carolyn Dicey Jennings

      The following ideas and arguments were central to my dissertation work, and are now published as an article in Philosophical Studies. I include them below in a much shortened format for those readers short on time, but high on interest (but hopefully not literally).

      The ultimate claim of this work is that top-down attention is necessary for conscious perception. (I argue elsewhere that attention is not necessary for conscious experience, in general.) That is, we might ask the question: what is the contribution of attention to perceptual experience? Within cognitive science, attention is known to contribute to the organization of sensory features into perceptual objects, or object-based organization. I argue something else: that attention enables the perceptual system to achieve the most fundamental form of perceptual organization: subject-based organization. That is, I argue that subject-based organization is brought about and maintained through top-down attention. Thus, top-down attention is necessary for conscious perception in so far as it is necessary for bringing about and maintaining the subject-based organization of perceptual experience.

      So what is "Subject-Based Organization"?

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    • Transferability as the epistemic value of deliberation

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      Today my research group in Groningen (with the illustrious online participation of Tony Booth, beaming in from the UK) held a seminar session where we discussed Fabienne Peter’s 2013 paper ‘The procedural epistemic value of deliberation’. It is a very interesting paper, which defends the view that deliberation has not only epistemic value (as opposed to ‘merely’ ethical, practical value), but also that it has procedural epistemic value (as the title suggests), as opposed to ‘merely’ instrumental value. I'll argue here that I agree with the thesis, but not for the reasons offered by Peter in her paper.

      The paper begins with the following observation:

      An important question one can ask about collective deliberation is whether it increases or decreases the accuracy of the beliefs of the participants. But this instrumental approach, which only looks at the outcome of deliberation, does not exhaustively account for the epistemic value that deliberation might have. (Peters 2013, 1253) 

      One way to spell out this idea is the following: suppose there were two knowledge-producing procedures with the exact same accuracy, i.e. which would produce the same amount of true beliefs and avoid the same amount of false beliefs. Moreover, procedure D involves deliberation, while procedure O relies entirely on an oracle, for example. If we can show that procedure D is superior to procedure O on purely epistemic grounds, then we can establish that deliberation has procedural epistemic value, rather than merely instrumental epistemic value (i.e. increase accuracy).

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    • Letting The Feminists Know What Time It Is

      By: Samir Chopra

      A couple of years ago, in a post commenting on Virginia Held's Sprague and Taylor Lecture at Brooklyn College, I wrote:

      My association with her goes back some twenty years, when I first began my graduate studies in philosophy as a non-matriculate student at the CUNY Graduate Center [in the fall of 1992]. My first class was ‘Social and Political Philosophy,’ taught by Professor Held. [During our first class meeting] on her reading list, I saw four unfamiliar names: Carole Pateman, Susan Okin, Catherine MacKinnon and Patricia Smith. Who were these, I wondered, and what did they have to do with the ‘public-private distinction’ (the subtitle Virginia had added to ‘Social and Political Philosophy’)? As we were introduced to the syllabus, Professor Held skillfully handled some questions: Why were these readings on the list? Why not the usual suspects? I was impressed, of course, by her deft location of feminist philosophy in our canon and its importance in exploring the public-private distinction, but I was even more impressed by the grace and firmness that she displayed in dealing with contentious student interlocutors.

      I want to add a little more detail to this story–as well as a little follow-up; your mileage may vary with regards to your assessment of the topicality or relevance of these embellishments.

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