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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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    • The PGR board letter, and a different perspective

      Many of you will have seen the following Facebook update posted by both David Chalmers and Jason Stanley (it’s astonishing how events in the philosophy profession unfold over at Facebook!):

      Over the past day or so, 24 members of the advisory board of the Philosophical Gourmet Report have signed a letter saying that they value the extraordinary service that Leiter has provided with the PGR, and that they now urge him to turn over the PGR to new management. The letter (drafted by David Chalmers, Jonathan Schaffer, Susanna Siegel, and Jason Stanley) has been delivered to Brian Leiter, who received it with good grace. We are in the process of collecting more signatures, and will soon make the letter public.

      At this point, this is pretty much the best outcome anyone could hope for, in my opinion. It is now a matter of waiting to see how the situation will further unfold, but should Leiter agree to step down, a PGR led by a number of people from the current board seems like a very promising solution. Brian Weatherson weights in with some ideas/suggestions, and mentions in particular Leiter’s treatment of Linda Martín Alcoff a few years ago, which seems not to have been on the radar enough in recent discussions. (Every time I thought of the possibility of BL throwing some legalese at me on account of my post suggesting he step down from the PGR, I reassured myself that he had said similar things before about others, but with a different tone altogether.) 

      However, there is another aspect of Brian Leiter’s behavior that seems worth noting. I’ve been contacted by a graduate student at Chicago offering the following testimony:

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    • What information should prospective graduate students get?

      There have been lots of discussions on the PGR (e.g., here), especially on its leader, Brian Leiter, including a poll on whether the of 2014 should be produced. Regardless of the outcome of this, I think we can already start considering alternative ways, independent of the PGR, to provide information for prospective philosophy graduate students. 

      1. Ideally, such information should should not be primarily about rankings of quality. Quality is a complex concept that is vulnerable to biases and enforcing the status quo.  We should rather provide prospective grad students with clear measures of placement rates and places where they could study the topic of their choice. Perhaps any type of ranking will be problematic. We could just provide descriptive info on a wide range of topics, e.g., where are places to study experimental philosophy, continental French etc. One can give that info *without* giving an overall rank of perceived quality. 
      2. The methodology by which placement rates are made and by which assessments of strengths within departments are made should be empirically informed by the social sciences e.g., in its selection of experts who make these assessments
      3. Collecting and dessiminating this information shouldn't be in the hands of one individual but shared responsibility. I originally thought it was something the APA, or perhaps a task force consisting of people from the APA, the AAP etc could do, but I am now not so sure whether this is a good idea. PhilPapers+ seems like a good place to host the information, especially given that prospective graduate students will already be familiar with PhilPapers
      4. It would be nice to expand information for prospective graduate students to non-Anglosaxon departments. There are lots of grad students outside the English-speaking world who could benefit from lists of placement records and specializations of faculty members outside the US, UK etc.