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    • In Praise Of Alan Watts And ‘Popularizers’

      By: Samir Chopra

      I have a confession to make: I enjoy reading Alan Watts' books. This simple statement of one of my reading pleasures, this revelation of one of my tastes in books and intellectual pursuits, shouldn't need to be a confession, a term that conjures up visions of sin and repentance and shame. But it is, a veritable coming out of the philosophical closet.

      You see, I'm a 'professional philosopher.' I teach philosophy for a living; I write books on philosophy. Sometimes people refer to me as a 'philosophy professor', sometimes they even call me–blush!–a 'philosopher.'  I'm supposed to be 'doing' serious philosophy,' reading and writing rigorous philosophy; the works of someone most commonly described as a 'popularizer' do not appear to make the cut. Even worse, not only was Watts thus a panderer to the masses, but he wrote about supposedly dreamy, insubstantial, woolly headed, mystical philosophies. An analytical philosopher would be an idiot to read him. Keep it under wraps, son.

      To be sure, I have read some original works in the areas that Watts is most known for popularizing: Zen Buddhism, Daoism, and Indian philosophy–especially that of the non-dualist Vedanta. I have even taught an upper-tier core class on Philosophies of India and China–my class covered the Vedas, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism. My philosophical training enables me to grapple with the substantial metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and political issues these writings so richly engage with. But I'm not a specialized scholar in these domains, and hardly ever read modern academic writing that tackles their areas of ongoing disputation and analysis. My current areas of interest–legal theory, pragmatism, Nietzsche–and my current distractions and diversions–mainly the politics of cricket–take up most of my time and intellectual energy.

      So I enjoy reading Watts when I can. I always have. He was erudite, he wrote clearly and passionately, and if you'll indulge me just for a second, I would even describe him as 'wise.' He tackles issues that are at the core of philosophical questioning and inquiry and attitudes; he often offers quite lucid insights into matters that emotionally resonate with me. Perhaps I do not have the background necessary with which to evaluate his claims about Zen Buddhism and the Vedanta; those more specialized in those domains have often contested his readings and explications. (Merely being of Indian origin does not, unfortunately, make me an expert on Indian philosophy.) But from my limited perspective, and with an acknowledgment of some expressions of only partial comprehension, and sometimes even disagreement, with his writings, I would venture that I did not find him guilty of too many philosophical sins. (For instance, his 'The Language of Metaphysical Experience' is a very clear piece of writing; this was first published in 1953 in The Journal of Religious Thought and later reprinted in Become What You Are (Shambhala Classics.)) 

      I do not know if Watts ever featured on philosophy reading lists at universities; my guess is not. He certainly is unlikely to in the future; he is dated now, I think. Perhaps only ageing hippies–dunno if I qualify as one–continue to read him. But I think it would be a shame if our fastidiousness about a certain kind of professional philosophical hygiene were to prevent us from approaching writings like his–that is, those who set themselves to expounding for the plebes–with less than an open mind.

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

    • Maybe the Best Rankings Are No Rankings At All

      by Ed Kazarian
       
      In the course of a discussion on Facebook begun by a colleague’s thoughtful and nuanced reflection on the kind of rankings we might want to have in the discipline, I was moved to offer an objection to the idea of ranking departments at all. I think it stands outside that particular discussion, so I’d like to reproduce it here.
       
      I have, basically, two reasons for thinking that the practice of ranking departments is unwise and likely to be harmful:  
      1) Rankings devalue the work of an awful lot of folks and, perhaps more importantly, provide the various agents of forces within the institution that may be hostile to the discipline (and to the humanities more broadly) a ready excuse to claim that most philosophy departments at US universities (or at least at research universities) aren’t worth the investment they require to maintain. Given the way we have seen some such people abuse metrics of any sort (no matter how questionable said metrics might be), I find it difficult to understand why we insist on producing one ourselves.
       
      2) It should be evident by now that the problem of determining acceptable ranking criteria in a pluralistic discipline is tremendously fraught and has proven to be very resistant to a solution that is broadly acceptable. 
      Instead of rankings, I think we should be moving towards a model where we collect and maintain as much up to date information about the various programs out there as possible. The discussion I mentioned above had already produced some really wonderful thoughts on what such a ‘database’ of programs might contain, and how it would benefit the various constituencies in the philosophical community. Indeed, as Justin Weinberg notes in one of his early posts at Daily Nous, part of what has been very valuable about Brian Leiter’s effort is that it has facilitated the broad circulation of key information about the profession that had previously been difficult to access for many people, including prospective students. Surely that sort of transparency is something we want, no matter what else happens going forward, to preserve and enhance—and which the various responsible parties in the profession should be working hard to foster. 

    • Inappropriate correspondence — to say the least!

      Many readers will have seen this already, but it needs to be widely shared and viewed: David Velleman and Sally Haslanger have been collecting instances of Brian Leiter threatening people with legal action, among other kinds of intimidating tactics, in private correspondence. Here are some examples. (My understanding is that there are more such examples, which may eventually be posted as well.) These are people he disagrees with on a number of issues, but the level of aggressiveness in his responses is astonishing, shocking, and unacceptable in a professional context (or any context, for that matter).

      (This is why my comment to his recent post on having been threatened with legal action only once in his blogging career was: the question is not how many times he was threatened with legal action; the question is how many times *he* threatened others with legal action. Answer: many times, from the looks of it.)

      The emails speak for themselves; no further comment is required. At the very least, I think this calls for those involved with the PGR in various capacities (board members, evaluators) to reassess their involvement.

      UPDATE (09/24): there is now a statement in support of Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins signed by her colleagues at UBC and many colleagues elsewhere (myself included).

    • RFID Tags and Commodification

      by Gordon Hull

      In a recent post, and by way of an important paper by Katherine Hayles, I suggested that “insofar as RFID chips negotiate the boundary between informatics and objects, and transitions between those, they should be studied as sites for the primitive accumulation of capital.  That is, they are places where objects can become subsumed into capitalist market structures, while being dispossessed (following David Harvey's terminology) of whatever value they might have had before.”  In the comments, Ed Kazarian suggested that the analysis also needs to think about the role of circulation and the ways that the wide diffusion of RFID tags facilitate the smooth circulation of commodities with the sorts of supply chain management techniques that characterize “just in time” capitalism. Here, I want to try to further that analysis a step or two, in part by complicating the sense in which I was using subsumption.

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    • The Unread Reading

       By: Samir Chopra

      In The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Žižek says:

      All too often, when we love somebody, we don't accept him or her as what the person effectively is. We accept him or her insofar as this person fits the co-ordinates of our fantasy. We misidentify, wrongly identify him or her, which is why, when we discover that we were wrong, love can quickly turn into violence. There is nothing more dangerous, more lethal for the loved person than to be loved, as it were, for not what he or she is, but for fitting the ideal.

      For some reason, these lines occurred to me shortly after I posted the following irate status on Facebook yesterday:

      Teaching honeymoon over. Walked out of class today with 25 minutes still left on the clock. 3 out of 33 students had bothered to do the reading. I struggled for as long as I could, and then told them I couldn't teach them given their failure to do the reading, that I'd see them next week.

      A stream of eminently sensible suggestions followed: assign short quizzes, do 'cold-calling,' ask students to do oral presentations in class, write response papers, write online in a blog or forum; and so on. I've tried all of these at one point or the other in my teaching career. (I can also add to this list: I have asked students to bring in marked-up passages from the text, which are supposed to serve as the basis for class discussion.) I have not been able to sustain any of them; most of these strategies, if not all of them, fall by the way-side during a semester. Perhaps I grow exhausted; perhaps the students do. Nothing works quite as well as a few students–half-dozen, say, in a class of twenty–doing the readings and coming to class prepared to hold forth on anything that caught their fancy. (In case you are wondering. the assigned reading was the first eighty pages of A Canticle For Leibowitz for my Philosophical Issues in Literature class.)

      Perhaps my struggles with The Problem of the Unread Reading Assignment are mine alone. Perhaps I am in the grip of an unshakable, untenable, fantastic, conception of my students: they do the readings because they have found the expressed rationale for doing so–the percentage of the class grade that depends on class participation, the intrinsic interest of the text, the intellectual value of close reading and analyses of philosophical material, and so on–to be sufficiently compelling; they are provoked, vexed, amused, irritated, and otherwise stimulated by the assigned readings and seek outlets through which they can express their responses; the classroom, populated by their fellow students, who have read the same material as them, and a teacher, who has promised to discuss it with them, seems like an ideal venue to do so.

      All too often, I impose this vision upon an uncooperative reality and find myself disappointed. You may be right in considering this a not particularly intelligent response, but here, sadly, as in too many places elsewhere, I find myself the slave of emotion, not reason.

      So if there is a 'violence' here, it is always inwardly directed: a crumpling of my resolve to continue teaching,  a paralyzing, seething, frustration that undermines my self-esteem and sparks dissonance about my decision to have ever chosen a path I seem eminently unsuited for.

      Of course, this is only the beginning of the semester, so it's too early to step off the road; for now, it's back into the breach, forewarned and forearmed.

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

    • Review of T. Parsons’ Articulating Medieval Logic

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      (Cross-posted at M-Phi)

      I was asked to write a review of Terry Parsons' Articulating Medieval Logic for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. This is what I've come up with so far. Comments welcome!

      ===================================

       Scholars working on (Latin) medieval logic can be viewed as populating a spectrum. At one extremity are those who adopt a purely historical and textual approach to the material: they are the ones who produce the invaluable modern editions of important texts, without which the field would to a great extent simply not exist; they also typically seek to place the doctrines presented in the texts in a broader historical context. At the other extremity are those who study the medieval theories first and foremost from the point of view of modern philosophical and logical concerns; various techniques of formalization are then employed to ‘translate’ the medieval theories into something more intelligible to the modern non-historian philosopher. Between the two extremes one encounters a variety of positions. (Notice that one and the same scholar can at times wear the historian’s hat, and at other times the systematic philosopher’s hat.) For those adopting one of the many intermediary positions, life can be hard at times: when trying to combine the two paradigms, these scholars sometimes end up displeasing everyone (speaking from personal experience).
       
      Terence Parsons’ Articulating Medieval Logic occupies one of these intermediate positions, but very close to the second extremity; indeed, it represents the daring attempt to combine the author’s expertise in natural language semantics, linguistics, and modern philosophy with his interest in medieval logical theories (which arose in particular from his decade-long collaboration with Calvin Normore, to whom the book is dedicated). For scholars of Latin medieval logic, the fact that such a distinguished expert in contemporary philosophy and linguistics became interested in these medieval theories only confirms what we’ve known all along: medieval logical theories have intrinsic systematic interest; they are not only curious museum pieces.
       
      Despite not being the first to employ modern logical techniques to analyze medieval theories, Parsons' approach is quite unique (one might even say idiosyncratic). It seems fair to say that nobody has ever before attempted to achieve what he wants to achieve with this book. A passage from the book’s Introduction is quite revealing with respect to its goals:
       

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    • Who submits to top general philosophy journals?

      In a recent survey, I asked philosophers about their submissions to journals, to get a sense of what journals people submit to and also what factors might influence their decisions on where to submit papers. Specifically, I wanted to know how frequently people submit their work to the top 5 journals in philosophy, which are usually regarded (according to polls) as the best journals in the field: Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Mind, Noûs and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Increasingly, publications in these journals are regarded as a marker of excellence. 

      However, there are several hurdles to getting published in the top 5. The acceptance rates are forbidding (I don’t have exact numbers, but journals in the top-20 that have published acceptance rates as low as 5%, (e.g., Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Canadian Journal of Philosophy). Presumably, the acceptance rates in the top-5 are lower still, making them more difficult to get into than Science or Nature. Also, review times at some of these journals tends to be longer than the standard 3 months. Those journals that are quicker close submissions for half the year, and unfortunately, they do so concurrently (otherwise, so a senior philosopher pointed out to me, they wouldn’t have the lower submission rates they are aiming for).

      251 philosophers completed the survey. Below the fold is a summary of some results.  I asked respondents to say how many papers they submitted to top-5 journals and any refereed journal over the past year (i.e., since September 2013).

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    • The MacArthur Drought in Philosophy

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      See here.  The last MacArthur “genius” fellowship awarded to someone they classified as philosopher was in 1993.

      On the whole, scholars outside of philosophy tend, I think, not to see much value in what most professional philosophers do.  The MacArthur drought is one reflection and measure of that.

      Not that prizes matter.  Sheesh.  We’re too busy thinking about important stuff like whether the external world exists (82% of target faculty agree that it does).  The MacArthur folks probably think that climate change is a more important topic.  But if the external world doesn’t exist then the climate can’t change, can it now?  So there!

      [Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind]

    • Philosophy’s Western Bias and What Can Be Done About It

      Guest post by Christian Coseru

      One may be forgiven for thinking, on reading Brian Leiter's diatribe against identity politics and the danger it poses for academic philosophy, that there is a swell in 'consumer demand' for expanding the philosophy curriculum in questionable directions and for the wrong reasons. To clarify: the 'consumer' in this case is graduate students dissatisfied with the lack on engagement on the part of Anglo-American philosophers with non-Western philosophical traditions. Or so the story goes.

      So Leiter asks: "should we really add East Asian philosophers to the curriculum to satisfy the consumer demands of Asian students rather than because these philosophers are interesting and important in their own right?"

      The reality is that there is no such large-scale demand, certainly not in top graduate programs, because one could not have gotten in by announcing one's intention of working in Indian or Chinese philosophy. That is not to deny that there hasn't been talk of opening up the discipline to non-Western traditions and perspectives (more on this below). But even the advocates don't think it can be that easily accomplished (not, at least, through curricular reform alone). Rather, the sense is that some change in the demographics of philosophy departments would have to take place for cross-cultural philosophical reflection to become the norm. Alas, we are a long way from that.

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    • Changing Philosophical Career Paths

      By: Samir Chopra

      I began my academic philosophy career as a 'logician.' I wrote a dissertation on belief revision, and was advised by a brilliant logician, Rohit Parikh, someone equally comfortable in the departments of computer science, philosophy and mathematics. Belief revision (or 'theory change' if you prefer) is a topic of interest to mathematicians, logicians, and computer scientists. Because of the last-named demographic, I was able to apply for, and be awarded, a post-doctoral fellowship with a logics for artificial intelligence group in Sydney, Australia. (In my two years on the philosophy job market, I sent out one hundred and fourteen applications, and scored precisely zero interviews. My visits to the APA General Meeting in 1999 and 2001 were among the most dispiriting experiences of my life; I have never attended that forum again. The scars run too deep.)

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