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    • ACA Rules Defining U.S. Part-Time College Instructor Workload Issued

      [Update: I didn't realize that these rules (and the story) are acutally seveal months old when I posted this. That said, we haven't as far as I know discussed them here, so I'll leave the post up to facilitate that.]

      There has been talk for some time suggesting that the Affordable Care Act might have the effect of forcing colleges and universities in the United States to start providing health-care to many, or even all of their part time instructors.  For some, this has seemed like a very promising possibility, since it might alter (perhaps radically) the fiscal calculus that has tilted in favor of ever-increasing use part-time instructors at most American institutions.  

      Corresponding to this, there have also been fears among those working as traditional, half-time adjuncts and even more those working those who had full or nearly full time contingent contracts that their courses would be cut or their positions eliminated.  Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, we all want adjunctification to end; but if the effect of destabilization were simply to force all adjunct positions to be maximally precarious, that would, at least in the short term, be movement in exactly the wrong direction. 

      Accordingly, people have been waiting anxiously for the Obama administration to issue their rules for calculating how many 'hours' part-time instructors are actually working for the purposes of determining their eligibility for ACA.  

      They're out.  And the best short characterization of them that I can think of is that the administration has imposed a set of rules that effectively neutralize any possibility that ACA will significantly affect the way universities use adjunct labor.  Details and a few remarks below

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    • On the utter futility of the politics of identity and difference

      Yesterday's post about the the extent that mainstream feminist thinking is implicated in trans exclusinary radical feminism generated some great comments. In particular, my impression that Women and Gender theorists overwhelmingly defined gender differences as being in the contingent realm of culture and sex differences as being in the realm of nomic necessity was mistaken. However, nobody took up the main point I was trying to make (and it should be clear that no one has an obligation to do so) so I'll try to frame it more generally.

      First, with respect to gender, it's not enough to problematize the gender/sex distinction merely by arguing that sexual difference itself is imbued with cultural and epigenetic factors. Has the debate gone beyond that sort of generic culturally relativist move? It was not clear from the comments. The challenge by Serano and Garcia is in part from the other direction; denying that aspects of gender difference are in the realm of nomic necessity leads to other forms of oppression. From Sullivan's post, the denial of this by many feminist activists involves systematically ignoring or dismissing the testimony of many trans people, and this suppression accounts for much of the acrimony between TERFs and transgender people.

      Second, the gender/sex issue wasn't a little bit orthogonal to the problem I tried to pose, which was that much feminist theory (at least the stuff I studied seven years ago) wasn't able to navigate a Scylla and Charibdis between politics of identity and difference. Serano and Garcia argue that even recent feminist theorists (who are aware of the danger) end up denigrating femininity and telling women that they should have traditionally masculine traits. But if the alternative is Carol Gilligan or Glover type theory, no thanks. Glover critiques the "final girl" in horror movies (the last possible victim who survives and kills the killer) as a "male adolescent in drag" in part because the final girl has "masculine" attributes such as planning and use of reason. As far as infantalizing condescension goes, this is about on par with pesticide companies giving pink teddy bears to women with breast cancer.

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    • Notes on the History of Irony

       Recent research has led me to look at the role of irony in aesthetics and philosophy. My interest was most immediately stimulated by section 408 of Vico’s New Science, which seems to me to point towards the role of irony and literary aesthetics in the Jena Romantics and Kierkegaard. Vico does so by referring to the simultaneous emergence of philosophical reflection and consciousness of irony in the Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

      The idea of irony is not directly addressed much by Vico, but his approach needs to be grasped to understand his full argument about the significance of the ‘persona’ as object of Roman law (that is the creation of a personality in law distinct from ‘life’ personality). The reading great significance into brief passages of Vico in terms of his overall argument and the resonance of his work with later thought, is inevitable given the nature of his argumentation and the structural oddities of the New Science. 

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    • Can feminism avoid being trans exclusionary?

      A few months ago some of us discussed Julia Serano's book Whipping Girl, which argues that a lot of mainstream feminism ironically enforces the Aristotelian view that masculinity is healthy and normal and femininity is artificial and harmful. The chapter on gender in Tristan Garcia's Form and Object makes a similar argument with respect to some academic queer theorists who (according to Garcia) end up excoriating people who don't cowboy up and take responsibility for their own gender.

      If there is a problem here it has to do with a calim that is taken to be almost analytically true in many Women and Gender's Studies classes. It goes like this. The division of sexes is a biological notion, and hence tied up with nomic necessity in some manner, while gender division is merely cultural, and hence highly variable and contingent. But the biology doesn't really support the presupposed views about biological sex (there are more than two genetic sexes, and the leap from genetic to genital sex requires at the very least lots of epigenetic factors we don't understand, and there are more than two genital sexes). And the view of gender as entirely cultural involves systematically ignoring what a lot of transgender people such as Juliana Serano have to say about their experience (and perhaps some of the relevant biology as well).

      A recent post by Andrew Sullivan chronicles how this debate has gone beyond academia and is actually become poisonous in the activist community, pitting trans exclusionary radical feminist ("TERF") activists against transgender activists.

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    • Google tipped off Police that a man’s email contained child pornography.

      Article here.

      Discuss.

    • Michelle Foucault

      You can find here the latest iteration of quotes from a philosopher cleverly juxtaposed with incongruous pictures.

      I think maybe that philosophers divide into those whose prose works well for this kind of thing and those for whom it doesn't. Anything even slightly portentous works, and if you are skilfull in choice of images, I think that anything with technical vocabulary would probably be ripe, but the result would be funny for different reasons.

      Some philosophers' work can be illustrated in a non-ironic way. Peter Singer once said that the pictures in his animal cruelty book convinced a lot more people than the actual arguments. Probably any non-trivial work of ethics could benefit from this kind of illustration. And, finally, visual artists have been appropriating philosophical sentences for decades. I forget the guy who put a sentence from Davidson next to all of his paintings (I can't find this because there is a guy who does watercolors of flowers also named Donald Davidson). It was cool stuff. More recently (due in part to the labors of the Rays, Negerestani and Brassier, as well as Armen Avinessian and Graham Harman) lots of artists are doing things with respect to Speculative Realism.

      I wonder what it is about philosophy such that our sentences work so well in conjunction with pictures, both in ironic contraposition and non-ironically. In any case, we should probably be happy to provide the service.

    • S*%# Philosophy Professors Say (hat-tip Joshua Heller w.r.t. The Tubes)

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      Justin Weinberg has a nice post and discussion at the dailynous of the old story that people on airplanes ask us for our sayings (it's variously attributed, twenty-five or so years ago Charles Hartshorne told me it happened to him). It was kind of a cool synchronicity that on the same day I read Weinberg's post, I discovered this? There's not that much wisdom among them, but some are pretty funny. Examples:

      “Logicians love to confuse people, just for the sake of getting clear on logic.”

      — Logic professor

      “Let me tell you about how different philosophy classes were in the ’60’s. I had a Norwegian philosophy professor at Berkeley who, one day, had our class take a walk through San Francisco and climb up a rope onto a cliff. Then we sat at his feet while he read from ‘Being and Time’.”

      — Philosophy of Mind professor

      “I always laughed at the honor pledge because it seems like that would be the first thing you would lie about.”

      — Ethics professor

      “This is at least how it works for human beings. I don’t know how it works for gods—I’ve never been one and I don’t know any.”

      — Philosophy of Mind professor

      Good stuff! Joe Bob says check it out.

    • Ferraris on Strawson and a Heidegger on Kant

      Nice NDPR review here by Riccardo Pozzo of Maurizio Ferraris' Goodbye Kant!: What Still Stands of the Critique of Pure Reason. According to Pozzo, the book is actually a best-seller in Italy, which is pretty cool. There's also this very funny passage (have to read it through to the end):

      For Ferraris, given that "ontology includes everything that is in heaven and earth, the realm of objects that are available to experience," which makes up the first main topic of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and given that "metaphysics deals with what goes beyond or transcends [experience]," which makes up the second main topic of the book, it does indeed make sense to speak of Kant's metaphysics and ontology (p. 20). In fact, "the reader of the Analytic has before him Kant's ontology, a work of construction and not of destruction" (p. 21). Ferraris follows suit with the two otherwise opposed readings of Kant by Strawson and Heidegger, with Strawson calling for a metaphysics of experience and Heidegger for an analysis of finite human being, "which amounts" — Ferraris succinctly notes — "to the same thing, said with more passion" (p. 21). 

      Ferraris himself is rapidly becoming one of the key figures in the movement in continental philosophy sometimes called "the new realism" or "back to metaphysics." His English language wikipedia page is pretty informative as far as these things go. In light of the recent reappraisal of Derrida by people such as Paul Livingston, Martin Hagglund, Graham Priest, and Debbie Goldgaber (following earlier work by people such as Sam Wheeler, and to some extent contraposed by Lee Braver's important interpretation of Derrida) it's interesting that Ferraris's early work is influenced by, and often about, Derrida. The wikipedia page (take with a grain of salt) says that his new realism comes in part by systematizing Vattimo and Derrida. A bunch of his stuff is coming out in English over the next few years. It will be fun to follow it.

       

    • Adam Kotsko provides helpful feedback to Derrida

      This is very funny. In the spirit of Derrida responding to Searle, I'll just go ahead and fully exerpt Kotsko's annotated version of the first two paragraphs of "Structure, Sign, and Play:"

      Perhaps [weasel-word!] something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event,” if this loaded word [loaded according to whom?] did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function [is this really its only function?] of structural–or structuralist–thought [which is it?] to reduce or to suspect [again, which?]. But let me use the word “event” anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling [why?  Unpack this].

      It would be easy enough to show [then show it!  This is a big generalization that you never support!] that the concept of structure and even the word “structure” itself are as old as the episteme [is this a reference to Foucault?  In that case, cite]–that is to say, as old as western science and western philosophy [this is a big claim, citation?]–and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the episteme plunges to gather them together once more, making them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement [unclear — I think I see what you're getting at, but it could be expanded and unpacked a bit more]. Nevertheless, up until the event which I wish to mark out and define [maybe you should lead off with what this event is supposed to be, rather than making the reader wait? I'm already losing the thread], structure–or rather the structurality of structure–although it has always [careful with these generalizations] been involved, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence [this feels jargony to me], a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure–one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure–but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure [what does this mean?  Unpack]. No doubt [this does not seem as immediately obvious to me] that by orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself [this seems a bit overblown — maybe nuance?].

      I think with the very best satire there is always instability concerning the target. Moreover, as Kotsko's effort makes clear, a measure of how ideological you are might be the extent to which you fail to realize this. Here one could with equal justification view Kotsko as satirizing either Derrida or his detractors. The inability to see it as both would be a clear example of the way that ideological commitments trump aesthetic ones. Not that that's always a bad thing. The early Nietzsche was, after all, wrong about the primacy of aesthetic norms over moral ones. I do, however, wonder what the final draft of The Birth of Tragedy would have read like if he'd turned it in to me for comment.

    • SPEP program on-line

      The program for the up and coming SPEP conference in New Orleans* is on-line here.

      Compared to the last two years, Badiou and German Idealism are very well represented this year. Cool stuff! 

      I'm pouring a little bit of rum** on the ground every night in the hope that it will propitiate whatever gods might have some say with respect to hurricanes. Two years ago a pretty nasty one walloped the East Coast during SPEP.

      [Notes:

      *Which is a fun place, if you dutifully consult your Fodor's*** guide. The last Central APA in New Orleans was kind of a depressing affair during the evening talk times. It was a little bit like the hotel in The Shining, symmetrical framing and all.

      **I'm not really a pagan, but hurricanes do kind of bring that out in you. It's not just the kind of waving-with-your-arms-to-get-the-already-released-bowling-ball-to-move type superstition. It's also that every time one misses Baton Rouge, my relief at not being hit myself substantially outweighs my upset for those currently suffering elsewhere. It's not a very Christian attitude. This beign said, anyone but a saint who has lived through one of those things understands the sentiment. Now I'm going to get back to my Voltaire. . .

      ***Not that Fodor, this is SPEP after all.****

      ****As much as I miss discussions of innateness, languages of thought, semantic atomism, anti-evolution, etc. at SPEP, it is a bit of a relief not to have to worry about feeling like a jerk for never laughing whenever various of Fodor's pets and older female family members are jokingly mentioned.]