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    • Disabled Scholars at Conferences

      Shelley Tremain, the philosopher of disability, brought my attention to a recent article in the CHE entitled Indifference Toward Disabled Scholars, Especially at Conferences, Troubles a Disabilities Scholar .* In it, bioethicist William Peace details a "nightmare" he experience as a disabled scholar trying to attend a conference.

      Peace also blogged about the experience here.

      Tremain offers the following commentary:

      ——-
      In my article "Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability" (https://independent.academia.edu/ShelleyTremain), I offered some details about ways in which the APA fails to treat disabled philosophers equally and promote our status within the discipline and profession. A recent petition that I and others circulated was motivated by this neglect. Some of the measures that the APA fails to take on our behalf concern the lack of information about disability (e.g., how to make conferences accessible, what APA chairs and presenters should do to make divisional meetings accessible, etc.) on the newly-furbished and inaccessible APA website. A recent conference on philosophy of disability at Syracuse University (at which all three APA disability representatives presented) demonstrates the impact that the APA's failure to provide leadership in this regard has throughout the profession. 
       

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    • Chelsea Manning on limits on Press Freedom during the Iraq war

      and its role in the roots of the current crisis, here.

       

      "If you were following the news during the March 2010 elections in Iraq, you might remember that the American press was flooded with stories declaring the elections a success, complete with upbeat anecdotes and photographs of Iraqi women proudly displaying their ink-stained fingers. The subtext was that United States military operations had succeeded in creating a stable and democratic Iraq.

      Those of us stationed there were acutely aware of a more complicated reality.

       

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    • World Cup thread!

      Here is a thread for people dying to discuss the World Cup with other philosophers!     I'll kick us off with these beautiful animations in the NYT explaining how the Dutch beat the Spanish so handily.

       

      Post your predictions, comments on past games, etc here.   If discussions get lively, I'll open up new threads as the tournament progresses.

    • The Future of the European Polity II: Institutions (part one)

      I've ended up writing two posts worth of material on European Union Institutions, so there will be a second part to this post, itself part of a series of posts on the direction of the EU. 

      The European Union has got caught up in a strange mix of technocratic centralisation, inter-state politics, and federal political institutions, which is not a satisfactory form of federalism, or confederalism, or consociationism, or whatever transnational  or interstate political structure one might believe best describes the European Union now, or what it should become. The reasons for this mix are themselves a mix of shifting compromises over  time and the belief of Jean Monnet and other 'Founding Fathers' of the European Union, that European politics could follow on from 'institutionalisation', that is the formation of European institutions with economic and 'technocratic' functions that are somewhat below the horizon of everyday political awareness. This began with fostering trade between France and Germany in the post-war period, bringing great economic and political benefits at that time. The time has come for more explicit politics, including an acceptance that integrationist schemes must be abandoned if lacking political support from citizens of the European Union. 

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    • Does taking pictures sully our memories?

      I live very close to Port Meadow, one of the largest meadows of open common land in the UK, already in existence in the 10th century, and mentioned in the Domesday book in 1086. I saw my first-ever live, wild oriole there. The land has been never ploughed, so it is possible to discern outlines of older archaeological remains, some going back to the Bronze Age. The consistent management of the land makes the changes predictable: it turns into a lake in winter, is sprinkled with buttercups this time of year (see pictures below the fold – both are taken at about the same place, but one in May and the other in November), and looks mysterious and misty in the fall. Whenever I walk on Port Meadow I take my camera, anxious to preserve any beautiful view that falls on my retina, to preserve it for future memories. And, like many other parents, I take dozens of pictures of my growing children. Recently, I saw an NPR piece (no author given) that took issue with this tendency to want to preserve pictures for future memory.

      The article launches a two-pronged attack against pictures. First, by worrying about capturing the moment, we lose the transience and beauty of the moment and enjoy it less. Second, the article cites psychological evidence that shows that people actually remember fewer objects during a museum visit if they were allowed to take photos of them, compared to when they only were allowed to observe them. The phenomenon is known as the photo-taking-impairment effect. Linda Henkel, who discovered the effect, says: "Any time…we count on these external memory devices, we're taking away from the kind of mental cognitive processing that might help us actually remember that stuff on our own." 

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    • APA prizes announced

      here

      (thanks to Amy Ferrer for the heads-up!) 

      Congratulations to Andrew Bacon, Sally Haslanger, William Lycan, Larry May, and my co-editor, Elisabeth Lloyd!

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘City of Samba’

      Thanks to fellow Brazilian logician Valeria de Paiva, I cam across this amazing video, ‘City of Samba’, created by the multimedia artists Jarbas Agnelli and Keith Loutit. The city of samba is, of course, Rio de Janeiro, a city that is perennially beautiful no matter how you look at it; but through the tilt shift lenses of the artists, it becomes frankly supernatural. The music is also specially composed by Jarbas Agnelli, using non-percussion instruments to recreate the magical drumming of a samba school. (Here is a video where he explains the creative process.)

      Many of you may by now be a bit fed-up with the World Cup-induced Brazil frenzy, but I assure you that this video will blow your mind even if you are suffering from Brazil-fatigue.

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    • Job Placement 2011-2014: Overview on Gender

      I have data on 715 candidates who have been placed in tenure-track, postdoctoral, VAP, or instructor positions between late 2011 and mid 2014 (ending today), drawn from ProPhilosophy (2011-2012 and 2012-2013) and PhilAppointments (2013-2014). I aim to make the spreadsheet with this data available by around July 1st (I will add any new data available by that date). Until then, I will report some initial findings, starting with gender.

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    • 164th Philosopher’s Carnival

       
      Lots of cool links presented in a fun way by Eric Schwitzgebel.

    • What are the bounds of toleration in a academic institution? (Sam Clark comments)

      In the thread about the Nietzsche club affair, Sam Clark of Lancaster University posted a comment that I think is worthy of discussion:

      ————

      Let me disclaim any ambition to adjudicate this particular case, about which I know next to nothing, and focus on the issues of principle that might apply to it.

      [Let's call PL the position]  that harm or the threat of harm is a necessary condition of our using power to interfere with speech, discussion, public meeting, political organization, or political recruitment.

      I have three objections to PL:

      1) PL is politically naive. If you don't interfere until there are blackshirts on the street beating people up, you've probably left it too late.

      2) PL assumes a contentious definition of 'harm'. The 'who gets to decide?' question is a problem for everyone, not just for me: in particular, [the defender of PL] is claiming the right to decide (a) that a discussion seriously entertaining the idea that some historically and systematically oppressed kinds of people are inferior and should be subjected to hierarchical authority does not do or threaten harm; and that (b) preventing a group from using institutional capital (meeting rooms, communication networks, attention) to facilitate that discussion is or does.

      3) PL takes as settled what should be subject to democratic deliberation: the bounds of toleration.

      —-

      Most readers seemed to be squarely in the "PL" camp.   How do they respond to these points?