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    • Disabling philosophy

      By Shelley Tremain, draft of a comment that is forthcoming in the April issue of The Philosopher's Magazine.

      Data compiled by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy indicates that the disparity between the labor-participation rates of employable disabled people and employable nondisabled people across all sectors of American society is abysmal: 21% for disabled people compared to 69% for nondisabled people. More specific figures for the disparity between disabled and nondisabled people employed as full-time faculty in academia are even worse, with philosophy boasting the greatest disparity in this regard of all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, comparable only to the STEM fields. For although disabled people comprise an estimated 20-25% of the North American population, surveys conducted in 2012 and 2013 by the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association (APA) suggest that they comprise less than 4% of full-time faculty in philosophy departments in the U.S. and, according to a 2013 survey conducted by the Equity Committee of the Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA), they comprise less than 1% of full-time faculty in philosophy departments in Canada. In other words, nondisabled people comprise an estimated 96-99% of full-time faculty in North American philosophy departments. These figures are shocking, constituting almost complete exclusion of disabled people from professional philosophy.

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    • Revenue at Any Cost: Institutional Debt and the Crisis of U.S. Higher Education

      As Protevi likes to keep reminding everyone on Facebook, it's been awhile now since I first started arguing that we haven't been paying sufficient attention to the role of institutional debt as a driver of the increasingly alarming developments in U.S. universities, especially those in the public sector.  I've gestured in this direction before on NewAPPS, but the appearance of a new piece on the subject by Josh Freedman on Forbes.com provides a perfect opportunity to develop the point a bit more.  

      Let me begin, then, by making a fairly bold claim. Taking the problem of institutional debt seriously makes it possible to provide a consistent account of many of the major problematic trends in U. S. higher education: rapidly accelerating tuition costs; significant declines in financial aid coverage; cuts to or elimination of low-enrollment departments and programs, experiments with mass-market distance learning and online education, and a general move toward 'Responsibility Centered Managment' (RCM) administrative models; dramatically increasing pressure on faculty at the level of compensation, workload, job security and working conditions; the outsourcing of many university functions to private contractors; building booms, especially those aimed at increasing campus amenities or leveraging university owned real estate for commercial purposes; and finally, continuing increases in administrative spending, especially in development offices and other areas concerned with financial management and business operations.

      All of this, which may otherwise seem contradictory and difficult to make sense of, can consistently be referred back to the urgent pressure that rising institutional debt imposes upon university operations: the need to maintain a sufficiently robust revenue stream to satisfy credit rating agencies and thus keep borrowing costs, and the costs of servicing existing debt, from exploding. Freedman provides, especially in the later parts of his article, an excellent discussion of how this works. 

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    • interesting debate between Peter Gratton and Graham Harman

      Nice audio of a recent presentation by Gratton here.

      Harman responds here.

      Gratton responds to Harman's response here.

      Given all the blogospheric animus (peaking about five years ago) that accompanied Quentin Meillassoux's critique of correlationism, it's extraordinarily cool that the "turn to metaphysics" in recent continental philosophy* has reached a point where you get this level of constructive criticism and dialogue. It will be really cool to read Gratton's forthcoming book. I think everyone who was lucky enough to see his talk on Meillassoux at SPEP this year is excited about it too.

      [*Which as three interlocking moments: (1) the new understanding of Deleuze as a speculative metaphysician, (2) Speculative Realism broadly construed (enough to include Badiou, Zizek, and Lacan in the conversation), and (3) a renaissance in the study of German Idealism. I think a fourth moment is a re-examination of the other great soixante-huitards: especially Mailbou, Haaglund, and Goldgaber on Derrida but also Brad Elliot Stone's audacious rereading of the whole tradition in Strawsonian terms (check out the first paper on his academia page).]

    • The night Twitter went down

      … in Turkey. I suppose no one should be surprised by what Recep Tayyip Erdogan is capable of by now, but this is definitely a new low. Below is a short BBC video narrating the chronology of events,  and here is a piece in the Guardian from the point of view of those fighting back against the suppression of internet freedom in Turkey (H/T Lucas Thorpe for both).

      I invite well informed readers to offer further elements on the situation in comments below.

    • Coming Attraction

      Starting this Monday, and probably going all next week, Amy Ferrer, the executive director of the APA, will be doing a series of guest posts here on NewAPPS.   She will be talking about the site visit program, about the new APA journal, and about the APA's diversity funding efforts.  She will also try to respond to questions from readers.  So, you won't want to miss this!

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Desafinado’

      This week we had the pleasure of welcoming Jerrold Levinson for a workshop in Groningen. I had never met Jerry in person before, but I had anticipated great conversations on music, given his influential work on the aesthetics of music. Well, as it turns out, it was even better than expected (and would have been better only if we had had more time to talk). It involved in particular some brief duets at restaurants in a variety of languages (English, Portuguese, French, even a bit of Spanish). 

      One of these songs was the bossa nova classic ‘Desafinado’: me in Portuguese, Jerry in English. And so the choice of what to post here at BMoF this week was pretty obvious: here is ‘Desafinado’, in the classic version from the Getz/Gilberto album, and the English version, ‘Slightly out of tune’ with the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald (live at a TV show). Incidentally, I find that the English lyrics, and Ella’s interpretation, give the song an ‘upbeat-ness’ that is extraneous to it, as it is basically a melancholic song about somebody who is accused of singing out of tune by his lover (and this causes him ‘immense pain’). Still, perhaps the way to think about it is of  ‘Slightly out of tune’ as almost like a different song altogether, and a great one at that.

      (And here is to hoping for more such duets involving Jerry and me in the future.)

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    • Introductions to three new Speculative Realism books put on-line by Edinburgh University Press

      Eup-coversEdinburgh University Press has posted the introductions to three books:

      1. Tristan Garcia's Form and Object (here),
      2. Adrian Johnston's Adventures in Transcendental Materialism (here), and
      3. Levi Bryant's Onto-Cartography (here).

      They are all pretty interesting.

      I helped Mark Ohm translate Garcia's book,* and our translator's introduction (included in the material EUP posted) is substantive.

      One of the really exciting things about Garcia is that he has single-handedly revived the tradition the French novelist/philosopher. La meilleure part des hommes (recently out in English as Hate: A Romance) won the Prix de Flore. It's an amazing novel.

      [*Unless you've done this, you have no idea how much work it is. But you learn so much about the philosophy in question (and about language itself) that it's an awesome experience.]

    • “But Quiet, Be Quiet A Minute”: On the Death of Rev. Fred Phelps

      The news has just been released that Rev. Fred Phelps, founder and lifelong shepherd of the Westboro Baptist Church (in Topeka, Kansas) has died at the age of 84.  I find it difficult, I confess, to summon the normal human compassion that usually accompanies news of another's death in this case, largely because Phelps dedicated his life to broadcasting his rejection of– not to mention enlisting others, including children, to stage carnival-like circuses around his rejection of– what most people would consider even the most minimally-decent exhibitions of human compassion.  Fred Phelps was one of the most infamous, outrageous, dishonorable and genuinely despicable hatemongers of my generation.  And, what is more, Fred Phelps' hate was as ferocious and vicious as it was blind.  Through the prism of his delusional and evangelical abhorrence, the Westboro congregants en masse considered themselves justified in casting an unjustifiably wide net of Judgment.  Caught in that net were many: ranging from bona fide innocents against whom no reasonable person could or ought cast aspersions, like Matthew Shepard, to a whole host of other "collateral-damage" victims of Phelps' quasi-political positions who found themselves the inadvertent and inauspicious targets of his his flock's detestation.

      I say again: I find it very, very difficult to summon the normal human compassion that ought to accompany the news of Fred Phelps' passing.

      Nevertheless, these are the moments when our inclination toward Schadenfreude, however deeply affirming and deeply satisfactory indulging that sentiment may feel, ought to be on principle squelched. 

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    • The Bait-and-Switch Blurring of Moral and Prudential in the World of Chutes and Ladders

      Chutes01Chutes and Ladders, if you didn’t know, isn’t just a game of chance. It’s a game of virtue. At the bottom of each ladder a virtuous action is depicted, and at the top we see its reward. Above each chute is a vice, at the bottom natural punishment. The world of Chutes and Ladders is the world of perfect immanent justice! Virtue always pays and vice is always punished, and always through natural mechanisms rather than by the action of any outside authority, much less divine authority.

      To the side you see a picture of my board at home.

      One striking thing: What 21st-century Anglophone philosophers would normally call “prudential” virtues and what 21st-century Anglophone philosophers would normally call “moral” virtues are treated exactly on par, as though they were entirely the same sort of thing.

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    • Philosophy, its Color Line, and its Culture of Justification

      Over at Times Higher Education, Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman has written an important piece calling the discipline on the carpet for its overall failure to critically engage its own whiteness.*

      There is a lot of remarkable stuff in the piece, which is organized around the paired questions of "who 'gets to do' philosophy?" and "who 'gets done' in philosophy?." It should be read in its entirety. As a teaser, however, let me just reproduce the following paragraph, which I'll discuss a bit below:  

      In a 2012 blog posting titled “What could leave philosophy?”, Brian Weatherson, professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, argues that “[f]or a few areas [of philosophy], it is easy to imagine them being in other departments, because they already overlap so substantially with work done in other departments”. Thus, instead of seeing overlap as an opportunity to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries, Weatherson sees overlap as an opportunity to police, enforce and constrict the boundary around philosophy. This narrow-mindedness is an example of what Kristie Dotson, assistant professor of philosophy at Michigan State University, has called philosophy’s “culture of justification” – not the legitimate demand that one justify the conclusion of one’s arguments, no, but the illegitimate demand that one justify that what one is doing counts as “philosophy”.

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