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    • Looking forward to guest blogging this week! (Amy Ferrer)

      The following is a guest post by Amy Ferrer, APA Exectutive Director

       

      Before putting up my first substantive post later today, I want to take a moment to thank the folks at NewAPPS for having me, and especially John Protevi and Eric Winsberg, who will be moderating comments and working with me along the way.

      Many readers will know that this is my second guest stint on a major philosophy blog, after an appearance over at Leiter Reports in late 2012. At that time, I was still new to the APA and my wide-ranging posts functioned, as much as anything, to introduce me and my priorities to the philosophical community. This time around, I’m going to be focusing on one particular area of interest: diversity and inclusiveness. Many conversations have happened online and off over the last several months on these important issues, so this week I’ll be talking about some of the APA’s ongoing work related to diversity and inclusiveness, joined on a couple of occasions by colleagues as co-authors. I can’t possibly take on every facet of this broad topic in just a few posts, of course, but I think we’ll have more than enough material for some lively and productive discussions throughout the week.

      Stay tuned!

      [Please note: My appearance on this blog does not constitute an endorsement by the APA of the blog or its content.]

    • Highly adequate women

      A comment on Shelley Tremain's post Disabling Philosophy concerns a different, but related, issue. Commenter Tara Nelson said:

      Relatedly, a truly sexist and essentialist view of women's abilities in philosophy has reared its head on the blogosphere, and Showalter seems unable to respond to it effectively. Hope someone here can nip this in the bud. It's in the comments section.

      Tara is referring to comments by commenter "Highly Adequate"–comments which include this one:

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    • Bad Economics/Economists: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescription

      My friend Alan Nelson recently posted a link on facebook to the following article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/business/economic-view-when-the-scientist-is-also-a-philosopher.html with an appropriately snarky note that the author, N. Gregory Mankiw (the Chair of the econ department at Harvard, natch), seemed to be arguing that the only changes to the status quo permissible are those that are verifiably Perato efficient improvements.  An obvious corollary is that, since every reasonably substantive and complex policy change will have winners and losers, we should never change policies at all.

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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.]