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Today, March 8, is International Women's Day. To celebrate this day, the APA’s Committee on the Status of Women offers a challenge: you can help to raise $10,000 to support the work of the committee. More information here:
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NBC Chicago article here:
Northwestern University professor Peter Ludlow, the target of a sexual harassment complaint by a female student, filed a response to that woman’s lawsuit in Cook County Court on Friday, denying her allegations and stating that she was the real aggressor.
Daily Northwestern article here:
Philosophy Prof. Peter Ludlow responded Friday to a Medill junior's lawsuit against him, denying he sexually assaulted her and calling Northwestern's subsequent investigation "flawed and one-sided.”
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The graduate students of the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University, have by a majority vote, adopted the following statement:
We find the alleged behavior of gross professional misconduct recently leveled against a faculty member in our department to be deplorable. Further, we judge that the university has failed our community in the way that they have handled these allegations of gross professional misconduct. In addition, we stand in solidarity with the victim of the aforementioned misconduct, with victims of sexual harassment and violence globally, as well as with their advocates (whom we do not consider to be vigilantes). As students, and educators, we take seriously the wellness of every member of our community. The members of our philosophy department have been genuinely dedicated to promoting inclusiveness at Northwestern, as well as within the broader philosophical community. It is among our highest priorities that we create and sustain a safe environment for all members of our community. In the spirit of these affirmations, we are deeply saddened that a member of our department has been found to be in violation of these moral and professional obligations.
We feel, however, that it bears saying that the behavior outlined in the recent lawsuit leveled against Northwestern is not representative of our sense of the prevailing culture in our department. The overwhelming majority of our community — both professors and graduate students, male and female — are engaged jointly in a project of inclusiveness and mutual support.
Since 2011 our department has maintained a committee to promote and sustain inclusiveness among the graduate student community. Among their duties, the Climate Committee hosts the Annual Inclusiveness Lecture on implicit bias and other issues affecting underrepresented and marginalized groups in the discipline. That same year we also founded an initiative geared towards fostering female undergraduate majors: WiPhi is a female-only group of members of the philosophical community at Northwestern at all levels (undergraduate, graduate, and professors) who regularly meet. WiPhi also hosts the Annual Gertrude Bussey Lecture, in honor of the first woman to receive a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern.
Additionally, our course listings represent our shared commitment to exploring issues of diversity and underrepresentation in the field, and in the broader community at large: Our department makes it a priority to regularly teach courses with substantial feminist philosophy content, as well as substantial focus on issues of race. We, the graduate students, feel that our community is home to several upstanding, vocally feminist, junior and senior faculty members. Our community is committed to fighting the sexism that has long been rampant in the broader philosophical community. And while we jointly feel compelled to express our deep sadness in response to the alleged behavior of a faculty member in our department, we also feel compelled to express our commitment to our community.
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As teachers, mentors and colleagues, we, professional philosophers, take our tasks of teaching, research, and service to the profession very seriously. We want to create a supportive environment where fellow faculty members and students feel safe and where their concerns are heard and addressed.
In light of recent events at more than one university, we the undersigned hereby petition the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association to produce, by one means or another, a code of conduct and a statement of professional ethics for the academic discipline of philosophy. We particularly urge past presidents of each division of the APA to sign this petition.
Please follow this link to sign the petition:
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Arthur Ripstein, Chair of the Graduate Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, writes:
It is with great sadness that I write to inform you of the death of Andre Gombay, who died last Friday, February 28th. He died at home, surrounded by family, and without sadness or fear.
Andre loved philosophy, and was intimately involved in every aspect of our department's life, bridging everything that anyone ever thought of as a divide He wrote and taught about both contemporary issues and the history of philosophy, in both theoretical and practical philosophy, engaging with figures classified as both analytic and continental, and he taught on all three campuses. A dedicated and much loved teacher, Andre taught for 15 years after his retirement in 1998; last year he re-retired, joking that this made him Professor Emeritus Emeritus.
He was a model to us all.
Andre was a distinguished scholar of Descartes, a much loved teacher and colleague, and it is hard to think of Toronto without him.
UPDATE You can post reminiscences and condolences here.
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As many readers will have seen, the great Paco de Lucia passed away last week. So to honor him, here is the (to my knowledge) only song recorded by him with a Brazilian musician, namely Djavan. The song is ‘Oceano’ of 1989, and to be honest it is not among my favorite Djavan songs (it doesn’t help that it was the main theme of the ‘love story’ between the protagonists of a soap-opera, so we all got over-exposed to it back in the day). But there is a beautiful solo by Paco de Lucia between 2.30 and 3.00 mins., which already makes it all worth it. I’m also posting one of the many breath-taking duos of Paco de Lucia with the equally great (and also prematurely deceased) Camarón de la Isla, simply because one can never get enough of these two; here, 'Tu cariño es mi castigo'.
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Friend of the blog and brilliant neurofeminist researcher Rebecca Jordan-Young asks people to visit this petition site in support of her distinguished colleagues Carol Vance and Kim Hopper. That bell tolling you hear, where if you don't bring in 80% of your salary in grants, you're fired even after 25+ years of superb work? It's for you too, soon enough.
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A terrible loss felt by many, many people. Notice is here, from Fordham University Press, where she was Editorial Director.
New APPS 