Hooray, I'm not alone

Announcing a blog about What It's Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy.

The blog accepts submissions from you: from any philosopher, teacher or student.

The blog has multiple goals. First, and most obviously, it is comforting to know that you (women with negative experiences) are not alone and that the causes of women-specific experiences are systemic.

Secondly, the blog is not only about negative experiences. It can also be used to highlight how things have changed for the better over time, to share ideas for dealing with unexpected and unhappy encounters, and to create recognition for how small or minor negative experiences accumulate.

Using Edublogs

I've been using a blog at Edublogs.org to supplement my Intro to Ethics class. I post the assignments so they're available electronically, I post interesting links or thoughts that didn't make it into the lecture, and students have posted comments to continue our in-class discussion. As a method, the course blog is a superb fit with my teaching style, the course content (timely environmental issues), and RIT students' predilections (lots of time online). 

As a platform, Edublogs.org has lost my support. The positive aspects are that it's free, that it's run on Wordpress (which provides many superior design options compared to Blogger), and (supposedly) it creates an educational community. I haven't seen much community, except for Brandon Watson's excellent ethics course blog.

Problems started a couple of weeks ago when I had trouble posting. The site posted an announcement that there would be an interruption of service for a couple of hours in the wee hours of Saturday morning. The interruption continued through the entire weekend, making it impossible for my students to access their assignment, the reading schedule, etc. From Monday through Wednesday, I was able to access the site only on occasion, with a lower than 10% success rate. At times, it was offline completely; at other times, I could view but not post.

I located the blog of the Edublogs.org founder, James Farmer (interestingly, not itself hosted on edublogs), which had a note about the extended outage issues. In a comment, I asked 

Can you give me a reason that I shouldn't migrate to Blogger? I like the wordpress design and the educational community, but reliability is everything.

The response I received was:

Good luck with migration issues.

Hard to imagine a clearer blow-off!

I was truly hoping to hear some good reasons that would save me the trouble of moving to another host (the sunk-cost fallacy had me in its hold), but now I'll be on my way as soon as this quarter winds down.

Cultivating Good Ideas

I read a New Yorker article not so long ago about how the process of insight works, and since then I've been noticing how and when different kinds of my ideas originate.

We all have flashes of insight at unusual times--not the times that we're thinking about a problem--but times when we're somewhat relaxed. For me it's when I'm waking up or going to bed, in the shower, on the longish walk between my car and my office or, most typically, when I'm out for a run. These are not times when a pencil or computer is handy, and I'm always nervous I'll forget them. Why the bad timing?

According to the neuroscientists interviewed in the article, there are different brain pathways for cranking through a routine problem and for finding solutions to non-routine problems. The latter requires the brain to explore all kinds of cognitive resources, and the flash of certainty we get with an insight is due to the unconscious cognitive work that we've already done, not just generating an idea but checking its fit, as well. (And this raises questions about how much of our "selves" we are actually aware of!) The process of insight requires that the brain relax and that the conscious mind pay attention to the weaker and more distributed signals it gets from unexpected quarters. This happens when the soft voice of what we might call the insight module is not drowned out by the insistent and confident voice of the grinding module. Naps help.

Knowing how the insight process works and which kinds of problems need insight rather than grinding should help us to work more productively. All creative work feeds off of some insight. I do think that in philosophy, there are some routines or scripts that are used to generate ideas, such as the many iterations on "A Kantian Analysis of..." the latest social problem in the headlines. The most interesting ideas, though, have more unique forms. Interdisciplinary work also requires bringing ideas that have not yet met each other into contact, and that resonates with the insight process.

Most of my work is of the grinding along nature. I have systems and reminders set up so that my lecture planning gets done on time. Also, the research writing that I'm doing right now is on some scientific research that is already completed, so that when I have the time to work on it, the process involves just describing what I did and what the results are. All the truly creative work came in the doing.

Blogging often feels creative to me, and sometimes driven by insight. Surfing others' blogs, perhaps because there is an element of the unexpected in what I will find, helps to turn on my own insight machine. In blogging (and for some, perhaps in writing their facebook updates), I pay attention not to something that I'm reading, but to my reactions about what I'm reading. I read something and then, an hour or day or week later, notice that I'm still thinking about it and that I have something to say. Knowing that there will be an audience is the motivation for thinking it through.

A piece on digital identity and security in the New York Times points out that many of us go through this process:

It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves.

Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site — “What are you doing?” — can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?)

Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.

It occurs to me that this is a valuable and underappreciated effect of Web 2.0: it increases self-knowledge and reflection.

Back to School

It's a holiday for most of us in the U.S., but for me it's the first day of fall term classes. It's been a wonderful and fairly productive summer, but I'm excited about the ethics class I have planned.

I'm trying a course blog this year: http://bristerethics.edublogs.org/
I've come to a point where I can't imagine that students would be satisfied with only paper copies of syllabi and assignments. And the online course support that RIT uses (MyCourses), besides being private, has a clunky and ugly interface that requires multiple page loads just to give out links. I hope that blogging will provide a better forum for student discussions (via comments) and for generating excitement.
(Thanks to Brandon Watson for encouragement!)


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I'm not teaching Plato this year, but I agree with Schwitzsplinters, who notes that the Dialogues are not much in the way of give-and-take. They model a mode of learning but not progressive inquiry and discovery; dialogue is still an underexploited genre.

Social Web-building

I've been visiting two new web applications.

1.
Sympoze is a social bookmarking site designed by philosopher Andrew Cullison where we can pool our collective judgments about online writing and resources. The site has multiple uses: you can visit just to see what other people are talking about, or you can contribute by adding your recent reads or evaluating what others have posted.
I'm excited to see this application and curious to see how it works over the long run. A recent study published in Science showed the counterintuitive result that electronic research databases have led to fewer rather than more published works being cited, in spite of easier and wider access. I hope that Sympoze will have a different effect--widening rather than narrowing the range of recognized philosophical writing and democratizing our field rather than concentrating the recognition of elites.

2.
Academia is a social networking site for academics, also developed (in part) by a philosopher. The model, of course, is facebook, but with just what academics need and none of the chucking and quizzing that we don't. Also, it's public and transparent, as knowledge rightly should be. I'm not yet sure if the site will develop into a strong presence, since it seems to me that it's precisely the exclusivity of facebook that contributes to its appeal--that is, the parade of "friends."
One note, which is that Academia has a preset--and rather strange--list of "interests." On the science side, there is no distinguishing among life science, though what I do with ecological history shares very little overlap with someone working in genetics. On the humanities side, though, one can pick between English or World Literatures. I think this site would become more useful for networking if it were possible to enter (and search) for very narrow specialties like "social epistemology," "historical ecology," and "public participation GIS." (Those are three that I would sign up for!)

A collection of tidbits

Links from this week and last:

Via GonePublic, "Who is a public intellectual?" ponders whether the public intellectual is in decline in these anti-intellectual times. Answer: no, but don't count specialized New York Intellectuals. Do count generalists who make thoughtful problems interesting in history, politics, literature, and science. Barbara Ehrenreich, Garry Wills. I would add Bill McKibben--I don't think it's the academic or journalistic affiliation that makes someone a public intellectual but the type of problem and the level of interest they get for it.

History, science, literature: astronomers have used events in Homer's Odyssey to identify the date that Odysseus returned from the Trojan War--April 16, 1178 B.C. Their crucial assumption is that Homer knew what he was talking about when he mentioned celestial events--when Venus was on the rise, when constellations were setting. And surely he did--no "security" floodlights to block the view back then.

An article on neigborhoods, from my neighborhood. I taught Robert Putnam's article on social capital in my critical thinking class this year. Most people got the message that close communities raise quality of life. But a few students claimed that because they were "naturally" loners, they would not benefit from making social ties, in spite of Putnam's research findings that, for instance, people who get together with friends are less likely to die in the next year. These few students were also the ones who were struggling in the class, struggled to even get to class, weren't washing, and just plain weren't having fun. The story they were telling themselves about their exceptional natural inclination was not doing them any favors!

When males do it, it's biology...when females do it, it's "promiscuity."

I used to read books, but now I read reviews. I used to read novels, but now I read magazines. I used to read journal articles, but now I can get most of what I need to fill that buzzing need for intellectual stimulation online. And I'm not the only one (fair warning: a Nietzsche reference in this one).

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year...His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Gender, Race, and Philosophy Blog

A warm welcome goes to the new Gender, Race and Philosophy blog, which accompanies the online journal Symposia on Gender, Race, and Philosophy.

Bob Gooding-Williams has started with a post about Barack Obama's deliberative and participatory vision of democracy. I look forward to more feminist and antiracist philosophy and critique!

The Symposia's current discussion is on an article by Noelle McAfee which was published in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. There are responses by critical theorist Amy Allen and pragmatist Scott Pratt.

Women in philosophy

At the Central APA in April, I was part of a panel on women in philosophy ("Why are Women only 21% of Philosophy?"). The other panelists were Elizabeth Minnich, Sally Haslanger, and Abigail Stewart (who was unable to be there, so Sally read her paper). Berit Brogaard at Lemmings has blogged about this session here and a post on critical mass of women in executive positions at Feminist Philosophers reminds me of it tonight. Sally Haslanger's paper from that session is linked through this post as well and also can be found here along with other information about women in philosophy. For those who are interested in this topic, my paper is available here.

I would really like to recommend Haslanger's paper. It contains recommendations that I also endorse. Among these are suggestions for "disrupting bias". For instance, she recommends that established feminist philosophers submit work to "mainstream" journals, make reference to feminists in their work, and use the terms "feminism" and "feminist" in their work.

Feminist Philosophy Blog

Hooray for a new blog dedicated to feminism and philosophy:

Feminist Philosophers: News feminist philosophers can use
http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/

A welcome addition to public discussion of feminist issues from a philosophical perspective!