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Val Plumwood, an influential philosopher, ecofeminist, and activist died on February 28. Author of many articles and book chapters and four books, her latest was Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2001).
She will be remembered for her contributions to a distinctively feminist, anti-patriarchical and anti-hierarchical philosophy of environmental encounter. She argued that Western forms of reason--scientific, economic, and instrumental--are the root cause of an ecological destruction that will eventually end our species. Her philosophical views can be experienced through her personal retelling of her near-fatal encounter with a crocodile. This riveting story illustrates an understanding of humans as potential prey, and the attack caused her to review how she thought of humans' place in nature:
This concept of human identity [as separate from nature] positions humans outside and above the food chain, not as part of the feast in a chain of reciprocity but as external manipulators and masters of it: Animals can be our food, but we can never be their food. The outrage we experience at the idea of a human being eaten is certainly not what we experience at the idea of animals as food. The idea of human prey threatens the dualistic vision of human mastery in which we humans manipulate nature from outside, as predators but never prey. We may daily consume other animals by the billions, but we ourselves cannot be food for worms and certainly not meat for crocodiles. This is one reason why we now treat so inhumanely the animals we make our food, for we can not imagine ourselves similarly positioned as food. We act as if we live in a separate realm of culture in which we are never food, while other animals inhabit a different world of nature in which they are no more than food, and their lives can be utterly distorted in the service of this end.
This is a good time to post some links and air some thoughts:
No doubt it is partly voyeuristic, but I'm fascinated by the Philosophy Job Market blog. They give some rules for one of my long-time favorite pen-and-paper games: Women in Philosophy Hangman.
Feministphilosophers comment on the philosophy job market: Why do we spend so much money making up complete applications with teaching materials and writing samples, when most of the supplementary applications are not even read? In some fields (e.g. English), an initial application includes only a letter and CV. There may be some disadvantages, but the advantages are the time and expense saved by job applicants, the convenience for hiring departments to not have boxes and boxes of applications to store, and the savings in environmental costs. Moreover, why not electronic applications? The sciences have been doing that for years already.
Last week Rob Helpychalk gave a talk on "A Retrospective Look at Postmodernism," a fun read.
There is a constant stream of reflective and thoughtful posts about teaching philosophy on the blog In Socrates' Wake. I would love to hear if their team has any thoughts on my concerns about attracting women to major in philosophy. A search of the blog says they haven't paid any specific attention to women as teachers or as students, so I'd like to hear if they have any ideas about why women make up only 30% of philosophy students or if there are any unique issues for women as philosophy teachers.
And here's a blog post with more comments than you have time to read--all about the ways in which women are excluded in math and computer science courses. Is philosophy different?
It seems that now whenever I see references to postmodern philosophy they are in the past tense:
"The postmodernist agenda was..."
"An attraction of postmodernist philosophy was that it..."
"There is much worth retaining from postmodernism..."
Postmodernism is alive, well, and current according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (though note that the cited texts were mostly written in the 1980s). But the present tense and the past tense are at battle on the Wikipedia sites for Postmodernism and Postmodern Philosophy. Is postmodernism alive or deceased? The copy on wiki sites is subject to change, but right now the tense confusion has produced this:
"[Davidson] argued that truth was not about getting it right...but was part of a social practice, and language was what served our purposes in a particular time."
(This use of the past tense seems to make it impossible to say anything about truth in general and to talk only about the intent of past truth-claims. But maybe, for a postmodernist, that's the point.)
When I was an undergraduate I identified with postmodernism. It was the movement of the times, so how could I not? I read Feminism/Postmodernism, edited by Linda Nicholson, and was especially motivated by her introductory essay and by Sandra Harding's article on "Feminism, Science, and the Anti-Enlightenment Critiques." I heard the feminist worry that perhaps postmodernism, by dismissing grand narratives, would also be dismissive of feminism. But I thought that sounded like a mere technical problem.
I read Foucault, and I read Nancy Fraser on Foucault. I thought postmodernism was about identifying power, calling it out, and then getting on with the business of using theory to smooth the way for progressive political change. I thought that the critical, disillusioning technique of postmodernism would be a useful one.
What I did not realize was that postmodernism's critique of reason was powerful but blunt. Its success was such that it was not able to carve away at a problem, exposing the power relations, exposing the ideologies, and revealing the questions of justice and knowledge that would yield to moral argument and empirical inquiry. It cuts and cuts and cuts until nothing is left.
The problem is that research into social relations, power dynamics, and ideological influence can never turn up negative results. If the problem with the modernism that postmodernism opposed was that history and intellectual development in the West was a monotonous story of the revealing of Reason through the ages, then the problem with postmodernism was the converse. Postmodernism is also monotone. Ideology and power relations always have an influence.
Philosophy is still working out how to distinguish the influence of reason from the influence of power, or better, how these interact. I think many areas of philosophy are at work on this. Social epistemology, feminist epistemology and philosophy of science, pragmatism, social and political theory, philosophy of technology, applied ethics.
