Most influential public intellectuals

Prospect Magazine has released its annual list of the most influential thinkers in the world.
8 of the top 20 are philosophers.
Go go go Liz Anderson!

These annual lists go back to 2005, and I want to make it my job, first, to make sure that I've read something or other by the philosophers that have appeared in them. (Yeah, I've got sabbatical coming up…)

And second, that by the time they graduate, the philosophy majors I teach have at least heard of most if not all of them.

Awards and Cognitive Bias

I want to keep track of this post—"When a series of entirely reasonable decisions leads to biased outcomes"—about the Waterman award not only because of the clear argument but also because of the bountiful links to more information which it provides.

Climate Change and the Ethics of Inquiry

My department colleague Lawrence Torcello is wading through hate mail as a result of this piece he published online:
https://theconversation.com/is-misinformation-about-the-climate-criminally-negligent-23111

He evaluates the level of harm done by those who knowingly, willfully discredit climate scientists in order to derail the public policy that would address climate change.

The piece has caused a firestorm across climate skeptic sites, including this report at FOX News:
"Philosophy Professor Demands Imprisonment for Climate Change Deniers"

Am I reading the same piece they are?

The university (president, dean, provost, chair, HR) has been receiving tons (hundreds? thousands?) of calls for his termination. The university refers letter-writers to this statement:
http://www.rit.edu/news/story.php?id=50607

Faculty women and service commitments

Some links related to how service commitments affect the advancement of women faculty:

"The Ivory Ceiling of Service Work"

“[W]omen associate professors taught an hour more each week than men, mentored an additional two hours a week, and spent nearly five hours more a week on service. This translates to women spending roughly 220 more hours on teaching, mentoring, and service over two semesters than men at that rank.

"Gender and Succes in Academia: More from the Historians’ Career PathsSurvey"


"Being Married Helps Professors to Get Ahead, But Only If They’re Male"

“Professors of both sexes do care a great deal about furthering an institutions goals and enriching the community, but men assert greater control over exactly how that happens.”

Why do philosophy students love Ayn Rand?

It always puzzles me.

Video-taped lectures

Dear Philosophy Teachers, What are your thoughts about bringing in guest lecturers? (pretty cool!)
What about video-taping other's lectures and showing them in class as guest lectures? (still ok but not as cool?)
What about making such guest lectures available for online students to stream? (that pushes the coolness factor up a bit, since they'd otherwise watch the same lecturer all the time, right?)
And now my real question.
How long can I keep using those same video-taped guest lectures? They're always and forever fresh to each new batch of students, after all. So for how many years can a guest lecturer be dead before I stop calling him a "class guest"?

Blogging

The list of reasons I don't blog like I used to is lengthy! The number of things I'd rather do than spend time on my computer is a larger than your human mind can conceive. Blogging was a great way to grow my confidence and fluency as a writer--a few years ago the original intention was achieved and now I'd rather write on my research projects than send these transient words into the ether. I've also been known to say that blogging is passé--post-Tumblr, post-Twitter, if it can't be expressed with merely a wink and a non-linguistic guttural sound, then it's too complex a thought for anyone else to process anyway. And besides, with Salon, HuffingtonPost, Slate, and the Atlantic begging anyone with a pulse to provide them with content, why write on a site all by your lonesome?

Nonetheless, I'm sure glad that others have the fortitude of spirit to keep trying, and here are two I'll be keeping my eye on:

Elenkus

Hopeless Generalist

The Sciences and the Humanities

I'm reading two blog-type articles.
Steven Pinker at the New Republic, "Science Is Not the Enemy of the Humanities" and Gary Gutting's response on the NYTimes Stone blog, "Science's Humanities Gap."

I spend much of my time standing in just exactly this space where the humanities and the sciences overlap. Some days, the landscape looks smooth and even, without discontinuities. Scientific, empirical methods inform philosophical inquiry, and ethical evaluation clarifies and directs scientific practice. Other days, the landscape is riddled with ditches. My experience in this place is so variable that I can't get through more than a couple of paragraphs of Pinker's piece without both nodding along with him and groaning at his blinkered, biased writing.

Like him, I have some colleagues in the humanities who will say idiotic things about how environmental and social harms are inevitably driven by science and technology. But why should I or anyone take them seriously? The same people who decry biotechnology's poisoning of our food with engineered DNA hire landscapers to spread pesticides and fertilizers with well-known negative health and environmental effects on their lovely lawns. The same people who denounce technology's corrosive effects on modern society walk around with a kid babbling at them on one arm while their nose (and and their attention) is buried in the tiny screen at the end of the other.

Likewise, I have colleagues in the sciences who are worse than ignorant about what we do in the humanities--they are outright hostile. The hostility I observe is not driven, oddly enough, by the ignorance and hypocrisy which gets under my skin, but by a belief that the humanities have no utility for students. Students are told, more or less, that an interest in the humanities will at best distract them from the studies that matter and may actually make them worse scientists or worse engineers. This tactic goes hand-in-hand with a trivializing attitude about the training required to be proficient in a humanities discipline. "I'm a philosopher, too" a biologist once said to me, "I have a Doctorate in Philosophy, don't I?"

Pinker writes:
"The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness."
While this is a true description of some humanists, it's false of most, and it plays into just exactly the kind of stereotyping which Pinker laments. While Pinker regrets the 1990's fad for postmodernism, he backs the current fad for "the digital humanities," which is just like the old analog humanities, except making full use of computer resources. Ten years from now, we'll shrug at the shallowness of the view that digitizing poetry, philosophy, literature, and history will make it more meaningful. It does make it more accessible (a boon when it comes to organizing and interpreting historical archive holdings), but digitizing alone does not create new ideas or change old ones.

Jenny Saul sums it up

Salon article: "Philosophy has a sexual harassment problem."

Slate podcast (about 11:30 in).

As this problem has drawn press, Saul (and others) have been right there making the clear points that matter:

• informal remedies make a difference—as a complement, not a substitute, for formal remedies
• formal remedies can work, or they can be used to cover up rather than to resolve problems
• the prevalence of harassment and sexual harassment is linked to the lower numbers of women in the field
• recruitment of women and minorities can therefore help to reduce the prevalence of the problem, but recruitment must be accompanied by retention
• there is no one explanation for the low number of women and minorities in philosophy, but given the degree and types of harassment, we might wonder why so many people stay in a field where they're made to feel unwelcome!

Sensible Gender-Neutral Language

I'm (still) reading Jo Ellen Jacobs' The Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill and came across such an interesting passage about the Mills' use of gender-neutral language.

In 1851 and 1852, Mill's Logic and The Principles of Political Economy were reprinted in third editions. By that point, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill had married. In this third edition, exclusively male language was replaced, when possible, with neutral language.

"'Men' was replaced by 'people' or 'mankind' and 'a person' was substituted for 'a man'"(216-217).
A footnote was also added to the Logic:

The pronoun he is the only one available to express all human beings; none having yet bee invented to serve the purpose of designating them generally, without distinguishing them by a characteristic so little worthy of being made the main distinction as that of sex. This is more than a defect in language; tending greatly to prolong the almost universal habit, of thinking and speaking of one-half the human species as the whole.

It's too bad this footnote was removed from the 1862 edition, published after Harriet's death.

When I have a student who insists on using exclusive language, I sometimes point to the APA's statement on the matter from the mid-1980's (from before the birthyear of my current students!) but now I have an even earlier philosophical text I can point to.

Philosophers and sexual harassment

Ah, what a show we had earlier this summer. This one became more entertaining than anyone could have guessed. And enlightening. Who else is on that list, I wonder?
And where will he work next? Somewhere--someone will look out for him, as this letter shows. Sadly, that's how this family works. One hopes it will at least be a position without graduate students.

Now that it's been a couple of weeks and the chuckling is over, it's time to recognize the underlying grossness of it all. Start here.

The Tiniest Offenses

The recent news about sexual harassment in philosophy has been bringing exposure (so to speak) to the problem--not to mention providing an awful lot of intentional and unintentional amusement.

Myself, I have not experienced (prolonged episodes of) sexual harassment at work. Even if common, it's not ubiquitous. Harassment, though, appears with regularity--either of myself or observed harassment of others. Gender is often a component, defining the target, the methods, the vulnerabilities.

But sometimes a great long span of time goes by--months, even--when I'm not harassed, and I don't hear reports of harassment of students and colleagues. But even in these intervals, there are the micro-insults, the patronizing gestures, the imbalance between duties and privileges.

I'm knowledgeable, aware, and sensitive, and I usually spot the insults, jibes, barbs, slurs and slights that are directed my way. Every now and then someone around me notices one I miss: "Did I hear so-and-so say that to you?" someone asks. Or I report on a frustrating encounter with a male student, and a male colleague says "No, I've never, not in 20 years, had a student say that to me."

An episode today. Dean asks a question of a committee I'm likely to chair in the fall, copies the full committee and the department chairs--and also copies Prof. Graybeard, past committee chair but no longer a member. I respond to the question. Dean acknowledges response. Prof. Graybeard, copied to all, supports the correctness of my response. I'm grateful.

Until a department chair asks me: "Why was Prof. Graybeard copied on that? And why did he respond? What did his response add?" Was it supportive? No, undermining.

Using Facebook for Volunteer Work

I have a problem, and maybe you can help me--because you know more about facebook than I do.

I work with a group to foster conservation and preservation in an urban old-growth forest in Rochester--Washington Grove. You may have seen me write about the work in the Grove before, e.g. here and here.

The group has been operating since about 2008, and although we coordinate with the City of Rochester, we are not incorporated as a non-profit. Our grants and fundraising is funneled through other organizations. For instance, the City of Rochester has a fund set aside for reforestation, and donations to the fund are tax-free. We've raised over $3000 for that fund, and it is informally earmarked for work in the Grove.

We also have a facebook page.

But before you "Like" it, hear my problem. The person who started the page (and is the admin) has left our group, and though he shares our goals to appreciate and preserve this forest, he is not committed to updating the page and is not willing to relinquish control of it. He may have more malign intentions towards the group than mere neglect--I'm not sure. (Politics is not my forte.) Facebook seems like as good a means as any to announce our once-a-month volunteer workdays, to post photos of the trees we've planted, and to build support for this project.

What to do? Report the page to facebook? Under what description? As hijacked? What can of worms does that open? Would it be worth starting a new page instead? Or first?

What's "Meant" Prior to "Assesment"?

I'm part of a "faculty team" that is working on assessment of a new general education requirement in ethics education.

In principle, I'm not opposed to there being an additional layer of accountability when it comes to course content and teaching effectiveness. I could imagine assessment procedures which could be used to hold faculty accountable against those hobgoblins that threaten higher education--grade inflation, the pedagogy of rote learning, deadbeat professors, arbitrary grading. And I can imagine procedures which faculty could use to gather evidence to make demands against administrators--for smaller class sizes, for  highly qualified teachers, for professional development and other kinds of support to improve classroom teaching.

But from what I can tell, the game of assessment involves developing a show that provides cover on all sides. One goal is to make it as simple as possible for faculty to perform, but the results are so shaky and obscure that the results could never be used to support demands. It neither requires nor builds respect between administrators and faculty.

Here is a snippet of conversation from my meeting yesterday--6 excellent professors in the room with the director of assessment.

Professor: How were the members of the assessment team chosen?

A. Director: We try to pick professors who are credentialed and qualified in the assessment target.

[My silent thought]: As opposed to those professors who are teaching courses for which they are not credentialed or qualified? Are only some of us who are teaching ethics courses qualified?

A. Director: Of course, some of the people we ask are unable to participate because they are engaged in research or other important projects.

Me, out loud now: Oh yes, I've heard of those people who do research, but none of us here do research or have other important projects going on. No, not us. Our lives are practically empty.


Here's a nice piece on the failed logic of assessment. By a philosopher, of course.

John Stuart Mill and Liberty

I've taught the main idea of John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" before--in introductory level courses. I've taught his separation of cases argument against government suppression of free speech. And I've taught Liberty in a way that incorporates a discussion of freedom of action and specifically victimless crimes.

But one of the questions that I had, going into teaching this course, is whether "Liberty" is supportive of the variety of political thought that in the news media gets called libertarianism.

I'm far from an expert on contemporary libertarianism. I know that it comes in liberal and conservative flavors, and that libertarians from the right and from the left sometimes find mutual support. Libertarianism.org, for example, houses information about Mill, and The Liberty Fund archives Mill's collected works at http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Fcollection=46&Itemid=27.

In my course, one very good and politically engaged student was conservative but had mixed commitments to libertarianism and communitarianism. He was mostly supportive of Mill's ideas and, when critical, usually viewed Mill's philosophy as tending to undermine social order and tradition. Another student was liberal in a distinctly libertarian way. He, too, found that Mill's political philosophy fit his own ideals.

But after a close reading of "On Liberty" and of some of Mill's other works, I have a difficult time seeing how Mill's commitments can provide the basis for contemporary conservative libertarians who would like to see less government, a reduction in government entitlements (usually with no reduction in government support for corporations), and a very low taxation rate and regressive tax scheme. Mill even seems amenable to limiting civil liberties in some cases if it is in the long-term interests of society.

In fact, Mill's individualism seems nearly completely secondary to his collectivism. The reason he supports individualism is for the very good reason that the way to develop the greatest potential in society is to develop the potential of its individual members. For example, he supports compulsory education at a time when it was controversial in England. And he is against limiting the choices that individuals make because in doing so we limit our possibilities for future growth. We should allow people to make mistakes because some of the different and unusual ideas they develop in their experiments in living will be better for society as a whole.

This is far from selfishness or egoism, and it is also far from saying that government has no business in people's private lives. The state does have an interest in how people develop their private lives, and its interest is to clear the way of obstacles to having the widest possible range of choices in how to live  (so long as people's choices do not harm others). The state has this interest because WE are the state--the commitment to participatory democratic governance is simple and straightforward. Further, there even seems to be a duty (or a consideration of beneficience, at least) to GIVE BACK to society, or to develop oneself for the sake of benefitting others, including the people of the future.

I had wondered if the individualism of "Liberty" was in conflict with the collectivism of "Utilitarianism." I think the relationship is this: an iron-clad commitment to the liberty of individuals is a pre-requisite to developing a society with the greatest sum total of happiness, and especially for the development of higher pleasures. One needs both freedom and security in order to write poetry. Mill comes back again and again to the idea that society has, can, and will progress. But that progress is built on two things: first, that people have liberty to change their lives in ways that are an improvement over past ways of living; and second, that they are motivated to develop and build the society, as a collective, rather than (just) to tend their own self-interests.