Philosophy's Blind Spot

I just received a promo textbook for teaching Intro to Phil. It contains 34 excerpts from primary texts. Five of those cover Hinduism and Buddhism. One of them is by a woman--a literary theorist writing about feminist aesthetics. Well, the world's population includes a whole lot of Hindus and Buddhists.

Innovations in Ethics Curricula

Innovations?! Well, no. Here is yet another of my frequent complaints! Textbooks in ethics (and in Intro to Philosophy, and in Philosophy of Science, and in Environmental Philosophy, and I'm sure in most of our other areas) go through frequent editions but each edition contains the same old topics with the same old papers.

Yes, some of the old papers are classics and nothing else compares. Judith Jarvis Thomson on abortion. But in general, except for the addition of pieces on climate change, an ethics anthology now looks almost exactly like an ethics anthology when I was in college--over two decades ago! And some of the pieces seemed dated to me then.

Today's exemplar just arrived in my mailbox--Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy, edited by Mappes, Zembaty, and DeGrazia and in its 8th edition with McGraw Hill. I don't think this text is any worse than all the others, but it's not better, either.

Take the example of the chapter on climate change. It contains 10 selections, but only 2 of them were written in the last decade! Both of those pieces are written by philosophers but were originally published in the popular press.

And let's look at the gender breakdown--something that should be informative about the degree of currency and creativity in an anthology. Women constitute 20% or so of professional philosophers but a much higher percentage among ethicists. In addition, this text has sections s on issues that have been extensively examined from a feminist perspective: sexual ethics, abortion, marriage, pornography, and global and economic justice. Finally, the text includes selections written by practitioners (rather than exclusively by philosophers) and published in the popular press (rather than just in philosopher journals).

So what can possibly explain this breakdown?

Of the pieces with named authors, only 15% have a female author. Some of those female authors have more than one piece in the anthology, so that only 12% of authors are female!

The cost of the text is over $100. Do any of these pieces come with an expiration date? I drink fresh milk, eat fresh eggs, and insist on fresh fruit. My mind requires fresh nourishment as well.

One Color and One Sex in Philosophy

I just got an announcement in my inbox for a new Intro to Philosophy text. This one is written in a way that makes liberal use of contemporary films so that students

"will not only discover a new relevance to their own lives, but will dissect the key readings with a perspective they were previously unaware of."

One wonders if the book is supposed to be relevant to women students, too. Out of 42 authors, the majority of them 20th- and 21st-century authors, only 2 are women. That's less than 5%! Not only is that far lower than the percentage of Intro to Philosophy students who are women, it's lower even than the still-very-low estimate of women teaching philosophy.

The text is called "Introduction to Philosophy in Black, White, and Color" but--ahem--the only color I see is White.

Books with nice covers and nice pages

Don't judge a book by its cover?

Why not?

The Modern Library hardbacks on my shelf have such lovely brass-colored dust jackets with black-and-white images, nice firm cloth bindings, and smooth, impossibly thin pages which never seem to yellow. Are they still being published? I just floated around the Random House site, here, and only found paperbacks. Even brand new, the hardcovers had prices only a hair above the competitors' paperbacks. I loved them!

I'm teaching Modern Philosophy in the spring, for the first time in over 10 years. And imagine my shock: E.A. Burtt, The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill is entirely out of print! Strangely, its companion volume, Monroe Beardsley, The European Philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche, is not. But that one is available only in paperback.

What's a good solution? What are other folks doing? I ordered The Empiricists instead. But I hate having a mismatched set. And are Locke and Hume not worth reprinting when Spinoza et alia are?

Neurosexism

Cordelia Fine's fantastic analysis of "neurosexism" and exposé of the sloppy reasoning that feeds misconceptions about gendered brain differences to the popular press is reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by Carol Tavris.

This is a good book to use in class--not just a class on feminist theory, but also in a philosophy of science class that examines the structure of evidential claims and the ways that values can influence scientific research and the communication of science.

From the review:

Fine’s romp through the fields of neurosexism is sandwiched between two other sections; in the first, she explores the unsexy, low-tech, but primary causes of gender differences in achievement: the persistence of discrimination, subtle and blatant, that convey the message to women – “You don’t belong here”, and the institutional rules, explicit and implicit, that impede advancement – or make it possible; after all, the international rise of women in law, medicine, science, bartending and the military did not occur because their brains became less lateralized. The final section examines the socialization of children and the phenomenon that draws so many parents to the notion that sex differences are innate: the sex-stereotyped play choices and behaviours of their toddlers. Parents aren’t wrong in what they observe. They are wrong only in assuming that their child’s preferences at the age of three, four or five has anything at all to do with what that child will grow up to become.

Big Books, Long Words

I tell people I only read short books. I tell myself I only read short books.

When a friend published a book and apologetically said "But it's not much of a book--it's less than 200 pages," I had to reply "That's the best kind! It's the kind of book that people will actually read!"

When asked about my favorite books, I can cite a whole list of really great reads under 200 pages long. The books in the Boston Review series qualify, and as a bonus, some add on scholarly comments, such as Susan Moller Okin's Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?. Loren Graham's What Have We Learned about Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? is a favorite of mine, not just for its fascinating thesis, but primarily because it is the perfect model of a short book. It asks some clear questions and then provides evidence to answer each. The evidence and the interpretations of it are not always the obvious ones.

Lectures can make good short books. Austin's How to Do Things With Words just would not have been as good a read if it were three times as long. I've never read Robert Brandom's Making It Explicit, which is over 700 pages long, as though he had to make it all explicit. And I don't believe everyone who says they've read it. It's far more believable that they might have read his Articulating Reasons, published just a few years later and covering similar territory in just over 200 pages.

But these books are (analytic) philosophy--and perhaps philosophy ought to be brief. But no, when I think of my favorite novels, they too are short. To take one example, Christa Wolf's Cassandra is less than 150 pages. And far more than novels, I always love to read a short story by Alice Munro or Muriel Spark.

In spite of my long-standing penchant for quick, concise reads and common, straightforward language (spare me the neologisms!), I've found myself reading long books this summer. But by necessity, only a few of them: Bowling Alone (544 pages), The Poisonwood Bible (576 pages), Roads to Quoz (592 pages).

From earlier this year, here's a column by historian Ann Vileisis on "The Pleasures of a Big Fat Book" (ooooh! Look at her bookshelf! That's like my bookshelf--well, it would be if you removed the big fat Russian novels!)

What's your preference? The focus of a short book or the rambling development of a long one? Is a preference for short books conditioned by too much Internet reading and too little patience?

Bullshit in Media and Politics

I've started grading students' written responses to Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit."

Frankfurt writes that "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit." Later on, he declines to take a stand on the essentially empirical question of whether there is more now than ever:

"Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is relatively more of it nowadays than at other times. There is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but the proportion that is bullshit may not have increased."

To my mind, this all but asserts that there is more now, and I would have thought that there is more right now than 20 years ago when Frankfurt originally wrote the essay. Isn't there more TV but less content? And don't media technologies allow us and tempt us to publicize our opinions whether we are experts or not? (Frankfurt says that "Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.")

But a student raised the insightful objection that there may very well be less bullshit now than 50 or 500 years ago, precisely because we can all be experts or can find an expert. There is more information--even more knowledge--easily available than anyone would have imagined a generation ago. And the standards of evidence are widely recognized. Superstition, myth, and ignorance allow bullshit to proliferate. The internet counters this, though, in holding varied sources of information (wikipedia alongside library databases), in encouraging multiple reports of experience (product reviews), and in helping people connect (MoveOn or consumer groups).

Students also quickly expressed the view that the current presidential administration relies on Bullshit. Frankfurt writes that

"telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertaions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person's normal habit of attending to the way things are may become attenuated or lost." And this is why "bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

As one student paper points out, one can be caught out in a lie. A liar can be confronted with evidence. But bullshit, being empty and made-up, is elusive and always leaves the bullshitter a way out. The Bushies have been careful enough to remain ignorant whenever possible, to filter evidence, to isolate themselves from expertise and knowledge, to make many leading but vague claims, and so to indulge in the refuge of Bullshit.

Jim Johnson has a label devoted to such political BS.

Addendum: Students suggest films to accompany Frankfurt's essay, in particular Wag the Dog and Thank Your For Smoking.

On Bullshit

Back in November I asked for reading suggestions for my Critical Thinking course. The one that I picked is Harry Frankfurt's contribution to the "theoretical understanding of bullshit"--his analysis of "the structure of its concept."

The 1986 article "On Bullshit" was known only to philosophical initiates until 2005 when, in a timely marketing move, it was published as a teeny-tiny book by Princeton University Press and found its way into the very short list of bestselling books written by philosophers. Others have cashed in since then, including the Popular Culture and Philosophy series at Open Court, with a whole collection of essays on Bullshit and Philosophy (see Rob Loftis' comment here).

Frankfurt distinguishes bullshit from lying. Liars know the truth and take some pains to conceal it, whereas bullshitters lack any sort of connection to or concern about truth: "this indifference to how things really are...[is]...the essence of bullshit." The bullshitter's "speech is empty, without substance or content." It is trivial; it is insincere. The bullshitter has his own motives, and in pursuing his goals, truth is a casualty. He does not even care about truth enough to lie. The evidence supporting a claim has nothing to do with the reasons why it should be accepted, for a bullshitter. And in virtue of paying no attention to the claims of reason and logic, "bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

My Critical Thinking class has taken one day to discuss this book, and we'll discuss it more today. I asked for examples of BS and the students came up with the usual examples from marketing and business. Several also had some sharp political insights (more about that tomorrow). And there was the predictably cynical comment that the essay was nothing but a performative confirmation that philosophy itself is nothing but BS.

But the comment that made me chuckle loudest was that

"Scientology is the biggest load of BS that God ever created."

What's popular in philosophy?

The campus bookstore at my university has invited the philosophy department to assemble a shelf of book recommendations. Presumably these should be books that might actually sell, and not, for example, Quine’s Word and Object or Carnap’s Aufbau, no matter how influential they might have been.

This has prompted me to consult Amazon for popular titles in “Philosophy.”

What counts as “philosophy,” or as “metaphysics” for that matter, depends on who you ask.

The Amazon listing of bestselling philosophy books includes titles such as “The 48 Laws of Power” (#231) and “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens” (#26,114).

One wonders about the prevalence of numbers in the titles of popular books--perhaps Wittgenstein could be a popular author if instead of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus it were titled “7 Propositions on Language and Reality.” Especially since language seems to be a hot popular philosophy topic, with Steven Pinker showing up in every list.

So, if we confine our picks to Philosophy that Philosophers Would Recognize, the bestselling list looks something like this:
Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (#70)
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (#303)
Thomas Cathcart and David Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes (a humorous but respectable survey of philosophy assembled by non-philosophers) (#384)

After that, the next most popular titles are clearly bought as college course texts:
Anthony Weston, A Rulebook for Arguments
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Plato, The Republic
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
(that last one is a surprise, eh?)

One of the most popular collections of current philosophical research articles is
The Daily Show and Philosophy (#2976), which probably explains why my students write essays about that utilitarian, Jon Stewart Mills.

In philosophy of science, the most popular books are
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (#103) and
Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (#3539)
which makes me wonder when it was that philosophy of science became engulfed by questions about religion.

Meanwhile, some of the books that I had hoped to pick for the bookstore shelf like Philip Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy are ranked lower (higher?) than 200,000.

Book review of Potter's Feminism and Philosophy of Science

Alexandra Bradner has written a thoughtful, sympathetic review of Libby Potter's Feminism and Philosophy of Science: An Introduction, Routledge, 2006.

How we'd love to have time on this blog to discuss many of the points the review raises! Alexandra's review is worth reading itself, but here let me pick a few highlights:

1. It's nice to see someone call out the PSA for their lack of attention to feminist philosophy of science at the latest (2006) conference. I would add that in recent years the pages of the journal have also overlooked work in this area and appear to underrepresent women, especially when writing explicitly from a feminist perspective.

2. There is much attention paid to the status of women in science by the NSF, the AAAS, and other organizations interested in science and science education. Such attention is not so often paid to the humanities, whether because gender disparity is not apparent in the humanities generally or because our national interest is not pinned to the humanities as it is to the sciences. But figures (nicely summarized here and more links here) show that, as a discipline, philosophy lags behind most life and physical sciences in terms of the representation of women. Thus, Alexandra is correct to draw attention to how

...although Potter's own philosophers take time to discuss the gender construct in which science is produced, there is no attention to the gender context in which philosophy is produced -- the number of female philosophers, their ranks, salaries, editorial roles in journals and major anthologies, differences in training, extra-career obligations, etc.

3. Bradner praises Potter for how

this introduction makes it clear that philosophers interested in the fact/value distinction (that is, all philosophers) ignore feminist philosophy of science at their peril.

4. Finally, Alexandra writes that she wonders

what exactly is feminist about Potter's conception of feminist philosophy of science, for although feminists are certainly interested in value intrusion and naturalized epistemology, there is nothing especially feminist about these interests.

This is a delicate point. Feminist philosophy is of interest to all philosophers precisely because the issues and oversights that it raises highlight ways of thinking that have the effect of marginalizing women. And usually, insofar as these ways of thinking affect some people differently from other people, they signal a more general and not specifically gender-relevant problem. However, as our attention is shifted to the more general problem, the relevance to feminism drops out of sight.