I’m adding this to my list of blogs to check out: Joseph Orosco’s blog, Engage: Conversations in Philosophy. Not only does he take up good issues, he’s guided by a thick sense of civic engagement. A while back we published an essay of his, “Cosmopolitan Loyalty and the Great Global Community,” in the Kettering Review (Spring 2004), taking up the cosmopolitan paradox of having both national and international citizenship. Joseph Orosco’s blog is another good example of public philosophy. Any more out there?
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I once read this horrible statistic that maybe four people read any given refereed journal article. Can that be? What a waste of all the energy and thought that goes into this kind of intense writing. And what a shame, we often lament, that writing for “the public” doesn’t count in promotion and tenure decisions. Gone are the days (namely the 1950s), when public intellectuals could write and be respected for writing to an educated and still broad public. Some of us are out to change this, in one way or another. Several years ago John Lachs and others helped raise money for an American Philosophical Association Committee on Public Philosophy. I’ve been part of this pioneering group. We’ve held some special sessions at the eastern and central APA. This is just a start.
So what is public philosophy? I’d say it is philosophy that is in some way or another engaged with public concerns, and not necessarily political ones, and with the public itself. This blog of mine is a species of public philosophy. The title “gone public” doesn’t refer to any initial public offering of stock options to the public. No cents are being made here, though I hope some sense is. We need a separate web site for public philosophy, but in the meantime send your thoughts here by way of a comment describing what kind of public philosophy you see happening in your corner of the world.
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I just came across Public Reason, a group blog for political philosophers. Looks interesting.
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In today’s New York Times Magazine, Kwame Anthony Appiah comments on the newborn philosophy movement of experimental philosophy, or “x-phi,” in which philosophers are turning to MRI machines and other laboratory technologies to help unravel philosophical quandaries. This new movement, he reports,
has rudely challenged the way professional philosophers like to think of themselves. Not only are philosophers unaccustomed to gathering data; many have also come to define themselves by their disinclination to do so. The professional bailiwick we’ve staked out is the empyrean of pure thought. Colleagues in biology have P.C.R. machines to run and microscope slides to dye; political scientists have demographic trends to crunch; psychologists have their rats and mazes. We philosophers wave them on with kindly looks. We know the experimental sciences are terribly important, but the role we prefer is that of the Catholic priest presiding at a wedding, confident that his support for the practice carries all the more weight for being entirely theoretical. Philosophers don’t observe; we don’t experiment; we don’t measure; and we don’t count. We reflect. We love nothing more than our “thought experiments,” but the key word there is thought. As the president of one of philosophy’s more illustrious professional associations, the Aristotelian Society, said a few years ago, “If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can.”
But x-phi philosophers (x-philes) are setting out to torch the armchairs, as evidenced in a YouTube video (Experimental Philosophy Anthem) that Appiah mentions. Take the question of when we think that an action is blameworthy? Why wonder abstractly when we can simply ask people what they think, just as Joshua Knobe has done? Why not set up an Experimental Philosophy Lab as Indiana University has? “More and more,” Appiah writes, “you hear about philosophy grad students who are teaching themselves how to read f.M.R.I. brain scans in order to try to figure out what’s going on when people contemplate moral quandaries. (Which decisions seem to arise from cool calculation? Which decisions seem to involve amygdala-associated emotion?) ”
What does Appiah think of this? What do I think of it? We’re both in agreement that empirical answers don’t settle philosophical questions.
You can conduct more research to try to clarify matters, but you’re left having to interpret the findings; they don’t interpret themselves. There always comes a point where the clipboards and questionnaires and M.R.I. scans have to be put aside. To sort things out, it seems, another powerful instrument is needed. Let’s see — there’s one in the corner, over there. The springs are sagging a bit, and the cushions are worn, but never mind. That armchair will do nicely.
What a great writer Appiah is! Let’s go further, though, and note that x-phi empirical work is nice work the way that the social sciences produce nice work. They observe how some people behave and think but not whether such behavior and thinking is coherent or commendable. Moreover, the presumptions and methods of such “science” still need to be reflected upon. That’s why we need philosophy of social science, not just social science. Philosophy at its best is self-reflective. An MRI machine is not.
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…read Rich’s blog. Rich Harwood is a real voice for civic and democratic change. I’ve known him for more years than I care to admit, first simply as someone with a good ear and knack for focus group research, someone able to hear what regular folks are saying about their condition and their concerns about public life. In the past several years he’s taken these experiences along with his own sense of things to be a beacon for democratic change. Hats off to Rich.
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If you’re busted for drugs and you’re black, guess what — surprise, surprise — you’re more likely to go to prison than if you’re busted and white. That’s the latest findings from the Justice Policy Institute. As Madison, Wisconsin’s Capital Times puts it, 97 black drug offenders are imprisoned for each white one.
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Today’s Washington Post has an interesting piece on Columbia University’s economist Graciela Chichilnisky and her ongoing disputes with her university over pay equity. The article raises familiar issues about perceived differences between successful men’s and successful women’s demeanors.
Columbia officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing litigation, said Chichilnisky can be abrasive and has difficulty getting along with colleagues. Her supporters say that even if the description is true, she would hardly be alone in the world of tough-minded academicians. They also add that if she were a man, the traits would not be an issue.
“On the one hand, the Larry Summers of this world question women’s genetical abilities in the sciences, while our powerful institutions use all their money and might to crush women who show what are the true genetical abilities of women in the sciences,” Chichilnisky said.
IVY LEAGUE
Taking on the Economics of Gender Inequity
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 3, 2007; Page B02In the world of economic theory, Columbia University‘s Graciela Chichilnisky is an A-list star.
Nobel laureates laud her work and call her brilliant; some economists credit her with an important economic theory. She is involved in the economics of fighting global warming internationally, and she was recently elected to the university senate.
Chichilnisky is also embroiled in a bitter 16-year fight, including two lawsuits and a countersuit, against the Ivy League school where she teaches. She says she has been a victim of sex discrimination. Her salary, she alleges, has not kept pace with those of her male counterparts. Research grants have been taken away, and administrators have retaliated because of her complaints, she says. Read more…
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Years ago a friend confided at the dinner table that he felt no connection to the events he read about in the paper. He noticed that other people felt appalled or sad or moved by the terrible events they read about, but to him they were just words on paper. He recognized it was strange to have no empathetic response, but he just couldn’t muster one.
I’m the other extreme. I get teary when I hear about the most minimal acts of kindness as well as the most distant suffering. I cried when I saw Solidarity take to the streets in the 80s, and I could barely sleep thinking about people jumping to their deaths on 9/11 or about the suffering and grievous loss following the tsunami and Katrina. I think most people are more like me than my friend at that dinner table.
I don’t take much stock in something like Hume’s notion of an inner moral sense. But there does seem to be a palpable difference in how people respond to the suffering and the joy of others. There’s evidence that this difference is hardwired, but I’d like to think there is more to it than that.
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A coalition of citizens’ groups, including the National Organization for Women and Consumers Union, is asking people to write to their members of Congress in a campaign to “stop big media.” I know leaders of many of these organizations and can attest that they’re doing good work. Their draft letter is as follows:
I am writing to urge you to support S 2332, the “The Media Ownership Act of 2007.” This legislation will ensure that the Federal Communications Commission addresses the dismal state of female and minority ownership before changing any rules to unleash more media concentration.
Nearly 99 percent of the public comments received by the FCC oppose changing the nation’s media ownership rules to allow a handful of large conglomerates to swallow up more local media outlets. Congress rejected the same changes to the rules in 2003. Yet the FCC is still pushing a plan to overhaul the rules by the end of the year.
This legislation would mandate that the FCC give the public 90 days’ notice before holding a vote on new rules to ensure a full public accounting of the impact of media consolidation before changing the ownership limits. These steps are necessary to preserve diverse local media that meets the needs of our communities.
Diversity is the cornerstone of a democratic media system. Yet research by Free Press found that that while minorities make up 33 percent of the U.S. population, they own less than 8 percent of radio stations and 3 percent of TV stations.
This legislation would create an independent task force to address the crisis in minority media ownership.
Our democracy requires the free flow of local information from diverse voices. Please support the “The Media Ownership Act of 2007.”
For more information and a way to send your own version of the letter electronically, go to StopBigMedia.com.
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Apart from the question of “Who has the rights to the lands of Palestine?” little can be more contentious than the question, “What counts as philosophy?” What are the bounds of this discipline of ours? I like to think that there aren’t any clear and proper boundaries but that there is a roughly common approach (but don’t ask me to define it) and, delightfully, a common canon (at least for what is understood as pre-20th century western philosophy, though lamentably white, male philosophy). Anyone of any persuasion teaching an intro to philosophy class is likely to include some of the philosophers Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Bentham, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, Rousseau, and maybe some selection from Marx, Nietsche, and James. With texts of the twentieth century all bets are off. But what’s one century in a discipline that goes back 25? Given our long history, we’ve had nothing like the canon wars that tore apart English departments in the 1980s. The common canon saves us, but it doesn’t give us a way to define or set bounds to what philosophy is. Philosophy has a way of undermining boundaries, like the boundary between what is properly philosophical and what is not. Just try to set up a fence and see how long it stands.
Even to the extent that we have a common canon, the question of what counts as philosophy is desperately unclear, at least once one strays from a “view-from-nowhere” approach to metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, logic, or any of the many philosophy-of-x arenas. Once the approach becomes more specific and situated, the border wars arise. And the lines are usually drawn between what is hegemonically understood as proper philosophy and what is not. Philosophy that is not in fashion in “the best” schools, not “prestigious,” not hard and clear and rigorous, not properly erected — including today American pragmatism, critical theory, post-Kantian European philosophy, and, oh, certainly feminist philosophy — doesn’t seem to count as philosophy at all, at least by those who are counting and protecting a certain definition of proper philosophy.
Just look (and you’ll have to scroll down and then scan the rigt-hand column) at the specialities of the list of evaluators who were invited to rank graduate programs in philosophy for the 2006 Philosophical Gourmet Report. I am told by a defender of the report that this is a “remarkably diverse” group of good philosophers and so it is truly able to gauge what are, objectively, the outstanding graduate programs in philosophy. Any program that doesn’t end up on the list, I’m told, simply isn’t a good program.
Shocking.
Who defines what counts as good philosophy and hence who counts as the good philosophers? Isn’t this kind of counting tantamount to defining philosophy itself, to saying that M&E (metaphysics and epistemology) counts, but feminist philosophy doesn’t? Or if it’s feminist, it isn’t M&E? Or if it’s concerned with Derrida and not Tarski, or the late Wittgenstein but not the early Wittgenstein, it just ain’t philosophy?
Is that very philosophical?
gonepublic by Noëlle McAfee 