by Edward Kazarian and Leigh M. Johnson A little over two years ago, more than 600 philosophers petitioned the American Philosophical Association to “produce a code of conduct and a statement of professional ethics for the academic discipline of Philosophy.” The immediate motivation for the petition was several high-profile cases of sexual misconduct by philosophers, which…
Read MoreThere’s an old anecdote about boiling frogs that is often employed by philosophers to explain the sorites paradox. If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, the story goes, it will immediately sense the heat and the danger, jump out of the pot, and be spared its life. But if you put…
Read MoreWomen’s voices, ideas, engagements, and critiques are constantly being erased and/or appropriated– in academia, on the internet, at workplaces of every ilk– sometimes through slick and malicious moves, but much more often as a consequence of careless inattention. Also, water is wet. I was just recently “disappeared” in an essay by my friend Joshua Miller…
Read MoreOnly a couple of weeks ago, I noted on this blog (in “Philosophy’s Gatekeepers”) that it had been 190 days since the last major breaking-news story about sexual harassment or assault in professional Philosophy. That was a noteworthy fact, And then, last Friday, the Thomas Pogge story broke. I’ll just direct readers to the news coverage…
Read MoreThere are so many things about Netflix’s original comedy series Grace and Frankie (now in its second season) to recommend it, not least of which is its pitch-perfect gallows humor. Orbiting around the decidedly 21st century lives of four septuagenarians– the eponymous Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin) and their now ex-husbands, Saul (Sam Waterston)…
Read MoreYesterday’s piece by Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden’s in NYT‘s The Stone (“If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is”) has already generated some of the most interesting online discussion about the discipline and profession of Philosophy that I’ve seen since our last salacious exposé. (What are we at now, philosophers? 190 days…
Read MoreThe photo to your left is of a sock-monkey, hung by a noose from one of the windows on the campus of Rhodes College this week. It should go without saying, I hope, that not only is the sock-monkey itself a manifestly racist symbol (echoing the colonialist project of comparing blacks to apes in order to justify their…
Read MoreThe first text I assign in my social and political philosophy course is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges entitled “The Lottery in Babylon.” In it, Borges’ narrator tells the story of his former home, Babylon, where (over the course of many years) a lottery evolves from being a voluntary game of chance into a mandatory…
Read MoreIn the January edition of the New Yorker, there was a story (“The Hit List”) about the so-called “Islamist war” on secular bloggers in Bagladesh. It begins with the murder of blogger Avijit Roy: atheist, rationalist and advocate of scientific understanding. (Roy: “The vaccine against religion is to build up a scientific approach.”) It is a…
Read MoreI read Emma Donoghue‘s novel Room somewhat by accident shortly after it was released in 2010 No one recommended it to me and I didn’t know anything about it in advance. Rather, I found myself stuck in an airport waiting on an indefinitely delayed connection, my attention-span for grading papers was exhausted, and so I wandered…
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