Women and Gender Issues

The Leiter/PGR Archive Is Now Closed (and, A Note from Your Archivist)

This has been a strange month for academic Philosophy, for professional philosophers and, as a more or less direct consequence, for this blog.  A little less than four weeks ago, on September 24, I began collecting various posts, essays and articles related to what I then anticipated was going to be, at the very least,…

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Philosophy Qua Frenemy

The earth revolves around the sun. Not everyone on talent shows has talent.  The square root of four is two. Your mom did it with your dad. Also, it’s not easy being a woman in Philosophy. I won’t bother to link to the series of scandals that have beset the discipline of Philosophy over the…

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“Somehow Philosophy Got Left Behind”

There’s a really great essay by Eugene Sun Park entitled “Why I Left Academia: Philosophy’s Homogeneity Needs Rethinking”  that appeared yesterday on HIPPO Reads.  Stop whatever you’re doing and go read it now. I’ve posted a fair bit of material on this blog addressing the racial and gender disparity in professional Philosophy, which remains truly embarrassing, but…

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“But Quiet, Be Quiet a Minute”: On The Death of Fred Phelps

The news has just been released that Rev. Fred Phelps, founder and lifelong shepherd of the Westboro Baptist Church (in Topeka, Kansas) has died at the age of 84.  I find it difficult, I confess, to summon the normal human compassion that usually accompanies news of another’s death in this case, largely because Phelps dedicated…

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On “Solidarity”

Let’s face it: exercising solidarity is tricky business, not the least of which is because “solidarity” itself is a tricky concept, which requires the subordination of real differences (across a whole host of important categorical domains) for the sake of some particular common interest that might prioritize similitude– often for prudentially strategic reasons– over, across…

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Please Do NOT Revise Your Tone

As some of you already know, I am also one of the bloggers at NewAPPS.  I’m re-posting here a piece co-authored by Edward Kazaian and I that appeared this past Tuesday on NewAPPS.  It’s generated a lot of conversation so far, and I’ll have a post forthcoming soon on my take on that conversation. What…

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Dr. J’s 2013 Year in Politics

It’s time for the next installment of my 2013 Year in Review Lists: the 2013 Year in Politics. Each December that I do this, it gets increasingly difficult to distinguish between the stories that properly belong on this list and those that fit more comfortably on the Year in Pop Culture list, which says something…

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Female Brains Are Prettier, More Fun At Parties, Less Tasty

I almost titled this “Once More Into The Breach, Part Deux” in reference to my Once More Into The Breach, Dear Friends post from last week, which criticized the way in which conversations about gender disparity in professional Philosophy continue to be framed by concept-distorting and argument-disfiguring gender essentialism.  My targets today are not “philosophers”…

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Once More Into The Breach, Dear Friends

Prompted by a recent piece on newAPPS, I’m (somewhat reluctantly) forced to acknowledge the renewed attention to a not-at-all-new phenomenon in the world of Philosophy over the last couple of years, namely, the dramatic under-representation of women in our profession.  Here’s what you need to know up front, assuming that some of you readers are…

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Tolerance Is Not A Virtue

Let me be clear at the outset: when I say that tolerance is not a virtue, I’m saying that as a philosopher for whom virtue has a conceptually substantive meaning.  I do not mean to imply that tolerance is a vice, a claim to which I think no reasonable moral agent, and no philosopher worth…

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