Women and Gender Issues

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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Hate Crimes, Complicated: Or, Why It’s So Hard To Do What’s Right, Even When You’re “Right”

I’ve never been in a fist-fight in my entire life  but, yesterday, I received my first black eye. I got my black eye roughly 48 hours ago now, on what just so happened to be the last day of my College’s Fall break, which ended Tuesday evening.  I spent the entire evening on Tuesday with…

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The Vicissitudes of Netiquette

In the last couple of days, I’ve received a lot of criticism about this post, in which I solicited Dr. Vincent Hendricks (and encouraged my readers to solicit Dr. Hendricks) to grant an interview with me, for the benefit of his English-speaking audience, about the recent kerfuffle surrounding his decision to post on his website–…

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Guest-Blogger Shiloh Whitney on the Hendricks Affair

[Introductory note from Dr. J: Hello, readers. Just a quick introductory note about today’s “guest blogger.” Shiloh Whitney (pictured left) is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at McGill University. She submitted a rather long comment to the previous discussion taking place on this blog surrounding the Hendricks affair, so I asked her if she wouldn’t…

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If P, then WTF?! (Revisited)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about what has come to be known in the professional philosophical community as “L’Affaire Hendricks,” in which Prof. Vincent Hendricks used several explicit and sexist photos (one example on your left) to advertise his logic course at the University of Copenhagen. I was, quite honestly, surprised to see…

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If P, then WTF?!

The image to your left is one of a set of images that were recently posted by Vincent Hendricks, Professor of Formal Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen and part-time Visiting Research Scholar at Columbia University, advertising his course in Logic. (The advertisement has since been taken down from Prof. Hendricks’ website, but you can…

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Leiter v. Alcoff, Part Two: The Context (or, Why This Isn’t Simply A “He Said, She Said” Story)

Okay, if you haven’t read Part One of this series, you should go back and do so. Otherwise, the following won’t make much sense. If you have read Part One, and if you don’t already have a dog in this fight, you may be wondering: what exactly is the big deal here? So what, two…

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Leiter v. Alcoff, Part One: The Basics

Now that things have quieted down a bit, and in response to readers who’ve been asking me to do this for a while, I’ve decided to offer a few reflections on the recent (and very public) kerfuffle between Brian Leiter and Linda Alcoff. I expect that most of you who aren’t professional philosophers don’t have…

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Kyle Ference Mans Up

The picture to the left is of a former student and advisee of mine, Kyle Ference (author of the Refudiating Through Life blog). During his time at Rhodes, Kyle was in many ways the very ideal of a liberal arts student. He was smart and hardworking, affable and well-liked, committed to socially-conscious extracurricular activities, a…

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