politics

Witch-Hunting in the Digital Age

Much to my own embarrassment, I’ve neglected to post here on the Steven Salaita controversy thus far, an affair with far-reaching implications not only for how we determine what constitutes both the civic and academic limits to the “right to free speech,” but also for a number of hiring-and-firing practices that are customary within the Academy but…

Read More

Archive of The Meltdown [Now Closed]

If the current results of Brian Leiter’s poll (which asks whether or not he should continue producing the Philosophical Gourmet Report) are any indication– it’s 1709 to 1118 in favor of “No” votes as I write this– and if Leiter intends to take those poll results as some sort of mandate, then Philosophy may very well…

Read More

Normalizing Civility, Policing Critique, Enforcing Silence and Misunderstanding Collegiality

How we ought to understand the terms “civility” and “collegiality” and to what extent they can be enforced as professional norms are dominating discussions in academic journalism and the academic blogosphere right now.  (So much so, in fact, that it’s practically impossible for me to select among the literally hundreds of recent articles/posts and provide…

Read More

A Note on “The Archive”

This is just to let readers know that I continue to update the Archive of The Meltdown daily.  I’m trying to catch everything substantive that shows up in re the recent events surrounding Leiter, the PGR and the September Statement– and I’m aiming to avoid redundancy as much as possible– but there has been a…

Read More

Professional Philosophy Triage

Justice tempered by Mercy Because I’m maintaining an Archive of (what I’ve called) The Meltdown here on this blog, I think I’ve read most, if not all, of what professional philosophers have said publicly in the last several days’ scrum regarding  Brian Leiter’s objectionable behaviors (or “civility” more generally) as well as the merits and demerits…

Read More

Interactive Timeline of the Leiter/PGR Controversy

As readers know, I have maintained an Archive on this blog with links to most (if not all) of the public essays, statements and posts regarding the recent controversy surrounding Brian Leiter and the Philosophical Gourmet Report.  A lot as been said over the last few weeks and, if you’re interested, you can trudge through…

Read More

What You Can Do To Support PIKSI (which you *should* support) OTHER THAN Donating Your Money (which, if you are able, you *should* also do)

It’s been a busy (in fact, record-breakingly busy) month here on RMWMTMBM, so I wanted to take a momentary break from the Leiter/PGR/SeptemberStatement brouhaha–about which this blog has more or less unfortunately become something akin to professional Philosophy’s version of TMZ— and instead remark upon an initiative as important to our discipline as, and not wholly…

Read More

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,…

Read More

CFT (Call For Tweeters) #SPEP14

Last year’s meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) was the first such conference, as far as I’m aware, that was live-tweeted by a significant-enough number of participants to be noteworthy.  I was one of the SPEP Twitterati last year in Eugene, and I wrote a post about that experience after I…

Read More

The Ferguson Lesson: Another Way To “Take Up Arms”

As someone who has spent the better part of her career researching, analyzing and teaching not only about the structure and nature of oppressive power regimes, but also better and worse ways to resist or transform such regimes, I’ve nevertheless been unable to settle in my own mind, to my own satisfaction, my position with…

Read More