New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Putting the Healy data to work: reflecting on bibliography building and on hiring

An important post at Feminst Philosophers ends with this recommendation:

I hereby urge you all to go look at your bibliographies, and– even more importantly– make sure you actively think about what women you should cite in current and future papers. Also: speak up when people use citation data to argue against hiring or promoting a woman. Show them the Healy data, and talk to them about implicit bias.

Read the whole thing!

Crackdown on university teachers in Turkey?

Toward the end of this otherwise unremarkable story* there is a worrisome bit:

In the meantime, Turkey's Education Ministry and Higher Education Board (YÖK) have launched investigations against teachers and university lecturers across the country who allegedly encouraged their students to join in the Gezi Park demonstrations, media reports said on Tuesday.

*Such is the state of discourse in Turkey nowadays (obviously, my grasp of the Turkish situatuon is filtered through news stories in English) that this bizarre sentence hardly seems out of the ordinary: " 'Firing tear gas is a most natural right of the police. Have they fired a bullet? Have they used guns?' Erdoğan asked."

The Healy Four in perspective

There is a lot more to be said about patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the Healy Four (H4), but Healy's citation data also suggest that the four most prestigious journals in the discipline may be lagging indicators. I have already hinted at this by calling attention to the reputation for slowness that at least three of the journals had during the period covered by Healy.  Here's some further evidence that H4 is a lagging indicator.

Jonathan Schaffer, who is extremely widely cited, does not crack the Healy 500. Now, what makes Schaffer interesting is that he does publish in the H4 in 'core' areas of philosophy; his papers get picked up and from 2008 (or so onward) cited a lot. (He returned Stateside in 2011.)  I would expect that in the next few years, Schaffer easily cracks a revised Healy 500. Now n=1 (although I have also looked at some other 'high citation, low Healy 500 impact, publishes in H4' e.g., Jonathan Hawthorne, our very own Mohan, etc.). Here's a defeasible moral: while H4 may publish cutting edge research, the citations in h4 reflect this with considerable lag.

More citation data from Healy

On the (ahum) dominance of David Lewis, and the relative lack of citations of women, here.

The Healy 500 data are raw-citations (not co-citations) in the Healy Four.

First, I stand corrected; the data suggest that Abe Stone was right because analytical philosophy has generated and recognized (via citations) a systematic philosopher: David Lewis.

Second, eighteen out of five hundred items in the Healy-500 are by women (3.6%) [UPDATED to REFLECT ADJUSTMENTS in HEALY's DATA.]

Phenomenology as a Practice of Liberation

There’s a nice little experiment undertaken by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons at Harvard University in which subjects were asked to count the number of times a basketball was passed back and forth in a short video.  Half of the subjects tested were so absorbed in their assigned task that they did not even notice a person in a gorilla suit walking into the middle of the action, thumping its chest, and leaving.  This experience of missing what is right before your eyes because you are focused on something else has come to be known as inattentional blindness.

How does a person snap out of inattentional blindness?  You don’t need an argument to show you that a gorilla was in the scene, you just need someone to point it out to you.  Both the demonstration of your inattentional blindness and the “cure,” as it were, is a simple re-orientation of perspective.  Maybe you will need to watch the video again, or maybe the simple prompt, “Did you see the gorilla?” will be enough to make the missed phenomenon snap into place.

I want to suggest that there are forms of collective inattentional blindness, which are harder to discern and even harder to snap out of, but that a socially-engaged practice of phenomenology can help us with both.  My example will be – not surprisingly for those who have read any of my previous blog posts – the invisibility of mass incarceration in the US.

Every chance I get, I remind people that the US incarcerates more people than any other country in the world.  It can get pretty annoying, actually, both for me and for them.  But it’s a point that still seems to float, like a gorilla pounding its chest, into the middle of each and every scene of everyday life in the US, without being noticed.

Look at this image, for example.  It’s a planner’s sketch for proposed developments in a part of Nashville that they are trying to get people to call “SoBro.”  (You can click on the image to see more of the details.)

What would it take to see this sketch as a scene of mass incarceration? 

What Do Co-Citation Networks Reveal?

What have philosophers been talking about for the last twenty years? That's the question Kieran Healey attempts to answer in his fascinating analysis of co-citation networks, which Eric reflects on here. I am not quite ready to reflect on Healey's results myself. I have been playing around with a prior question that might interest readers. And I don't feel I have gotten to the bottom of this question yet.

What is a co-citation network? A co-citation edge is a pair of articles that are cited together. Suppose that I write an article that cites both A and B. An A-B edge is thereby formed. Now suppose that B is never cited except together with A—perhaps B is a discussion of A—but A is sometimes cited together with B and sometimes together with C. (A could be a discussion of C; alternatively, A and C could be discussions of the same topic.) The consequence will be two edge sets emanating from A, but only one from B. Thus, B will be less of a hub, or more peripheral, than A. 

The idea is illustrated by the most isolated network of all: a two node network connecting Mark Crimmins' 1998 paper, "Hesperus and Phosphorus: Sense, Pretense, and Reference," and Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe. Why these two? 

If you want to get published in the Healy Four, cite A few high status men...

Take a discipline racked by deep insecurity about its worth compared to science, which finds its most pleasing self-image in imagining itself continuous with the natural sciences and aspires to their ‘hardness’, throw in a largely male population, add a desperate job market, a culture of uncritical hero worship of its luminaries, mix in a sphere of ostensible academic interaction used instead for preening and strutting and the academic equivalent of mating, and you have, I think, the makings of a domain, which will continue to remain hostile to women.--Samir Chopra

In light of Brit's experience, one striking feature (as Karen pointed out at once) of the Healy co-citation networks is the near absence of women co-citations in "high prestige" journals (see my first attempt at analysis). How bad are things? In Healy's diagram I couldn't find Marcus, Thomson, Kamm, Wilson (neither Margaret nor Catherine), Wolff, Diamond, Anderson, Gilbert, just to name a few. 

Co-citation networks in philosophy

I took twenty years worth of articles from four major philosophy journals and generated a network from it based on the citations contained in those articles. The substantive idea is as follows. An academic discipline is a sort of exclusive, ongoing conversation. The conversation is carried on, amongst other settings, through books and articles. In many disciplines there are a few high-status general-interest journals that claim to publish the best work in the field. Particular members of the field will of course disagree about how true that is, but for my purposes the point is just a descriptive one. I am interested in what high-status actors in a field are talking about, and one source of information about this is what gets published in high-prestige journals that claim to represent the core of the discipline.--Kieran Healy

For a fantastic visual representation of Healy's results, see here. ("The graph shows co-citation patterns for the 500 most-cited items over the past twenty years, based on the articles published in our four journals.") The main results are instructive, but not surprising:

"[A] The core of the graph is a group of highly-cited items clustered around the most-cited item in the dataset: David Lewis’s 1986 book, On the Plurality of Worlds....[B] A second large cluster of citations focus on epistemology. Here the key works are by Tim Williamson (2000), Keith de Rose (1995), and Jim Pryor (2000). Interestingly, [C] there is a paper by Lewis here as well (Lewis 1996)....this is going to be a common occurrence....[D] there seem to be two separate clusters in the philosophy of mind...The first seems to be about consciousness...the second...is arguing with Jerry Fodor...[E] Work in ethics, metaethics, and political philosophy forms a component disconnected from the main graph."

Below the fold analysis (by Schliesser not Healy).

Pants on fire. Being turned down is far too easy

“I invited every woman working in the field. They all turned me down.”

This is the typical “excuse” editors and organizers of all- or almost-all-male conferences and volumes present in lieu of a defense. On previous occasions some of us have argued that this is a bad excuse. That the excuse itself could be a lie never occurred to me.

How few women authors are there in intro philosophy courses?

Following up on Catarina's post on Tania Lombrozo's article, one of the reasons offered for why women leave philosophy early on might be the lack of women philosophers in introductory syllabi. So how few women are there? Meghan Masto, assistant professor at Lafayette College, conducted a survey and gave me the opportunity to share her results on NewApps: 

We gathered syllabi from introductory level philosophy courses taught  at the top 40 small liberal arts schools in the country (as ranked by  U.S. World News). The results of this research confirmed our  suspicions. So far we have collected 57 introductory level philosophy syllabi from 22 of the schools contacted. By our count there are a  total of 739 philosophers included on the syllabi and only 60 of these are female. So a mere eight percent of reading covered in introductory level philosophy courses are written by women. Thirty one of the 57 courses include no female authors at all (courses included an average of thirteen philosophers on their syllabi). Further, if we were to exclude the syllabi from the ethics courses and include the syllabi only from the 43 non-ethics courses, the percentage of female  philosophers discussed is even lower. By our count, these non-ethics syllabi include 602 philosophers on the reading lists, with only 36 of these being female—so a mere 6 percent of philosophers discussed in non-ethics courses are female. Twenty-four of the 46 non-ethics courses included no female authors at all.

Why do women leave philosophy, and so early on?

This post by Tania Lombrozo on the causes of the gender imbalance in philosophy has been widely shared and reshared on Facebook and other venues, but (at Tony Chemero's suggestion) I figured it might still be worth posting a link to it here, for those who may have missed it.

Until recently, most of these hypotheses lacked empirical grounding. Collecting relevant data is no easy task, and social scientists weren't exactly lining up for the task. So part of the excitement last Friday — as we waited for a presentation titled "Women and Philosophy: Why is it 'Goodbye' at 'Hello'?" — was the promise of data. The speakers were Toni Adleberg and Morgan Thompson, two master's degree students at Georgia State University, presenting preliminary findings from work with Professor Eddy Nahmias.

One of the conclusions is that "the biggest drop in the proportion of women in the philosophy pipeline seems to be from enrollment in an introductory philosophy class to becoming a philosophy major." If that's the case, one obvious suggestion presents itself: increase the presence of women philosophers in introductory syllabi.

With the support of the Georgia State Department of Philosophy, for example, the researchers will test out one strategy for attracting more women to the major: this fall, graduate student instructors will use course syllabi with 20 percent or more female authors, at least doubling the current proportions.

This is of course an idea that has been put forward many times before, but it will be interesting to see if it will have the desired effect of keeping women on board. We hope it will!

UPDATE: A few months ago Helen had a post up precisely on the topic of suggestions of literature by women for intro classes, including the link for a Google spreadsheet where people could add items.

Against the Global Society of the Spectacle

This Reuters article highlights one of the background factors behind the Brazil protests: the twisted priorities that support massive spending for the World Cup that displaces public services spending.

Contrasting the billions in public money spent on new stadiums with the shoddy state of Brazil's public services, protesters are using the Confederation's Cup as a counterpoint to amplify their concerns. The tournament got off to shaky start this weekend when police clashed with demonstrators outside stadiums at the opening matches in Brasilia and Rio. "We shouldn't be spending public money on stadiums," said one protester in Sao Paulo who identified herself as Camila, a 32-year-old travel agent. "We don't want the Cup. We want education, hospitals, a better life for our children."

I'm reminded of Catarina's moving reminiscence of the Brazilian football great Sócrates. I can't help but think he would have been at the forefront with these critics of the way the World Cup -- and the Olympics -- have been used as pretexts not just for real estate speculation but also for security state expansion.

Mellen Press Owner Withholds Nazi Diary.

Brian Leiter has been reporting on the scandalous legal tactics by Mellen Press to silence its critics. It turns out that the owner of the press, Dr. Richardson, may now face his own legal problems [HT David Gordon]. Reuters reports:

When Kempner died in 1993 at age 93, legal disputes about his papers raged for nearly a decade between his children, his former secretary, a local debris removal contractor and the Holocaust museum. The children agreed to give their father's papers to the Holocaust museum, but when officials arrived to retrieve them from his home in 1999, they discovered that many thousands of pages were missing....

the Holocaust museum has gone on to recover more than 150,000 documents, including a trove held by Kempner's former secretary, who by then had moved into the New York state home of an academic named Herbert Richardson.

The Rosenberg diary, however, remained missing.

Early this year, the Holocaust museum and an agent from Homeland Security Investigation tried to locate the missing diary pages. They tracked the diary to Richardson, who was living near Buffalo.

Richardson declined to comment. A government official said more details will be announced at the news conference.

For more on  the story, see this account at the The Buffalo News.

Ultras and occupation of public space in Gezi Park

This Salon interview with an urbanist about Gezi was published the afternoon before the 15 June police attack. It includes this memorable description of sports fandom, occupation of public space, and political affect:

On Saturday [1 June] there was a back and forth struggle with the police all day, but they backed off around 3PM, largely thanks to the Beşiktaş soccer team’s ultra fans, Çarşı. They maintained a solid front before the tear gas and police. Their steady patience at the front line kept those us of behind them in place up until the police retreated. Then, we all rushed into the park shouting ideological slogans. The feeling of walking back in was amazing, powerful…. It’s a standard thing to walk in a park. You know, “It’s like a walk in the park,” the saying goes, but the effort here transformed it. To be with those thousands of people taking control of our urban space, our park, in our city came with a sense of communal empowerment I’d never felt.

When is the History of Philosophy not the History of Philosophy?

With apologies for the Delphic headline . . . TypePad doesn't allow italics. The question is this: shouldn't the history of philosophy be the study of philosophical content in historical texts? Should it be the study of something else? And really, I don't care whether you are an analytic philosopher or something else. The question remains: shouldn't the history of philosophy for you be concerned with what you find interesting in old texts?

Eric is alarmed by Julia Annas's notoriously provocative article on the state of ancient philosophy. Annas recounts how in the nineteen fifties and sixties, pre-Socratic philosophers such as Parmenides and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle (and in the seventies, the Hellenistic philosophers) began to be treated as "equal partners in philosophical debate," with the result that "For some time it has been taken for granted, in the major philosophical departments, that ancient philosophy is part of philosophy."But, she records, later scholars turned away from the ahistorical stance.

Dennett, Deepities, and Rowan Williams

[This is a guest-post by Michael Kremer.--ES]

Brian Leiter comments in typical acerbic style on an excerpt in the Guardian from Daniel Dennett’s latest book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, titled “Daniel Dennett’s Seven Tools for Thinking:”  “A curious list; not clear Dennett has always honored all of them!” 

What Leiter doesn’t notice, though, is that Dennett violates one of his principles in explaining another! Dennett's last tool is “beware of deepities.” He explains a deepity as

“a proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading, it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading, and the devastating importance from the first reading, and thinks, Wow! That’s a deepity.”

Dennett then offers two examples. The first is the claim that “love is just a word.” The second, he says, is not “quite so easily analyzed:” “Richard Dawkins recently alerted me to a fine deepity by Rowan Williams, the then archbishop of Canterbury, who described his faith as ‘a silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark’.” Dennett concludes “I leave the analysis of this as an exercise for you.”

Periwinkle

I don't understand the economic wrapping paper around this story—perhaps Eric can explain?—but if you skip the first three paragraphs, it is a lovely reflection, the platonic form of droll or wry or sardonic. (Those are all the same, right?)

What can historians of philosophy learn from ancient philosophy?

Ancient philosophy, however, is a philosophical way of engaging with these texts; that is what distinguishes it from other ways of studying them. And philosophy develops differently at different  times, so we should reasonably expect the state of ancient philosophy to reflect its engagement with philosophy.--Julia Annas "Ancient Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century," (25).

Summer is arriving so it's time (despite two more rounds of grading ahead and too many deadlines) to read around a bit. When I first encountered the passage above at the start of Professor Annas' self-congratulatory essay -- "engagement with analytical philosophy  restored the study of ancient philosophy to philosophical vigour"  (41) --, I was surprised because I thought it meant that Annas was going to historicize the practice of "ancient philosophy" (by which she means the philosophical, analytical engagement with folk like Plato, Aristotle, and others). The surprise following from the fact that I would not expect her to have an interest in such an enterprise. (The rest of the essay suggests, she doesn't really, although she admits "we do well to be aware of" our own "philosophical assumptions and methodological preferences." (42))

One might also read the passage above as reflecting on the danger that fashions in contemporary philosophy are echoed (perhaps with some delay to let these fashions be reflected in graduate curricula) in the interpretation of past thinkers. (While researching my dissertation I noticed that Ayer gives us a Hume as seen from Vienna; Garrett gives us a post-Quine-ean Hume; it made me wonder if my Chicago Hume would be a funny mixture of Wittgenstein and Kant.) Indeed this is what she has in mind (e.g., p. 27). Now, one might think that once such a diagnosis is offered one is well down the road of debunking the enterprise so diagnosed. While there are glimpses of a debunking attitude ("we can now see that a great of the time and fuss [about "the 'Third Man'"--ES] was off the point" (31; [undergraduates could always see it and those silly enough to say so would be told they lacked rigor]), it's not the main point of Annas' narrative of "progress" (26ff.). Rather, she celebrates the hard-won autonomy of "ancient philosophy" from present concern:

Why didn't I think of this?

"As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations)." See here for more of the revolutionary cost-saving ideas by Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg. [HT Rich Booher on FB]

As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations). Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg, author of The Fall of the Faculty, says that many colleges and universities face the same administrative issues every day. By having one experienced group of administrators make decisions for hundreds of campuses simultaneously, MOOA would help address these problems expeditiously and economically. Since MOOA would allow colleges to dispense with most of their own administrators, it would generate substantial cost savings in higher education. - See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/06/forget_moocslets_use_mooa.html#sthash.5Ix9WnMO.

As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations). Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg, author of The Fall of the Faculty, says that many colleges and universities face the same administrative issues every day. By having one experienced group of administrators make decisions for hundreds of campuses simultaneously, MOOA would help address these problems expeditiously and economically. Since MOOA would allow colleges to dispense with most of their own administrators, it would generate substantial cost savings in higher education. - See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/06/forget_moocslets_use_mooa.html#sthash.5Ix9WnMO.dpuf

Social unrest and police brutality in Brazil too

It is not only in Turkey that police brutality is being deployed against protesters: last Thursday, a protest against an increase in bus and subway fares in São Paulo turned very sour, with the police using the well-known arsenal of tear gas, rubber bullets etc. against peaceful protesters holding flowers. In particular, many journalists were badly hurt and/or detained while covering the events. (To be clear, what happened in São Paulo does not come anywhere near the severity of the current situation in Turkey, but there are some striking similarities.) Since then, protests in other Brazilian cities have erupted, indicating a general situation of social unrest.

There are two factors worth pointing out to explain how such events could have come about. The first is the fact that, while there has been undeniable prosperity in Brazil over the last decade, and much has been done to fight social and economic inequality (such as the successful ‘Bolsa Familia’ program), prices have ski-rocketed everywhere, especially in cities such as Rio and São Paulo. (I remember when we went to Brazil on holiday 10 years ago, and everything was so much cheaper than in Europe. Now, I don’t even bother converting the prices into Euros, otherwise I’d be constantly in shock and would not enjoy the vacation.) Public transport, in particular, came to represent a big toll in a family’s monthly expenses, but dissatisfaction with the higher transport fares represents dissatisfaction with outrageous prices everywhere, for everything.