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Jan 7

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Day 7: Mentoring the Mentors Workshop at the APA

When I heard that there is a growing trend among public institutions, including my former institution to refuse to count mentoring as service work, I was aghast. How am I still surprised?  This move would contradict their stated commitment to retain working class students and students of color.  I take it to be a great privilege to work at a place that recognizes the link between successful learning and good mentoring and the link between retention of students at risk of not finishing college and good mentoring, but I really wish these links were more widely recognized.  Yet even when we do recognize the importance of mentoring, we don’t necessarily know how to do it well.

So I was delighted to be invited to participate in the workshop organized by previous directors of PIKSI-Rock (Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Institute at the Rock Ethics Institute), Ellen Feder and Mariana Ortega.  The workshop aimed to develop a set of best practices and shared experiences for philosophy faculty who send their students to PIKSI and thus demonstrate an investment in attracting and retaining diverse practitioners of philosophy to the major and to graduate school and to graduate students involved in PIKSI. Read more

Jan 6

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Day 6: That Time I Worked for Rick Santorum: A Political Conversion

The summer after my junior year at the College of William and Mary, I interned for Rick Santorum in his Washington, D.C. legislative offices. I got the internship because my family had been very involved in anti-abortion activism, like Operation Rescue involved. In high school in Philadelphia, I had worked for a local anti-abortion activist organization and the director, William Devlin, knew Santorum’s Chief of Staff, Mark Rodgers. So he hooked me up. I think I interned for 10 weeks, but maybe it was 8. When I graduated from college, I went to work for Brabender Cox, Santorum’s political consultants who continue to advise Santorum in his presidential campaign. Read more

Jan 5

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Day 5: Making of a Murderer and the End of the Symbolic Order

I’ve been watching the Making of a Murderer.  I’m on Episode 4.  If you haven’t started it yet, don’t worry, there are no spoilers here.  I think this is an unspoilable series because, well, you know everything when you start watching.  Not everything, but the gist, and that’s why you start watching.  The gist is that a man in Wisconsin was falsely convicted of sexual assault, spent 18  years in prison, was exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence, and then, was possibly framed by police when he sued the police department for wrongful conviction.  It was that last bit that motivated me to watch. Read more

Jan 4

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Day 4: A Gluten-Free Life. Really, It’s Just Been Six Months

I have always been someone who prided myself on being willing and able to eat whatever was put in front of me.  Once, the guy who lived in the apartment downstairs from me in West Philly invited me to an after-hours event at Vientiane Café, a Thai restaurant on Baltimore Avenue.  He was hosting a private dinner where they were going to serve even more authentic Thai food.  This included water bug pâté, which I ate.  So the first time I had to positively answer the question whether I had any dietary restrictions, I was embarrassed.  Even just last weekend, when a friend asked, “You guys eat everything, right?” I took it as a point of pride that we were thought to be “those kind of people,” the people who weren’t fussy.   Then I had to say, well, no, I’m gluten-free. Read more

Jan 3

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Day Three: Conversion Practices

On New Year’s Day, I visited my Uncle Jon in Chicago.  He is a member of JPUSA, a Christian commune in Uptown.  He’s a feminist progressive Christian who is more aware of his white male privilege than any Christian man I know, so it’s refreshing to spend time with him.  He was telling us about his changing views on evangelism.  He described a certain perspective on efforts at conversion that he called, “dive bombing.”  “Dive bombing” is when you come from above and attempt to strip your target of their (false) understanding of the world so that you can then replace it with yours.  This approach, he pointed out, is very condescending.  And it works by establishing that someone else is wrong.  So it’s basically gaslighting evangelism. Read more

Jan 2

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Day 2: The Greeks Exhibit at the Field Museum

On New Year’s Eve, I went to the Field Museum in Chicago to see its special exhibit on the Greeks.  The Museum has collected 500 artifacts from Greek museums, which cover 3500 years of history, beginning with the Minoans on Crete and other Cycladic islands.  I had seen many of these pieces in their home museum, which admittedly, is already pulled from the original context, but seemed at least to beckon to the sense of the place from which they were found.  Seeing them all pulled together robbed them of their aura (in the Benjaminian sense), it seemed to me.  I’m glad they could pull it together for people to see, but I just want to put the plug in for going and visiting places and the museums in those places.

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Jan 1

31 Days of Blogging: January Resolution

I don’t have the resolve for a year long’s resolution, and everyone seems to be poo-pooing resolutions this year anyway, so forget it.  I’ve decided to resolve just for a month I’m going to blog every day.  I was inspired by Jill Stauffer, who did it every day in December.  I am feeling a certain trepidation about this resolution, perhaps that is a sign that it is a good one.  I often think about something Jill said at the public philosophy panel at SPEP in 2014 about how things need time to percolate in private before bringing them to the world, and I think this notion influences my public philosophizing.  I spend a lot of time ruminating before sending things into the world.  I think that is useful, but I think it is also useful to develop habits of daily engagement and thoughtfulness.  So that’s what this is.  As you can expect, I’m also going to reflect along the way about what’s hard about keeping this resolution, which I expect will have something to do with being a woman in philosophy on the Internet.  Stay tuned.

calvin-hobbes-new-years-resolutions

Thanks to Fit is a Feminist Issue for the Calvin and Hobbes find.

Dec 6

Man Up! Exhortations to Masculinity in Film and TV

With some help of some Facebook friends, I’ve collected a list of scenes from film and television of fathers or coaches or other male role models shaming younger men for not being manly enough.  Here’s the list.  It is surely not exhaustive.  Add your suggestions in the comments. Read more

Dec 2

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Aristotle on Happiness

Aristotle scholars spend a lot of time arguing over whether and in what way a life of action, what is called a ‘practical life’ (from the Greek praxis), which includes a life focused on ethical and political concerns, can possibly achieve happiness, or whether only contemplation — the theoretical life of the philosopher or thinker or scientist — can achieve complete happiness for human beings.  Commenters suppose from several chapters in Nicomachean Ethics X.7 that the case is obviously on the side of contemplation.  Then they fight over how to limit that claim or re-interpret it.

But today, I’ve been prepping those passages to teach and I just don’t think they add up to the obviously strong argument for contemplation against deliberation that pretty much everyone who reads Aristotle seems to think they do.  One argument in particular — that it’s what the gods do — seems just not the case.  What the heck then is Aristotle doing?  Here’s what Aristotle writes:

But that complete happiness is a certain contemplative activity would appear also from this: we have supposed that the gods especially are blessed and happy–but what sort of actions ought we to assign to them?  Just acts?  Or will they appear laughable as they make contracts, return deposits, and do anything else of that sort?  But what about courageous acts?  Do the gods endure frightening things and run risks, because doing so is noble?  Or liberal acts?  But to whom will they give?  And it is strange if they too will have legal currency or something of that sort.  And what would their moderate acts be?  Or is the praise, “they do not have base desires,” a crude one?  All that pertains to actions would appear, to those who go through it, petty and unworthy of gods. (1178b8-17, Bartlett and Collins translation)

Puh-lease, Aristotle.  It seems just as likely from all this that the gods don’t do any of these things because the gods don’t really live virtuous lives.  Do the gods do just acts?  No, Zeus steals women and cheats on Hera on the regular.  The whole of Hesiod’s Theogony seems to be about the frightening risk-taking acts of gods.  But no, not because it’s noble.  They want power, or they’re just bored.  Liberal acts?  Well, basically, that seems to be all of Homer and most of Hesiod where Zeus gives things to gods, and that part where Zeus and Prometheus divide stuff up and give it out.  “And what would be their moderate acts?”  Got me there, Aristotle: we don’t know, because no god has yet to be moderate. Read more

Nov 19

Intellectual Capture

In his book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, Philip Mirowski argues that economists were unable to respond adequately to the economic crisis of 2008-2009 because they were subject to “intellectual capture.”  Observers of markets have long complained of “regulatory capture” where those who regulate Wall Street are too cozy with those they regulate and thus held hostage or “captured” by those relationships and so unable to sufficiently regulate their old buddies.  Mirowski argues that many economists were similarly beholden to Wall Street, and unwilling to call foul on the theories that supported the governmental intervention to save Wall Street.

But it isn’t just economists and Wall Street.  The academy, I think the academy in general, but definitely philosophy, suffers a similar intellectual capture.  It works like this.  Junior faculty earn credibility by having senior faculty who vouch for them.  If you are a junior faculty member, you hesitate to call out those who seem to operate in the community of your own protectorate because that is what gives you credibility.  If you need the protectorate to be strong for your position to be strong, you can’t question it.  Especially more vulnerable members of underpresented groups within the community both need the protectorate for others to pay attention to them and are structurally unable to challenge the workings of the protectorate without their own position becoming more vulnerable.   You might not even call out other junior faculty because of fear of their protectorate.  And while justice would seem to demand it, the structure of the academy gives you no incentive to point out the ways your own community is patriarchal and racist, but rather to protect those who perpetuate those practices because it would seem to protect you.  This is one reason we need more women and people of color in the academy.

As academics become more engaged in activism within their institutions and beyond, we need to be thinking about how the structures of activism, in the name of changing the conditions in which we work, repeat them, and repeat them in a way that seems to structurally deny any real critical voice from within regarding how we are repeating them.

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