Gender Inequality in Philosophy Ph.Ds

So here is an interesting image about the amount of recent women awarded Ph.Ds.

The question, I think, ought to be what is the cause of this large gender inequality in philosophy.  I do not have a problem with the gap in the mathematics intensive fields, but the large disparity in philosophy does seem odd.

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Self-Ownership

In the Second Treatise, John Locke posits the concept of self-ownership: “… every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body had any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his,” upon which he bases his labor theory of property (LTP). In brief, since one properly owns one’s body, and thus labor, one acquires ownership over a material object because one invests one’s labor in the material object. Ownership, so to speak, transfers from agent through the labor into the material object. So, e.g., one may come to own a flask of wine by investing one’s labor in the growing and harvesting of the grapes, their vinification, and the construction of the flask. A corollary of the LTP is that one may also acquire ownership via trade, wherein one voluntarily exchanges a material object for agreed upon remuneration, gift, and compensation for material transgressions. Although, ideally, if one were to trace the genealogy of an object’s ownership, whether via gift, trade, or compensation, one will find that it begins in original labor investment. In spite of its prima facie strengths, as formulated by Locke, the LTP admittedly suffers from many difficulties, and thus requires modification. When suitably modified, I would argue, the LTP is essentially correct, but its correctness will not concern us at the present moment. Rather, what will concern us here is the plausibility of the self-ownership concept itself, for if the concept of self-ownership proves to be implausible, so too then does the LTP. (However, this last point is contentious; many proponents of the LTP do not postulate self-ownership, but for reasons I shall not state here I think they are wrong not to do so.) While this post does not address every criticism of self-ownership, it addresses the most significant one.

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Karl Marx: Requiem for a Devalued System

“Marxian exploitation is the exploitation of people’s lack of understanding of economics.”

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia

The impetus for this post was provided by two graduate students here at the University of North Florida, Doidos and Solta (not their real names). In conversation with Doidos and Solta, I was made aware that both were rather sympathetic to Marxist political philosophy. (In fact, on more than a few occasions, Solta even claimed to be a Marxist.) Despite their proclamations of capitalism’s “exploitative and oppressive structure” and their palatable antipathy toward the economic system that permits them the luxury of academic pursuit, it occurred to me that neither Doidos nor Solta knew a thing about Marxian economic theory. E.g., they could not for the life of them provide me with a coherent encapsulation of Marx’s conception of surplus-value, use-value, or exchange-value, all of which are necessary for his theory of exploitation. I could only conclude that, for them, “exploitation” and “oppressive” were indicative of a facon de parler rather than an understanding of a political-economic theory. Therefore, it is my hope that both Doidos and Solta read this post (though I am confident that neither will) and listen to the accompanying lecture. Even if they dismiss the critiques of Marx contain herein, perhaps they will learn a bit about their patron saint’s economic thought.

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A Blog of Her Own

Four popular female bloggers dicuss the ins and out of blogging in this interesting panel discussion.

(HT: Feminist Philosophers)

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Thinning Out Our Concept of the Ideal American Indian

Thick concepts are generally thought of as concepts that are both descriptive and normative. They describe something and, at the same time, say what something should be. Thinner concepts are concepts, then, that pull apart the normative and descriptive. In this essay, I want to use ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ in different ways than these terms of art. I shall be using the terms thick and thin to mean equivocal concepts that are bundled together and can be pulled apart.

The notion of the ‘ideal’ American Indian is a concept, in my terms, that is very thick; very loaded. As I have explained before, there are at least five different ways American Indians are conceived; in religious, cultural, racial, genetic and political terms. The idea of what I shall call ‘the ideal American Indian’ merges all of these together into one single body. The ideal American Indian, then, (that is, the particular individual or concept that epitomizes the American Indian) includes all of these different forms of identity. (We could include, too, that the ideal American Indian is generally understood to be male.)

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Ownership of the People, by the People, and for the People

“Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.” H. L. Mencken

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A Graduate Conference for Feminist Philosophers, Call for Papers

I was visiting the web-page of the Philosophy Department at the University of Western Ontario, and noticed that they had an open call for papers for an upcoming graduate student conference on feminist philosophy (Sept. 18-20). The Keynote speaker is Alice MacLachlan (York University).

 Here is an excerpt of their description of the conference: “This conference aims to bring together graduate students from across North America who share an interest in feminism, post-coloniality, queer theory, critical race theory, philosophy of disability and anti-oppression theory in general, regardless of their primary area of research. ”

The deadline for submissions is on June 15th. Click here for more information.

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This Thing Called Race…

… is the title of tonight’s philosophy slam hosted by JU.  The presentation will be given by Dr. C.W. Dawson, Jr.,  of Bethune-Cookman College.  The slam begins at 7:30 and will be held at the London Bridge Pub, Downtown on the corner of Adams and Ocean.  For more information e-mail aaxelss@jacksonville.edu .

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Globalization and the Struggle for Peace and Human Rights…

…is the topic of the Global Studies Association of North America’s 2009 Conference. 
May 8th through the 10th.
Click here for more details.

Co-Sponsored by the Peace Studies Program at Florida Atlantic University.

Keynote Speakers include: Ginette Apollon (“Human Rights in Haiti”), Farshad Araghi (“The Global Food Crisis: Event or Conjecture?”), Stephen E. Bronner (“America and Darfur: Notes for a New Policy”), Micheline Islay(“The Sixtieth Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Exploring the Past and Anticipating the Future”),  Roland Robertson (“The Global Politics of Human Rights”).

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I love being a woman!

Just stopping by the blog with some girl power to my sisters across the world to celebrate International Women’s Day. I hope each and every one of us get to live to see the day when women are no longer beaten, forced to bear children, battered, forced into prostitution, abused, discriminated against, held in slavery, raped, mutilated, ridiculed, bonded in marriage, circumcised, sold, and traded.

I long for the day when women are no longer blamed for the clothes they wore when they were raped, the words they spoke when they were beaten by their partners and the helplessness they feel when they are isolated in their marriages. I wish that one day women aren’t the only ones held responsible for pregnancies. I hope that young women will one day go to college solely for the purpose of an education and not at all for the purpose of finding someone to marry. I want to live to see that women will go to work and get equal pay.

I think women are astonishing creations. Being a woman is one of the things in my life that I am most proud of. Being part of the world’s largest minority, however, is not. And so the fight must go on..!

http://www.internationalwomensday.com/

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Miranda Fricker on Epistemic Injustice

An interview at Philosophy Bites:

Testimonial injustice occurs when others fail to treat you seriously as a source of knowledge. In this interview Miranda Fricker, author of a recent book on the topic, explains this concept which lies at the intersection between epistemology and political philosophy.

This interview is from 2007, but I just found out about it via Feminist Philosophers. And here’s a review of her book, Epistemic Injustice:

Epistemology and Ethics have traditionally been kept apart. This book brings them together. Miranda Fricker focuses on two kinds of epistemic injustice: the injustice that occurs when someone is not treated seriously as a possible source of knowledge (testimonial injustice) and the injustice that occurs when a society lacks a conceptual framework for understanding the experiences of someone who has been treated badly (hermeneutic injustice). An example of the first kind is when someone stopped by the police is not believed because he is black; an example of the second type is when someone is a victim of sexual harrassment in a society that still lacks that concept. Both are kinds of epistemic injustice in Fricker’s terms. That is they are harms that an individual suffers that relate to that individual’s potential to give knowledge and to be a subject of social understanding.

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Alison Des Forges (1942-2009)

A memorial notice can be found here.

Des Forges, born in Schenectady, New York, in 1942, began working on Rwanda as a student and dedicated her life and work to understanding the country, to exposing the serial abuses suffered by its people and helping to bring about change. She was best known for her award-winning account of the genocide, “Leave None to Tell the Story,” and won a MacArthur Award (the “Genius Grant”) in 1999. She appeared as an expert witness in 11 trials for genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, three trials in Belgium, and at trials in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Canada. She also provided documents and other assistance in judicial proceedings involving genocide in four other national jurisdictions, including the United States.

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“The Obama Effect”

Readers who have followed recent philosophical discussions on implicit bias and schema disruption (here, for example) may be interested in this study reported at The Situationist attempting to test whether having an African-American president has changed the way African-American students perform on tests, and whether it has enhanced their ability to overcome stereotype threats that decrease academic performance.

The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results.

“Obama is obviously inspirational, but we wondered whether he would contribute to an improvement in something as important as black test-taking,” said Ray Friedman, a management professor at Vanderbilt University, one of the study’s three authors. “We were skeptical that we would find any effect, but our results surprised us.”

Readers who haven’t followed the discussions on implicit bias and schema disruption or who aren’t familiar with the relevant psychological literature may wish to follow the links at the end of the entry at The Situationist.

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Podcast: The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Here’s an AALS podcast on the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This podcast has three speakers, Tim Coulter, Angelique Eaglewoman and G.W. Rice. While listening to the podcast, it’s helpful to look at the UN Declaration, as speakers refer to various articles in their discussions.

Tim Coulter discusses how the Declaration got started, why it was started, and the innovative ideas it brought to international law. Coulter talks about how the first draft of the Declaration developed in the 1970’s: He had been practicing Indian law and realized that, among other things, any victory he might get for a client could be struck down without due process by the federal government. He realized that his native clients didn’t have the legal protections and rights that most American people have. So, he and others sought to change the law; not merely federal law—international law. For the first time, Coulter says, victims of human rights violations got to develop international human rights law.

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A Situationist Interpretation of MLK Jr.

At The Situationist. Here’s a snippet:

To be sure, King is most revered in some circles for quotations that are easily construed as dispositionist, such as: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Taken alone, as it often is, that sentence seems to set a low bar. Indeed, some Americans contend that we’ve arrived at that promised land; after all, most of us (mostly incorrectly) imagine ourselves to be judging people based solely on their dispositions, choices, personalities, or, in short, their characters.

Putting King’s quotation in context, however, it becomes clear that his was largely a situationist message. He was encouraging us all to recognize the subtle and not-so-subtle situational forces that caused inequalities and to question (what John Jost calls) system-justifying ideologies that helped maintain those inequalities.

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Academeology: A Book by Female Science Professor

An academic blogger, Female Science Professor, began blogging anonymously in 2006. Her blog postings have been collected in a book which might interest our readers who like reading and thinking about science, intersections of philosophy and science, the production of scientific knowledge and the workings of academia. Female Science Professor is, well, a female scientist who, as a female, is a member of an underrepresented group in her specialization. Here’s a review of her book, Academeology:

Pseudonymous blogger Female Science Professor (FSP) first introduced herself in May 2006: “I do not look my age, I do not look like a professor, I do not look like a scientist. My colleagues are, with a few exceptions, very kind and polite to me, and some (many? most?) even like me … but they do not take me seriously.”

That post set the tone for what has become a collection of more than 500 short essays describing her experiences as a scientist, a professor and one of the few women working in her field of science. […] FSP’s blog has steadily gained popularity, with her clear writing style, candid revelations and often humorous musings. The blog’s comment section allows her readers to share their own academic experiences.

(HT: Feminist Philosophers)

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Links for the Holiday

As many people prepare to eat holiday feasts and go shopping on Black Friday, over at the Utah State philosophy blog, Harrision Kleiner talks about Peter Singer’s argument on moral duties for helping the poor. And while Americans react to seeing Sarah Palin give an interview as a turkey is slaughtered behind her, Kleiner calls attention to Singer’s article in Newsweek on animal rights. A clip from Singer:

If animals do have rights, what rights would those be? The most basic right any sentient being can have is for his or her interests to be given equal consideration. After that, things get more complicated. Some advocates think that all animals have a right to life. Others give more weight to the lives of beings such as chimpanzees, which are capable of understanding that they have a life, and of having hopes and desires directed toward the future. The movement’s supporters agree that the way we treat animals now, as test subjects and factory-farm products, is flagrantly wrong.

Meanwhile, native people attempt to educate folks about the real story of Thanksgiving and discuss what Thanksgiving means to them. For many native families and friends of native people, Thanksgiving often turns out to be an annual discussion of Native American stereotypes

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The Native Vote: Post-Election

In a historic year for native voters, one might wonder how the native vote affected the election. Here’s a report:

Despite an unprecedented outreach by president-elect Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, some states with significant Indian populations safely sided with Republican John McCain on election day.

Indian voters have played a difference in close elections, especially in states like Montana and South Dakota. But this year, their power wasn’t enough to push the two states, which went Republican in 2004, to the Democratic side.

Obama made history by campaigning on the Crow Reservation in Montana in May and by launching impressive outreach efforts among American Indian and Alaska Native voters there. Native Americans make up 6.3 percent of the state population, according to the latest estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

But while Obama clearly won counties with large Indian populations, he lost the state to McCain by two percentage points. However, the race was fairly close — only about 12,000 votes separated the candidates in a state with about 38,000 Native Americans of voting age.

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President Obama

God bless the new President of the United States!

Now let us do all we can do to help him uphold his oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States!  Let those of us who pray, pray for him, and let all of us ensure that he hears the voice of the American people on every issue of moment in the hope that he will be able to govern wisely.

Throughout the campaign, Senator McCain kept repeating that “nothing is inevitable.” Well, of course, but even though African Americans are still a minority, almost everyone of them became an immediate committed campaign worker for Obama. And why not? If Guiliani had gotten the nod, I admit that I would have felt a little prouder, a little more committed knowing that a New York Italian had a chance at the presidency. How grand it is that an African American is at last president! I only wish that he had been a Conservative. Perhaps he will come to his senses (ha ha) . We will surely put the politics of race behind us now, especially since Obama will not be spared the sharpest criticism , for he is in the hot seat. The Republicans will no doubt find African Americans to push to the top of the Party, so that they may throw the biggest rocks. This can only be good for the nation.

At the same time, we can look at our opponent’s party organization with awe. It was brilliant. There are so many lessons we can learn from it, and commit ourselves to a return to a party organization where we actually ask lower ranks what they think, and give them a real opportunity to contribute and commit, as the Obama organization so obviously has. They are not going away now, having tasted the sweetness of real victory, so we have no choice.

Will we come together as a nation? I doubt it, not yet. It seems to me that we have never been more divided than we are today. The policies of President Obama, as he has explained them, are anathema to many of us, myself most definitely included. Yet to the extent that he operates within the bounds of the Constitution, we must support him in anyway we can as we watch his administration play out. This is an essential component to any democracy, a component that has been lacking for decades in our country. After the debate is over and the vote is taken, the minority throws what support it can behind the majority for the good of the whole. We give their programs a chance to develop, to work or not work, until the time when they may be fairly criticized and the debate begun anew. I will encourage my own party to do just that, even as I work to help rebuild it, and expel the factions that are, in my decidedly biased opinion, responsible for its defeat.

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Haslanger on Bloggingheads

Here’s an interesting discussion with Sally Haslanger (MIT).

(HT: Leiter)

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Happy Halloween!

And don’t eat too much candy!

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Simone de Beauvoir in Philosophy Now

The current issue of Philosophy Now marks the 100th birthday of Simone de Beauvoir with several informative articles about her work.

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Pornography Symposium

The Symposia in Race, Gender and Philosophy has a new symposium on Anne Eaton’s “A Sensible Anti-Porn Feminism” with commentary by Patrick D. Hopkins, Rae Langton, Ishani Maitra, Laurie Shrage. Check it out here (Spring no. 2).

Jender at Feminist Philosophers comments:

Eaton’s paper is an exceptionally careful exploration of what a sensible anti-porn feminism should look like: how such a view should define ‘pornography’, what conception of causation it should use, what sorts of causal claims it should make/explore, what sorts of rigorous testing would be needed to actually establish these claims, and what sorts of remedies it should advocate (not necessarily legal ones). It’s well worth reading even for feminists who are not anti-pornography, partly because it provides a new and interesting foil, but mostly because it raises so many fascinating and important methodological points.

(HT: Feminist Philosophers)

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The Native Vote: Clips from the Blogosphere

As longtime readers know, I’ve been blogging about American Indian political issues here for almost a year now. Yet I have only just begun to scratch the surface. I take it as a given that these issues are relevant to folks working in political philosophy, ethics, and so forth. I also understand these issues aren’t discussed much in philosophy departments or the general media.

As it happens, election time is a very good time to learn about American Indian political issues since things of particular interest to native voters are hashed out nicely in native newspapers and the blogosphere.

Most American Indians got the right to vote in U.S. elections in 1924 under the American Indian Citizenship Act. Thus, American Indians have dual citizenship. They are citizens of two sovereign political entities—their respective tribes and the U.S.—and can participate in both tribal and U.S. elections.

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The Cobell Case

I thought it was time to finally put up some info on the Cobell Case. This case is called the largest class-action suit against the United States. And it is a pretty huge issue considering it is about the mismanagement of a whole lot of Indian money. It’s only right for someone blogging about American Indian political issues to have a post about it.

Since it is such an important case, I’m including two videos today. The first video is an interview with Eloise Cobell about the case. The second video is a speech Cobell gave at the 2008 National Rural Assembly.

For background, you might want to check out this tidbit on the Dawes General Allotment Act. For more information on the case, check out the wiki on the Cobell Case and the website Indian Trust.

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