Back when I was a graduate student in the 90s, first at St Andrews University and then at Leeds, philosophy departments were terrifying places. Seminar rooms often felt like amphitheatres. Every week, the same ritual would unfold in the senior research seminar. First, a visiting speaker from another University would spend an hour explaining the details of his new theory to an ostentatiously bored and listless audience. Grimacing through the faint applause, he would brace himself for what we all knew was to follow.
I reckon philosophical fashion alternates roughly every half-generation, so for instance you see LW getting some of his own medicine from Oxford's very own Sarsons-specialists, people born in, say the 1870s (and more wedded than he was to a neo-scholasticism about language). And then there's Williams's nice remark abt Hare's over-rationalism: Hare was born ten years before him. A Procrustean thought, but hey, mebbe encouraging abt the future. Am rereading Parfit at the mo, so what went round certainly comes around 40 years on. Funnily or something enough, one of the less public school-y places at St A' s was Logic and Met, I - as a comp product - thought. I remember interesting grammar school/redbrick maths/science types on the staff. And not as rebarbative as it was ten years later. Somebody once got gently upbraided for failing propositional logic n > 2 times. But they had been around for an awfu' lang time ...
Ma'am - a few years back, when you were still at Sussex Uni, we had a dialogue re the collapse of humanities in Academia. I posited as a tax payer time had come to put an end to the endless nonsense and nastiness now pouring out of "academia" by pulling the plug in courses such as "gender studies". You said you felt that it was the job of academia to do deal with its current crisis, and that it would.
Well, a few years on, I have to say I am right. Everything you write about* makes me think "And I pay for this nonsense?". It would be good to know, for example, that "Gender studies" actually contributed to society, or even to the economy. Fat chance. "Gender studies" is meaningless to the vast majority of the nation, it does not enlighten us or make us better people, indeed, like great swathes of the humanities, it now seems to be disappearing up its own fundament.
Shame really. And I say that as a humanities BA Oxon, 1972. I know the value of humanities; that academia should destroy that, and that is taxpayers should be funding said destruction makes me sad and very very angry.
* what you write is spot on and beautifully written. The subject, sadly, not so.
If I may be so bold – not yet "deplatformed" ... – as to raise a finger, or even a hand ...
Generally a great essay, at least on a something of a quick skim; many points certainly deserve a more detailed response. But, to start the ball rolling, nice analogy with "cocooning philosophy" and consequential follow-up by pointing out that few budding philosophers will transform into "butterflies", even if of the hot-house and ivory-tower variety.
But something of a more or less damning indictment of Academia, academic philosophy in particular. ICYMI, in the same vein, you might "enjoy" several salvos on the same front, to wit:
Michaelle Robillard's "How I Left Academia, or, How Academia Left Me", his opening "Universities are madrassas for woke stupidity” (Delingpole) being worth the price of admission in itself:
As all three of you apparently emphasize in rather damning detail, there are any number of quite serious "systemic" flaws in the whole edifice of education. Which seems now less institutions to promote the acquisition of knowledge, much less wisdom, and more ones to provide job security, and to flatter its denizens’ and devotees’ “pretensions to infallibility”. Arguably the rather too ubiquitous rot characterizing not just religions but also too many “sacerdotal corporations and schools of philosophy”, as T.E. Huxley put it:
However, while I sincerely wish you, and others, the best of luck in "cleaning out those Augean stables", in that Herculean task, I can't leave without raising the somewhat delicate question as to a few of your own questionable if not contentious and quite problematic "unexamined assumptions", "untenable premises", and "prior commitments". To wit, your rather bold assertion about:
"still perfectly functional understandings of 'woman' and 'man' in terms of 'adult human female' and 'adult human male'. ..."
No doubt there is at least some utility in some of those "functional understandings". At least if one understands that genitalia and karyotypes constitute only something in the way of "proxy variables", or "accidental properties", which correlate in useful ways to the primary variable and essential properties of the category "female".
But while the implications and consequences of that statement of yours may appear somewhat obscure, I really think the issue is anything but "academic", that the consequences are pervasive and pernicious, that it underwrites the odious and pigheaded "ignorance" which Huxlely called "one of the chief sources of evil: "toxicity" from hell to breakfast.
And that is no more evident that in what some have called the "Ideological Bias in the Psychology of Sex and Gender", and undergirds what the reviewers of "Professing Feminism" called the "virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students" in the deluded if not demented Woman Studies programs in the backwaters of Academia.
No doubt there is some merit in the "feminist project", and I see that you're no particular fan of feminism in general. But far too many feminists betray what Huxley called the "spirit of scientific investigation", although they're hardly unique in that regard, which leads many of them, including Maya Forstater, to the "risible absurdity" that "biological sex in humans is immutable":
You might think that's just a trivial issue or aspect, but a great deal of justification – see Jane Clare Jones' "bun-fight over some mythic essence", for example – to argue that it undergirds, lies at the rotten heart of far too much of "identity politics", from Academia, to Science, to Religion, and Politics itself. Delenda est, indeed.
We all have those type of "unexamined assumptions" – which are, sadly but quite often, merely the pretexts to "pretensions to infalliblity"; everyone but me and thee, of course. But while they are also often the "bedrock" on which our professions and livelihoods, if not our psyches are founded, I really don't think we or society in general are going to have much success in that Herculean task unless we're all willing to take an honest look at them.
It’s insane that people like Robin Dembroff complain of discrimination from their offices at Yale! My guess is that they have been rewarded for their identity and political positions, not hindered by them. It’s interesting that they identify as “trans” when they read as standard issue butch lesbian. Regardless of their reason for identifying this way, the outcome is undoubtedly good for their career, despite their ridiculous claims of “oppression”.
The detail in all this that surprises me the most is the rule that you cannot debate the statement that “trans women are women” in philosophy discussions. How can people accept being told what to think, when the idea in question requires accepting clearly debatable definitions and philosophical positions? And why trans women in particular? Why not a ban on discussing positions offensive to most of us regarding race or the inferiority of women? The hyper focus on trans issues is bizarre and I still don’t understand how we got here.
Well, the knitting at least has a historical precedent
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricoteuse
I reckon philosophical fashion alternates roughly every half-generation, so for instance you see LW getting some of his own medicine from Oxford's very own Sarsons-specialists, people born in, say the 1870s (and more wedded than he was to a neo-scholasticism about language). And then there's Williams's nice remark abt Hare's over-rationalism: Hare was born ten years before him. A Procrustean thought, but hey, mebbe encouraging abt the future. Am rereading Parfit at the mo, so what went round certainly comes around 40 years on. Funnily or something enough, one of the less public school-y places at St A' s was Logic and Met, I - as a comp product - thought. I remember interesting grammar school/redbrick maths/science types on the staff. And not as rebarbative as it was ten years later. Somebody once got gently upbraided for failing propositional logic n > 2 times. But they had been around for an awfu' lang time ...
Ma'am - a few years back, when you were still at Sussex Uni, we had a dialogue re the collapse of humanities in Academia. I posited as a tax payer time had come to put an end to the endless nonsense and nastiness now pouring out of "academia" by pulling the plug in courses such as "gender studies". You said you felt that it was the job of academia to do deal with its current crisis, and that it would.
Well, a few years on, I have to say I am right. Everything you write about* makes me think "And I pay for this nonsense?". It would be good to know, for example, that "Gender studies" actually contributed to society, or even to the economy. Fat chance. "Gender studies" is meaningless to the vast majority of the nation, it does not enlighten us or make us better people, indeed, like great swathes of the humanities, it now seems to be disappearing up its own fundament.
Shame really. And I say that as a humanities BA Oxon, 1972. I know the value of humanities; that academia should destroy that, and that is taxpayers should be funding said destruction makes me sad and very very angry.
* what you write is spot on and beautifully written. The subject, sadly, not so.
If I may be so bold – not yet "deplatformed" ... – as to raise a finger, or even a hand ...
Generally a great essay, at least on a something of a quick skim; many points certainly deserve a more detailed response. But, to start the ball rolling, nice analogy with "cocooning philosophy" and consequential follow-up by pointing out that few budding philosophers will transform into "butterflies", even if of the hot-house and ivory-tower variety.
But something of a more or less damning indictment of Academia, academic philosophy in particular. ICYMI, in the same vein, you might "enjoy" several salvos on the same front, to wit:
Michaelle Robillard's "How I Left Academia, or, How Academia Left Me", his opening "Universities are madrassas for woke stupidity” (Delingpole) being worth the price of admission in itself:
https://michaelrobillard.substack.com/p/how-i-left-academia-or-how-academia?s=r
And, here on the "other side of the pond", Liel Leibovitz' "Time for the Academy To Put Its Pencils Down: American academia is beyond salvation":
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/academia-beyond-salvation
As all three of you apparently emphasize in rather damning detail, there are any number of quite serious "systemic" flaws in the whole edifice of education. Which seems now less institutions to promote the acquisition of knowledge, much less wisdom, and more ones to provide job security, and to flatter its denizens’ and devotees’ “pretensions to infallibility”. Arguably the rather too ubiquitous rot characterizing not just religions but also too many “sacerdotal corporations and schools of philosophy”, as T.E. Huxley put it:
https://mathcs.clarku.edu/huxley/CE4/
"Delenda est", indeed.
However, while I sincerely wish you, and others, the best of luck in "cleaning out those Augean stables", in that Herculean task, I can't leave without raising the somewhat delicate question as to a few of your own questionable if not contentious and quite problematic "unexamined assumptions", "untenable premises", and "prior commitments". To wit, your rather bold assertion about:
"still perfectly functional understandings of 'woman' and 'man' in terms of 'adult human female' and 'adult human male'. ..."
No doubt there is at least some utility in some of those "functional understandings". At least if one understands that genitalia and karyotypes constitute only something in the way of "proxy variables", or "accidental properties", which correlate in useful ways to the primary variable and essential properties of the category "female".
But while the implications and consequences of that statement of yours may appear somewhat obscure, I really think the issue is anything but "academic", that the consequences are pervasive and pernicious, that it underwrites the odious and pigheaded "ignorance" which Huxlely called "one of the chief sources of evil: "toxicity" from hell to breakfast.
And that is no more evident that in what some have called the "Ideological Bias in the Psychology of Sex and Gender", and undergirds what the reviewers of "Professing Feminism" called the "virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students" in the deluded if not demented Woman Studies programs in the backwaters of Academia.
No doubt there is some merit in the "feminist project", and I see that you're no particular fan of feminism in general. But far too many feminists betray what Huxley called the "spirit of scientific investigation", although they're hardly unique in that regard, which leads many of them, including Maya Forstater, to the "risible absurdity" that "biological sex in humans is immutable":
You might think that's just a trivial issue or aspect, but a great deal of justification – see Jane Clare Jones' "bun-fight over some mythic essence", for example – to argue that it undergirds, lies at the rotten heart of far too much of "identity politics", from Academia, to Science, to Religion, and Politics itself. Delenda est, indeed.
We all have those type of "unexamined assumptions" – which are, sadly but quite often, merely the pretexts to "pretensions to infalliblity"; everyone but me and thee, of course. But while they are also often the "bedrock" on which our professions and livelihoods, if not our psyches are founded, I really don't think we or society in general are going to have much success in that Herculean task unless we're all willing to take an honest look at them.
It’s insane that people like Robin Dembroff complain of discrimination from their offices at Yale! My guess is that they have been rewarded for their identity and political positions, not hindered by them. It’s interesting that they identify as “trans” when they read as standard issue butch lesbian. Regardless of their reason for identifying this way, the outcome is undoubtedly good for their career, despite their ridiculous claims of “oppression”.
The detail in all this that surprises me the most is the rule that you cannot debate the statement that “trans women are women” in philosophy discussions. How can people accept being told what to think, when the idea in question requires accepting clearly debatable definitions and philosophical positions? And why trans women in particular? Why not a ban on discussing positions offensive to most of us regarding race or the inferiority of women? The hyper focus on trans issues is bizarre and I still don’t understand how we got here.