Digressions&Impressions

On Orphaned Papers: Haldane and the Fate of Scientific Eugenics

This paper was submitted to the Annals with an accompanying letter to the Editor, Professor Lionel Penrose, dated 17 February 1960. It has lain as item 136 of the Penrose Papers in the Manuscripts and Rare Books section of University College Library until recently brought to our notice by Dr K. R. Dronamraju, to whom we wish to express our thanks. We would also like to thank Naomi Mitchison for permission to publish this interesting manuscript of her brother’s. Lastly we gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Ms G. M. Furlong, curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books in the library of University College London. J.B.S. HALDANE (1996), "The negative heritability of neonatal jaundice,"Annals of Human Genetics, 60: 3-5. [HT: David Haig]

By an 'orphaned paper' I mean to refer to a paper accepted for publication in a volume quietly abandoned by the editor and, after years of ambiguity, it becomes unseemly to ask about its fate. Often there is no malice involved in such cases. Editors are humans, after all, and their professional activities may be interrupted for all kinds of (generally sad) reasons. Sometimes journals or presses fold or transition away from existing projects. A recent discussion on social media suggests that having some papers orphaned like this is not altogether unfamiliar to senior scholars.

My advice to younger scholars is not to show infinite patience and to pull your paper and resubmit it with an eye toward tenure clocks (and to archive it at a relevant site). And, this is why I use the language of 'orphan'; because orphans need not die still-born, and may get adopted and find all kinds of lovely homes and have lives that enrich us all. 

Haldane's paper was never orphaned in the technical sense.  For, there is no evidence it was accepted for publication when it was received by Penrose initially. (I return to this below.) Even so, I understand why Prof. Haig thought it a nice example of the phenomenon given the clear family resemblance to it. 

J.B.S. Haldane (1892 –1964), was a famous scientist and public intellectual in his day. For example, as I noted a few months ago, he was one of Ernest Nagel's targets as an anti-exemplar of "malicious" (Marxist) philosophy of science. The quoted passage at the top of  this post is, as should be clear, an editorial note attached to the paper. The paper was submitted while Haldane was at the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta (for background see here). Perhaps he thought the paper got lost in the mail or he moved on to other topics. 

The paper itself has been noticed after publication including by philosophers. So, for example, Peter Godfrey-Smith (65) cites it the make the important point that parents and off-spring may be "anti-correlated." (See also Sober, who credits learning about it from Godfrey-Smith.) More about this below.

An interesting fact about the recipient of the paper, Lionel Penrose, is that he changed the title of his chair from "Professor of Eugenics" (1945-1963) to "Professor of Human Heredity." The wikipedia entry also notes that "the "long delay" in changing this name was due to "legal problems" associated with the original donation from Francis Galton and described how Penrose simply ignored the "eugenics" element of his job title." This raises interesting questions about whether Penrose (who is the father of Roger Penrose) should have accepted the Chair in the first place (although he surely deserves our gratitude for his stance and the name change).* Be that as it may, it also tells us that UCL could have confronted its own entanglement with eugenics more forcefully already over half a century ago (rather than being shamed into incomplete and imperfect action (recall) by Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, and others recently). 

Haldane himself clearly remained interested in eugenics. I won't attempt here to summarize seriously his views, in part because they seem to have shifted over time. He was a critic of racial eugenics of his age, because he clearly thought much of it unscientific. It is not entirely clear to me if he would have welcomed a scientifically sound racial eugenics.

And at the core of the posthumously published paper, he makes clear the connection between eugenics and his own paper:

This example will, I hope, act as a warning against the assumption that where a character is mainly determined genetically it will be more frequent in the progeny of those who manifest it than in the progeny of those who do not. This assumption is taken for granted in popular expositions of Darwinism and of eugenics. It is doubtless more often true than false. But the case here considered is not trivial. (5)

This made me wonder whether Penrose prevented publication because he wanted to downplay the association between Darwinism, human genetics, and eugenics in the mid 1960s. (One interesting fact is that no referee reports are mentioned; this makes me suspect the paper was not sent out to referees.)

So, I checked some of the works on Haldane by Dr K. R. Dronamraju, who found the paper in the archives (for more on him see here). According to him "Haldane and Penrose enjoyed a lifelong friendship that was both cordial and mutually beneficial" (Popularizing Science: The Life and Work of JBS Haldane (2017) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 249). He also emphasizes that they agreed on eugenics, "They were opposed to the sterilization of mentally defective individuals that was advocated by some eugenic groups. Both shared the belief that the science of human genetics was still in its infancy and could not justify such far-reaching decisions." (250) Oddly, he does not offer any evidence for this claim, so it is hard to say if this was always the case. Unfortunately, after an imperfect search, I have been unable to find discussion of the 1996 paper by Dronamraju anywhere. So, I view my speculation as ungrounded in evidence. 

Haldane's warning that such cases of anti-correlation are not trivial has not, as Hirsch notes by quoting the same posthumously published passage by Haldane I have just quoted, been heard by those who wish to turn eugenics into a mature science. Hirsch is scathing about the inability to confront the limitations of heritability analysis by even the most scientifically serious (and not racist) eugenicists. Hirsch's heart seems to be in the right place, but I have to admit that I feel decidedly ambivalent about the very project of improving scientific eugenics even when purged from its racialist tendencies.+

I wonder, not for the first time, if everything that advances science should be published while recognizing, with a shudder, that apparently I am willing to contemplate not treating the 'rights' of all 'orphans' alike.

 

On Karl Pearson on Spinoza and Maimonides; On Jerusalem, Athens, and Eugenics

In the above remarks I have considered only the Yad Hachazakah, because hitherto attention seems to have been entirely directed to the More Nebuchim (cf. Joel, Sorley and others). It is not impossible that in the intervening ten years Maimonides somewhat altered his views. I should not be surprised to hear that the More was held more 'orthodox' than the Yad. The latter, despite much Talmudic verbiage and scriptural exegesis, notwithstanding many faults and inconsistencies, yet contains the germs of a truly grand philosophical system, quite capable of power- fully influencing the mind even of a Spinoza. Such a reader would, while rejecting the exegesis, recognise the elements of truth in the pure theosophy (cf. Joel, Zur Genesis, p. 9), and this is the point wherein the two philosophers approach most closely. In the second place, I have confined myself entirely to the influence of the Yad on the Ethica. Greater agreement would have been found with the Korte Verhandeling van God, &c., while Spinoza's views of Biblical criticism (especially his conceptions of prophets and prophecy as developed in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) owe undoubtedly much to the Yad. Yet I wished to show that the study of Maimonides was traceable even in Spinoza's most finished exposition of his philosophy. Those who assert that Spinoza was influenced by Hebrew thought have not seldom been treated as though they were accusing Spinoza of a crime. Yet no great work ever sprung from the head of its creator like Athena from the head of Zeus; it has slowly developed within him, influenced and moulded by all that has influenced and moulded its shaper's own character. Had we but knowledge and critical insight enough, every idea might be traced to the germ from which it has developed. While recognising many other influences at work forming Spinoza's method of thought, it is only scientific to allow a certain place to the Jewish predecessors with whom he was acquainted. Critical comparison must show how great that influence was. We naturally expect to find considerable divergences between any individual Jewish philosopher and Spinoza; these divergences have been carefully pointed out by Mr. Sorley, but they are insufficient to prove that Spinoza was not very greatly influenced by Hebrew thought. My aim has been to call in question the traditional view of Spinoza's relation to Jewish 'philosophy, i.e., that he learnt enough of it to throw it off entirely. I cannot help holding that, while Spinoza's form and language were a mixture of medieval scholasticism and the Cartesian philosophy, yet the ideas which they clothed were not seldom Hebrew in their origin. He might be cast out by his co-religionists, but that could not deprive him of the mental birthright of his people- those deep moral and theosophical truths which have raised the Hebrews to a place hardly second to the Greeks in the history of thought. Hebrew Philosophy seems to have a history and a development more or less unique and apart from that of other nations; once in the course of many centuries it will produce a giant-thinker; one who, not satisfied by the narrow limits of his own nation, strives for a freer wider field of action, and grafts on to his Hebrew ideas a catholic language and a broader mental horizon. He becomes a world prophet, but is rejected of his own folk. Such an one of a truth was Spinoza, and another perhaps, albeit in a lesser degree, Moses, the son of Maimon.1--Karl Pearson "Maimonides and Spinoza," Mind (8), No. 31 (Jul., 1883): 352-353 [HT: Jeffrey Bernstein]. 

Recently, I posted a picture of Karl Pearson's blue plaque in Hampstead on social media. In which he is presented as "pioneer statistician." By implication, I noted (recall here; and here) that Pearson's eugenic activities where, pardon my expression, white-washed. In subsequent discussion Prof. Bernstein asked whether this is "the Karl Pearson who also wrote some essays on Spinoza?" 

I had no idea! But the answer is: yes. 

I have quoted the conclusion of the essay above. As it happens, a few days before I presented a draft paper, "Spinoza's Emendation of the Hebrew Bible in the Ethics," at an online version of a department colloquium at Santa Cruz (recorded here). While I had removed Maimonides from the slides in the presentation because I had re-read parts of his Guide to the Perplexed in the weeks leading up to the presentation and had grown a bit skeptical of my earlier enthusiasm connecting the two thinkers. So, the timing of Bernstein's comment was perfect because the relationship between Spinoza and Maimonides had become a matter of urgency to me. 

Let me start with Pearson's paper. He offers excellent set of argument for the idea that Maimonides'  Yad Hachazakah (literally: strong hand) is, despite non-trivial differences of presentation and the manner of treating the subject matter, a major influence on Spinoza's Ethics. The Yad is generally known as The Mishneh Torah (מִשְׁנֵה תּוֹרָה‎, or "Repetition of the Torah"). Its main purpose is to articulate and codify Jewish written and oral law. Despite receiving a rocky reception -- parts of which were burned --, it has become an extremely influential work within the development of Jewish law and ritual. 

Some other time I return to the details of Pearson's paper. Here's the thing: I missed the angle between The Mishneh Torah and Spinoza Ethics entirely. And this made me wonder how this is possible. The first thing to note is that Pearson's paper -- despite, and perhaps (I return to this below) the fame of the author -- has had negligible impact on Spinoza reception since. It is cited in a well known paper "A Portrait of Spinoza as a Maimonidean," by Warren Harvey a significant figure in Spinoza scholarship. But the citation is totemic; Pearson's paper is not used at all. And the reason for this is that Harvey is interested in connecting Spinoza to Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed not The Mishneh Torah (which is barely mentioned by Harvey in his article.) 

Now, it is possible that Harvey considered Pearson's papers on its merits and simply rejected the argument. This is not impossible because Pearson cherrypicks favored passages, sometimes relies on a bad translation, and systematically ignores lots of ways in which Spinoza and Maimonides differ in approach. (He does mention a few doctrinal differences, but mostly in order to illuminate the agreements).

But it is more likely that for Harvey the connection that Pearson drew was simply far-fetched. And the reason for thinking this is that Harvey is working with an opposition between Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (faith) in which The Guide falls on one side and the Mishneh Torah on the other side. For, Harvey starts his paper with announcing, "I try to sketch a portrait of Spinoza as a Maimonidean, as the last major representative of a tradition that mightily dominated Jewish philosophy for almost five centuries following the appearance of the Guide of the Perplexed." Much of the paper constructs this very tradition of Jewish philosophy artfully and unobtrusively.  In this tradition there is no place for Mishneh Torah, except the accidental one that its author also happens to have been an exceptionally gifted philosophical author of the Guide. Because the Mishneh Torah does not even qualify as philosophy.** 

I do not mean to suggest that learned commentators on Spinoza's Ethics never mention the Mishneh Torah. (Carlos Fraenkel discusses a passage in Cogitata Metaphysica in light of Mishneh Torah). Or that all commentators would agree with the implicit contrast between Jerusalem and Athens. For many, Spinoza's Ethics is timeless philosophy unrooted from any historically situated tradition. If one comes to believe, as is increasingly common for good reason, that Spinoza is to quote Michael Della Rocca "an arch-rationalist," there would be no reason to connect Spinoza's thought with Maimonides' Yad that appears to take revelation for granted. 

Of course, even scholars doubtful of the significance of Jewish philosophy on Spinoza, will recognize that Spinoza discusses the Mishneh Torah in the Theological Political Treatise. But that book, while important to the founding of the radical Enlightenment, is itself generally treated as an application of his philosophy to practical problems (including the relationship between revelation and philosophy). And while political philosophy is now treated as philosophy again, by and large commentators do not read the TTP to find Spinoza's true metaphysics. And so while I do not want to claim that the TTP is itself treated as belonging to Jerusalem, even its fans think of it as less philosophical than the Ethics. This attitude is also visible in Pearson (who treats the Ethics as much more "finished" philosophically than the TTP.

As an aside, part of the argument I presented at Santa Cruz is that the Ethics is, on some crucial matters, far more pious and guarded than the TTP , and also, and even more surprising perhaps, directly engages with the Hebrew Bible.

So, I have suggested that Pearson's essay and the argument he presented have been ignored because they do not fit the preconceptions of what counts as philosophy even by those friendly to the suggestion that Maimonides is a significant influence on or important to understanding Spinoza. But one may think that the reliance on the category of Jewish philosophy should form no objection to treating the Mishneh Torah as a source of Spinoza's philosophy because, after all, Pearson also relies on the category.

But, as the quote above suggests, Pearson's idea of 'jewish philosophy' is more Herderian and relativistic: the contrast between Athens and Jerusalem here is not a contrast between truth and revelation, but rather a contrast between two competing traditions toward the truth. When people like Harvey speak of Jewish philosophy, they mean that the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition is articulated in a Jewish context and responsive to concerns mediated by jewish experience and history. But Pearson thinks of Jewish philosophy as an autonomous philosophical  tradition: "Hebrew Philosophy seems to have a history and a development more or less unique and apart from that of other nations." That is to say, Pearson's conception of Jewish philosophy is analogous to the way scholars in the period (recall here and here) think of Chinese and Indian philosophy, as belonging to a civilization distinct from western philosophy's home.  (Except that Hebrew philosophy occurred geographically within the West.)

At this point one can understand why some readers will have wanted to keep their distance from Pearson, whose later work shows more interest in racial and ethnic superiority. Pearson's fondness for ranking cultures is already visible in the quoted passage. Although it is not impossible that his contemporaries would have been more bothered by his philo-semitism than the fact that he was ranking intellectual/cultural tradition!

Of course, Spinoza and to a lesser extent Maimonides are treated by Pearson as something more than Hebrew philosophers; they are world (philosophical) prophets. And one can discern in this Pearson's hope that, despite varied starting points (even Ohio will do), true philosophy transcends the culture that births or generates it.+ Pearson himself is clearly speaking from this superior to one's own intellectual culture's vantage-point. And, let me submit that it's this almost cosmopolitan perspective, much more than the sense of superiority toward other peoples, that is at the root of the science of eugenics.

 

 

 

 

 

On the Whitewashing of Philosophy

But "Africans are philosophers. From the moment they were abducted they argued philosophically that it was unjust," Coleman says.  But they weren't listened to, and even today they are missing from the canon of Eurocentric curricula and are not valued as philosophers.

Enlightenment philosophers such as Hobbes or Rousseau philosophised and spoke about slavery, but not really about the European colonial enslavement of African people. If they did, it was in a supposedly universal political sense as the opposite of freedom, or metaphorically, as in Wollstonecraft, who meant "enslaved" wealthy, "white middle-class women." "She didn't really want to get her hands dirty with the actual enslavement right before her eyes."

...

A leading member of the "Sons of Africa" was Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, who had been abducted on the West African coast. Later, he was the first African who penned and published arguments against enslavement in English.

The most notable thing about this was that his writings weren't narratives or biographies, like those of his colleague Olaudah Equiano, but rather philosophical arguments that were rooted in the European ideas of the Enlightenment, beginning with John Locke, one hundred years earlier, in the 17th century.

Cugoano committed himself to Locke's idea that each person owns himself. Accordingly, his philosophical argument was that this also applied to Africans and, therefore, African persons couldn't be owned by other persons. Through enslavement, African people had been dispossessed of themselves, argued Cugoano. With this, he came to a conclusion implicit in Locke's thought - one that Locke himself had not drawn. For Locke once wrote: "Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves."--From An interview with Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman by Aaron Salzer, of science.ORF.at Translation from German by Dr Jeff Bowersox and Daniel James. [HT DailyNous]

Coleman is right that philosophy has been whitewashed. I learned this not during my BA & PhD, but while entering the profession, as I became a student -- guided by the economists David Levy and Sandra Peart -- of the shared history of economics, statistics (recall), and philosophy, which is not just at the intersection of Utilitarianism's history (e.g. recall this post on W.E.B. Du Bois). Questions of breeding/eugenics, slavery, and racialized (inferior) others haunt the enterprise from the start (recall this post). In the English-language context the racialized (to be enslaved/bred, etc.) other is not just African (or, recall, Indian), but also Irish (recall my post on Berkeley).

So, it is a painful fact -- for those of us who reflect on the fact that we continue and renew a practice, even a continuous tradition --, that philosophy has systematically effaced African voices from our history and self-conception. It is painful because I take pride to belong to a community that in its self-conception is receptive to argument and evidence.  Coleman is right to be unrelenting about this "whitewashing" and to bring to our attention African authors and arguments that contested the institution of slavery and the nature of philosophy (by say, giving living evidence that philosophy is not just an occupation of white university professors or leisured gentlemen [see also Haslanger's comments]). My view, perhaps too optimistic, is that thereby Coleman puts us in the position to renew, even revive, philosophy if we are willing to live up to his challenge.

But Coleman has a tendency to essentially our philosophical past through the implication that the institution of slavery was uncontested by Enlightenment thinkers (or before). But this ignores not just the opposition to the institution by Radical philosophers that Jonathan Israel has been describing at length in his works, but even the non-trivial opposition of Adam Smith and, especially, his student, James Millar (see here for scholarship), to really existing slavery in their own day. They did so in lectures and publications. They were not alone in Scotland: James Beattie (who is loathed by Hume and Kant), also was a fierce opponent of slavery in part on strongly held religious grounds (reminding us of the positive role of Christian thought).* This is is not to deny that each one of these Scottish men requires critical and serious criticism of their views of race, empire, slavery (etc), but Coleman has a tendency to present the past in Manichean terms. He thereby obscures that the the nature of philosophy was contested in the Enlightenment age of slavery and that slavery was, in fact, one of the key issues of contestation--my suspicion is that part of Ancient philosophy's opposition to Sophism turns on the Sophists attack of slavery (see here for hints). (And when we look closely at the debates during the eighteenth century we find plenty of complexity; even Hume, who was too comfortable with racism and no abolitionist, liked to taunt his Republican opponents that their beloved liberty was founded on slavery.)

These days it's still a hard sell to convince professional philosophers that Mandeville (a complex proto-Feminist) and Millar were philosophers worth taking seriously. (Poor Beattie: if Kant and Hume agree about something it must be true!) It's not so long ago, and now I speak from personal experience, that Adam Smith was put in the same non-philosophical category by many professional philosophers. (Amusingly enough, Smith gets re-discovered in every generation for over a century now.)

Now, this is not a plea for using Millar to displace Cugoano in any future canon or curriculum. Rather, it's to point out that Coleman is right that there has been institutionalized forgetting and effacement, including (judged by a depressingly low bar) philosophy's rare, more noble past.

 

On (not) Teaching Galton and Pearson

First, one of the core modules, called ‘Critical Whiteness and Critical Eugenics’ which focused primarily on the history and legacy of Eugenics at UCL (Galton and Pierson [sic]) was thought to be too narrow for a core module.--Jo Wolff at DailyNous.

A year ago I noted, in response to a petition "to create a permanent, tenure-track position in the Department of Philosophy for Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias," the following:

Nearly all Anglophone and European philosophy departments don't do better than UCL [=University College London] when it comes to the number of appointed "Black academics." The situation is dismal. Anything that puts the (harsh) spotlight on this disgraceful situation ought to be applauded. But, human nature being what it is, we prefer such a spotlight on others, not ourselves. A bit of additional reflection suggests  that our self-interest and principles match up: outsiders shouldn't interfere with our contextually sensitive, hiring decisions (which involve our expert judgments). After all, when the spotlight is gone, we are stuck with a lifetime colleague.

Hiring decisions are not just contextually sensitive, they also involve a discovery process about the candidate by the search-committee and (this is often forgotten) by the candidate, that is, one discovers one's aspirations and needs, and it is a discovery process about the the hiring department (this is often forgotten, especially, by european universities) by the candidate as well as by the hiring department itself (which may discover its own disunities, or the falsity of the plattitudes it tells about itself to others and self).

Critics of UCL should probably put their money where their mouth is: hire Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman who crosses out his surname to “highlight the stigmatising expressive meaning” of the “badge” given to his forebears by slave owners, into your own department or, more creatively, start a crowd-funding source to give UCL more time to keep him on soft-money. If UCL were open to this, I would certainly contribute to such a crowd-funding source.

I am, however, critical of part of Jonathan Wolff's comments explaining why UCL is letting go (firing?) Coleman. Because I have criticized Wolff (who is a well known political philosopher) before, I just want to say (to my suspicious readers) that to the best of my knowledge we have never had any professional/personal interaction, and from what I have read I believe his intentions are noble. Perhaps, surprisingly, I am not critical of his claim that there was "no business case for a new post." While there is a deplorable tendency to reduce university decision-making opportunistically to business case decision-making -- it's deplorable because it's often promoted by a rent-seeking managerial class whose lifestyles are subsidized by exploited workers--this is indeed the harsh reality of modern university life.

But I do want to challenge the claim that a focus on the "history and legacy of Eugenics at UCL (Galton and Pierson) [sic]" is "unduly narrow for a core module." Here we see a kind of unintended consequence of the professional success of Rawls, Nozick, and Cohen, who managed to transform political philosophy from a neglected subject into a respectable, technical topic inside professional philosophy and higher education. For, they did so by nearly completely effacing and re-modeling the earlier focus on the complex and contested ways in which demographics, political economy, biology, social institutions, inheritance, family-planning, education, and, alas, race interact each other in blueprint or dystopia for better societies (from Plato to, well, Pearson.) With climate-change-inspired concern about demographics, these old issues have a new resonance and urgency.

In fact, Wolff's reports on the committee's thought make me wonder how widespread the (arguably culpable) ignorance is of the fascinating and complex issues surrounding the life and works of Galton and Pearson. I have reported how I managed to get a PhD in Philosophy (in a department -- The University of Chicago -- that prided itself on its broad historical coverage) without having much knowledge of the role of many still famous professional philosophers, economists, statisticians, biologists, psychologists, and sociologists in the extremely broad eugenics movement(s) (which was both a Progressive and a Conservative/Fascist cause)--a chance encounter with two then marginalized economists, David M. Levy and Sandra Peart changed my perspective forever. The exception was a quest lecture (by the historian of statistics Stephen Stigler) on (as I remember it, although I believe Stigler's emphasis was elsewhere) Pigou's discovery of what later became known as Simpson's paradox in his criticism of (I believe) Pearson over Galton/Pearson style statistical arguments that connected eugenic policy proposals to public health, alcoholism, social work, English-Scottish relations, etc. (Here's the bit that made it into Stigler's important book.)

In fact, after having become something of an expert (by philosophy standards) on the history and philosophy of economics, I cannot think of a more appropriate and serious way to start a ‘MA in “Race” Difference and Domination’ than by exploring the complex and fascinating lives and works of Galton/Pearson and put them in institutional and political context. It would be an eye-opening and troubling course that almost certainly will scrutinize enduring myths that professional intellectuals and academics tell themselves about the past and present. The only shame is that the folk most of need of such a course are the ones likely to think it is too narrow.*

Why the Canon Fight is Different in Analytical Philosophy; on Heroworship

For a brief spell in the 80’s and 90’s, higher education was consumed by the canon wars. For those too young to remember, the canon wars were some earnest and intense battles among people who couldn’t agree on which authors needed to be taught for students to be considered properly educated.--Inside Higher Education (2013).

A year ago Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman succesfully managed to ignite discussion within professional philosophy about the status of the canon (recall my response).* Other humanists might think -- paraphrasing a quip falsely attributed to Heinrich Heine (which doesn't stop the Wall Street Journal from recycling it) -- that philosophy is the Netherlands of higher education, everything happens there three decades later. (Genuine humanists know that debates over the canon are as old as the canon itself.) While there are solid sociological-demographic reasons that help explain why philosophy remained aloof from the canon wars (the short version: professional anglophone philosophy is overwhelmingly white, male, change-averse and unreceptive toward unmasking narratives), there is also a key intellectual reason: within analytical philosophy the (Western) canon is largely irrelevant to disciplinary conversations.+ No command over the details of the text is ever presupposed. This is no surprise because analytical philosophy was founded -- self-consciously mimicking Descartes's dismissiveness toward book-knowledge -- as a revolt against historical approaches to philosophy.

While the days may be gone in which one could count on all literature professors to recite Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, Virgil, Goethe, Dante, and the other mighty dead, especially Middlemarch, from memory, to this day working knowledge of some such books provides a shared, contested frame of reference in literary and cultural studies even if nobody thinks that command of such books is a mark of civilization or even a signal of one's cultural capital. And while close reading persists in college courses, the idea that literature can replace Scripture has long been deconstructed, and De Man unmasked; I would not be surprised if it has had its brief, ironic revival prompted by a Simpsons episode.

By contrast even when I present on David Hume's Treatise to professional historians of philosophy, let alone generalist philosophical audiences, I make sure to prepare detailed excerpts of key passages. Hume is the fourth most admired philosopher in history (according to a recent poll); he is the highest ranked English language philosopher--his Treatise the acknowledged masterpiece.** Even the anti-historical logical empiricists would say nice things about Hume. My excerpts are not merely aids to memory; I know that the passages I am calling attention to are simply unknown. Professional philosophy is not a discipline in which texts from the past are internalized. (Yes, there are a few Hume scholars that have working knowledge of some texts, but even among that lovely crowd -- dominated by professional philosophers -- there are very few people that know Hume's major works really by heart.)

Even when working positions come to be known as Humean or Carnapian (etc.), odds are we are dealing with Hume* or Carnap*. It doesn't matter, really, if Hume is not a Humean. (The relationship between, say, Carnap and contemporary Carnapians is very interesting and illuminating.) While there are a few magisterial clubs within professional philosophy -- Kantians often really try to get Kant right (even at the price of introducing anachronism), Wittgensteinians even have a second-order debate whether it makes sense to get Wittgenstein right, etc. --, philosophical puzzles and controversies do not get settled by authoritative interpretation of major texts. Of course, interest in such puzzles can be started by way of some such interpretation. 

The above is not to deny that there is an image of philosophy prevalent within professional philosophy in which a limited number of historical, canonical figures are very prominent: starting with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle through Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant (etc). These folk are often, indeed, implicated in subtle and not-so-subtle forms of ideological domination (or worse). It is worth serious reflection why Gorgias's Helen is unread; why even specialist scholars are unaware of the male feminism of Toland, Mandeville, and John Millar--all eighteenth century figures that were once extremely famous. (Even world class Nietzsche scholars tend to be ignorant on the genealogy of genealogy.) It is shocking that (the first) professional interest in early modern female philosophers only commenced less than a generation ago.  

If we abolish the canon in professional (analytic) philosophy, we just give folk another excuse not to read books. This trend may be unstoppable anyway: the textbook is beloved by university technocrats who hire cheap labor to teach pre-set curriculum with well-defined (achievable) goals.

For, in addition to the image of philosophy, there are classic works, often drawn from those canonical figures that figure in the image of philosophy, which are routinely but not exclusively used to introduce students to philosophy (e.g., an intro to ethics course with Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Mill--hopefully Sophie de Grouchy before long, too) [recall, recall, and more if you use Google]. Arguably, Nietzsche has become canonical within professional philosophy because teachers could not resist the allure of assigning him in their courses. There could be quite a bit more experimentation and innovation in the pool of such classics. In preparing a course on Islamic philosophy, I encountered Ibn Tufayl (recall) and was certainly not the first to be struck by how easily he could fit in any text-based introductory course in epistemology, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. 

What does exist in professional philosophy is a kind of hero-worship of living authority figures and the recently deceased.* Manifestly odd views can endure because they are associated with some such hero and, more importantly, because they put (often informal, but no less tight) conceptual and methodological constraints on what is acceptable within professional discussion. Williamson describes the mechanisms involved in a recent essay: he patiently explains the fear factor that surrounded Quine for a while [recall my post]. This is why in the overthrow of such heroes we find more than argument--there is also rhetoric; Williamson describes Lewis's metaphysics as "extreme" (9) and memorably, but unflatteringly, notes that Lewis is "also known as ‘the machine in the ghost’ for his eerie computational power, mechanical diction, faint air of detachment from ordinary life, and beard from another era." (8)

This hero-worship is associated with a lot of the worst features of the discipline; the common cruelty, the lack of respect for viewpoints associated with outsiders, the willful ignorance, and the awful systematic demographic patterns of exclusion. So, if we abolish the canon in professional philosophy without ending the hero-worship not much will change about the professional practice.

LEMM & HISTORY NOT ATTRACTING BLACKS IN THE PHILOSOPHY PROFESSION

 There is a willful, not necessarily a conscious, preference among many members of the philosophy profession largely to maintain the status quo in terms of: the social group profiles of members; the dynamics of prestige and influence; and the areas and questions deemed properly or deeply "philosophical." None of this is good for black folks.--LK McPherson at NewAPPS, Dec. 12, 2011.

I put a screaming headline on this post. That's because I just finished reading “What is the State of Blacks in Philosophy?” (2014) Critical Philosophy of Race, by Tina Fernandes Botts, Liam Kofi Bright, Myisha Cherry, Guntur Mallarangeng, and Quayshawn Spencer. DailyNous posted a link to the piece, but to my amazement it has not generated any significant public discussion that I am familiar with. So, let me provoke some. According to the paper (this is summarized on DailyNous from which I quote):

• Blacks make up just 1.32 percent of the total number of people professionally affiliated (as grad students or faculty) with U.S. philosophy departments.
• Approximately 0.88 percent of U.S. philosophy Ph.D. students are black.
• Approximately 4.3 percent of U.S. tenured philosophy professors are black.
• Of black philosophy Ph.D. students in the U.S., half are female. That is about double the rate of the U.S. philosophy Ph.D. student population as a whole.
• The distribution of black female Ph.D. students across philosophy Ph.D. programs is much lower than black males. Specifically, 69 percent of black female Ph.D. students are at Penn State.
• The top areas of specialization for U.S. black philosophers are (1) Africana, (2) Race, (3) Social and Political, (4) Ethics, and (5) Continental philosophy.

One bit of terminology: Fernandes Botts et al. use "BIPs" to refer to Blacks in the Profession; I follow this convention. Before I offer some commentary I want to note that the "4.3 percent of U.S. tenured philosophy professors are black" number is based on the number of tenured APA members. I think it would be a  mistake if that number became the baseline for future discussion of BIPs. For, Kate Norlock reminds me that NCES has calculated (based on now ten year old data) that there are about 13,000 full-time philosophy faculty. (These are NOT all tenured, of course. But it excludes nearly all PhD students/ABDs.)* The number of BIPs in the (non-graduate-student) full-time teaching population, is, thus, probably closer to approximately 1%. This is back-of-the-envelope calculation, so should be treated with caution; it excludes part-time faculty! But that rough 1% number matches better, I think, the other data collected by Fernandes Botts et. al.

Correlation isn't causation. But....ahhh...correlation can also not be ignored.  So, to be blunt, every time we treat the LEMM as the CORE parts of philosophy (recall) and every time we mock SPEP-style Continental philosophy, we are, in effect, also (further) marginalizing (insulting, demeaning, etc.) the majority of BIPs. Every time you are a bystander to this, you are very likely complicit to making matters worse when it comes to the status of BIPs.

Or to get to the nub of the matter: the way professional philosophy understands what philosophy is may well be part of the problem. The issue has been explored with subtlety by Kristie Dotson in her now famous paper (see also her post at NewAPPS and McPherson's post linked at the  top of this post). I think we need to acknowledge that analytical philosophy, the way it has evolved, and the way we understand the history of philosophy are part of the problem. This is not to deny that we may have inherited Plato's original sins. (See also this post; so, yes, I was probably too optimistic, if not just deluded, in this post.) How much, I don't know. (This is not to ignore problems within Continental and other areas of philosophy; I am just not the right person to speak about them.) That is to say, rather than only focusing on fighting bias (explicit/tacit)), and improving procedures, we should be open to the possibility that our systematic downplaying of those parts of philosophy that seriously question both the philosophical status quo as well as the political/social/cultural/institutional status quo, and philosophical complicity in it, may, in fact, contribute to the very problem here.

When I was an undergraduate I was in awe of most of my philosophy teachers. I admired their intelligence, their argumentative skill, and their intellectual integrity. At the time, I didn't think I could become as good as them, but I wanted to join a club in which I could participate as a peer in the noble quest for the search after truth and justice. Professionally philosophy has treated me better than I expected. In looking at the numbers collected by Fernandes Botts and her colleagues, I now recognize that I was also striving to join and be allowed into a club very much like myself. And while I want to scream like my headline, this belated -- 'what took you so long?!' -- insight makes me wonder how many of my aspirations are tainted.

A petition to Appoint a "Black Academic"

UCL states that it was established to 'open up education in England for the first time to students of any race, class or religion.' Unfortunately, with regards to race, the university has not evidenced the same aspiration for its academic staff. The relegation of Black academics to perpetual short-term contracts and constant threat of redundancy is, and has been for some time, a national dilemma—as reflected by Parliament in its minutes of evidence, pointing to a case from UCL. 

Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman is one of those academics. In his nine short months as a Research Associate in Philosophy of ‘Race’, he has contributed more to the progress of UCL as an equitable, 21st century community of scholars than most professors who have been here more than a decade. As the Department of Philosophy has recently given lectureships to individuals who had yet to obtain PhDs and has hired four lecturers this year, it is implausible that no permanent place exists for the crucial work in which Dr. Coleman is currently engaged.

We, the undersigned stakeholders in the UCL community and concerned parties-at-large, insist that Professors Michael Arthur (Provost), Jonathan Wolff (Dean of Faculty of Arts & Humanities) and José Zalabardo (Head of Department, Philosophy) intervene to create a permanent, tenure-track position in the Department of Philosophy for Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman before the end of his contract on 30 September 2014.--Petition, "Keep Your Black Academics." [HT: Justin Smith]

Exerting external pressure on a university to influence its hiring decisions is a delicate matter, particularly, as is usually the case, when one doesn't have all of the relevant information. Still, I'm signing this petition in order to signal to those to whom it is directed, first of all, my agreement with its drafters that there is a grave problem of lack of diversity within philosophy in the UK, and, second of all, that Professor Coleman is an exceptional philosopher: a gifted and inspiring thinker and communicator. He'll be making history somewhere or other, and it is in UCL's interest to ensure that he does it there.--Justin Smith.

The distinguished scholar, Justin Smith, alerted me to this petition (which he signed with the explanation provided above). I am familiar with petitions to save people's existing jobs, but this is the first that I am aware of that tries to pressure a university in order to "create a permanent, tenure-track position" for a particular candidate. The sponsor(s) of the petitions are anonymous, going by "black students."*

Nearly all Anglophone and European philosophy departments don't do better than UCL [=University College London] when it comes to the number of appointed "Black academics." The situation is dismal. Anything that puts the (harsh) spotlight on this disgraceful situation ought to be applauded. But, human nature being what it is, we prefer such a spotlight on others, not ourselves. A bit of additional reflection suggests  that our self-interest and principles match up: outsiders shouldn't interfere with our contextually sensitive, hiring decisions (which involve our expert judgments). After all, when the spotlight is gone, we are stuck with a lifetime colleague. 

Unless, of course, when outsiders intervene...successfully.