Digressions&Impressions

On Top of the World

While I was thus dividing my thoughts, now turning my attention to some terrestrial object that lay before me, now raising my soul, as I had done my body, to higher planes, it occurred to me to look into my copy of St. Augustine's Confessions, a gift that I owe to your love, and that I always have about me, in memory of both the author and the giver. I [Page 317] opened the compact little volume, small indeed in size, but of infinite charm, with the intention of reading whatever came to hand, for I could happen upon nothing that would be otherwise than edifying and devout. Now it chanced that the tenth book presented itself. My brother, waiting to hear something of St. Augustine's from my lips, stood attentively by. I call him, and God too, to witness that where I first fixed my eyes it was written: "And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not." I was abashed, and, asking my brother (who was anxious to hear more), not to annoy me, I closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself. Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain...--Petrarca (1336).

There is a wide difference between admiration and love. The sublime, which is the cause of the former, always dwells on great objects, and terrible--Burke.

Today's post is an act of escapism after spending a morning serving on a committee that allocates grant money to scientists that have perfected the art of sincere over-promising and diligent accumulation  of strategic publication records; I picked up Cassirer and Kristeller's The Renaissance Philosophy of Man.

I used to associate Mt. Ventoux with the ritualized memorial of the death of Tom Simpson and, more favorably, the awe-inspiring time trial win by Jean-François Bernard in 1987 to be followed by disastrous team-tactics toward Villard-de-Lans. But now I can set those alonside Petrarca's account of his climb* of the mountain which, according to Wikipedia is 1,912 m (6,273 ft). (I read it in Nachod's translation in the Kristeller/Randall volume, but link to another one.) The logician, Buridian, is said to have gotten there first, but Petrarca's account is worth reading if only because of his astute comments about the trickiness of selecting travel companions.

The passage quoted above is near the end of Petrarca's description of his thoughts once he reached the top of the mountain together with his brother and two servants. In fact, the reported thought occurs at the start of sun-set. I am not the first to note that Petrarca, who describes his conflicted will alongside his narrative of the day-long journey up the mountain, echoes the conversion moment in Augustine's Confessions, where, carried along by the chanting kid's voice, which he decides to interpret as a command from God, Augustine picks up Scripture and is inspired to convert to Christianity by Romans 13:13-4, which induces a serenity of heart without doubt [quasi luce securitatis infusa cordi meo omnes dubitationis tenebrae diffugerunt].

Petrarca quotes a passage from the Confessions in which a post-conversion Augustine describes people's hankering after the sublime while lacking self-knowledge.** It is tempting to say that Petrarca treats Augustine as teaching him the significance of the spiritual life.

That's not all false, of course, but it is worth noting that in Petrarca this spiritual journey is re-interpreted as a call to a philosophical life. I don't just claim this just because of the emphasis on self-knowledge. Rather, I recognized (recall this post) Petrarca's quote from Seneca's eight letter (one of those "pagan philosophers"), nothing except the soul is worthy of wonder; for the soul, if it be great, naught is great, which characterizes the greatness of soul of the self-sufficient, even sublime mind--one that attains immortality by skilled emendation or posthumous fame.

The physical, strenuous exercise of the climb prepares the body for a turn to philosophy, that is, the transformation of a weak, unstable mind into one that can face even death with equanimity. That the turn to philosophy is treated as a transformative, Pauline experience in the manner of our very own L.A. Paul is, of course, no surprise as such. But precisely at that transformative moment Petrarca is not just unable to talk with his pious brother (who had been extolled as the perfect climbing companion),*** but his brother's need is a source of possible irritation. Petrarca's account is so beautiful that one might miss the ugliness of the moment in which fellow-feeling is not permitted.

I do not wish to rule out ways that are philosophical yet permit exquisite co-affectivity rather than a withdrawal from human need, that is, philosophical escapism. But not for the first time I am struck by how alluring philosophical escapism can be felt from within and how discordant it can be seen to be from without; Petrarca's poetic-philosophical-confessional shows that mountaineers can indeed see farther.

Citation, or Change the Conversation

Grad student to one of his supervisors: I liked your manuscript a lot and have only added some minor suggestions, but some of its major claims were anticipated by X.

"I discovered these claims independently."

Grad student: but why don't you cite X; he got there first [by a decade]?

"I don't have to cite X because I did not read X and I am not going to read X."

Thanks to more Healy data (aided by Bloom) about some purportedly generalist high prestige journals and blogging by Meena Krishnamurthy, citation practices in analytical philosophy are back in the harsh spotlight. Familiar patterns of exclusion are magnified at the top of the citation pyramid; if I understand Healy's analysis, women and other minorities are (largely) absent in the 1%.

The exchange I quoted at the top of this post really happened. In reflecting on it over the years, I assumed initially that the supervisor, who teaches at a research-focused university, was just ungenerous to X, who teaches at a small college and not even in professional philosophy. (I will leave the identity of the grad student vague so as to protect my sources.) At the time I also treated the information as evidence of a lack of inquisitiveness by the professor. This particular professor did not have the juvenile pride in lack of philosophical literacy common among some analytical philosophers (of an older generation), so I was surprised by his stance. Later, as a true empiricist, in glancing through the book to check if X was, in fact, cited, I learned that X was indeed never mentioned. In fact, non-citer's book has been cited three to four times as often as X since. There is no justice.

As I became more at ease in professional philosophy, I learned that this incident was not an isolated event. Professional philosophers rarely cite (as Healy notes we average less than fifteen citations per paper). As I became an experienced historian of philosophy who could distance himself a bit from his own intellectual culture, I concluded also upon further reflection on analytical citation practices the following:

• Low citation rates of others create an illusion of originality; 
• low citation rates of others create and participate in historical effacements and cover-ups;
• low citation rates of others make one's background commitments opaque and, thereby, creates barriers to entry to outsiders;
• if citation is a scarce good it becomes a valuable commodity to be given as either a form of (aspirational) tribute or a rare act of generosity.

That is to say, citation within analytical philosophy is primarily a form of status signaling (recall). It tells the reader what peer group the author belongs or aspires to. 'Peer group' is a polite way of saying faction. This is no surprise, of course, if we look at institutional factors (and pay attention to the empirical evidence recall). The journals that Healy draws his data from are captured by particular groups within professional philosophy. (As is well known some of the most famous and celebrated philosophers of the twentieth century are barely mentioned in their pages [recall].) This intersects with the by now well known demographic patterns of exclusion (and a number of other biases).

To be clear, now that more and more analytical philosophy takes place in an institutional grant environment where 'objective performance metrics' play a role, we should expect citation practices to change (perhaps, led by Synthese or blog-driven citation-echo-chambers). It is an open question to what degree these grants, which tend to divide the academic world into chosen winners and the rest, will facilitate new demographic patterns of outcome alongside, say, the globalization of Anglophone professional philosophy.

Okay, the stage is set for my observations on Healy's analysis of this state of affairs. Healy writes:

Most of the time, publishing in a high-status journal is in effect a permit to talk about other people’s work. Your contribution must be framed by the central items in your field. And while it’s hard to clear that bar, a much, much smaller number of articles move from being items in the literature to being topics of the literature. Most of the articles in our dataset are “contributions to the literature” in the first sense, but not the second. In this case the agenda-setters, as opposed to the participants, are all men.

As I’ve said before, an academic discipline is a kind of exclusive conversation. Even for very successful entrants, “participation” usually means being present as a contributor, but not as a topic-maker. It’s a little like attending an ongoing public debate. You need a ticket to enter and sit in the audience. You may be called on by the moderator to ask a question or make a point from the floor. But the agenda for the discussion is set by a much smaller panel of people up on the stage—people who started out as audience members. Most of academic life has this structure, from departmental talks to conference panels and plenaries to journal exchanges. A key issue then becomes how work gets selected for attention up on the stage, who gets engaged with from the stage, so to speak, and how this process plays out as new audience members come in the door.--Healy. [Italics in Healy's original; but emphasis added in bold--ES.]

It is no surprise, and legitimate, that attention is now focused on the ways in which deserving women are excluded from setting the discipline's agenda and to offer reforms to this state of affairs (see here). I have no doubt that the discipline's conversation would be enriched and improved with women among the 1%. For example, as my regular readers know I think it was a near-disaster for analytical philosophy that Stebbing was forgotten while Max Black, a very fine philosopher, but nowhere near as original and interesting as Stebbing, set parts of our collective agenda (recall and here).   

Healy's analysis takes the institutional status quo as given. (That's not meant as a complaint--he is doing empirical sociology, after all.) Healy's analysis emphasizes the commonalities between the practice of philosophy and other academic disciplines without pausing at this fact. Philosophy is, on the whole, not an empirical science and so largely not driven by empirical or computer results (yes, I have heard of X-PHI!) or investment in experimental systems that drive lab research. In scientific fields, the sociology of citation is influenced by the organization of science, of course, and existing norms of citation, but citation does not only aim to participate in the discussion but also to advance (fill in your favorite epistemic goal here). While undoubtedly bits of philosophy undoubtedly aim at something more than participating in the discussion, large chunks of philosophy are nothing but attempts at keeping the beautiful, noble, (etc.) and, yes, exclusive conversation going. Of course, this is not merely a dis-interested enterprise because there are success goods to be derived from being the center of some conversations.

We learn from the example of Socrates, that keeping the conversation going without aporia and anger is no simple matter; we learn from the fate of Hume's Treatise that even in an extremely literate and philosophical age a work's philosophical significance can be overlooked. We learn from the profession's ignorance of, say, early modern feminists, female and male, that ignoble historical cover-ups succeed.

I end on a reflexive, narcissist note. After my first two years in the profession, I recognized that there was no place for me in the audience of the agenda-setters. My papers were being rejected without comment at the top journals (recall) and I experienced being invisible at professional events. (I am a white above average-length male, by the way; I have long arms.) I became aware of the often invisible barriers to participation; after all, when they do not do so themselves, the agenda-setters rely on trusted gate-keepers to pre-select the approved audience. Part of the story is that I got trained into the wrong conversations at Chicago--the leading factions had moved in another direction (recall). I accepted that my work would appear in supposedly less prestigious outlets and through 2010 I would average under ten citations per year (the vast majority of which self-citation).

Then I co-founded NewAPPS with the aim to change the institutional status quo; I have very much enjoyed directing attention to other people's work overlooked by the agenda-setters of yesterday. Amazingly, too, the scholarly citations to my work increased five-fold per year since--not enough to be in the 1%, but beyond my expectations. This is not a matter of justice (recall X). But sometimes you should not buy the ticket to the main attraction because it is a corporate re-run; enjoy a walk in fresh air, instead, and seek out more interesting and more diverse (and, thus, epistemically more robust) conversation partners--it's not impossible that before long inquisitive folk will want to join in the fun.

On a Rigged System

Philosophy and Public Affairs seems to me to have a real problem with bias. Because I suspected that it had such a problem, I went through back issues last year, looking at volumes 37, 38, 39, 40 and 41, in which there are 57 papers. Of those 57 papers, 17 had at least one author who received their doctorate from the same institution as the current Editor, Oxford. Another 13 were written by authors whose doctorates were from Harvard, where a number of editorial staff work or studied. The next most common place for authors to have received their doctorate is Princeton, where the journal is based. Of the ten papers in those five volumes published by authors who were last year employed by institutions in the western United States, four are by members of the editorial staff, three are by former visitors at Princeton, where the journal is based, and two are by people who were supervised by members of editorial staff. Only one of the ten has an author with no obvious links with editorial staff. It is impossible to be sure, simply on the basis of that sort of data, that there is anything untoward about its editorial policy, let alone anything deliberately so. I suggest though that it places the burden of proof on those who claim that it assesses all submissions in the same way.--Anonymous at DailyNous.

Let's assume that anonymous counted correctly. If not I apologize to the good folks at PPA. Let's also stipulate that all the papers published in PPA are of high quality. I have only one experience with the journal (a desk-reject).

I am always surprised by folk that are surprised that the system in professional philosophy is rigged, consciously and tacitly, in all kinds of ways. It is, of course, amusing to notice that the hard-core proceduralists (and ethical theorists) among us discretely and conveniently tend to play along with all of this. (Recall that yesterday I argued it's okay to have a few transparently biased journals in the profession. [I also linked to a small fraction of my previous blogging about this.]) This kind of stuff is noticeable to anyone that reflects on and has experience with referee practices, boy-wonder pathways, and all that. I also pointed out that in my experience plenty of other journals are captured by factions and/or overlapping factions, and reminded readers that such capture does not even require explicit cartels. In the broadest sense this (journal capture] is a near truism because for over half a century North American (and UK/Aussie?) analytical philosophers ensured that the Continental types would have almost no access to 'top' journals thereb quietly eliminating them from a presence in the 'top' departments until enough analytically trained philosophers could claim they were covering the same Continentalish material 'more rigorously' (etc.).

I have benefitted from the system, although during the last few years I have also benefitted from being a modest critic of the status quo. I am not one of the victims without a job displaced by a better connected insider. Even so, it is worth exploring how even the most priviliged insiders are diminished by this state of affairs. For example, all of professional philosophy is diminished when those that communicate philosophical positions to the world, and attempt to be, say, normative authorities qua professional philosophers, are the product of a system that at the elite level is not open to systematically engaging with alternative approaches and known objections. I will not suggest causation, but it is noteworthy that professional political philosophy's standing in the public sphere has, it seems, catastrophically diminished during the last four decades. It is equally noteworthy that the recent analytical work on ideology and bias (Langton, Fricker, Haslanger, Maitra, Saul, Dotson, Stanley, etc.) has not originated in political philosophy, and thereby bypassing some of the obstacles to being heard.

Ordinarily, I tend to blame hyperspecialization and professionalization (and a larger cultural anti-intellectualism and commercialism) for philosophy's relative public irrelevance, but perhaps part of the problem is the ways in which professional philosophy is a clubby system that is incapable of reforming its practices. (For the record: I think the worst of the clubbiness is past us; and I am hopeful the situation is vastly improved during the last decade.)

Let me close by moving from the abstract to the personal. I have an enduring interest in political philosophy. But when I was a PhD student, I recognized that if I wanted to stay in professional philosophy there would be little place for the kinds of questions and problems I was interested in exploring. Nobody explicitly said, 'don't do political philosophy,' but I could also sense a decidedly lack of excitement for the issues that unsettled me; I am neither Rawlsian nor Libertarian nor much enamored by the Capabilities Approach. And I didn't quite see where my interests in political economy, technocracy, ideology, and my more recent interests in situated knowledge and their intersection could find a home in political philosophy, especially with my quasi-historical sensibility. (Eventually I recognized that I could find a home for some of these interests on the fringes of philosophy of economics and the growing science and values literature housed in philosophy of science.) I thought it was far more sensible to present myself as a historian of philosophy than, say, a political philosopher (recall).

On leaving evidence of one's missteps

In 2013, Annals received nine hundred and fifteen papers and accepted thirty-seven. The wait between acceptance and publication is typically around a year. When a paper arrives, “it is read quickly, for worthiness,” Nicholas Katz, the Princeton professor who is the journal’s editor, told me, and then there is a deep reading that can take months. “The paper I can’t evaluate off the top of my head, my role is to know whom to ask,” Katz said. “In this case, the person wrote back pretty quickly to say, ‘If this is correct, it’s really fantastic. But you should be careful. This guy posted a paper once, and it was wrong. He never published it, but he didn’t take it down, either.’" From "The Pursuit of Beauty: Yitang Zhang solves a pure-math mystery." By Alec Wilkinson-New Yorker. [Emphasis added--ES]

After my friend, M. Ali Khan, the mathematical-economist, called my attention to this piece during his trip to Tokyo, I saw it posted and discussed all over the internet among fellow academics.  Evidently, narratives about a lone, non-bragging (male?) genius that while working in obscurity, even at times outside academia, gets a big, non-applicable question right resonates with our desires for purity, beauty, and truth. Wilkinson's piece is full of comments by fellow mathematicians who comment on the fact that Dr. Zhang's public disposition does not conform to academic self-promotion that is the norm.

As the quoted passage at the top of the post reveals, the odds of getting a paper published in the top mathematics journal are very low. (This is also the case in philosophy.) Not unlike the once too common norm among philosophy journals, the referees apparently knew the identity of the author of the paper.  Moreover, this identity was not sterling, but rather damaged goods. It is to the credit of the journal's editors and referees that they were willing to look past their partially informed bias here. Perhaps, it's their sense of fairness, or, perhaps, the expected pay-off ("really fantastic") and initial plausibility made it worth everybody's effort to dig deeper into a paper by a lowly regarded peer.

It must be a well established fact that first impressions matter a lot in most psychological judgments. Among professional philosophers it used to be the case, and presumably still is the case, that making mistakes (or, worse, blunders) can mark one as untalented/unskilled and unfit for professional philosophy. Among the highest virtues, if not the highest (after clarity?), prized by analytical philosopy is carefulness. This virtue -- and it has a lot in its favor -- has a status quo bias built into it because it discourages experimentation and boldness. For to be bold means to work on topics where the side-constraints that can prevent obvious-to-others' mistakes are less evidently available (because not as well explored). Of course, once one is senior/established in the field people are more forgiving of one's mistakes. (Life really is unfair that way.) But one rarely gets established in fields with advanced intellectual division of labor by being very bold in the first place.

Evidently "he left it [the posted paper--ES] up because he hopes to correct it." If we take this at face value, it seems the paper was left as a kind of externalized pre-commitment to keep working on a project that had run into barriers. To have something incomplete, or something falling short of professional standards, visible to the world can be a way to motivate oneself to complete or purify it; it can also be a way of quietly asking for help on the project from one's peers. But...in a zero-sum, almost unforgiving, competitive environment it is also a way of risking not getting an audience at all. 

On getting credit for One's Students' Publications

One by-product of the publishing arm's race (recall this post and the discussion at Dailynous) that the role of graduate educators (supervisors and others) is increasingly geared toward making sure that their students publish during their doctorates. This has been facilitated by the ongoing trend toward the 'PhD as a number of collected articles.'  These trends are magnified in Flanders, where I work; our grant agency is oriented toward rewarding publications. The rule of thumb right now is that you won't even be considered (!) for a post-doc without at least four refereed journal articles. In effect, this encourages graduate supervisors to act as lab-heads (obtain grants and all that) and also to hire post-docs, in part, to help professionalize graduate students on a day-to-day basis.

One way to acquire the skill of writing a journal article is to work with somebody who knows how to do it.* Some of my colleagues work extremely closely with their students; it is time-consuming and also -- depending on the circumstances -- not always the most rewarding work, especially if one reads and re-reads as well as re-writes many multiple drafts of the same paper. Not surprisingly, although not always without some tension, graduate supervisors put their names, too, on the final publication. Predictably, this is not always a happy outcome; in some cases the student is a glorified research-assistant; it's not clear that such graduate students really learn to become independent thinkers and develop their own philosophical voice. In other cases the supervisor is a powerful free-rider exploiting their status; when the ability to obtain research-leave or research grants is tied to research-output this is a predictable outcome. (To be clear: on the whole I avoid publishing with my own PhD students, although I have published with other people's graduate students.) Human nature being what it is, one is always likely to overestimate one's own contribution to the final publication-outcome in a supervisor-graduate student relationship.

Of course, having only co-authored papers is still, I suspect, a mark against you in hiring decisions in much of professional philosophy even though it shows skill at team-work, developing professional relationships, and acquiring that most valuable resource -- an other person's philosophical time. So, in addition to avoiding free-riding, it's not always an optimal option to reward the supervisors's role in publication by adding their names to the byline. There are, however, other ways to reward their roles, including (but not limited to) tenure and promotion or generous acknowledgment in the first footnote. For example, at my university, supervisors and co-supervisors get extra, generous credits to their research accounts for some of the publications of their students at successful completion of the PhD.  In fact, the supervisor can choose to share this credit with others who contributed to the effort.

 

*This post was promted even encouraged by facebook discussion with Michael Weisberg; the usual caveats apply.

On 'Me 2 Research' and English-as-Second-Language Citation Rates

A few years ago, Gereon Wolters initiated public discussion among philosophers of science about the "ever increasing use of the English language also in the humanities, and here particularly in disciplines like logic and philosophy of science." (I am quoting from his 2013 paper, which refers back to the discussion on the HOPOS list in 2011. [The discussion has been renewed by Gabriele Contessa and my friends at philosopherscocoon.]) Given the grant and reward structure(s) in Europe, there are lots of incentives for publishing in English in internationally recognized journals. (Such incentives exist elsewhere, too, but I will restrict my observations to Europe.) This generates barriers to entry to non-native English speakers. Think about it for a second: philosophy is difficult as such; yes, really; now add linguistic hurdles, and, then add, say, tacit biases that make us treat sub-standard English as inferior. (Linguistic snobbery is not limited to the French, really!)

The incentives to publish in English in international journals have also generated a culture in which publications that are not in English are often assumed (a priori) to be inferior than the ones published in English. This inference is not silly--Europe is full of 'in-house-journals' with extremely intellectually-nepotistic publication practices that publish papers of, let's say, parochial interest. For this reason alone, I would be willing to defend the general claim that encouraging publication in English in international journals (etc.) has probably raised average quality of European philosophy (but I am about to qualify this claim). Simultaneously with the move toward English as the lingua franca of European philosophy, there has been (not surprisingly) an influx of young scholars trained in, or returning from, the USA/UK/Canada/Australia--many of these scholars automatically privilege the work they are familiar with. These scholars flourish in the increasingly common grant environment in Europe; their CVs are of the right sort: publications in English in the right sort of journals, etc.  [These remarks are autobiographical, of course.] If they are like me, they also have a built-in-bias against the parochialism, in-crowd, be generous to the Chair-culture so common in much of the European academy. 

Above I said  that I would be willing to defend the claim that average quality of European philosophy has increased by encouraging publication in English in international journals. But it does not follow that all the work not in English is bad. In particular, a claim about averages is compatible with the further thought that (a) there can be quite a bit of excellent work not in English, and (b) that raising average quality also means encouraging a lot of 'me 2 research' by which I mean 'the Nth publication' on a topic that works on other people's epicycles, especially those people producing work at leading Anglophone departments. That is to say, average quality can go up while the work becomes more derivative. Even if the reader distrusts my use of 'quality' and 'derivative,' you may note that encouraging publishing in English tends to homogenize the philosophical landscape.

Sincerity is the Denial of Complexity

[T]he arbitrariness of art careers, or were they really arbitrary? Who gets to speak and why?--Chris Kraus I love Dick (164)

[I]sn't sincerity just the denial of complexity?--Chris Kraus I love Dick (181)

These letters're the first time I've ever tried to talk about ideas that I need to, not just to amuse or entertain.--Chris Kraus I love Dick (192)

"[D]on't forget you live by compromise and contradiction cause those who don't just die like dogs."--Chris Kraus I love Dick (240)

A few weeks ago, when I was a bit low after a bruising encounter with fierce, confident philosophically trained minds, I wrote a friend how much I admire her uncompromising ability to combine being a philosopher and being, well, her. She wrote me back that while my fine thoughts reflect well on my image of her, the real, more fragile her was struggling with suicidal despair through the Summer. It's not that the despair as such that caught me by surprise—all the people I admire let their fragility and despair into their lives, and it's their capacity to do so that gives their words, professional and informal, an urgency that I treasure—but I had always half expected her to reach out to me if she would hit bottom. Upon reflection I consoled my wounded vanity with the thought that, of course, she had sunk so low she had become incapable of reaching out to me; my conscience answered, in turn, 'maybe she expected to be pushed further down by Professor Schliesser?' 'Would she think me really capable of such cruelty?' 'Who isn't?'

Around the same time I noticed that a young scholar listed Chris Kraus's I love Dick in a top-10 book-list that have been popular on Facebook. I had never heard of it before which I decided spoke in its favor. Despite the book's humor, it makes for uncomfortable reading—the deformation of the moral reflexes of pretentious academic men (you know, like me) and their impact on (to quote) a Serious Young Woman are exhibited in eerily familiar fashion. The deformation is captured in many scenes, but this passage presents it in a nice one-liner:

Because emotion's just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.--Chris Kraus I love Dick (196)

Kraus here holds out to the possibility of disciplined emotion. We might say an analysis in which the head is coupled to our feelings. The idea that emotion can be terrifying resonates with my experience; it need not be yours, of course. When I was a teenager I was cautious about letting anybody get close to me intimately. (I still prefer baby-steps.) And so now I wonder if I prefered the company of books because they kept me distant from my feelings (and other people's).

Even so, Kraus's book is not anti-intellectual. In fact, it offers a remarkable defense of the idea that books can offer a life-line to those capable of grabbing it:

Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly can ever fulfill—getting larger cause you are entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind.--Chris Kraus I love Dick (207)

The view from up here

He who studies with a philosopher should take away with him some one good thing every day: he should daily return home a sounder man, or in the way to become sounder.--Seneca Letter 108

In the bowels of cyberspace, philosopher Eric Schliesser (Ghent) has earned the amusing nickname "the Ghent Balloon," in recognition of the amazing amounts of hot air he can generate on any topic, no matter how trivial.  Since he is a serious scholar and philosopher, my own suspicion is that he really doesn't believe a lot of the stuff he blogs, and that he does it mainly to garner attention or to satisfy his apparently   enormouos appetite for righteous posturing.  Whatever the explanation, his latest balloon ride warrants a couple of observations.  First, regarding its juvenile title, there was no "dust-up":  Prof. Haslanger made a claim, and I disgreed with it for the reasons given.  I often agree with Prof. Haslanger on issues in the profession, but I did not agree with her about this.  That is not a "dust-up," but Prof. Schliesser apparently would like to make it one.  Second, if Schliesser does not believe that meaningful qualitative judgments are possible, and that all we can do is meet the demands of each "constituency," then he should cut through the hot air with a bracing burst of icey directness and say so clearly.  Third, his feigned uncertainty about this line from my original comments--"Only if one thought every intellectual constituency within the APA produced good philosophical work could [representing them all] possibly be a desideratum:  but does anyone really believe that?  (One need only look at the MIT faculty to see that no one there does.)"--is a bit incredible, even allowing for his rhetorical tendencies.  If anyone at MIT believed that all the intellectual constituencies in the APA produce high quality philosophical work, then MIT would have--maybe just once in the last 25 years, say--hired a philosopher trained at a SPEP department, or a philosopher affiliated with the Society for American Philosophers.   In fact, MIT hires (even when they hire Continental and feminist philosophers) only from a small handful of departments, about a half-dozen (Princeton, Berkeley, MIT, Oxford, two or three others on occasion).  I conclude that no one there believes that all the intellectual constituencies in the APA produce high quality philosophical work.  I also think that is the only reasonable view to hold, and I would be astonished if it were not Eric Schliesser's view, posturing to one side.--Brian Leiter.

I have always admired balloons, from a distance. They courageously glide, silently through the sky, yet vulnerable to the unpredictable elements. They represent our noble inquisitiveness and sense of adventure, while reminding us of the fragility of our control over the environment. Piloting a balloon requires skill and judgment as well as a bit of luck. It's a lovely aesthetic; come visit us in Ghent some time (here).

But, yes, I have somehow managed to become a character in a Swiftian plot. And I know than when you have been defined in some such way, it's wiser to incorporate the new meme into one's identity than to pretend it away. After all, to give you my metaphysical thought of the day, the comedy of life is constituted by potentially contrary impressions! So, I give you an image of Ghent from a balloon as a reminder to myself that my aspirations look ridiculous to some as well as a mark of my timidity.

On using Earlymoderntexts.org in scholarship (with notes on translation)

There is much that could be said in criticism of this paper, but the primary reason for rejection is that the whole argument turns upon a misquotation.

The author's main claim is that the two arguments which appear on p.135 of the Penguin Classics (ed. Woolhouse) edition of the Three Dialogues (pp.185-6 of Jessop & Luce, which is the standard reference for Berkeley and it is annoying that the author does not use it) have different conclusions. The first, allegedly, concludes the falsity of ‘VII. Mind-independent sensible things have those qualities that they are perceived to have’, whereas the second the falsity of ‘VI. Sensible qualities are parts of [inhere in] mind-independent sensible things’. The author quotes the first argument at length on p.8 prior to reconstructing it, a quotation which ends ‘From all of this, shouldn’t it seem to follow that all colors are equally apparent, and that none of the ones that we see are really in any outer object?’. This text is what appears in Jonathan Bennett’s  www.earlymoderntexts.org edition of Berkeley, which does not claim to be faithful to the original and in this case is quite clearly not faithful. What Berkeley actually wrote was: ‘From all of which, should it not seem to follow, that all the colours are equally apparent, and that none of those which we perceive are really inherent in any outward object?’. Apart from the utterly outrageous sloppiness of using a paraphrastic edition aimed at undergraduates in a research article submitted to an elite scholarly journal, and the intellectual dishonesty of giving a reference to the impeccably edited Penguin Classics edition rather than the actual source of the quoted passage, this error shows the author’s argument to be simply mistaken: Berkeley takes VII, the claim about inherence, to be part of the conjunctive conclusion of the first argument.

I would be loathe to impute deliberate deception here, but it is worth noting that while both the quotations illustrating the alleged two versions of the Argument from Perceptual Relativity come from earlymoderntexts.org, the quotations from the Principles on p.1 of the manuscript do appear to come from the Penguin Classics edition, making clear the author had it or a similarly accurate text to hand and wasn’t working entirely from the Bennett paraphrastic edition."--Referee, or Anonymous.

A distinguished philosopher [Anonymous] forwarded the excerpt from the referee report s/he wrote on a recent assignment to me. I quote with permission (even encouragement). I have not read the original paper (and luckily I am not the author!) nor have I double-checked all the relevant sources, so I cannot judge how fair Anonymous is, but I would share Anon.'s irritation if I discovered that a text relied on a suppressed translation (which is known to be un-scholarly). I should mention that Anonymous is not a hyper-specialist historian of philosophy (you know who those are!), but also makes contributions to more 'contemporary' areas. In follow up exchange Anonymous suggested that there are two key issues here:

1. Someone in the profession not being able to see the dangers of using earlymoderntexts.org and what this says about (i) academic standards (why think anything less than the best scholarly edition will do*) in Philosophy as a discipline and (ii) how earlymoderntexts.org might be misleading our students about how scholarship is to be done.

 

2. Referencing a print edition when you have actually used an online source (and without checking the accuracy of the online source).

 

This behaviour would be regarded as highly unprofessional and cast doubt on someone's suitability for an academic job in other humanities disciplines, but seems to be tolerated in (anglophone?) philosophy.

I  agree with Anonymous, although I will qualify my agreement below. First, all translation is an interpretation. Translating complex philosophical texts is much, much harder than figuring out 'gavagai.' This is so, even if you have written the text yourself and are fluent in both languages. You should try translating some time; even if you are not a meaning holist, you'll discover that a lot of philosophical jargon is not stable and uniform across cultural and temporal contexts. (Surprisingly enough, this is even  true of works in the history of physics.) So, leaving aside honest mistakes, all translations involve non-trivial judgments and trade-offs with a complex interplay among style, content, jargon, sentence structure, and even argumentative structure (this list is not exhaustive).

On a Code of Conduct in Philosophy

[THIS POST HAS BEEN REVISED TO CORRECT MY PRESENTATION OF THE EDITORIAL SITUATION AT NOUS & PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMONOLOGICAL RESEARCH-ES.]

If professional philosophers were serious about a code of conduct they would focus on tackling the conflicts of interests in the profession that are all too common standard operating procedure not just in the relatively low status, albeit potentially lucrative  (by philosophers' standards) corners of applied ethics, but also in the ways in which our journals and job-searches (etc.) are run. Many of these conflicts of interests also generate the incentive-structure in which senior scholars have career advancement opportunities to share; this makes an environment of sexual harassment with a whole variety of temptations and blurry lines more common. (I am not claiming they are solely responsible for this behavior!)

Let me explain.