Digressions&Impressions

On Bureaucrat Philosophers

During my Summer blogging break philosophy's modern association and intertwining with bureaucracy was highlighted in two stimulating essays, which both received considerable social media attention (by philosophy standards): first, in his moving, autobiographical essay, "Two Tendencies," on what we might call the praxis and orientation of philosophy, Liam Kofi Bright articulates a kind of "dualism" in which one of the major tendencies is titled, 'Basically Pleasant Bureaucrat.' Second, while writing at DailyNous about the tensions, even incommensurable value conflicts, that may arise when one innovates in teaching in light of the values of the underlying philosophical source material, C. Thi Nguyen, distinguishes among the roles (and values associated with these roles) of "Teacher, Bureaucrat, Cop."

Now, in C. Thi Nguyen's essay the bureaucrat is explicitly associated with "fairness" in grading and (in more "authoritarian" role) the enforcement of the rules. For those of us who work in systems where the academic is a civil servant (as the Dutch system was in living memory), or where the process of how one assigns grades can be evaluated and challenged at and by exam committees (who in turn have to show evidence of due process and proper application of rules to possible appeals committees), C. Thi Nguyen's challenges of combining pedagogic or mentoring principles with bureaucratic ones are undoubtedly familiar. His lively descriptions of the conflicting considerations involved resonated with me. (Go read the essay!)

However, fairness is not really a bureaucratic principle.* Impartiality and rule-following (and, as he suggests, rule-enforcement) are. I noticed C. Thi Nguyen's emphasis on fairness because in my own Dutch context (teaching at a huge state school) students and administrators alike will use 'equality' -- in the sense of treating like alike not in the sense of giving everyone the same actual grade -- when they focus on the proper process of grading. Despite the different vocabularies, C. Thi Nguyen and my Dutch students both capture the same commitment or principle that indeed is meant to block species of judgment and discrimination, let alone prevent any measure, if that were possible, of how the soul has been turned to the good, to infiltrate one's grading practices.

Once higher education is shaped by government funding in a Weberian state, in which degrees play certain certification roles in public life (or where students can sue over their  grades), it seems inevitable that some bureaucratic principles seep into and constrain professors' evaluative or grading practices in virtue of the fact that we are functionaries of potentially huge organizations. To what degree that undermines the very possibility of a philosophical education I set aside here.

Because he is vocal admirer of Carnap, even one of our foremost exemplifications of what (the Spirit of) a Left Vienna philosophy would look like today, I was not surprised that Liam Kofi Bright embraces the cognitive division of labor and even bureaucracy. Even so his characterization of the Basically Pleasant Bureaucrat surprised me, and in order to explain that I quote the paragraph that introduces it: 

The first tendency is that which is most visible in my published work. Here the thought is that philosophy is a sort of public service work, a small part of the greater enterprise of generating knowledge that can be put to use in bettering our estate. The work is essentially service orientated (Dotson 2015) or Mohist in nature (Johnston 2010) — to work in this tendency one must be trying to find what combination of beliefs, technologies, and social practices will best foster flourishing (including, of course, refining the idea of “flourishing”). At a high level this will involve identifying and resolving social problems. These are cases wherein one finds “the failure of an organised social group to realise its group ideals, through the inability to adapt certain desired lines of action to conditions of life” (Du Bois 1898, 3). Upon finding these one must work out what needs to change — the ideals, the actions, the conditions of life, etc — and work out how these changes may be effected. However it turns out that doing this effectively requires a huge division of labour and so most of the time one will not work at that high level of abstraction, but rather on more specific technical puzzles. None the less, the essence of this tendency is to commit to this project of perpetual collaborative amelioration.

Now, one reason I admire Liam Kofi Bright is how he can find points of contact, even overlap, between purportedly different philosophical traditions. In our discipline, which values disagreement and the focused objection and sharply polices standards boundaries, this capacity to see, say, how Master Mo's ameliorative, egalitarian consequentialism anticipates (say) Carnap's without having to diminish our admiration for Carnap is lovely (and politically important). [It's also lovely how he can turn his wide reading into stimulating reflection for the rest of us!]

Now, public service is a bureaucratic value. But Liam Kofi Bright also demands the kind of initiative (e.g., "one must work out what needs to change — the ideals, the actions, the conditions of life, etc — and work out how these changes may be effected") that one does not naturally associate with bureaucratic life, so there is a latent tension here in the way the first tendency has been labelled. (I return to this below.)

But I was especially surprised by the attempted, seamless integration of the Basically Pleasant Bureaucratic perspective with Dotson's conception (recall) of service philosophy. Now, to begin to explain why, I first (with apologies) quote myself on service philosophy:

Dotson observes that the professional philosophy she encountered is incapable of being self-justifying. This is no surprise because the dominant traditions (e.g., analytical philosophy, scientific philosophy, etc.) rest on broadly consequentialist foundations that presuppose shared values. The tacit elitism that could be counted on to do the real work -- that a life of philosophy is best -- does not sit well rhetorically in a democratic culture. Genuine and secure axiological foundations are not easy to come by in an intellectual culture that is scientistic. Dotson's attractive vision turns the weakness of the recent tradition around and turns it into a virtue: philosophy is not self-justifying or autonomous, but a good tool in the service of other ends. So despite many differences in sensibility, she is, thus, not far removed from the spirit of, say, Left Vienna. (D&I, 03/24/2015)

So, one may well wonder why I act all surprised at Liam Kofi Bright's stance if I myself had already noticed what one may call the 'formal resonance' between Dotson's and his approach to philosophy in which a certain kind of consequentialism and externally given (and optative) ends combine. But, of course, sensibility matters.

For, while in practice the service philosopher may well find herself advising government and shape the bureaucracy, she explicitly receives her ends from social movements and activists and joins in their (ahh) praxis ("I have learned and continue to learn living and working as a Black feminist, epistemology-based activist.") And without wishing to romanticize either bureaucrat or activist, the activist is willing, if necessity demands it, to break rules and violate norms in a way completely orthogonal to the bureaucrat.** 

At this point one  may well object on Liam Kofi Bright's behalf that he may not be adverse to taking guidance from activists, nor abhor a revolutionary impulse. After all in the paragraph I have quoted, he quotes Du Bois, who eventually, late in life, joined the communist party because “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism—the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute—this is the only way of human life.” (Quoted from Angela Davis.)

But when Liam Kofi Bright quotes Du Bois, he is quoting from his reformist period. And Liam Kofi Bright himself explicitly advocates "amelioration" even over many generations ("Philosophy conceived of as [the building of] la Sagrada Família.") And while amelioration and even conceptual engineering is formally compatible with some species of activism, there is a different attitude in each toward both the disciplinary and social status quo. So, even if we ignore the virtues of bureaucracy, and treat his first tendency in terms of a highly skilled, even experimental Basically Pleasant Bricklayer there is an important contrast between it and the spirit of service philosophy (relative to the status quo).

I also suspect that there is a more important difference between service philosophy and the BPB tendency. I am circumspect here because I do not self-identify with each approach and I don't have recent phenomenological access toward my speculation: but I suspect the activist philosopher can experience the spiritual satisfaction that the "alienated labour" (that, as Liam Kofi Bright reports), the sublimating BPB experiences.** 

For, while activism can be a soul destroying grind and isolating (even very dangerous), in a well functioning activist milieu, it has as a predictable side-effect the creation of communal feelings in the pursuit of a self-transcending goal that simultaneously is self-justifying. Of course, how to get to that point is no easy matter and actually require some attention to nurturing the life of the mind as part of the activist ethos. (This is a neat subtext in Zena Hitz's Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life.) But the service philosopher's attitude toward her own work would not have to be alienated. 

Let me close with a final observation. Since Max Weber there is a peculiar blind-spot that the bureaucratic life has attracted relatively little attention from philosophers this despite the outsized significance of it in the modern state and, as C. Thi Nguyen and Liam Kofi Bright remind us, to many of own own lives as professional academics. (I suspect this is partial effect of the fact that many high prestige academic institutions try to maintain (at least the fiction of) self-governance in ways that those who work as functionaries cannot maintain.) And while I have only scratched the surface of both essays, a key feature of our involvement in bureaucratic life is that our educational and research practices are shaped by rules, norms, and goals that are extrinsic to philosophy (and education). This strikes me as rather important to our self-understanding if only because it allows us to organize our thinking about the many unhealthy symptoms we often encounter and discuss (reliance on metrics, rankings, stability of hierarchies, the lengthening syllabi, etc.). And so I am grateful to both for starting this conversations.

 

Is Platonic Feminism, Feminism? (On giving Feminism its History) Reflections inspired by Khader's Decolonizing Universalism.

One intuitive and widely held conception of feminism is neither ethnocentric nor justice monist. It is the conception, articulated in the early work of bell hooks, of feminism as opposition to sexist oppression. Oppression, according to Marilyn Frye is a social phenomen wherein disadvantage systematically accrues to members of certain social groups relative to members of others. Systematicity and group-based disadvantage are necessary conditions for oppression....Sexist, or gender, oppression is systematic disadvantage that accrues to a person by virtue of a membership, or perceived membership, in a gender--or as a result of a system of gender.  Serene J. Khader (2019) Decolonizing Universalism: A  Transnational Feminist Ethics, p. 37.

...

It may seem to exclude opposing forms of oppression beside sexism, such as racism, capitalist oppression, or imperialism--or to suggest that sexism ought to be prioritized over them. Indeed, because of such concerns, hooks later changed her definition of feminism from the one I have jst endorsed to include opposition to all intersecting oppressions. However, taking the fact of intersectionality seriously, and opposing other oppressions, does not require building opposition to other oppressions into the concept of feminism (and, in fact, many intersectional feminists do not take intersectionanility to be a definition of feminism). Something does not have to be part of the definition of feminism to be morally urgent. Moreover, there is a reason specific to the project of this book for not making opposition to imperialism and racism definitional for feminism. Incorporating opposition to imperialism into feminism defines away the possibility of conflict between feminist and anti-imperialist goals, a conflict that is endemic to transnational feminist praxis. Serene J. Khader Decolonizing Universalism: A  Transnational Feminist Ethics, p. 41 (emphasis in original) 

Regular readers know I am interested in platonic feminism.  By this I mean the family or cluster of positions that often simultaneously (i) deny political equality (and so defend forms of aristocracy or elitism); and (ii) insist that  any privileges /rights and obligations you give to men based on some quality/property must also be offered to leading women who have this quality/property. Platonic feminism often presupposes claims about (iii) natural/heritable inequality of talents, but need not require these. Often, platonic feminists rely on controversial claims about the distribution of talents within populations and the symmetry (or not) of these between the sexes. Finally, platonic feminism is compatible with (iv) commitment to moral equality of all. So, often Christian or Muslim platonic feminists embrace (iv), while pagan ones need not. 

Platonic feminism so understood has a long history going back to at least Plato's Republic (hence the name; I would be thrilled to find a female anticipation to Plato, so we can change the name). Men and women have defended varieties of platonic feminism, including Ibn Rushd (recall), Christine de Pisan, Thomas More, Marie le Jars de Gournay (recall also), Anne Marie Van Schuurman (recall), Margaret Cavendish, etc. I do not mean to suggest that platonic feminists are beyond criticism: some platonic feminists have been eugenicists and racists. 

The term -- platonic feminism -- is anachronistic and does not require the author's familiarity with Plato. There are at least five reasons to be interested platonic feminists: first, it allows for the recovery of the (frequent) aristocratic women whose writings were effaced from memory due to the masculine conception of mass democracy (which understood itself as a progressive enterprise)--recall these posts (here and here on Olympe de Gouges) on Eileen O'Neill's Disappearing Ink.  Second, it makes visible key features of pre-history of feminism, which now turns out to have quite significant length. Third, it turns out that platonic feminists often have quite sophisticated analyses of institutions of oppression and the mechanisms of acculturation of gender. Fourth, those of us interested in emancipatory (including feminist) project may well learn from the successes and not infrequent failures of platonic feminism. So, for example, some versions of platonic feminism anticipate what we may call (after Sandberg) 'lean-in feminism.' Fifth, such an interest may be a fruitful remedy against the widespread assumption of moral progress. The claims of this paragraph are, in part, an invitation to read my other posts on platonic feminism and a promissory note.

The charge of anachronism, while maybe true, is not fruitful. (I doubt that it is true because it also presupposes that we already know what the history of feminism is.) Today, I want to respond to the charge/objection that platonic feminism is not really feminism because it shortchanges women who lack the requisite properties/qualities it is willing to advance/defend.* We may say on behalf of the objection that (at least the female partisans of) platonic feminism exhibit(s) an incomplete sisterhood. 

So let me respond. As Khader notes in her excellent book (which I will be blogging more about soon): while opposition to all forms of oppression is welcome (even required, perhaps), feminism is about opposition to sexist oppression. Often platonic feminists live in aristocratic and hierarchical societies where there are many forms of subordination and hierarchy. In such contexts, women can be oppressed by many social mechanisms and institutions. The question from the perspective of feminism is to what degree they are oppressed in virtue of being a woman (because, say, patriarchy, religion, inheritance laws, economic prohibitions, medical views, etc.). As it happens some platonic feminists were quite radical about proposing alternative forms of (egalitarian) political organization, while others seem quite at ease with various other forms of hierarchy, including forms of hierarchy that ignore the lived experiences of many women. 

Now, to be sure, not all objections to, say, patriarchy, are feminist in character. For example, Locke is a fierce critic of (Filmer's political conception of) patriarchy. But the criticism is (to the best of my knowledge) not offered in virtue of patriarchy's oppressive character toward women.

Yet, one may still think that this response does not get to the heart of the problem. Platonic feminists are, in practice, primarily interested in advancing the political and economic interests of meritorious women.+ Nearly all platonic feminists assume, in practice, that this will be only a (talented) subset of all women.** This may not be a feminism worth having. I think the objection contains a kernel of truth and certainly invites us to reflect critically on a system of privilege/hierarchy. But to me the objection does not seem fully persuasive.

Consider feminist defenses of pay equality in professional women's sports or funding (stateside) for female college sports.*** By definition these activities are elite activities. In the case of professional sports that's self-evident. In the case of college sports there are barriers to entry along athletic and scholastic (and often economic) dimensions. One may object to professional and college sports on many grounds, including, perhaps, that they reinforce a social system of hierarchy (and celebrity, and for the capitalist critics a variety of exploitation, etc.), including many forms of oppression that victimize women. But granted our imperfect conditions (and Khader is very much theorizing for non-ideal circumstances), opposition to gendered/sexed pay-inequality and funding seems feminist even if it does not exhaust feminism.++ 

 

On Taboos & Polarization in Politics & Philosophy

[T]he logical empiricists can be interpreted as engaged in a project of voluntarist racial eliminativism. They did not take themselves to have an in principle argument against racial categorisation of human beings. Their frequent references to biological racial categorisation make it clear that they thought this was something you could coherently do, and it would be inconsistent with their version of conventionalism to argue that one is cognitively mistaken to use an empirically meaningful categorisation scheme. Hence, while the position I am attributing to them is similar to the position that racial taxonomic terms are simply meaningless, it is not quite that – it is not that they thought there was no empirically meaningful way that one could make sense of human racial taxonomy. Rather, it was that they thought one ought not use these terms....As such they adopted a policy of refusing to endorse any instances of racial categories being used as part of empirical explanations, and discouraging racial explanation by rhetorical means.--Liam Kofi Bright (2017) "Logical empiricists on race" Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

Liam Kofi Bright reminded me of his paper in response to my post on the method of composite portraiture (which traces back to Galton). [I leave aside here to what degree Bright's paper fits that method.] In his paper he diagnoses a taboo within logical empiricism against (biological) racial explanations of social affairs. The taboo is maintained by an act of self-legislation in the adoption of certain conceptual frameworks (and methods) and a rhetorical-polemical attitude against those that used alternative conceptual frameworks (that included racial explanations). What makes taboos interesting is that, in order to be effective, they require self-command and group discipline/loyalty, that is, esprit des corps. This is possible when a group is reasonably small, shares an important aim, and has a way of controlling entry. Bright does not address the maintenance of the taboo, but in the sentences I skipped, Bright suggests that it is their (i.e., the logical empiricists') shared "political projects" and moral commitments, which are 'external' or 'optative' to the adopted framework that sustains the taboo (a word he does not use), undoubtedly facilitated by informal communication (when they were in the same place) and small numbers. Because Bright reads the logical empiricists in a Kantianizing fashion (with relativized a priori), we may remind ourselves that they are not the first to legislate a taboo within philosophy: in Kant's Die Metaphysik der Sitten, Kant (recall) limits -- as (ahh) Slavoj Žižek point out -- the possible philosophical role of history (as a form of inquiry) into the origin of a legitimate authority on practical grounds.

In his essay, Bright explicitly recognizes that the taboo (racial explanation) is maintained not because using it is meaningless. That is to say, the logical empiricists have not shown that using racial explanation is false. One need not be Freud to recognize one does not need taboos on the evidently false. But it also does not follow that the logical empiricists thought the taboo was hiding the truth. (If anything, using a taboo to hide the truth is self-defeating because one will generate contradictions, internal tensions, etc.) Rather, it's clear that they thought that regardless of the scientific status of racial explanation, there is always a non-trivial risk these get mingled with immoral/inhumane political aims. That is, the members of the Vienna Circle are (recall) engaged in responsible speech because they recognize what we call the inductive risks of legitimizing racial explanations. The polemic with Heidegger centers, in part, on their recognition that his way of philosophizing has noxious consequences (recall Glymour). Taboos can be efficient in preventing the predictable downstream costs and energy of combating the pernicious effects of the damage done by racial explanation (in the service of racial hierarchy, social exclusion, eugenic programs, etc.).

Bright is clear that the logical empiricists engaged in polemical rhetoric against those that violated their taboo. This is significant for two reasons: first, they attempted to impose their internal compact on others (who had not contracted into their program). That is, there is something imperialist to demand from others that they abide by your self-imposed taboo. Second, we can discern here strategies that became all too familiar in their students and heirs in later generations of analytical philosophy; an excessive willingness to use rhetorical means in combating opposing schools.

Given the political moment -- with racial subordination and elimination a live possibility -- it is easy to forgive the logical empiricists willingness to aim to impose their taboo with rhetorical means on others. They were were part of a struggle in which the racialist explanation loving sides were quite willing to support racial hierarchy, and worse. But most of the subsequent academic struggles their students engaged in are not like this; being wrong about when to discusses semantic composition or modal metaphysics does not lead to racial elimination.*

As an extensive aside, Bright recognizes a problematic exception to his argument: Neurath's translation (in 1910 with his first wife Anna Schapire-Neurath) of Galton's work on eugenics, Hereditary genius.** (Speaking of taboos, Neurath's translation goes unmentioned in the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Neurath!) Now, Bright could have said that in 1910 logical empiricism did not exist yet and that circumstances between 1910 and, say, the 1930s were different (the founding of the Vienna Circle can be dated to 1928 or so). This would also explain Neurath's apparent change of heart later. This is not Bright's strategy (perhaps because he also quotes from the relatively early (1921) Anti-Spengler.) With a nod to Thomas Uebel's contextual analysis and, more important, the writings of W.E. Du Bois, Bright remarks that a defense of racial breeding need not be a defense of white supremacy. And, undoubtedly, there is logical space between the can wish to breed for all kinds of characteristic without wishing for a racialized polity. And, in fact, in 1910 eugenics was part of a progressive, scientific gospel that influenced all kinds of policies and scientific projects not all of them pertaining to race (see Tim Leonard's book).

Even so, it is worth noting that by 1910, Galton's Heriditary Genius, was an old book (first published in 1869); it draws on Darwin's ideas, but by 1910 was certainly not cutting edge in its science. It has, in fact, a chapter, "The Comparative Worth of Different Races" which is as bad as it sounds.*** Galton, who was the leading statistician of his age, concludes "that the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own [Anglo-Saxon]." (In the hierarchy, the negro is still a grade above the "Australian type.") A satirist may note that Galton is, in fact, willing to acknowledge that there were better races than his own, for he remarks that "the average ability of the [long vanished!] Athenian race is, on the lowest possible estimate, very nearly two grades higher than our own." But Galton takes this to be an argument for racial purity because the Athenians allowed too much interbreeding!+ So, Galton's Heriditary Genius clearly embraces the existence of racial hierarchies (and these are not incidentally connected to British empire). But, interestingly enough (and I suspect this may have had some appeal to young Neurath), unlike many German eugenic tracts, Heriditary Genius is not antisemitic. While the Jews are not formerly classified in the racial hierarchy (due to lack of statistical evidence), most of the references to Jews in it are favorable.

Let me return to Bright's article. He establishes the existence of a philosophical taboo in (what I'll call) a highly polarized political context. Bright does not take a stance on the strategy he describes. But I am inclined to think that sometimes such taboos are necessary and useful and that the logical empiricists are in this, and in so many other ways, worth emulating. The opposing camps were part of a larger Kulturkampf where there was a genuine risk that bullets (and worse) would settle the true about racial hierarchy [to be precise: bullets can't settle the truth]. In the context of such high degree of polarization, the voluntary enforcement of taboos can serve a valuable function. They save and harness intellectual resources, they prevent unnecessary mingling of meaningful ideas with awful political and ethical policies, and they prevent the ambitious young from being tempted down unwise and immoral paths.

Of course, the rhetorical and professional enforcement of a taboo comes with a two-fold cost. First, as we have  seen, the very success of the strategy may encourage imitation of certain, imperialist behaviors (involving less dangerous topics) in less existentially polarized contexts. Second, the existence of a taboo is also a temptation for the unscrupulous and ambitious young who find themselves born in later times. They may well think that there are low-hanging fruits which will advance the cause of knowledge (and their career). Sometimes these unwise are lucky and they live in quiet times and their greedy, rashness has no downside.

 

Singer on Moral Shifts

As our moral standards shift, however, different characteristics of the historical person become more relevant, and the symbol can develop a different meaning. When Wilson’s name was added to Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs in 1948, Rosa Parks’ famous bus ride was still seven years away, and segregation in the American South was not under serious challenge. Now it is unthinkable. Wilson’s racism therefore becomes more salient.--Peter Singer. [HT Brian Leiter]

In my blogging I tend to be rather critical of Peter Singer (despite my admiration for his contribution to animal rights) because he has a tendency to align the purportedly right thing to do with technocracy (in which the downside risks of elite-policy-making tends to be placed on vulnerable others). But I really like the concluding two paragraphs of his post:

Wilson’s contributions to the university, the US, and the world cannot and should not be erased from history. They should, instead, be recognized in a manner that creates a nuanced conversation about changing values, and includes both his positive achievements and his contributions to America’s racist policies and practices.

At Princeton, one outcome of that conversation should be the education of students and faculty who would otherwise be unaware of the complexity of an important figure in the university’s history. (I certainly have benefited: I have taught at Princeton for 16 years, and I have admired some of Wilson’s foreign-policy positions for much longer; but I owe my knowledge of Wilson’s racism to the BJL.) The end result of the conversation we should be having may well be the recognition that to attach Wilson’s name to a college or school sends a message that misrepresents the values for which the institution stands.

As I said, I really like the drift of these comments. But it is alarming that even Singler, who has spent quite some time reflecting and writing on Sidgwick, only learned of Wilson's racism recently (through student protests); it says something about the way the Utilitarians, the Progressive era, and the great internationalist era that led to the foundation of the League of Nations are remembered. The entanglement with eugenics (even Sidgwick was rather tolerant of it), racism, colonial imperialism, and Apartheid (Smuts was one of the great statesman of the League of Nations) is often effaced from the narrative and self-awareness. Perhaps, because of my growing awareness of these effacements (which I encounter regularly in the shared history of philosophy and economics), I found the paragraph at the top of the post out of sync with the rest of the argument.

 

For, Singer's paragraph comes very close to a false version of moral historicism; it's not quite clear what he takes to be 'unthinkable.' But the idea that challenging segregation was unthinkable in the 30s/40s is very partial history.+ As Singer's own narrative makes clear, President Wilson helped undo much of the progress after Reconstruction (at the Federal level). Moreover, the 1930s and 40s saw the rise of the second Klu Klux Klan and a more general revival of a pro-slavery/pro-racial narratives (this is why the naming of Calhoun College in the 1930s, who was especially known for his defense of slavery, at Yale is not idiosyncratic). To put it in Singer's terms, if there had been a "moral shift," then it was (in many respects) regressive when it comes to race relations in the generation(s) before Rosa Parks.

 

In fact, in nearly every generation there are courageous and humane voices that opposed the worst versions of racism and eugenics (this is also true when we go back further in time). The NAACP (with a very significant role for the philosopher, W.E.B. Du Bois, the fascinating Oswald Villard , Mary Ovington, etc.) has its roots in the Niagara Movement itself a response to the disenfranchisement and racism promoted by Wilson's Democratic party. In fact, the founders and the first generation(s) of the NAACP represent such an interesting cross-section of ideologies and life-stories that the very idea that there was no "serious challenge" to segregation is just itself a version of such narrative effacement.*

 

Perhaps, Singer can find the time to read a biography of Thurgood Marshall or simply learn about the significance of Smith vs Allwright (1944)?  The history of philosophy is intertwined with the history of political and legal theory (President Wilson was a political scientist with a Hopkins PhD, after all); we owe it to our students to do homework on and understand the institutions and privileges we have inherited and develop.

 

 

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 Kate Manne's "Losing Battle"

[Yo]u have to learn to accept the rejections themselves gracefully...But sometimes, they simply confirm that you are fighting a losing battle. This referee report was one such. The reviewer complained about my use of feminist terms and concepts throughout the paper – e.g., “hegemonic dominance”, “messages that are not only false but oppressive,” and “hermeneutical injustice,” being the specific phrases which they listed as objectionable. And they went on to remark more generally that “the rhetoric of the ms. is such that it will, I think, (1) turn off some readers and (2) distract from the author’s argument. The author brings in some concepts and language which, whatever their merits, seem dubious to many of us in the analytic tradition.”

As a feminist philosopher in the analytic tradition, this is a very disappointing reaction to encounter. Many of us...take the above terms and concepts to be standard, useful, and indeed vital, stock-in-trade. And the people who the reviewer feared would be so “turned off” by the language as to be “distracted” from my argument seem to include the reviewer themselves, ironically. They not only managed to completely miss, but handily illustrated, my central point in the paper. The point being that if one espouses politically marginalized views within philosophy, then one is disproportionately likely to be dismissed, disparaged, silenced, or even excluded from the discipline altogether. One is less likely to be given a platform in leading journals, for one concrete example, in view of which one is of course less likely to be able to earn a living wage, let alone get tenure.

...Feminist philosophy is virtually absent, and plausibly systematically excluded, from top journals...

These points have important epistemic as well as political implications. (This was the main intended lesson of my paper, which the reviewer missed entirely.) Some epistemologists have argued recently that, if you discover that you are in the minority in philosophy, insofar as most of the philosophers who you take to be smarter and more expert than you take a different view, then you should doubt your own judgment. Generally speaking, you should defer to the experts. In my paper, I argued that this idea fails to be compelling when it comes to philosophy, specifically. For suppose that one forms a certain idiosyncratic philosophical view or judgment. It is difficult to know if one’s view is just foolish (as is admittedly quite likely if no one else has ever or would ever share it), or whether one’s natural intellectual allies have been selected against, essentially. For if (e.g.) feminist voices in philosophy have been silenced or suppressed, all I will hear is silence. Much the same goes for my reviewer, naturally.

So should I be especially worried about the plausibility of my position in virtue of the fact that there are admittedly a fair number of smart, knowledgeable analytic philosophers who think like my reviewer, and are dubious about, or even positively contemptuous of, feminist views and methods? I don't think so. For there might have been plenty of smart, knowledgeable feminist philosophers who would have agreed with me, were they only around and given the platform from which to do so. The problem is that people like my reviewer are the ones with most of the power. And the more they wield this power to exclude feminist philosophers, the more their sense of what ‘we’ do will in fact be accurate.

The final irony is that this is hegemonic dominance par excellence. And it is the fact that it persists, not the concept, which is bullshit.--Kate Manne (of Facebook) [quoted with permission].

I sometimes joke that analytical philosophy has so evolved that it is now easier to get a paper defending the modal intuitiveness of the Trinity published in Philosophical Review than it is to get a hearing for work inspired by, say, De Beauvoir, Fanon or Du Bois. The not-so-funny point is that the methods and technologies deployed by analytical philosophy generate few intellectual barriers to introducing substantive views. This makes it actually easy to discern, if one is willing to do so, that if some views are not being aired, then there are almost always certainly sociological mechanisms that explain the barriers to entry (recall my post on Lewis's intervention on behalf of Priest). 

One interesting, such sociological mechanism is the use of images of science in order to create an image of philosophy that make it reasonable to deny alternative views a hearing or to respond to known objections. By an 'image of science,' I mean a list of characteristics of science, often associated with a bunch of epistemic virtues, that get trotted out in polemical or self-justifying context. Two elements of the most pernicious image of science are (i) the idea that experts mutually adjust (or haggle)--this is a view (recall) that has its clearest expression in the work by Aumann (the game theorist who won a Nobel in economics); (ii) the Kuhnian, technocratic idea that science is about paradigmatic consensus. These underwrite the idea of expert deference within philosophy (which understands itself as producing something akin to scientific knowledge, often with some appeal to inference to best explanation). What is often forgotten is that what (i) and (ii) have in common (and this is true of Aumann as much as it is true of Kuhn) is the commitment that science is usefully thought of as perfectly free market in ideas. But even if one arranges one's institutions of knowledge (journals, promotions, tenures, prizes, grants, etc.) to facilitate the reality of (i) and (ii) [this is sometimes called 'social engineering'], it can still be the case that market of ideas is not free.

The reason why we know that the market of ideas is not free in analytical philosophy is that our methods are, as Katrina Hutcheson notes, often non-transparent [quick example: the nature of analysis (recall and here)], which is why there has been a salutary turn to meta-philosophy, and that our top journals have been run as (often in house) factional fiefdoms. Undoubtedly the latter served a purpose in order to ensure the survival and even dominance of analytical philosophy in light of various competitors. It also lead to a lot of toleration for hyper-analytical approaches in areas where they are manifestly not suitable (quick and dirty example: the philosophy of art).*

Manne titled her Facebook post "Losing Battle." Analytical feminism is not losing the battle (recall my post on analytical ideology studies). I say this because analytical feminism has succeeded at attracting a lot of young talented folk (including Manne!), who, in turn, are mining -- and by the magic of philosophical alchemy are transforming -- rapidly some of the best ideas developed outside of analytical philosophy in order to create something genuinely new and important (e.g. Dotson, Haslanger, Stanley, Langton, Saul, Maitra, Fricker, etc.).**

For those of us with a historical sensibility, this sponge-like ability to absorb, transform -- and sometimes unfairly present as wholly new -- is in fact, one of the beautiful, shameless essences of analytical philosophy. The lack of proper shame, alas, also entails that we regularly generate bullies and gatekeepers that confuse their second-rate philosophical abilities for true philosophy.

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.

Dead white, not entirely useless

Dear dead white man, we thank you for your kind offer to take care of the philosophy on our behalf, but, with all due respect, you are not equipped to take care of the philosophy on your own.--Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, "Philosophy is Dead White -- and Dead Wrong," Times Higher Education.

If you are so moral, how come you're so privileged?--Anonymous.

Philosophy as a discipline is a racialized project. It doesn’t have to be--Drabinski

About fifteen years ago my research on the shared history of philosophy and economics introduced me to Sandra Peart and David Levy, two philosophically sophisticated economists. Among their diverse interests, was a fascination with nineteenth century satirical cartoons (many of which published in Punch). I have to admit that at first I found this interest bordering on the childish. (Cartoons are not for serious folk, I mistakenly thought.) These influential cartoons depicted racialized and sexist satires on leading economists and philosophers with an interest in abolishing slavery, Irish home rule, and promoting woman's suffrage as well as anti-conception.* (Some of their material was first published here.) These cartoons generated many of the stereotypes that threaten to this day. A few years later, I taught Fanon in a class on social thought. I have never looked at philosophy (and economics) the same again.

Stigler's Scientific Revolution

Economists generally share the ruling values of their societies, but their professional competence does not consist in translating popular wishes into an awe-inspiring professional language. Their competence consists in understanding how an economic system works under alternative institutional frameworks. If they have anything of their own to contribute to the popular discussion of economic policy, it is some special understanding of the relationship between policies and the results of policies. The basic role of the scientist, therefore, is that of establishing the costs and benefits of alternative institutional arrangements. (Stigler, Presidential Address at the AEA, The American Economic Review, 1-2)

George J. Stigler was a Chicago-economist who won the Nobel prize (1982) "for his seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets and causes and effects of public regulation." But this citation does not quite capture what he become known for in the economics profession. In addition to an acerbic wit and a very robust defense of markets, he "deserves a great deal of the credit for getting economists to look at data and evidence." (The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics) Moreover, the entry on Stigler continues,"one could examine the actual effects of regulation, and not just theorize about them. Stigler devoted his entire 1964 presidential address to the American Economic Association to making this point. He argued that economists should study the effects of regulation and not just assume them."*

Yesterday, I noted the significant afterlife for the idea that "economists generally share the ruling values of their societies," which is a core assumption for the technocratic political ideal. Here I focus on the fact that that Stigler really is one of the economists that turned economics from relying on "the telling anecdote," (Stigler, 12) into a data-driven discipline (although his presidential address notes non-trivial predecessors on this score).** While Stigler may not have been able to foresee the extent to which economics would become data-mining, Stigler himself declared that "it is a scientific revolution of the very first magnitude-indeed I consider the so-called theoretical revolutions of a Ricardo, a Jevons, or a Keynes to have been minor revisions compared to the vast implications of the growing insistence upon quantification." (Stigler 17; the Kuhnian language is no accident--in fact, Stigler had theorized about scientific revolutions before Kuhn, and warmly welcomed Kuhn's Structure.) This declaration, he claims, "is prophecy, not preaching." (Stigler 17)

W.E.B. Du Bois, economist, philosopher, true lover of humanity

I have told you of those seventy-five landholders in Lowndes County--owning $25,000 worth of land, building new and better houses and working steadily and saving. And yet, gentlemen, not a single one of those men under the new constitution of Alabama has the right to vote: they cannot say a word as to the condition of the roads that pass their farmers, the situation of the schools, the choice of teachers, the kind of county officers or the rate of taxation. They are just as absolutely disfranchised as the worst criminal in the penitentiary and as I am in Georgia. You can twist this matter up and down and apologize for it and reason it out--its wrong, and unjust, and economically unsound, and you know it. (Du bois, 1906 "The Economic Future of the Negro," 242)

During the nineteenth century, philosophy, political economy, and moral sciences were overlapping disciplines that remained in fruitful, albeit increasingly fractured, conversation through the first half of the twentieth century. As philosophy became professionalized (as a species of scientific philosophy), it lost all memory of this; John Rawls educated himself into these matters and was the last to have a deep and wide knowledge of the issues. The oldest generation of active economists (who were still required to take history of economics in their graduate education) are the last disappearing store of knowledge about any of this.

One myth about the shared history of philosophy and economics is the idea that the historical overlap between the two is essentially constituted by utilitarianism.* W.E.B. Du Bois was no utilitarian, yet at the start of his career he was a distinguished economist trained in Berlin in the German historical school, then led by Schmoller and Wagner.** The passage above is, as Prasch suggests (320), directed at the economist John Bates Clark -- whose name is still remembered in professional economics because of the very influential medal named after him --, who had argued that economic development had to be prior to expansion of the franchise. Du Bois points to the enduring moral and economic truth: economic activity is embedded in (developing) political frameworks, which play a non-trivial role in generating patterns of economic outcomes.