Forgive me, this is really random but, there’s this youtuber I really think you would like (if you aren’t already familiar with her) called Contrapoints. She mostly focuses on social justice issues but she has a really funny, often weird and surreal approach to her videos. (She reminded me specifically of you because she’s a philosophy grad and sometimes discusses philosophical concepts as they relate to her points)

Thanks for the recommendation! I watched one of her political videos then found the one called “Why I Quit Academia” because I was curious (her YouTube channel describes her as an “ex-philosopher”). It sounds like she was educated in a Continental rather than analytic philosophy department, at least in grad school – and probably in undergrad, too, or she wouldn’t have chosen such a department for grad school. So she’s describing a flavor of bullshit that I tend to encounter from people in other humanities disciplines – mostly various literature departments (Comp Lit is usually the worst), but also History, Art History, etc. Analytic philosophy departments are their own brand of special.

She quotes Daniel Dennett, who’s definitely an analytic philosopher, as saying that most of academic philosophy involves discovering higher-order truths about Chmess: a variant of chess that nobody plays. He was probably talking about the kind of bullshit metaphysics that goes on in analytic departments: trying to discover the deep nature of things by analyzing our concepts of them, which mostly ends up being an explication of the worldview presupposed by a very specific upper-middle-class dialect of English. For the most part, analytic philosophers don’t claim to be advancing the cause of social justice when they do that kind of stuff… but now philosophy of race and gender have become very trendy in analytic departments. People tend not to be as aggressively Leftist, and you do actually find the occasional libertarian (Nozick, also cited in the video, was an analytic philosopher) or Christian monarchist (OK, maybe there’s just the one in my department). Importantly, analytic philosophers (like Contrapoints!) usually think there’s more than merely symbolic value in engaging directly with the opposition, and that you can change people’s minds with reasons… even if we acknowledge that most beliefs are formed non-rationally and only justified post hoc.

Analytic philosophers, unlike Continental philosophers, pride themselves on writing clearly and intelligibly and making explicit what they mean by key technical terms. It’s definitely possible to hide a lot of bullshit behind a facade of clarity, and to read a paper understanding every sentence perfectly but then come away wondering what the hell you were supposed to get out of it. But they can also write things that are accessible to a general audience without being dumbed-down. An internet acquaintance of mine, Kate Manne (a professor at Cornell), recently published a book called Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny that has attracted some mainstream attention – including the ire of Jordan Peterson and his troll army, which must speak in its favor.

Now I’m mostly just rambling, but… I guess it seems like Contrapoints might have been better served by studying in an analytic department, since she seems to value clarity, accessibility, cross-ideology engagement, and humor.

Hearing a self-absorbed, (allegedly) sexually harassing professor go on about how we shouldn’t consider Aristotle’s views on ethics because his view is a form of rational egoism rather than fundamentally other-regarding and he didn’t believe women and slaves could attain the good life is really a trip.

Fun times in academic philosophy

I missed the visit days for prospective graduate students in my department a couple weeks ago because I was in California, so I was surprised and alarmed to receive this e-mail from the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) last Tuesday:

“As you may have heard, a prospective student made a number of inappropriate sexist comments in conversations with graduate students during the visit last week. I am writing to let you know that I have written to the student in question, to point out that I find the comments that have been reported to me to be highly inappropriate, and that such comments are serious violations of norms that we all are committed to upholding. I added that I would take issue with such comments being made in our department not only by prospective students, but also, and especially, by people who are members of our department, such as the department’s graduate students.”

Of course, I immediately asked some people who I thought might be in the know for all the gory details. In conversations with various grad students in the department last week, I found out that he did all of the following:

He remarked to a female grad student on how easy she must have it in the department because she’s a woman.
He told a female grad student that he was glad to see that most people in the department work on “real” philosophy rather than feminist philosophy.
He speculated that a famous professor in our department was probably only working with a specific grad student because she’s an attractive woman.
He saw two grad students listed on the website with the same Chinese last name and assumed that the woman must only have been admitted because she was married to the man. (The kicker: not only are they from different places – the woman grew up in China, the man in Canada – but the man is also flamingly gay.)
He was told a story about how two Asian-American women, as first-years, walked into the grad student bar and a male student loudly remarked, “Mmm, China.” (Incidentally, one of the women is Korean-American.) He was not horrified, and in fact seemed to think this was perfectly normal.

Part of the reason I was feeling so shitty last Thursday is that I got involved in an argument between a male grad student who works on philosophy of law and a bunch of other grad students about whether we were treating the prospective student unfairly by talking amongst ourselves about how terrible he is, which would probably lead the grad student community to be inhospitable or even hostile toward him if he were to come here, without adequate proof of his misdeeds and without giving him an opportunity to show himself to be better than we thought, or at least redeemable. This was obnoxious not least because law guy is a guy – and he acknowledged that he can’t know how women feel about the sexist remarks, but he is South Asian and said the prospective made a remark to him that might be construed as racist, but he was giving him the benefit of the doubt. He also kept going on about “procedural justice” (which he said he’s a big champion of in his research as well) – which sounds an awful lot like the “due process” that opponents of the Me Too movement like to scream about – and insisted that it applies with regard to “the court of public opinion” as well as more official channels like the decision whether or not to rescind his admission offer. An implication was, of course, that he wasn’t sure whether he could trust the testimony of people who reported the sexist and racist behavior, most of whom are women. Because what “due process” so often means is “you can’t believe women – they’re overly emotional and misinterpret things and/or they’re crazy and they lie.”

Anyway… the DGS e-mailed the prospective to tell him that kind of behavior was inappropriate and would not be tolerated in the department, the prospective responded by indignantly denying everything (you know those hysterical women!), the DGS told him he was looking into rescinding the offer, and the prospective wisely decided to go somewhere else – namely, Oxford, where he’s been doing a B.Phil (a glorified second bachelor’s degree that’s special because it’s from Oxford), and where they seem to be OK with this kind of shit.

Big, existential sigh. @fuckyeahrichardiii, @writernotwaiting

bruisingfetish:

averagefairy:

small boob privilege is so real like…. bralettes… underboob tattoos… going braless?? not looking hyper sexual at all times ???? running comfortably? i could go on

YAS finally someone said this

Re: the “not looking hyper-sexual at all times”: I was troubled to notice at an all-women’s networking and mentoring workshop in academic philosophy – which is about ¾ male (like, worse than math and physics) – that the vast majority of the women there had very small breasts (and I include myself here), and an unusual number of them were not wearing bras and it looked fine. I strongly suspect that small-breasted women do better in a male-dominated, in many ways toxically masculine discipline like philosophy because they can pull off the androgynous look, and coming off as more masculine gets you taken more seriously. Not to mention that your ideas get more attention the less attention your breasts draw.