AAPT Members American Association of Philosophy Teachers

Elliot Cohen has an entry on his Psychology Today blog promoting his forthcoming book:
Conquer Your Anxiety with Philosophy | Psychology Today

Conquer Your Anxiety with Philosophy

While I generally agree that psychology has a historical tendency to overextend itself and medicalize normality, I worry about this approach.  Cohen appears to be promoting basic critical thinking mixed with pop-psychology (i.e. 'cognitive dissonance') as an alternative to psychological therapy. Consider:

If you push yourself to formulate the premises of your thinking, it is then possible for you to refute them with a little critical thinking, that is, prove to yourself that they are irrational.

Uh... yeah. That's why anxiety is a disorder. Because it is irrational. If it were rational anxiety, one wouldn't be seeking counseling.

But maybe this is just a part of the natural correction to over-diagnosis and Psychiatric classification-creep. 

Another worrisome story coming out of London:
Middlesex University philosophy protesters suspended (From Enfield Independent)

Two professors, one lecturer and several students have been forbidden to enter the Trent Park campus, in Bramley Road, until Friday, when a hearing is due to take place.

Christopher Merrill has a post over at the Huffington Post arguing that the systematic decrease in funding for the humanities is related to the increase in tolerance for abhorrent political activities like torture. Merrill is implying a causal relationship here, but it that precise mechanism is not detailed.

Christopher Merrill: The University Is Not a Factory: On the Crisis in the Humanities  read more »

I have absolutely no interest in contemporary French Philosophy. But I do have a certain distaste for public intellectuals who tend towards hyperbole at the cost of precision. So I find it delightful when these eruptions occur. Does that make me a bad person?

Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG: Bernard-Henri Lévy comes a cropper with fake philosopher

In his latest book, published this week amid the traditional adulation in the media, Lévy, 61, attacks Immanuel Kant, the 18th century philosopher. He calls him "raving mad" and cites as his authority Jean-Baptiste Botul, a 20th century philosopher.

The trouble is that Botul never existed. He was invented as an elaborate joke in 1999 by Frédéric Pagès, a literary journalist, who wrote works in his name.

Bernard-Henri Lévy a laughing stock for quoting fictional philosopher - Times Online  read more »

No, you don't want to know:
Q&A: Slavoj Žižek, professor and writer | Life and style | The Guardian

What is the worst job you've done?

Teaching. I hate students, they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring.

Isn't that everything that is wrong with our discipline? Public intellectuals have this way of starting out as 'original and interesting promoter of the discipline' and ending as 'embarrassing caricature hell-bent on destroying the discipline' but has anyone made that transition more quickly than Zizek?  Gandhi was more violent than Hitler. Students are stupid and boring.

Maybe it's time we stop calling him a 'philosopher' and start using title for which he's most qualified: 'psychoanalyst.' "The most dangerous psychoanalyst in the west" has a bit of a different ring to it doesn't it?

I've kept an eye out for coverage of our non-discrimination petition from last spring--you'll find previous entries here and here. But this one is useful as an example of loaded rhetoric as well:
American Philosophical Association and Christ-Centered Colleges « Academic Freedom File  read more »

Riva Gold, phil major from McGill, has a highly entertaining commentary on the gender gap in Philosophy. While I don't want to minimize the concerns she is expressing, I just can't pass up some of these quotes, like the one in the title.

The Patriarchy of Philosophy: Women in philosophy departments find themselves pushed to the margins

Philosophy is one of those rare majors that, when declared, simultaneously elicits looks of reverence and contempt from others. Philosophy majors are often seen as meek hipster wannabes who emit foul odours and begin every sentence with “it is the case that.” And with good reason.

It took me nearly three months to learn what Hegel meant by “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” and I assure you, it was not fascinating.  read more »

The National Union of Students, with help from HSBC, has produced a report on student-professor contact hours by discipline in the UK. The Guardian had a brief story about it this morning:
Arts students 'see academics for just nine hours a week' | Education | The Observer
A 'mini-report' on the contact hours and the full report produced by NUS and HSBC are available from NUS's press-release site here:Media Centre: News And Events: NUS.org.uk

The data set is worrying. Here's the graph included in both:

That's 9 hours a week in History & Philosophy, 5 of which are in lecture, and 3 of which are in tutor sessions.  I'd love to see an equivalent study done here in the US. It strikes me that it would be pretty easy to create a meaningful measure of school-value by simply dividing the number of contact hours by the number of students present during that session - McDaniel has 3 contact hours a week for a 4-credit class (I know, don't get me started) and our 'official' average class size is 17. That gives students 0.176 of an hour of the professor's attention per class. 4 classes means 0.70 hour of faculty attention per week per student.  read more »

I can't understand why an online magazine "dedicated to the analysis and understanding of religious forces in the world today, highlight a diversity of progressive voiced and aimed a broadening and advancing the public conversation" is interested in the enactive mind thesis, but apparently they are: You Are More Than Your Brain: A Revolutionary Theory of Consciousness | RDBook | ReligionDispatches

Consciousness, he argues, and all the things that that word means (thinking and feeling and the fact that the world shows up for us, to use Noë’s turns of phrase) does not originate from the brain the way digestive acids originate from the stomach, or the way light originates from the lens of a movie projector. Consciousness is the product of a living organism dynamically interacting with the world around it

Actually, we do know a little more than that: Thompson, who advocates a view of perception similar to that of Noë's, explicitly endorses Buddhist theology through his work in philosophy of mind and cognitive science - but I've never known Noë to do that. I'm just not sure what this has to do with religion.

At the bottom (after spending a whole section criticizing the 'new atheists' and never mentioning Noë once), the article finishes with:  read more »

It is only 20% women. Actually, this is really not news at all. It's been at that level for a generation.

A Dearth of Women Philosophers - Idea of the Day Blog - NYTimes.com

Evelyn Brister over at 'Knowledge and Experience' is all over the statistics and analysis, so there is no need for me to repeat her here.

My real complaint here is that the NY Times used an image of Ayn Rand as a Woman Philosopher! You've got to kidding me. For an article about academic, professional philosophy, nonetheless. I mean, seriously. How hard is it to find a photo of a woman philosopher? Let's choose one at random - say, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago Martha Nussbaum? Oh, 1 click on google. Difficult. She even has a fairly detailed page on wikipedia. The third hit for google search on "Woman Philosopher" is a gallery of images of various suitable choices. And if they really had the energy, the first link is to an alphabetical list of women in philosophy. Many philosophers have their pictures right there on their web pages: Ruth Millikan has her picture on her public web site. And she's in Connecticut, so it isn't even a long drive for an interview.  read more »