What Kind of Democrats are Obama and Clinton?

Robert Gooding-Williams has an interesting post on the new Gender, Race, and Philosophy blog. He makes a good case that candidate Clinton is a democrat in the old elite style, while candidate Obama is a deliberative democratic. I’d love it if the latter were true. Whether it is so will be seen in [...]

what a day

What a day, stock market crashing, hordes massing at the Supreme Court lamenting the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, news broadcasts of the democrats dissing each other like children.  Yesterday was supposedly the most depressing day of the year, the day that the bills come home to roost after Christmas spending, a cold Monday. But [...]

Blacks v. Women

This is the best of times. We have an African American man running for president, with a real chance of winning, and we have a woman running for president, with a real chance herself. And we have more than one white man running with seriously progressive politics.
And this is the worst of [...]

Women Friendly Grad Programs

The American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women has compiled a document of “women-friendly” graduate programs.  Here’s how to find it.  Go to the committee’s web page and scroll to the bottom. Click on the link for “women and feminist friendly graduate programs.” Here you will get a pdf of the document.  Many [...]

David Cooper on Finding the Music Again

David E. Cooper’s recent piece for the Philosopher’s Magazine is a good reminder about the need for work that is integral to one’s life:
It was a bright morning in the summer of 1978, but my mood, as I entered my study to pick up on the previous day’s work, did not match the weather. There, [...]

Perplexing Percentages: Women, Philosophy Faculties, and the Rankings

Last summer Julie Van Camp put up a list of the percentage of women tenured/tenure-track faculty in 98 U.S. doctoral programs. The range is from 50 percent at Penn State and the University of Georgia (brava!) down to six percent at the University of Florida and the University of Texas, five percent at the University [...]

The Deciders and Philosophy Rankings

Many people regularly visit this blog of mine to see what’s being said here about philosophy rankings, namely, the infamous Leiter report. Some say that if a philosophy Ph.D. program isn’t “Leiterrific” — if it doesn’t score well on the Leiter report — then it’s objectively not a terrific program. I beg to differ. [...]

Not your old APA

I spent some of the final days of 2007 at the American Philosophical Association eastern division meeting in Baltimore.  What a change from years past.  There were some very good sessions, including one on the history of philosophy with attention to difference, featuring Robert Bernasconi, Eduardo Mendietta, and Penny Deutscher.  There were several feminist panels [...]