Infighting about Trotsky

It was amusing to read (at Lenin's Tomb) of some recent infighting occasioned by a damning scholarly review of Robert Service's Trotsky: A Life (Harvard, 2009), involving a pair of fellows from the same nook of the anticommunism industry, the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution, and Peace.  While Service's book has been criticized by several leftist reviewers, it had generally been well-received in academic circles. This changes with Bertrand M. Patenaude, who writes, in The American Historical Review (see here):

In his eagerness to cut Trotsky down, Service commits numerous distortions of the historical record and outright errors of fact to the point that the intellectual integrity of the whole enterprise is open to question. 

By the end, he concludes (but read the whole review, it's worth it):

Harvard University Press has placed its imprimatur upon a book that fails to meet the basic standards of historical scholarship. 

At Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee puts the review in context and requests comments from the author, the review's author, and Harvard. Service's response is to accuse Patenaude of being a 'Trotsky romantic.' From Harvard, McLemee gets no response.

One (More) Reason Unions Matter to Professors

Inside Higher Ed reports that an arbitrator has ruled that Florida State University fired twelve tenured professors in violation of its contract with the faculty union, and ordered these jobs reinstated. In response the university also reinstated nine non-union tenured professors. This, of course, speaks to the importance of unions, and also tenure. The arbitrator's decision-making process should be of some interest, especially by those of us who have made such arguments:

Further, the arbitrator touches on an issue that has angered many faculty members in traditional liberal arts departments in this era of budget cuts: the idea that their departments are somehow evaluated as less financially viable than others that attract outside grants. The arbitrator uses anthropology -- the target of cuts at Florida State -- to challenge this thinking by noting, as many faculty members have, that its tuition revenue makes it financially strong (running a surplus in fact).

The finding compares anthropology (subject to deep cuts) with meteorology (which was protected), applying the administration's stated goal of focusing on departments with high costs. Anthropology's cost per degree awarded is $33,343, compared to more than $50,000 per meteorology degree. And anthropology's net tuition earned exceeds that of 14 of the 17 departments in arts and sciences at the university. "It made no sense to eliminate anthropology from a budget standpoint," the arbitrator writes.

While I don't think that financial calculations should be at the forefront of reasons as to why humanities departments should not be cut, we shouldn't take that reason off the table. If the numbers lean in favor of such departments we should use them in order to shift the debate to ideological terrain: universities are going after the humanities because they (in better situations) engage students and challenge them to think critically about their place in society or within the university (so many of which are rapidly transforming into glorified business and tech schools).

The Politics of University Budgets

Amy DePaul interviews Christopher Newfield, author of Unmaking the Public University, over at Alternet. Although I haven't read Newfield's book, I think his general thesis is correct: he argues that the ideological battles over university curriculum and the cutting and privatizing of university budgets are part of a concerted effort to undermine a more diverse and critical approach to education. While it is true that some universities have become mired in financial difficulties, the logic of their solutions follows that of a loosely neoliberal or 'business' perspective. We've already argued that student debt is political, because increased debt can reduce a graduate's inclination toward low-paying work in activism or social justice work (at the same time that it implies a consumer's model of education); following Newfield we should add that budget cuts are political insofar as they target fields that study the negative aspects of contemporary life, and that advocate a critical and diversified public life. One excerpt:

You say in the book that elites on the right began to focus on universities increasingly. What actions did they take?

They attacked every reform in the humanities that racially integrated the curriculum, including attempts to broaden ‘great books’ courses at Stanford in the late 80s. The humanities as a source of knowledge in society was gradually discredited. In the early 90s, attacks began on affirmative action in California and elsewhere.

The other flank of the culture wars is the budget wars and my argument is they are basically the same thing. The goal was to discredit fields that had studied negative aspects of American life. The second goal was to use budget pressures to de-fund disciplines that seemed too critical of the established order. History, literature studies, anthropology, sociology -- anything that isn’t econometric and efficiency oriented, anything too skeptical, all of that stuff should only be tolerated if it can pay its own way.

An Update on My Precarious Employment

I don't know about you, but when I wasn't (re-)reading Capital, I was spending a significant part of my summer trying to figure out where I was going to work during the 2010-2011 academic year. After the initial round of sessional job postings (listed course by course here at the University of Ottawa) I was only offered one course, in the Visual Arts Department, which is 'Art Theories' in Winter Semester (for my California friends unfamiliar with the term, the Winter Semester runs from January to late April). While I like the prospect of diversifying my teaching repertoire with the 'Art Theories' course, having written a book on the philosophy of art and all, for a few months I had no Fall teaching.

I can now add, having signed the contract yesterday, that I will be teaching 'Reasoning and Critical Thinking' in the Fall. That gets me to the 1/1 course load that I've been living off for the past four years, so I've survived, somewhat, the across-the-board cuts (enabled, I've heard, by an increase in teaching duties for full-time professors) here at the University of Ottawa. I'm hoping, with a few more posts up, to add another course or two. 

A lot of philosophy professors find 'Reasoning and Critical Thinking' to be a pain to teach, but I must say that I prefer it to unemployment.

To conclude, I'll link to two blog posts about adjunct work and the humanities, although I will add that I'm more on the side of Peter Gratton (here) rather than Ian Bogost (here); I don't think that contemporary 'humanist' disciplines suffer from isolationism as much as they suffer from some combination of explicit and implicit (residual) elitism. 

On Intellectual Bankruptcy

Mark C. Taylor is at it again, proposing more non-solutions to haphazard diagnoses about the state of academia in the 21st century. Most recently, he bemoans the financial straits that many schools are encountering without much more than the idiotic suggestion that universities continue to gut teaching to save money.

Taylor seems fundamentally unable to grasp the political failure at the heart of the problem, unless, of course, the whole point of his argument is that the crisis of the university is a brute fact that cannot be changed but must be accepted. In this case, his apocalyptic vision of the collapse of the world of higher education today is mere pretense to whatever solution he affects to have, condensed in the misguided slogan of the 'intellectual and financial liquidity.'

But Taylor probably grasps the true political problem of academia, and nevertheless remains opportunistic enough to ignore it. The true problem is the capture of the university by capital, that is, the relentless drive to privatize the university and make it another domain of profit, rather than public education. The problem, then, is not a failure of management (even if many administrations have been doing a poor job at fighting the symptoms of the problem), but a political failure, specifically, the lack of political will to maintain accessible education for a changing student demographic. Part of this is symptomatic of the last three decades of neoliberalism, and part, I think, is due to the professorial labor aristocracy (yes, I just said that!) circling the wagons and protecting what it has, consequences for the junior and precarious faculty be damned.

Zinn's FBI Files Released

No surprise that the FBI was meddling in the life of Howard Zinn, historian, activist, and outspoken critic of US domestic and foreign policy. Raw Story has published some excerpts (including links to the PDF copies) as it combs through the 243 page document. The FBI maintained an interest in Zinn from the late 1940s to the 1970s, and put some effort into getting him fired from Boston University:

In a document from the Boston FBI office (see PDF file here), an FBI "source," whose name was redacted from the publicly released documents, was quoted as being outraged over Zinn's comment at a protest that the US had become a "police state" and that prosecutions of Black Panther Party members were creating "political prisoners."

According to the source, Zinn stated that (I'm now quoting from the original documents (pages 69-70 of the PDF):

"Police in every nation are a blight and the United States is no exception."

The file continues:

Boston proposes under captioned program with Bureau permission to furnish [name redacted] with public source data regarding Zinn's numerous anti-war activities, including his trip to Hanoi, 1/31/68, in an effort to back [redacted] efforts for his removal.

The document quoted was dated 4/17/70, after Zinn received tenure at BU (on this process, see You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, pp. 183-185). As we know in retrospect, Mr. Redacted failed. Yet another good reason to keep tenure...no matter what Mark C. Taylor says (that's actually a link to one of Taylor's critics, and a sharp one at that).

The So-Called Report on the Conference...

For somebody who defended his dissertation last November and who successfully landed a contract to turn it into a book, I probably over-scheduled the last academic year. In November, I presented a paper on Sartre at the North American Sartre Society, and just recently participated in a panel on Marx, Heidegger, and Benjamin at the CPA and gave a paper on Badiou and Heidegger at the EPTC. For the next academic year, I've already got an abstract under review for the Radical Philosophy Association's meeting, which, if accepted, would make it the fourth time I will have gone to one of their meetings.

Now, I don't have a very extensive report to give on the conference(s). I was in Montreal for two full days, Tuesday and Wednesday, and spent three hours each day participating; Tuesday at our panel, and at  the  EPTC for three papers the next day, each related to my participation or a friend's: Wes Furlotte commented on a paper, I went to see what Chris Nagel, professor at CSU Stanislaus, was up to lately, and then I gave my paper. So, in total, six hours at the Humanities conference. Which isn't very much. At the last NASS meeting, I think I spent a majority of my time watching papers, commenting, arguing, schoozing, etc. 

From whence the question: why?

I've been thinking about this for a few days. There are a few answers I could possibly give, but I think it's related to the professional politics of large conferences. Nevertheless, I have two very different impressions of the CPA and the EPTC. Let's start with the CPA. I get the general impression that it's an analytic philosopher's  game. It's difficult not to get that impression when reading the schedule; and it's even harder not to get that impression when you start your panel on Tuesday morning at 9am and nobody's there. Yes, you read that correctly: Matt, David and I had no audience until perhaps 9:30am (and only 3 people passed in or out). Now, it was raining on a Tuesday morning, which is a strong motivator for somebody not to jump up and rush to a conference, and other panels didn't seem to runneth over in attendance. 

 

But let's put it this way: at some point you've got to make decisions about where to present your work, because these events cost money, and require a significant time commitment. So it's probably best to present work where you will get helpful commentary, suggestions, polemics, and contacts from people who have some familiarity with the subject matter (and you might learn a thing or two at other talks). Now, if the CPA is an analytic philosopher's game (and this might not be true in all cases), then it might not be the place for continental papers. However, even if it's not an analytic philosopher's game, the non-thematic orientation means that any response that you may get will be fairly broad. I didn't used to think like this because I was writing on Schelling, and almost anywhere you go, few people have any familiarity with his work.

However, I've started working on more contemporary figures, so my expectations have changed. Next year, at least, I will only be sending a paper to the EPTC. Not just on the response my paper received, but because I've had two good experiences with them. And rather than my rushed schedule this year, I can spend a few days at a few panels, participate a bit more. I know that this might not be the strongest reasoning, but it's the impression I've been trying to work out for the past few days.

So on to the Badiou paper: it was about the differences between Badiou and Heidegger on mathematics and technology. It's been a cursed paper. I wrote it about 3 and a half years ago, and the EPTC is the only group to take it; it was full of set theory formulas, and then it was intentionally polemical, talking about how Badiou's work disproves Heidegger's 'oracular proferring' on technology (the phrase is from J-L. Nancy). The commentator, Jonathan Blair, caught the rhetorical gambit behind the paper (the insistence on the opposition of Badiou and Heidegger), and pointed out how in some ways Badiou does not get beyond some possible Heideggerian objections, and that at some point, a decision is behind their differences. Which is the set up I expected. But this kind of objection leads us to a different set of problems (which we didn't actually get to because chaos broke out during the Q & A that had very little to do with my paper). 

 

The most important problem, I think, is that if a decision is the basis of ontological procedure, then ontology itself is a strategic discourse, and is not 'first philosophy.' I think the very problem is the idea of first philosophy itself; that rather than fetishizing the 'proper' beginning as securing philosophical discourse, we need to return a method of thinking totality in media res (which is why I'm not doing something like Derrida; in addition, this is going to have something to say about political economy...), without collapsing the distinction between philosophy and politics. One of the strong points of Badiou's philosophy is how he organizes a way of thinking that seeks to avoid the "passion of the real," which distinguishes his work from the 'oracular proferring' of Heidegger.

Students and Staff Suspended at Middlesex

Students and staff continue to fight the Middlesex University administration's decision to shut down the department. Most recently they staged an occupation of the library on the Trent Park campus. This has led to the suspension of several students and Philosophy professors Peter Osborne and Peter Hallward. The Save Middlesex Philosophy blog reports that:

Some Middlesex University Philosophy students, along with Philosophy professors Peter Osborne and Peter Hallward, were suspended from the University this afternoon. Hallward and Osborne were issued with letters announcing their suspension from the University with immediate effect, pending investigation into their involvement in the recent campus occupations. The suspension notice blocks them from entering University premises or contacting in any way University students and employees without the permission of Dean Ed Esche (e.esche@mdx.ac.uk) or a member of the University’s Executive.

Since the university's administration seems unable and unwilling to resolve the matter, let me propose that they would do much better suspending Vice-Chancellor Driscoll, Vice-Chancellor Ahmad, Vice-Chancellor House and Dean Esche pending an investigation into their involvement which has led to the recent campus occupations.

And if you haven't already, sign the petition join the Facebook group, and spread the message.

Middlesex Philosophy Faces Closure

This isn't a joke. I received this email today from Radical Philosophy, which operates out of Middlesex:

Late on Monday 26 April, staff in Philosophy at Middlesex University in London were informed that the University executive are to close all Philosophy programmes: undergraduate, postgraduate and MPhil/PhD.

Philosophy is the highest research-rated subject at Middlesex University, with 65% of its research activity judged 'world-leading' or 'internationally excellent' in the UK government's recent Research Assessment Exercise. It is now widely recognised as one of the most important centres for the study of modern European philosophy anywhere in the English-speaking world. Its MA programmes in Philosophy have grown in recent years to become the largest in the UK, with 42 new students admitted in September 2009. Middlesex offers one of only a handful of programmes left in the UK that provides both research-driven and inclusive post-graduate teaching aimed at a wide range of students, specialist and non-specialist. It is also one of relatively few such programmes that remains financially viable, currently contributing close to half of its total income to the University's central administration.

Needless to say, Radical Philosophy very much regret this decision to terminate Philosophy at Middlesex, and its likely consequences for the teaching of philosophy in the UK. This is a shameful decision which essentially means the end of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, a hub for internationally renowned scholarship (http://www.web.mdx.ac.uk/crmep/; staff include Eric Alliez, Peter Hallward, Mark Kelly,Christian Kerslake, Peter Osborne and Stella Sandford). This act ofwilful self-harm by the University must be resisted.

In her article for the 'Comment is Free,' section in the Guardian, Nina Power writes:

Middlesex philosophy has been responsible for bringing contemporary thinkers to a wide audience through numerous international events and collaborations with European and American institutions, as well as cultural venues in London, such as the French Institute and Tate Britain. The postgraduate centre for research in modern European philosophy receives research grants from national funding bodies and there are 63 postgraduate students working on MAs and PhDs. It is an important and unique place – without doubt one of the few philosophy departments in the country where you can study contemporary European thought in any sustained way. It is also one of the only philosophy departments in existence that takes seriously philosophy's relation to other disciplines and to the world at large. The research centre at Middlesex is an institution as important to people not in philosophy as to those within it, and plays a critical role in the intellectual and cultural life of London.
There has been a slew of articles on Comment is Free in recent days lamenting the poor showing of women and ethnic minorities in philosophy and at philosophy-related events (Bidisha, Julian Baggini, Hilary Lawson). Middlesex is one of the few departments whose curriculum addresses this imbalance as a problem for and within philosophy, rather than pretending that the discipline itself plays no role in perpetuating class, gender and racial divisions.
The closure of philosophy at Middlesex will send a terrible message: that philosophy doesn't belong in ex-polytechnics, even when they achieve better results than elite institutions. [...] Closure at Middlesex would be a step back to the bad old days when philosophy meant a few young, white and almost entirely male students at privileged institutions discussing the finer points of formal logic over sherry. Middlesex University must be prevented from dismantling one of the finest philosophy departments in the country: fight to keep philosophy alive.

Do your part:
Sign the petition (our own Mr. Shaw is signatory 4094, update: Mr. Smith 4138), join the Facebook group, and spread the message.

What is an Intellectual?

Not a bad week here at the Notes Taken, as Devin had a chance to satirize the Texas State Board of Education for its decision making process and the shoddy research skills of Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Matt had a chance to post our first 'reading' of a movie, which concerned Lars von Trier's The Antichrist.

We also had a chance to catch up with what is going on elsewhere on the net:

1. A friend of mine brought, through a very indirect way, a recent statement by the president of the MLA about dissertation monographs, in which she questions whether or not its current 'book-form' is outdated in a rapidly changing world. I don't want to sound cynical but inspirational passages such as "Future faculty ... will require flexible and improvisational habits and collaborative skills to bring their scholarship to fruition" doesn't make me think of new technologies and research skills; it makes me think of non-tenure track employment.

2. It seemed inevitable after J.D. Salinger's death that his letters would start turning up. This week his correspondence with E. Michael Mitchell, who designed the cover of Catcher in the Rye, has been made public. It also seemed inevitable that some wannabe would claim a correspondence that could not be produced (see here or here). That would be Taki Theodoracopulos, who said he exchanged hundreds of letter with Salinger, in which the recently deceased declared his hatred for Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and VS Naipaul. Reading the "excerpts" that Theodoracopulos produced on his site, should make it pretty obvious that it's a hoax.

3. Then, to return to topics related to the recently deceased, it appears that National Public Radio's obituary on Howard Zinn included rousing tributes from Noam Chomsky, Julian Bond and....wait for it...David Horowitz? I can understand the first two, friends and fellow travelers of Zinn's but so far as I can tell, the only reason that Horowitz was on the show was to 'balance' the reporting by contrasting the first two with a dissenting opinion. Here's some of Horowitz's comments that didn't make the cut (so, in case you are wondering, it is reproduced on his website; don't worry, that link right there is to Alternet, not Horowitz's site):

According to the account he published on his Web site, he told Keyes that Zinn was responsible for "helping Stalin" to "slaughter" and "enslave" Eastern Europe; that he "never flagged in his political commitment to freedom's enemies"; and that he "supported every enemy of the United States in every war...including the Islamic Nazis whose first agenda is to finish the job that Hitler started."

Those remarks didn't make the cut because, of course, they are beyond ridiculous. Here's what made the show:

"There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn's intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect," he explained. "Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse."

N.P.R was rightly scolded for including this garbage. Not only is Horowitz a charlatan, but as far as I can tell his only expertise is self-aggrandizement at the cost of others. Here, it's no different, but it's a well paying shtick. Unfortunately.

4. We can't end on that note. If you've made it this far, you might as well watch this debate, from 1969, between Noam Chomsky and William F. Buckley (this is part one, I'm sure you can find part two).

The Personal is Still Political: The Status of Women in Philosophy

The autumn of 2009 has witnessed an interesting upsurge in questions of women’s place in the study of philosophy. The season began with several blog posts commenting on news reports about the absence of women studying philosophy. Subsequent posts and news stories began to question why so few women were studying philosophy, how this problem could be addressed and even whether the only problem was that the disparity appeared to be a problem rather than a natural tendency. One particularly contentious set of exchanges on the topic took place on Brian Leiter’s blog, Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, and concerned the question of whether philosophy classes constituted a hostile environment for women. One of the original news stories on the topic explained the absence of women in the philosophy classroom by suggesting that “one reason may be that women are turned off by a culture of aggressive argument particular to philosophy, which grows increasingly more pronounced at the postgraduate level.” This suggestion, regardless of its merits as a description of what turns many people against philosophy and not only women, drew the ire of Brian Leiter’s corner of the blogosphere. After launching ad hominem [sic?] attacks on two prominent women philosophers who he regards as “hacks,” Leiter offers the enlightened suggestion that it is “demeaning to women” to say that the excessively aggressive argumentation that he prefers drives women out of the classroom and contributes to the absence of women in the profession generally. Never mind that this kind of dismissal, which Leiter employs quite regularly—as when a subsequent post jokes that Judith Butler writes her books using a random academic sentence generator—, may be precisely the kind of aggressiveness that women and others find intolerable about the study and profession of philosophy, the question deserves more than the dismissive or inevitably confounding treatment it receives from Leiter.

Without referencing that debate in her article for The Chronicle of Higher Education’s October 16^th “Diversity in Academe” issue, Regan Penaluna offers the hypothesis that misogyny in the philosophical canon may account for the absence of women in philosophy classes and their subsequent absence in the profession. Perhaps aware that her article would appear in a special “diversity” issue of the Chronicle or perhaps as an ironic underscoring of women’s exclusion from mainstream philosophy, Penaluna claims that since “the canon as it stands is almost entirely composed of men—including many who have little good to say about women” this situation “cannot but contribute to an unwelcoming environment.” (B27) Citing the fact that “other disciplines, such as history, English, and the sciences, also have male-dominated canons, but they attract comparatively more women than philosophy does,” Penaluna suggests that “for this reason, one might conclude that the cause of gender disparity in philosophy is not the canon” (B27) thereby suggesting that professors’ handling of misogynous material might have something to do with women’s attraction to the field. This would make the problem of philosophy less an academic problem concerning what to study and more a political problem about how to study it. In short, the disparity between women in philosophy and women in other fields with male-dominated canons might be a political problem rather than an epistemological one. Mercifully, Penaluna quickly provides the corrective to the unsettling question of whether philosophy professors’ handling of the subject might be partially to blame for the exclusion of women when she asserts that it “would be wrong” to exculpate the canon for the political actions of its interpreters.

Of course it is possible that both the canon and its handlers are to blame for creating an atmosphere of hostility toward women in the faculties and classrooms of philosophy departments. After all, it is not the philosophical canon alone that “demands that its students identify more closely with its canonical figures” (B28), it is rather philosophy faculty themselves that either do or do not “bring a critical approach to the interpretation of patriarchal texts, while also raising awareness of [. . .] works by women” (B27). Nevertheless, Penaluna explicitly rejects the idea that the political decisions of philosophy faculty to utilize a sexist canon without bringing a duly critical perspective to texts and thereby encourage their students to passively accept not only canonical figures but their misogynist attitudes are to blame before reiterating “that there are few women in philosophy because the canon is sexist and there is little being done about it.” (B28, emphasis added) Although that little conjunction, and, is unstressed in Penaluna’s article, I prefer to stress it because it highlights that the textual problem is actually a political problem about the relations that philosophers have not only with their material, but with one another as well. If philosophers are trained to emulate rather than critique their forbears, this is a failure of philosophical reflection to consider the political consequences of a certain kind of activity; it is not an effect that texts produce on their own. If it were not the activity of philosophers that made the difference then the “obvious” solution that “philosophers consider the misogynist passages of great philosophers in a critical manner” and “mainstream feminist philosophy” (B28) would have no chance of success before the occult power of the text.

The proposal to mainstream feminist philosophy, however, will only have marginal success at bringing more women into the classroom and the profession without a corresponding change of attitude toward the philosophical canon. One of the prevailing themes in feminist philosophy involves critiquing the canon’s exclusion of women through their inclusion as an object of study. That is, in the Aristotelian conception of woman as receptacle, for example, part of the problem is the presumption that woman are known and not misrepresented by that description. Consequently, the traditional role of women in philosophy has been a form of passive inclusion as an object of knowledge whose ability to speak has been far more rigorously proscribed because of that inclusion than because of women’s exclusion. To be sure, Brian Leiter includes women like Judith Butler in his philosophical universe, but he does so by suggesting that she works unthinkingly, mechanically, instinctively and therefore “incompetently” in the medium of thought that is philosophy’s proper sphere. It is therefore unsurprising that feminist philosophers have raised significant questions about the phallogocentrism of the Western philosophical tradition and thus found themselves at odds with the preferred narrative of inclusive progress that philosophy spins about itself. At the same time, it is unsurprising that those feminists who questioned the political effects of philosophy’s preoccupation with the cerebral at the expense of the bodily became the objects of scorn for the philosophical mainstream committed to toeing the same line that resulted in women’s exclusion in the first place. The problem with the token inclusion of women philosophers who do not challenge the philosophical mainstream is that the presence of a Martha Nussbaum or Maudmarie Clark, valid in its own regard, is purchased at the expense of disparaging those who challenge the profession, like Butler or Rand, as either hacks, or “sophomoric,” as Leiter characterized Penaluna’s mention of Nietzsche’s possible misogyny.

In denying the political responsibility of philosophers, I wonder if Penaluna offers a critical narrative that is in fact very comfortable to academic philosophers because it does not significantly disrupt their standard practices within the profession. These practices may start with reading the same books ad nauseum, but they further involve utilizing the same conceptual techniques no matter what their limitations and no matter what the consequences of those limitations. For example, in attacking the canon, one is conspicuously silent on the complicity of academics, who may have hesitations about the possibly misogynous bits in Nietzsche or the pro-slavery aspects of Aristotle, but skip over that material rather than assessing it openly. This preserves the respected tradition of decorum in which philosophers decline criticism until they can be sure about the grounds for criticism at the expense of those for whom such views are not only intolerable, but detrimental. It is emblematic of this attitude that Peter Carruthers suggests that the proportion of women in philosophy needs further study by experimental philosophers. By skipping over misogyny in philosophy through delay or oversight or simply substituting it with material that makes the same substantive point without including the offensive details, academics convey a powerful message about the place of women in the discipline: misogyny and those it hurts are not part of philosophy proper, a field that knows no gender, class or cultural identity. Rather these are simply errors to be at least ignored, or at best replaced with a more inclusive figure that preserves the timeless truths of the masters. As Penaluna notes, such an attitude is neither philosophically, nor socially responsible. Misogynous aspects of the canon should impugn the philosophical integrity of those associated with them because they display a stark lack of attention when “philosophers who devote[] their lives to investigating human experience” can ignore a significant portion of humanity by remaining “simply unconcerned with the condition of women.” (B29) Moreover, it begs the question of the social function of philosophers if they believe that the experience of women or the difficulty in responding to misogyny belong to subjects outside the purview of philosophical reflection.

Because I am not sure that Penaluna isn’t simply a more subtle and nuanced writer than I am, I will refrain from claiming that she misleads readers by downplaying the political implications of choices that philosophers make about their subject-matter. This may be wise if for no other reason than that she cites the numerous political decisions philosophers make to promote the continued relevance misogynist ideology. Nevertheless it seems relevant to emphasize that these claims are not simply hypothetical postulates, but reflect the actual conditions of women studying and making their way into the profession of philosophy. The absence of women from philosophy classrooms and the professoriate is already a political issue that many current members of the profession have ignored, promoted, misrepresented or resisted. Philosophical reflection should play a role in deciding which of these options we would like to continue, but that will not come about unless one is clear that reflection takes place within the medium of political relationships rather than being outside of them.