Mini-Heap
A new Mini-Heap…
- Synthetic wombs and the abortion debate — the ideas of a few philosophers are discussed in this NYT article
- “The aesthetic and the moral are not as separate as we would like to believe” — Agnes Callard (Chicago) on the “fine line between respecting others’ right to their bad taste, and opting to participate in it”
- “There is no established orthodoxy about gender in academic philosophy” — a statement from 33 philosophers
- The top ten places for an undergraduate degree in philosophy in the UK, according to The Telegraph — more noteworthy for the publicity it brings to philosophy than its content
- “The people you want to listen… aren’t the ones who are listening” — Mark Alfano (Australian Catholic University) is attempting to burst the anti-vaxxer bubble.
- “The rapid speed at which this science is advancing suggests the potential for promising applications of memory-editing techniques in the future” — a discussion of recent advances in memory editing and how they might translate to current clinical practice
- There’s no such thing as the direction of time — Matt Farr (Cambridge) lays out the C-Theory of time, which “goes a significant step further even than the B-theory”
Mini-Heap posts appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, the ever-growing collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers.
The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thanks!
The link saying there is ‘no established orthodoxy about gender’ includes this line,, clearly directed at gender critical philosophers: “We should conduct our research freely and responsibly, without treating other people’s lives as though they are abstract thought experiments.”
The anonymous post earlier this week says gender critical “writings and behavior are best understood as aimed at achieving their activist ends,” implying it therefore shouldn’t be read or respected like academic work.
So gender critical work is both a demeaning abstract thought experiment and an activist enterprise? Seems like a tough double bind for anyone to navigate, without simply being silent.
Also, “there is no established orthodoxy about gender in academic philosophy,” but we’re told that we must investigate gender so that we “do not call into question . . . the validity of their [trans people’s] own understanding of who they are.”
There is no orthodoxy, but you are forbidden from advocating any view that suggests that a person can be mistaken about their gender.
Quite so. It seems that we can’t even investigate the possibility that people might mean different things by “man and woman”, so that both the person who says of someone “that is a woman” and the person who says of them “that is not a woman” may be correct.
I’ll jump on the skeptical bandwagon. I think it is correct that there is no orthodoxy on gender in philosophy– and as long as people have different positions and opposing arguments on gender, that is how it ought to remain.