Collecting stones
That absurd “the TERFs have FORCED me to quit philosophy” piece is, somewhat to my surprise, getting a lot of attention today, especially (it seems) from philosophers. I was thinking yesterday it would be just another rant that few people would notice, if only because the quality is so dire. But Brian Leiter shares information that indicates otherwise:
A number of philosophers have written me about this noxious, and I suspect fraudulent, display, and I apologize that I can’t respond to everyone as I’m participating in an intellectual event, and so trying to avoid engaging with the usual social media grandstanding and narcissism as much as possible. But I will share one set of comments from a philosopher elsewhere, since it makes clear the absurdity of this essay:
In what amounts to an AI-driven performative contradiction of its thesis, I’ve seen numerous philosophers on my Facebook feed share the article as something with immense moral import, with exactly zero of my hundreds of philosopher Fb friends offering even the mildest criticism. (One friend of a friend tried to do so, and was promptly told to take it elsewhere.)
I’m staggered by that. The piece is not even credible as being written by a grad student in philosophy. It reads like a typical social media-style rant. It has no trace of argument. It shows no sign of any philosophy training at all.
It’s too invasion of the body snatchers for me. Have they all lost their minds? Have they all been replaced by pods?
The note to Brian continues:
All this praise is for an article that,
(i) Frames as a “hateful” and “phobic” practice of “debating my existence” any philosophical discussion of gender which “does not proceed from [the] initial assumption … that trans people are the gender they say they are” (though NB many gender-critical types insist that they are concerned with sex, not gender, and are happy to let people be what they say in the latter respect as long as this doesn’t mean that they can share prisons and rape shelters with people of the opposite sex) — including under this umbrella not only the infamous Kathleen Stock (and Becky Tuvel I think??), but also yourself and Justin Weinberg, i.e. he of “moral resisters” fame; and further
(ii) Calls for a total no-platforming of gender-critical philosophers and philosophical arguments in journals, at conferences, and on blogs and social media.
Striking, isn’t it. And philosophers themselves are cheering this on? What is wrong with them?
Philosophers sharing this article, which in my feed have included several who were on hiring committees for departments I interviewed at in the past, have made it quite clear to everyone in the audience that it is people like me who are not welcome in the profession — that my existence as a non-hateful or -phobic scholar who thinks that “gender identity” might be a pseudo-concept, or that biological sex isn’t a matter of inner feeling, is very much up for debate — and that even the mildest refusal to toe the party line on gender means being framed as the moral equivalent of a white supremacist.
One such philosopher, on Twitter as opposed to Facebook:
Her essay lays out a serious problem in academic philosophy that some of us have been noticing and talking about for a while now. It is stark evidence that the problem isn't merely intellectual: it is chasing diversity out of our profession.
— Jonathan Ichikawa (@jichikawa) May 31, 2019
A “heartbreaking personal essay”? A self-obsessed hyperbolic attack on feminist philosophers by someone with no philosophical training is more like it. But Ichikawa isn’t some random woke bro, he teaches philosophy at UBC (BC=British Columbia).
And apparently there are many more like him, adding to the pile of stones to throw at Kathleen Stock.
Trans activists seem to be trying to turn move their claims directly from the “new ideas challenging the status quo” category to the “things that are established beyond question” category. They want their opposition to be treated as the equivalent of creationists or global warming deniers — except with even more moral condemnation.
The problem is that they’re skipping all that unpleasant work in the middle of actually convincing people. In order to declare that “the debate is over” on a topic, there has to actually be a debate first.
Now, not every single person needs to participate in that debate. I’ll bet that it is genuinely difficult on a emotional level for some trans people to engage in philosophical discussion about the nature of sex and gender, trans rights, etc.; that it hurts them to hear certain arguments. But that doesn’t mean that everyone else should refrain from having public discussions on the topic. It just means that maybe you’re not cut out to be a philosopher, or at least not one who works in that particular field.
It hasn’t been that long since philosophy has been exposed as having a “woman-problem” – i.e., the typical academic culture of treating women like objects of personal gratification and treating them as having inferior brains.
Sooner or later, every field that has a “woman-problem” is probably going to be beset by trans activists wanting to turn the attention from women who have struggled to overcome that toxic culture toward themselves.
Interesting how philosphers can drop logic, critical thinking, and questioning claims when it comes to acedemic politics and tribalism. It’s like they take off their philosophy hats and put on their big, glittery Woke badges to let everyone know they’re in and with it. Hip, even. Not really a good advertisement for rigourous thought and deep analysis. I was briefly in a university philosophy department until I discovered that philosophy was not for me. This happened before I’d gotten very far in my Masters work, and well before I’d had any inkling of whatever intradepartmental skullduggery might have been simmering in the background. I never Mastered, and my skull remained undugged.
(In a tiny, strange coincidence, it turns out that one of my favourite professors from that time, Dr. Alison Wylie, who had co-authored a report on the “Chilly Climate” for women faculty at University of Western Ontario
http://www.constancebackhouse.ca/fileadmin/publicationlist/Postscript_to_the_Backhouse_Report_-_part_1.pdf
ended up in the philosophy department at the University of Washington in Seattle! https://phil.washington.edu/people/alison-wylie)
YNNB, in a graduate philosophy department where I took some classes during my graduate work, I was horrified by the same phenomenon. These people knew all the rules of logic and critical thinking, but when they became engaged with environmental philosophy, all bets were off. They needed to be more environmental than Edward Abbey, while being more humanist than…well, any other humanist. They needed to be totally anti-western imperialism, and assume that everything eastern peoples did was hunky dory and perfectly in tune with the environment, even if it meant denying that the Dalai Lama knew anything about Buddhism!
Over the years I’ve become more convinced that education doesn’t cure fallacious thinking. At least, not in the general sense; you can educate people on a particular subject (like, say, vaccines) and dispel their false beliefs that way. But all the “critical thinking” and logical reasoning and lists of fallacies mostly just help people get better at defending their erroneous beliefs that they arrived at through extra-logical means.
I remember the party line in skeptic circles was “we don’t claim to be smarter than people who believe in psychics and ghosts and other woo-woo stuff; we’re just better at knowing how we can be fooled.” I bought it for a while. Probably said it a bunch of times. But I watched too many big name skeptics make asses of themselves to believe that any more.
So I’m not surprised if philosophers aren’t disciplined thinkers when they’re not specifically engaging in philosophic discussions. Lawyers aren’t any better; professionally we can hopefully distinguish between strong arguments and weak ones, but when “off the clock” we’re mostly good at convincing ourselves how good our own arguments are.
And then there’s Rachel McKinnon, so yeah, you have a point.
I was actually wondering for a while if McKinnon was ‘t philosopher’.
That “assumption” thing was my first clue of several that tp might not be a proper philosopher. Surely, if there’s one thing philosophers love day in, day out, morning noon and night it is identifying and attacking assumptions, isn’t it?
The idea that a philosopher might say that there’s one particular assumption that must be held forever and indisputably true seems to imply a lack of philosophical training and instinct. It seems about as close to the opposite of philosophical thought as I can imagine.
‘I think therefore I AM A WOMAN, DAMMIT, NO DEBATE, SHUT UP!’
In that thread of Ichikawa’s, he clearly implies that those who don’t uncritically accept the claims made by TP are just like climate change deniers. And, what is so fucking infuriating and frightening, is that this so-called philosopher appears to endorse the wholesale expelling of people from that field anytime someone (who? TP?) decides that these reprobates hold “transphobic” views.
This thread got me wondering if the author TP could be trained in philosophy, but using transgender logic that can only make sense to a transgender person.
I am not a philosopher (IANAP), but as I understand it, Descartes asked what he could say about the world without making any assumptions or premises, and he found he could say only one such thing:
I imagine TP knows that line of thinking, and takes this to be as fundamental:
If that’s the case, then:
1) I see narcissism in that. TP seems completely invested in being a woman (whatever that means), and merely asking any questions about it triggers an existential crisis.
2) I see solipsism in that. TP should wonder, how do other people function? We can observe other people who are not existentially defined by gender identity.
TP said they were a grad student, but this makes me wonder:
I wonder if TP was a professor who made their school look bad on Twitter, and couldn’t get papers through peer review because transgender ideology is incoherent. Maybe their school decided their employment could end now, at the end of the school year. In September, I’ll see if a school is missing a transgender philosophy professor.