Graduate Students In Philosophy Research Articles

A Puzzle for Readers of Arthur Danto’s Aesthetic Theory

Sometimes theories of art are considered in isolation from broader intellectual concerns. One strength of Arthur Danto’s much-discussed aesthetics lies in its intimate relationship with his philosophical system. The definition of art is linked to theories of action, knowledge and historiography. That analysis is summarized in his book Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy, which presents a simple triangular diagram: subject/representation/world. The subject acts on the world, and the world causes representations. The relations are between the world and the subject, between the subject and its representations, and between the representations and the world. The first relation is that of causality, and the third that of truth [1].And to understand the second relation, we need a theory of the self, that is, an explanation of the connection between the representations and the person experiencing them. Danto claims that pretty much every basic philosophical position can be defined in relation to this structure. We are connected to the world; we are aware of the continuity of experience; we act upon the world: These relationships must be described.As it stands, this diagram raises an interesting problem. Danto offers a comprehensive list of everything that exists: the subject, the representations and the world. He refines the analysis in two later versions of this diagram, also in Connections to the World, in which he presents true belief, a relationship between the subject, a proposition and facts, and in the account of action when he describes the triangular relationship between the subject, an idea and an object [2]. In all three diagrams there are subjects, representations and the world. The task of philosophy is to sketch their relationships as revealed in knowledge and action.How then should we understand the place of this diagram itself in this philosophical system? In another book, his treatise on historiography, Danto writes, “It is always a fair question to put, whether a theoretical work on history can apply its theories to self” [3]. The same point can be made about this diagram. Since the diagram shows all that exists, it’s a fair question to ask what its place is in that discussion. The diagram cannot be a representation because it includes also both the world and subject if we accept Danto’s theory; and it cannot be a subject or the world either. Danto wants to diagram a view of the relationship between the world and representations that stands outside of the world. But how is that possible?Danto’s diagram creates an interesting philosophical problem, which he (surprisingly in my judgment) doesn’t consider. What exists according to him are three distinct kinds of things—subject, representations and world. From what point of view, then, are these things presented in his diagram? Thomas Nagel discusses “the view from nowhere” to identify the goal of this search for an impersonal point of view [4]. Without reference to Danto, he identifies a real philosophical problem. A painter must depict a landscape from some particular point of view. Danto wants to diagram a view from nowhere, an illustration of the relationship between the world and its representations, which stand outside the world. But how is that possible? If you are above a city, you can view it as a whole. And if you could stand above the earth, you would see the entire planet from that vantage point. But there’s no way that you can look at the world from outside and describe its structure as the diagram supposes. There is a contradiction in claiming that all that exists are subjects, their ideas and objects, and showing that in a triangular relationship, a diagram with a God’s-eye point of view. We are looking at the world from a viewpoint that is, by hypothesis, outside of that world.Perhaps, then, this diagram is akin to the illustrations of “impossible worlds” discussed by Ernst Gombrich in Art and Illusion, with reference to examples by William Hogarth and M.C. Escher, structures that “cannot exist in our world” [5]. They look like pictures of reality but the elements depicted don’t fit together. There are illogical effects in Hogarth’s engraving False Perspective (1754). The man on the distant hill looks as large as the woman bending out of the window of the inn and can be seen to light his pipe at her candle. The trees on the hill appear to become larger the further their distance from us, and yet some of them overlap the inn sign [6].Maybe, then, Danto could simply have omitted his diagram. Were Connections to the World printed minus these three diagrams, no real loss would be suffered, though the argument might be more difficult to follow. But that doesn’t really resolve this problem, for it would be easy enough for someone else to turn the diagram into an artwork.Imagine that we’re looking at a small artwork—a drawing of a triangle. The three points are labeled subject, representation and world, and are joined by three straight lines. This seems a simple linear drawing. But the reader may ask, Is this artwork not the very diagram by Arthur Danto that you critically analyzed earlier? It is and it isn’t. Danto claimed that after the early period, when he both made artworks and did philosophy, he quit art-making. But in Connections to the World, one finds three potential artworks—the diagrams we have discussed. More exactly, these diagrams are not works of art but, as Danto makes clear, illustrations of his argument. A diagram differs in kind from a work of art. For example, the scale, color of lines and typeface would matter in an artwork but not for a diagram, which needs only to include the words “subject/representation/world” and the three straight lines linking them.Imagine, then, that an artist reads Danto’s books and chooses to make copies of his first diagram. A devoted reader of his accounts of Warhol’s Brillo Box, she takes Danto’s diagram and turns it into an artwork called Diagram—a drawing that is indiscernible from the banal image reproduced in the University of California Press paperback edition of Connections to the World. A midcareer artist who shows at a good gallery, she asks a good price for her image, a product, she says, of years of philosophical study and training as a visual artist; she asks a price considerably higher than what Amazon asks for Danto’s book, $31.95, postage included for Amazon Prime members. Soon enough, the Museum of Modern Art purchases the drawing, puts it on show and sells full-size limited-edition replicas in its shop.And then, taking my story full circle, after visiting the exhibition of Diagram, a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia University sends to The Journal of Philosophy her submission “The Artworld” whose title, she says, is itself a Danto indiscernible, though its contents are very different, she argues, from that found in Danto’s 1964 publication, which it duplicates word-for-word [7]. In her version of that essay, taking up the passage where we read of “the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art,” she writes: “It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art and keeps it from collapsing into the real object, which it is (in a sense of is other than that of artistic identification)” [8]. Here, she says, we see the true difference between the artwork Diagram and the mere diagram in Connections to the World. After all, she observes, we know that “to be a work of art is to be (i) about something and (ii) to embody its meaning” [9]. And here she quotes from her treatise in progress, tentatively titled After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. “What I have learned from Danto,” she observes, “is how to use visual and verbal indiscernible images and texts whose meaning depends upon the context in which they are presented.”Here I extend the account of my text “Indiscernibles and the Essence of Art: The Hegelian Turn in Arthur Danto’s Aesthetic Theory,” The Library of Living Philosophers. Volume XXXIII. The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto (Chicago: Open Court, 2013) 215–228. Danto discusses thought examples like Diagram copying “The Artworld” and After the End of Art in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981). Thanks are due to Lydia Goehr, Joachim Pissarro and Robert Stecker for comments on earlier drafts.

Contributors’ Notes

Tymon Adamczewski is assistant professor at the Department of Anglophone Literatures of Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland, where he teaches literary and cultural studies. He is the author of Following the Textual Revolution: The Standardization of Radical Critical Theories of the 1960s (McFarland 2016) and of several articles (in AVANT, Image [&] Narrative, NJES, Theoretical Practice, among others) which address diverse aspects of critical theories in various contexts. He has recently edited a monograph titled All Along Bob Dylan: America and the World (Routledge 2020) and is interested in the critical discourses of contemporary humanities, music and ecocriticism.Christine Bacareza Balance is Associate Professor of Performing & Media Arts and Asian American Studies, and core faculty in the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) at Cornell University. Her writings on former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, Asian American YouTube artists, Bruno Mars, Glee’s karaoke aesthetics, and spree killer Andrew Cunanan have been published in various journals. Balance is the author of Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America (Duke University Press, 2016) and currently is working on a book titled Making Sense of Martial Law that analyzes the 21-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and how U.S.- and Philippines-based performances and events critique the “Marcosian imaginary.” With Lucy San Pablo Burns (UCLA), she co-edited the recently published artist-scholar collection, California Dreaming: Movement & Place in the Asian American Imaginary (University of Hawai’i Press, 2020).Erin Bauer is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Her research examines the construction of sociocultural identity through systems of globalization. In particular, she explores the interconnection between genre and identity as a contemporary implication of global processes (media/migration, hybridization, and appropriation). Her current book project addresses the worldwide spread of Texas-Mexican accordion music, called conjunto, a regional tradition historically forming a symbol of working-class cultural identity. Her writing appears in Rock Music Studies, several essay collections, the Latin American Music Review, and Latino Studies. Bauer holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Claremont Graduate University.Sophie A. Brady is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Princeton University. Her scholarly interests include music and decolonization, twentieth-century experimental composition, global popular music, and the history of sound reproduction technology. Her dissertation examines the history of the musical avant-garde outside of Europe and North America, focusing on experimentation and recording at Radio Dakar and other Francophone African radio stations in the second half of the twentieth century.Zack Bresler is a Ph.D. Fellow in the Department of Popular Music at the University of Agder, Norway, supervised by Professor Stan Hawkins. Motivated by an obsession with immersive and interactive media, such as surround and 3D sound, virtual reality, and interactive art, Bresler is a popular musicologist whose research focuses primarily on pop music as it is presented in audio-visual new media with an eye towards the aesthetics of music productions, compositional design, listener experience, and staging.Steacy Easton is a writer and visual artist, living in Hamilton, Ontario. They have been published across North America, in commercial and academic spaces, about what Country means, for the past 15 years.Julia Ehmann is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg and holds a scholarship from the German Research Foundation. Her research interests include the study of popular music histories, cultural heritage, as well as issues in fandom and reception studies.Natalie Farrell is a Ph.D. student in music history/theory at the University of Chicago. Her work has been published in Music and Letters, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and The Flutist Quarterly. Her research on neoliberal trauma and musicians’ unions has been funded by grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Eastman School of Music’s Paul R. Judy Center for Innovation and Research. Her other research interests include Northern Irish prison music, affect theory, and popular music. In her free time, she likes to knit and spend time with her dog (who is named after Leonard Bernstein).Kate Galloway is a faculty member at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she teaches in the Electronic Arts, Music, Games and Simulation Arts, and Sciences/Critical Game Design programs. Her research and teaching address sonic responses to environmentalism, sound studies, digital culture, sound art, and interactive media.Eric Harvey is an associate professor in the School of Communications at Grand Valley State University. His book Who Got the Camera? A History of Rap and Reality will be published by the University of Texas Press in October 2021. His scholarship has appeared in Black Camera, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Cultural Industries Journal, and Convergence; and he has also written about music, media, and culture for Pitchfork, Slate, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and The Village Voice.Antoine Haywood is a doctoral student and Presidential Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. A scholar of media, Antoine’s research focuses on understanding the contemporary relevance of public, educational, and governmental (PEG) access media. Using ethnographic methods and drawing on his 15 years of experience working in community media, he evaluates how local governments, nonprofit organizations, and citizens use geographically defined communication infrastructures to enhance civic participation, democratic communication, collective learning, and care. Haywood’s current projects focus on understanding how social impact occurs when Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities in Philadelphia use community-based info hubs to access digital platforms and tell stories about local issues. He is also a musician, vinyl record collector, video maker, and a proud native of Palm Beach County, Florida.Stephanie Hernandez is a Ph.D. student of English literature and music at the University of Liverpool. Using an interdisciplinary approach, she is researching the echoes of Romanticism in the popular music of the 1960s and 1970s. While completing her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English literature, she worked at both The Beatles Story and Handel & Hendrix in London, which fostered her interest in the cultural legacy of historically musical spaces. Stephanie is also a music journalist, whose recent publications include Ultimate Classic Rock, Warner Music UK, Rhino Entertainment, and others.Kristina Jacobsen is an ethnographer, singer-songwriter and cultural anthropologist. An associate professor of ethnomusicology and anthropology (ethnology) at the University of New Mexico and a faculty affiliate in American studies, her research focuses on language reclamation, expressive culture, popular music, and arts-based research methodologies. Her first book, The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language and Diné Belonging (UNC Press, 2017), is based on two and one-half years of singing and playing lapsteel guitar with Navajo (Diné) country western bands on the Navajo Nation and was the winner of the 2018 IASPM-US Woody Guthrie Award for Outstanding Book on Popular Music. Jacobsen is a touring singer-songwriter, fronts the all-female honky-tonk band Merlettes, and is the founder and co-facilitator of the UNM Honky-Tonk Ensemble. Supported by the US-Italy Fulbright Commission and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, she recently completed one year of ethnographic fieldwork on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia for the book project, “Sing Me Back Home: Ethnographic Songwriting and Language Reclamation in Sardinia, Italy.” While in Sardinia, she also recorded an album (her fourth) of original songs collaboratively written with Sardinian songwriters and language activists, House on Swallow Street (released in spring 2021) with the Sardinian label, Talk About Records.Vincent Jenewein is graduate student in philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. He is also a music journalist and a DJ/producer of electronic dance music.Steve Jones is UIC distinguished professor of communication, research associate in the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory and adjunct professor of computer science at the University of Illinois—Chicago, as well as adjunct research professor in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was founding editor in 1987 of Tracking: Popular Music Studies, later renamed The Journal of Popular Music Studies. He is currently editor of New Media & Society, an international journal of research on new media, technology, and culture, and co-editor of Mobile Media & Communication, a peer-reviewed forum for international, interdisciplinary academic research on the dynamic field of mobile media and communication.Maria Kouvarou holds a Ph.D. in music from Durham University. Her research interests include popular music and society and critical theory, among others. As independent researcher she has published articles in Popular Music and Society, Historia Critica and Popular Music. She is also a creative writer and a performer.Jonathan Leal is a scholar-musician and post-doctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities (and in Fall 2022, assistant professor of English) at the University of Southern California. He is the co-creator of Wild Tongue, an album of original music by nine Latinx bands from South Texas, and Futuro Conjunto, a Chicanx transmedia album named one of the best Latinx music releases of 2020 by Pitchfork, Texas Highways, and Raymus Media magazines. His arts and culture writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Air/Light Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, The San Francisco Classical Voice, and elsewhere. He is currently completing his first book, Dreams in Double Time, on music, race, and interiority.John Macintosh is a lecturer in English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he completed his Ph.D. in 2019.Kimberly Mack is an associate professor of African American literature and culture at the University of Toledo. She’s the author of Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020). Mack is writing her second book, The Untold History of Early American Rock Criticism (under contract with Bloomsbury Academic), about the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and white women who helped develop American rock criticism and journalism during the 1960s and 1970s. She has contributed her work to various music publications, including Music Connection, Relix, No Depression, PopMatters, and Hot Press.Andrew Mall is an avid record collector and associate professor of music at Northeastern University in Boston, where he teaches courses in ethnomusicology, popular music, and music industry studies. He is the author of God Rock, Inc.: The Business of Niche Music (University of California Press, 2021) and co-editor of Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives (Routledge, 2021). He is also book review co-editor of the journal Ethnomusicology, and vice president of IASPM-US.Jennifer Messelink is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at McGill University. Her research focuses on race and gender in postwar easy-listening music. In particular, she examines generic formations, stylistic differences, and the historical significance of mood music and exotica—distinct types of popular instrumental music of the 1950s. Her research is supported by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada.José Vicente Neglia is a lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Hong Kong. An ethnomusicologist by training, his current research concerns the politics of memory in popular music, for which he has conducted extensive research in Japan and North America on a genre of rock called garage rock. He is currently working on a project funded by the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong on reissue recordings as a distinct form of media in rock music.Ryan H. Nelson is clinical ethics fellow at Baylor College of Medicine. He completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Utah in 2019.Matthew T. Phillips is a writer and artist based in Melbourne Australia. He has completed a Ph.D. in anthropology at Deakin University. He writes about the intersections of music, technology and consciousness.Elliott H. Powell is Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts and associate professor of American studies and Asian American studies at the University of Minnesota. His work sits at the intersections of race, sexuality, and popular music. He is the author of Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). His work can also be found in many journals and edited volume, such as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, The Routledge History of American Sexuality, Jazz Research Journal, and The Black Scholar.Emmett G. Price III is executive editor of the Encyclopedia of African American Music (Greenwood, 2010) and editor of The Black Church and Hip Hop Culture: Toward Bridging the Generational Divide (Scarecrow, 2011). He Dean of Africana Studies at Berklee College of Music and is the founding executive director of the Institute for the Study of the Black Christian Experience (ISBCE).Francisco E. Robles is an assistant professor of English, Latino studies, and gender studies at the University of Notre Dame. His work appears in Latino Studies; MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States; Post45: Peer Reviewed; Post45: Contemporaries; ASAP/J; sxsalon; Killing the Buddha; and in Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities (University of Arizona Press, 2020).Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is author of Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke, 2021); MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age (Minnesota, 2016). With co-author Mara Mills, he is working on Tuning Time: Histories of Sound and Speed. He also has a new project cooking on artificial intelligence and culture. Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org.Marco Swiniartzki is associated lecturer at the professorship for Western European History, Institute for History, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. He has written the book The German Metalworker’s Union 1891-1933 (2017; translation) and many articles exploring the history of work, workers, industry and capitalism in Germany and Europe. Currently he works on his project Glocal Metal. Metal Communities in International Comparison and Transfer (1978-1995), supported by the Gerda Henkel foundation. In 2021/22 he will become fellow of the Historisches Kolleg, Institute for Advanced Study in History, in Munich. He was executive secretary of the Historical Commission for Thuringia, worked as an editor and reader, and has organized the thematic year 2018 about social movements for the Free State of Thuringia.Karen Tongson is the author of Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019), and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011). In 2019, she received Lambda Literary’s Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction for her body of work to date. She is chair and professor of gender and sexuality studies at USC. Her contributions have appeared in NPR, LARB (Los Angeles Review of Books), The Los Angeles Times, The AV Club, Entertainment Weekly, L.A. Weekly, BuzzFeed Reader, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Public Books, among other public and scholarly venues. She co-hosts and executive produces the podcasts Waiting to X-Hale with Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh, and the limited series, The Gaymazing Race with Nicole J. Georges.Mikkel Vad is a musicologist, specializing in jazz and popular music history. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, where he is wrapping up a dissertation titled April in Paris, Autumn in New York: European Jazz in the US, 1945-1970s. He teaches problem-based courses on historiography, cultural theory, and sound, where students learn to think critically about music across genres, time periods, and cultures. His research and publications revolve around the themes of history (especially reception history and historiography), space and place (especially cultural geography and transnational music), technology and media (especially theory and analysis of the recording), and race and ethnicity (especially whiteness studies).Melissa A. Weber is a writer, researcher, and educator whose areas of interest include twentieth-century Black popular music, New Orleans music, and histories of hip hop and Washington D.C. go-go. She currently teaches history of urban music at Loyola University New Orleans and serves as curator of the Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz with Tulane University Special Collections. She has written for Red Bull Music Academy, Wax Poetics, and liner notes projects for labels such as Vinyl Me, Please; and has presented papers at Pop Conference and annual meetings for IASPM; the National Council for Black Studies; the Society for Ethnomusicology, Southeast and Caribbean Chapter; and the Dayton Funk Symposium at University of Dayton. Weber continues to host her Soul Power radio show at WWOZ FM New Orleans, as she has for the past 25 years.Eric Weisbard is professor of American studies at the University of Alabama and co-editor of The Journal of Popular Music Studies. His books include Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music; Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music; and Use Your Illusion I and II (2007) in the 33 and 1/3 series. He organized the Pop Conference from its inception in 2002 through 2018, editing three books of conference writing: This Is Pop, Listen Again, and Pop When the World Falls Apart. Before that, he was a rock critic: music editor of the Village Voice, record reviews editor for Spin, editor of the Spin Alternative Record Guide, and a writer for Spin, the Voice, and other alt-weeklies—some of that work is collected on Rock’s Backpages.Clinton Bryce Williamson is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. His dissertation, Nebulous Figures: A Cultural History of an American Riotocracy, 1848-1929, explores the ways in which a so-called lumpenproletariat crafted refusals to work as strategies for restaging value and assembling improvisatory commons in America during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Assembling a broad, multi-genre cultural archive, it argues that representations of and from those living on the margins of the wage modeled potential worlds rooted in wage labor’s absence.

Are University Students Who Are Taking Philosophy Courses Familiar with the Basic Tools for Argument?

Philosophy courses help students develop logical reasoning and argument skills or so it is widely assumed. To test if this is actually the case, we examined university students’ familiarity with the basic tools for argument. Our findings, based on a sample of 651 students enrolled in philosophy courses at six Greek universities, indicate that students who have prior experience with philosophy are more familiar with the basic tools for argument, and that students who have taken philosophy courses at the university have stronger argument-recognition and argument-evaluation skills compared to university students with no prior experience with philosophy. Moreover, our findings suggest that students get more familiar with the basic tools for argument as their level of engagement with philosophy increases, and that they get significantly better at evaluating arguments when they become graduate students in philosophy. However, our findings also suggest that the majority of students in philosophy classrooms haven’t developed fluency in (at least some) basic argument-related concepts and skills. To remedy this, we argue that philosophy instructors need to re-think (a) the place that the teaching of argument has in philosophy courses, and (b) the way that they teach students about argument.

Interview with Invited Speaker Michela Massimi, Philosophy as a Way of Life

Abstract Michela Massimi is a Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Edinburgh and was the keynote speaker for Philosophy as a Way of Life. She is currently the PI for an ERC-funded project ʽPerspectival Realism. Science, Knowledge, and Truth from a Human Vantage Point.ʼ Massimi has extensive experience working on interdisciplinary projects and has frequently engaged in public philosophy. In this interview, she discusses the future of research in the UK post-Brexit, the challenges and rewards of interdisciplinary research, shares some thoughts on the history of philosophy and science and our relationship with it, and emphasises the importance of bringing philosophy into the public sphere. She also offers advice for early career researchers and graduate students in philosophy.

Alignment of Citation Behaviors of Philosophy Graduate Students and Faculty

Objective – This study analyzes sources cited by graduate students in philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB) in 55 PhD dissertations and master’s theses submitted between 2005 and 2010, to discover their language, age, format, discipline, whether or not they were held by the library, and how they were acquired. Results were compared to data previously collected about sources cited by philosophy faculty at UCB, in books published between 2004 and 2009, to identify how closely citation behaviors aligned between the two groups.
 
 Methods – Citations were counted in the PhD dissertations and master’s theses. Citations to monographs were searched against the local catalog to determine ownership and call number. Comparison numbers for faculty research were collected from a previous study. Results were grouped according to academic rank and analyzed by format, language, age, call number, ownership, and method of purchase.
 
 Results – Graduate students cited mostly books, though fewer than commonly found in other studies. Citations were almost entirely of English language sources. Master’s students cited slightly newer materials than doctoral students, who in turn cited newer materials than faculty. The library owned most cited books, and most of those were purchased on an approval plan. Doctoral students most frequently cited resources outside the discipline of philosophy, in contrast to master’s students and faculty.
 
 Conclusions – The citation behavior of graduate students in philosophy largely, but not entirely, mirrors that of the faculty. Further study of citation behavior in humanities disciplines would be useful. Understanding the behavior of philosophers can help philosophy librarians make informed choices about how to spend library funds.

Implicit Bias and Gender (and Other Sorts of) Diversity in Philosophy and the Academy in the Context of the Corporatized University

Equal employment opportunity strategies required by Title VII, designed to address explicit or overt discrimination on the basis of sex, have not significantly increased the numbers of women faculty or graduate students in philosophy. Philosophers have recently begun exploring the possible implications—both practical and theoretical—of unconscious or implicit bias, for the lack of gender diversity in philosophy.

Master-Slave Dialectics in Charles Johnson's "The Education of Mingo"

slave is a part of master, a living but separated part of his bodily frame. (Aristotle, Politics 1255b-10) In a postscript to The Phenomenology of Black Body (1993), Charles Johnson describes difficult circumstances under which he originally composed that essay in 1975. A graduate student in philosophy at SUNY-Stony Brook, Johnson was in midst of one of most difficult years in his life--a year marked by unemployment and hardship, as well as by birth of his son Malik (611). (1) During this year of increased family responsibilities and decreased financial resources, Johnson nevertheless found time to write first complete draft of Oxherding Tale, a novel that he would see published seven years--and several revisions--later. More surprising, perhaps, is that Johnson somehow made time during this difficult year to read Sartre's Being and Nothingness, Heidegger's Being and Time, and MerleauPonty's Phenomenology of Perception--all in little over a month. Thus, if 1975 was a year in which Johnson was to draft what some believe to be his finest novel, it was also a time in which he solidifie d an interest in philosophical descriptions of intentionality and subject-object -- what Johnson describes as the correlate of and its content, noesis-noema, or subject and (600). (2) Johnson draws upon several philosophical accounts of subjectivity in The Phenomenology of Black Body, citing -- among others -- Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Fanon, MerleauPonty, Sartre, and Du Bois. He concludes that experience of black embodiment should be understood as a distinctive variation on subject-object -- one that develops within and out of a color-caste system. As Johnson explains, The experience of Black becomes, not merely a Self-Other conflict, nor simply Hegel's torturous master-slave dialectic, but a variation on both these conditions, intensified by particularity of body's appearance as black ... [and] as lacking interiority (605). Within a color-caste system, Johnson suggests, subjectivity of Blacks is denied, as they are one-sidedly seen by whites and appear as body sans mind for (608). ambiguity of lived -- as both subject and object -- is thus reduced by white Other to status of a thing. Influenced by var ious twentieth-century responses to Hegel's phenomenological analysis of encounter with Other, Johnson's reading of phenomenology of black as a special variation on subject-object anticipates more recent inquiries into what bell hooks calls looking relations (125) and Gayatri Spivak identifies as the mechanics of constitution of (294). Johnson's understanding of phenomenology of Black also provides an important context for understanding his early short story The Education of Mingo. Originally published in Mother Jones shortly after first appearance of The Phenomenology of Black Body, tale's direct allusion to structures of intentional consciousness (6) serves as a textual invitation to read this philosophical fable in context of that earlier essay. (3) Indeed, The Education of Mingo can be read as Johnson's fictional engagement with -- and self-conscious re-writing of -- various philosophical analyses of subject-object r elations, including Hegel's well-known master-slave dialectic. Masters and Slaves ... just where master has effectively achieved lordship, he really finds that something has come about quite different from an independent consciousness. It is not an independent, but rather a dependent that he has achieved. (Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind 236-37) central character in The Education of Mingo is Moses Green, a poor white Southerner living in antebellum America. Although he inhabits a country shaped by historical diversity -- a fact made clear when he pays for his purchases with Mexican coin and eats hominy made from Indian corn - Moses nevertheless feels threatened by what he perceives as an increasing American pluralism (3). …

Advancing the Dialogue: An Editor's Reflections

In the spring 1969 semester, as a first-year graduate student in philosophy, I first encountered phenomenology within unique circumstances for which I remain profoundly appreciative. Although I had heard the term before ? in its Hegelian context?I arrived at the University of Texas at Austin from a tradi? tional (historically-focused) undergraduate philosophy department without, to the best of my recollection, any recognition of the names of Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, or Ricoeur. In retrospect, I suspect that my undergraduate department avoided the dominance of analytic philosophy that characterized most philosophy departments at that time by (in effect) ending philosophical history with the nineteenth century. That's a slight ex? aggeration: we did study twentieth century Philosophy of Science; the Phi? losophy and Literature course introduced existentialism via Sartre; and the American Philosophy course emphasized Dewey. That limited exposure changed radically in Spring 1969, when I had the extraordinarily good fortune to enroll in a lecture course, Introduction to Phe? nomenology, taught by Richard Zaner, as well as a seminar on the Logical Investigations taught by Quentin Lauer S. J., who was visiting from Fordham University. The result was near-total immersion in what was for me a totally new, and yet immensely compatible, way of thinking ? even, an alternative attitude and very way of being: Husserlian phenomenology. (The immersion is only "near" total because the semester's work was rounded out by a semi? nar on Marx's ontology taught by Dieter Hendrich and the auditing of Charles Hartshorne's seminar in process philosophy). Very early on, I learned that this new way of thinking and being, phenom? enology, was not "natural." Dick Zaner solemnly instructed us on this truth. Phenomenology, he said, was "an unnatural act" that enabled us ? if we were patient and diligent in applying ourselves to attending to "the things them? selves" ? to discern what was so "natural" as to be unnoticed. More specifi? cally, he carried on the interest of his own teacher, Alfred Schutz, in applying that power of discernment to a phenomenology of the social world. This fo? cus would lead him, within a few years, toward the intersection of phenom? enology and clinical ethics, toward describing "the things themselves" as constituted by being human (even, remaining human) in the midst of medical exigency, and into using that descriptively warranted knowledge to work for

Poetry at One Remove

Poetry at One Remove John Koethe (bio) The installation of poets in the academy is now so complete that it is easy to forget that the relation of poetry and contemporary literature—let alone poets and contemporary writers—to departments of literature was once considered problematic. It was not really until the establishment of the New Criticism that contemporary poetry became an acceptable object of academic literary studies, and even then the methods of reading it applied, and the readings of the works of high modernism those methods yielded, tended to ignore issues of authorial presence and of the ways in which works of literature were actually produced. True, most of the major poets of the generation succeeding the high modernists—Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop—spent at least parts of their careers in English departments. But more often than not this was as teachers and scholars of literature, as with Berryman and Schwartz, or, as with Lowell and Bishop, as individual teachers of writing, whose roles were sui generis and left them only distantly connected to the departments to which they were formally attached. It is only recently, with the explosion in the number of creative writing programs, that the idea of poetry as the basis of an entire academic career has emerged, a career in which one receives formal instruction in the writing of poetry both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, and having thus acquired the requisite credentials, joins the professoriate in a capacity structurally no different from that of a professor of German, philosophy, or economics. My own situation as a poet has always placed me at one remove from formal literary studies and the teaching of writing. In high school I was deeply fascinated by literature, particularly modernist fiction, and did a certain amount of writing myself. But these were secondary to my primary interests in mathematics and physics, which I intended to pursue as a career. In college my interest shifted to philosophy, and I began writing poetry seriously. At that time there were at Princeton a number of undergraduate poets, most of them (even those who were English majors) united in their disdain for the English department and the contemporary poets of whom its faculty approved. R. P. Blackmur did serve as a source of encouragement and inspiration, though of course he was himself an autodidact whose relationship to academia was [End Page 93] a somewhat uneasy one. Several little magazines were edited on the campus, some with ties to poets of the New York School, and discussions of poetry were usually intense exercises in what nowadays would be called theory. As a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard I found the relation of students who were poets to the university to be different, with a much greater sense of allegiance to the institution and to the writers associated with it. I found this atmosphere uncongenial, and came to think of my role in the university almost entirely in terms of my philosophical studies, while associating myself as a writer with the poets and artists I knew in New York, in the completely uninstitutional setting of the small part of the literary world they constituted there. And I have continued to think of my role as a philosopher as a professional and academic one, and of the writing of poetry as at some level an essentially gratuitous act. And while it may be making a virtue of necessity, I have a vague feeling that this sense of estrangement from the idea of writing as an academic profession is not entirely disadvantageous, and that it has had a distinctive effect on the way in which I think of poetry and on the actual poetry I write. At least that is what I want to try to explore here. There are certainly incidental effects of coming to poetry from outside the arena of literary studies, and of coming to it from the practice of philosophy in particular. There is a kind of orthodoxy in contemporary poetry that favors the concrete, the vivid, the evocative, and the particular, and avoids the discursive and the abstract. I think that it...

"An Unsuitable Job for a Philosopher"

A panel at the Eastern division meeting of the American Philosophical Association was convened last winter to address the question, "How Can (and Should) Graduate Programs in Philosophy Train for Non-Academic Jobs?" Called in response to the prolonged scarcity of academic jobs, the panel was intended to respond to and elaborate upon Richard Schacht's essay, "W(h)ither Graduate Study in Philosophy?" published in the APA's Proceedings and Addresses in May of 1998. My aim is not so much to criticize Schacht's position regarding effective strategies to address the scarcity of academic jobs (and the questionable future of graduate study in philosophy that accompanies this scarcity), as it is to examine the ground of the failure-exhibited both in Schacht's essay and the accompanying APA panel---to investigate these questions philosophically, that is, to apply the tools of philosophical analysis to problems facing the profession. After reviewing Schacht's treatment of the problem, I will bring the analytic framework of social theorist Pierre Bourdieu to bear on the questions Schacht's essay provokes concerning philosophical practice. Analysis of philosophical practice in terms offered by Bourdieu, together with the account of the recent history of philosophy provided by John McCumber, will enable us to suggest possible mechanisms that function to check the practice of philosophy. Articulation of these mechanisms, I shall conclude, suggests modes of resistance native to philosophical practice that may offer the possibility of a substantive response to current questions regarding the future of graduate education. Schacht's "W(h)ither Graduate Study in Philosophy?" Taking account of the fact that a significant number of graduate students in philosophy are unable to secure academic employment or become uninterested in doing so, Schacht proposes several modifications to graduate education. As he sees it, graduate training in philosophy currently operates on the model of a "pipeline," where departments function as professional schools, preparing graduates to take their places in academic positions. In the absence of sufficient "market demand" for individuals with such training, Schacht reasons, a different model--the "open field"--could be instituted to accommodate those students interested in pursuing post-baccalaureate study in philosophy absent the expectation that this study would end in employment as professional philosophers. Such a model could entail rethinking the requirements of the Ph.D., or granting a degree such as the MPhil. Offering the MPhil. would benefit students who opted to cease their study of philosophy beyond the M.A., and could also provide departments with the research and teaching assistance they require, something that is currently provided by doctoral students banking on a future in academia. Schacht's essay is admirable for the seriousness with which it approaches the problem, and the genuine concern he demonstrates both for the profession and for the individuals who commit considerable time and resources to the pursuit of a degree in a discipline that could very well fail to offer them anything in the way improved job prospects in or out of philosophy. It falls short of its own goals, however, in failing to address substantively the role of philosophy departments in training graduate students for non-academic employment. While Schacht writes that "careers in law, business, government, academic administration and publishing are but a few examples" (Schacht 1998, 3) of professions that find the training and credential of the Ph.D, in philosophy beneficial, he does not suggest concrete ways that the "open field" model could serve as preparation for employment outside academia.1 The reticence Schacht displays with respect to venturing even preliminary suggestions for how training in philosophy could be made (or be understood to be) conducive to work outside the academy is significant, I believe, for the implicit difference it reveals, not simply between philosophy and the "real world" but between philosophy and other academic disciplines. …

Coloring Outside the Lines

Review| April 01 1991 Coloring Outside the Lines Race to the Screen at the Euclid Theatre, Toronto, Canada, Jan. 26-Feb. 3 Darrell Moore Darrell Moore Darrell Moore is an activist and graduate student in philosophy at Northwestern University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1991) 18 (9): 4. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1991.18.9.4 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Darrell Moore; Coloring Outside the Lines. Afterimage 1 April 1991; 18 (9): 4. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1991.18.9.4 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 1991 by The Regents of the University of California1991 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch by Wayne Hudson

660 BOOK REVIEWS times recalls that of De veritate. (As Marrone points out, this work is representative of Grosseteste's earlier and more 'Augustinian' period.) These passages have suggested to most scholars that even in his efforts to come to grips with Aristotle, Grosseteste continued to hold to his early views on the place of divine illumination in man's knowledge of simple truth" (p. 195). He then goes on to explain why it is we ought not to take Grosseteste to mean what he appears to mean, even if, as he admits : "Every historian who has written about Grosseteste's thought" has tended to do so. His recommendation is that we consider such passages in the text as attempts at imagery or metaphor, to be read in the corrective light of what Robert says elsewhere-or rather, fails to say elsewhere about divine illumination in explaining how man knows truth. Here again, the simpler lesson would seem to be that Grosseteste, like William of Auvergne, remained committed to St. Augustine's illumination theory, despite the newly discovered insights from Aristotle. The foregoing critical remarks, it must be emphasized, reflect this reviewer 's opinion only as to Marrone's general thesis, i.e., his contention that William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste are in the business of replacement rather than synthesis. The running comment he provides on how the two men handled the exposition of truth is very well done, and will be of help to anyone who seeks to learn what they thought about the subject. As a final note, I might refer the reader to another recent study, viz., The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste by James McEvoy (Oxford, 1982), who, it seems to me, strikes a better balance in the way he presents one of Marrone's two scholars in this complex period of transition. FRANCIS E. KELLEY St. Bonaventure University St. Bonaventure, New York The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch. By WAYNE HUDSON. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982. $27.50. This is an impressive book whatever one thinks of Bloch's philosophy. Ernst Bloch was one of the most elusive thinkers in twentieth century Marxism; at times he seemed studiously vague not only in his prose but in thought as well. All the more reason then to be grateful to Hudson for his systematic, clear presentation and analysis of Bloch's philosophy. The origin of this work was Hudson's doctoral dissertation on Bloch written under Leszek Kolakowski at Oxford in 1975. Thus, one needs to BOOK REVIEWS 661 qualify the author's claim that this book is an introduction of Bloch to the English-speaking world since it is anything but an introduction for the general reader. Rather, the detail of argument and the frequent allusions to and comparisons with other philosophers and philosophical schools make the book most attractive to teachers and serious graduate students in philosophy. Hudson displays a scholar's attention to fine points of nuance besides commendable mastery of material on classical German philosophy, Marxism, and Bloch himself. One senses Hudson has fairly and carefully set forth Bloch within a context of Marxist revisionism even when the author disagrees with his subject. The research is indeed thorough, perhaps even a bit excessive-941 footnotes for 218 pages of text! To use Isaiah Berlin's parable, Bloch is best understood as a hedgehog rather than a fox-a man with a single great insight which he uses to retrieve and re-cast other ideas that became conventional. That single insight was the importance of utopian thinking. In six chapters Hudson unfolds Bloch's approach, not so much chronologically as thematically, helping the reader to see the basic insight, explaining how Bloch developed this insight into a metaphysical system, and showing where Bloch has enriched, challenged, confused, and strayed from the Marxist tradition. The opening chapter is a brief outline of Bloch's biography and a short note on the ambiguity of his use of the term " not yet." Chapter two covers the major themes in Bloch's project for a utopian philosophy while the two middle chapters expand this effort to illustrate how Bloch conceived of a " Marxist metaphysic." The last...

Editorial: To confront ethical issues in medicine.

When I was a graduate student in philosophy, at Harvard in the late 1950's, medical ethics was a subject of no interest whatever. Our regular fare was Russell and Frege on the logical foundations of mathematics, or Wittgenstein on the uses of language. Normative ethical questions, whether about medicine, war and peace, or welfare policy, were considered out of bounds for the prevailing analytic philosophy. Nor was the medical profession clamoring for the participation of philosophers and others in grappling with medical ethics.When some newly found colleagues and I conceived the idea of the Institute of Society, Ethics and . . .

R. S. Peters' Concept of Character and the Criterion of Consistency for Actions

Educational TheoryVolume 25, Issue 1 p. 54-64 R. S. Peters' Concept of Character and the Criterion of Consistency for Actions Dale Kennedy, Dale Kennedy Graduate student in philosophy of education and educational psychology at the University of Nebraska.Search for more papers by this author Dale Kennedy, Dale Kennedy Graduate student in philosophy of education and educational psychology at the University of Nebraska.Search for more papers by this author First published: January 1975 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.1975.tb00667.x R. S. Peters, “Moral Education and the Psychology of Character,”Philosophy, The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, Vol. 37, No. 139 (January 1961), pp. 37–56, and in Israel Scheffler (ed.), Philosophy and Education (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1966), pp. 263–286. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume25, Issue1January 1975Pages 54-64 RelatedInformation