PEA Soup

Implicit Bias Conference: call for papers

Implicit Bias, Philosophy and Psychology

Sheffield: April 20-21, 2013

Deadline for Submission: 15 December 2012

Click through for details...

Petition: Philosophy of Race in the PGR

For those of you who have not yet seen it, I'd like to encourage you to consider signing this petition, advocating for the inclusion of the Philosophy of Race as a specialty in the Philosophical Gourmet Report.  There is some discussion of the petition here, at Feminist Philosophers.  One note I'd add is that a number of departments that are already highly esteemed by the PGR -- including, by my count, six of the top seven programs in the overall rankings, which says something -- have people doing interesting and important work in this area, as do a number of other departments.  In any event, it is a thriving, important field, which anecdotal evidence suggests has increasing interest for potential graduate students and hiring schools.

Performance Evaluations in an Entrepreneurial Work Culture

As summer comes to a close and we get ready to return to the classroom, I've been thinking more about the different shapes my colleagues' summers have taken, about how much we've written and how much real holiday we've taken.  As a philosophy department chair, one of my responsibilities is chairing the department's annual performance evaluation committee and each year I'm struck anew by how hard some of my colleagues work. I feel humbled by how much very high quality work some colleagues publish.

Institutions, Systems, Structures

Folks who work on oppression often distinguish oppression attributable to individuals from oppression attributable to institutions.  Thus, there's a lot of discussion about institutional racism or sexism, say, as well as discussion of systematic or structural racism or sexism.  Here's a quick question: anyone have any thoughts on the nature of the relation between the institutional, the systematic, and the structural?  Are these terms just being used as synonyms, at least in the relevant literature?  I have a vague feeling that it is possible to have non-systematic and non-structural institutions, but (since the relevant systems and structures are all social systems and structures, I presume), I'm not sure that there are any non-institutional (social) structures or (social) systems.  Any thoughts?

Black Women in Philosophy

In case you haven't seen it, there is an article on Black women in philosophy in the Chronicle of Higher Ed today:
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=rVDdSShyYzsDdqdVtrhbFS234msgNfm3