new journal: environmental humanities

Find it HERE. From the website (which is currently under construction):

Environmental Humanities is an international, open-access journal that aims to invigorate current interdisciplinary research on the environment. In response to a growing interest around the world in the many questions that arise in this era of rapid environmental and social change, the journal will publish outstanding scholarship that draws humanities disciplines into conversation with each other, and with the natural and social sciences.

balloons for public higher education

Today the students, faculty, and staff of Slippery Rock University held a rally on the quad to  express their support of public higher education in Pennsylvania, their solidarity with everyone who struggles to pay for the cost of college, and their opposition to Governor Tom Corbett’s proposed budget cuts to the state university system. The rally culminated in the release of these balloons, which represent the rising cost of public education.

This is the opposite of snobbery, Mr. Santorum. This is about equality.

the assault on public higher ed in pennsylvania

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a great article about Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett’s ongoing attack on public higher education. Read it HERE.

‘why didn’t he just say that’

Today I went back to the comment thread on Eric Schliesser’s post on the continental/analytic divide, which I commented on here. Generally I avoid comments sections because they are often just time-sucking, inefficient ways to have debates. Plus, there are inevitably (and I mean that in the strictest sense) wild non sequiturs, offensive, and infuriating remarks made that only serve to reinforce the notion that rational dialogue (and ultimately, if I can be permitted a hyperbolic moment, democracy) is doomed to fail. The comments on Schliesser’s post are mostly tolerable, but I want to highlight a series of comments made between Mohan Matthen, John Drabinski, and Daniel Nagase.

At comment 23, Matthen chooses a difficult, presumably impenetrable passage of Derrida’s Of Grammatology. This passage, on its own, is supposed to demonstrate the very problem with continental writing. (Incidentally, if it did perform in this way it would serve to reinforce Schliesser’s point that a lot of ‘continental’ philosophy trades in such performativity.) This is precisely the kind of game that is often initiated at Leiter’s blog and to which I alluded in my earlier post. Drabinski chimes in at comment 61 to say that the Derrida passage makes perfect sense, and then at 67 Matthen asks Drabinski to unpack the passage for him, although you can tell right away that a trap is being laid. Before Drabinski replies, Nagase (comment 77) asks Matthen to defend the legitimacy of his tactic, and largely, I think, succeeds in deflating Matthen’s tactic (Drabinski thinks so too).

Matthen pushes Drabinski at 82, but instead of taking the bait, Drabinski precisely lays out the game that Matthen is playing. What is so helpful about Drabinski’s reply at 89 is how he shows that what Matthen is trying to do is to get Drabinski to ‘clearly’ articulate the obscure Derrida passage only so he (Matthen) can then reply, ‘Now why didn’t he just say that’?, in which case Drabinski would look like a dupe and Derrida would be exposed as the charlatan that ‘analytic’ philosophers believe him to be. Read Drabinski at comment 89 for yourself; Matthen concedes the game at 92.

governor tom corbett: out of touch with higher ed reality

Post at the APSCUF blog here.

wolff’s plea for page numbers; or, on e-books

I concur with Jonathan Wolff that academics (and not just us) need page numbers in their e-books if they are going to replace the standard format. If they can put words on a page, why not a number in the corner of that page? I also love the idea of bundling e-books with hardbacks at a discounted rate. There are probably few people willing to buy both (duplicates, that is) at the list price, and failing a discount it’s likely that readers will find ways of making electronic versions available for free. In fact, why not throw in the e-book for free with purchase of the hardback? Perhaps this is the price publishers should pay for eliminating our ability as consumers to photocopy a chapter for use in class. Unless I don’t understand the technology fully, one of the downsides to the e-book is that you cannot make a portion of it available (under fair use law) to others for the purposes of education. This, to me, is a serious drawback.

I love my Kindle. I bought it instead of an iPad precisely so that I would not be distracted by all of the options available on the iPad. But where it fails as a technological advance is in the way it forbids me from ‘flipping’ through the text. Searching is an amazing option, but when the coordinates I’m looking for are (echoing Wolff) ‘near the top of the right-hand page somewhere in the middle of the book’, the Kindle gives me the blank stare. I don’t see how this can be regained. The other wonderful thing about Kindle books is that they’re often cheaper than the ‘material’ version. When they’re not, I’m disappointed and not yet likely to spend the money on the e-book instead of the hard copy.

Then again, perhaps ‘flipping’ is not meant to be regained. What we have to wait for is a reconfiguration of our reading practices as a reading population under the new e-book regime. Eventually–maybe even more quickly than we realize–our brains will stop taking the time to make mental notes as vague as the one quoted above, and it will generate some new mnemonic strategy for marking key passages in the text. This will be an adaptation to the new e-text, rather than an adaptation of the  text to our old reading practices. Or some compromise.

schliesser on the continental/analytic divide

I found Eric Schliesser’s short critique of a recent piece in the NYT by Gary Gutting to include a number of new ways of conceiving what continental philosophy is up to and why it cannot be easily (or completely) translated into analytic philosophy. It’s also refreshing to hear someone express a reservation about the supposed clarity of Anglo-American philosophical writing. For someone with a background in the history of philosophy, rather than the ‘standard’ analytic undergraduate training, I often find analytic writing difficult. Yes, it’s partly because I’m more comfortable reading continental thought, but it’s also because there’s a certain affected casualness that permeates a lot of analytic writing, a casualness whose rhetoric suggest that what is being said is communicable in ‘plain English’, but which often ends up remaining opaque (Schliesser’s term) and elusive/allusive.

Schliesser’s post also works to undermine the standard criticism of continental philosophy used often by Brian Leiter, who is always taking the easy shot at the style of continental writing. Schliesser makes some plausible suggestions regarding the reason, if not the necessity, of continental ‘jargon’. This is not to excuse that writing which is truly terrible, which exists, of course. It is to challenge the critics to make their complaints a bit sharper by saying something specific about the deficiencies of a particular continental author, rather than just quoting that author out of context and at his/her weakest stylistic moment.