Dan Fincke hosts Philosophers’ Blog Carnival # 133. All you know-nothing peeps who think philosophy is just wankery, read and learn.
Just a few selected teasers –
- Thinking about the “vagueness” charge leveled against Occupy Wall Street, Benjamin S. Nelson, at Talking Philosophy explores virtues that listeners need to have before they can go blame communicators for failing to express themselves adequately.
- Andrew Taggart has an extensively detailed discussion of his Philosophical Counseling business (replete with FAQ), in which he explains both how it works and how he charges for it, makes for a fascinating read. It seems pitched towards potential clients so it also offers a glimpse not only at how one might do and charge for philosophical counseling but how one might advertise it.
- Being A Woman In Philosophy continues to chronicles the seemingly pervasive stomach-churning sexism in philosophy departments. This month there was the story of a male philosophy graduate student who walked into a room full of male graduate students and one female student, and loudly asked “Who’s read for the gang bang?” Read how the department handled it.
- Rust Belt Philosophy examines the extent of parents’ rights to decide what their children can learn in school in response to claims that because parents have great responsibilities for their children they have great rights to determine how they are educated in all matters. The occasion of the discussion is the question of sex ed.
Bon appetit.
Ophelia, the Talking Philosophy link leads to an article about zombies. Appropriate for Halloween, but not the OWS article I was expecting!
hahaha, stacy, here’s the specific link: http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=3327 It was in the same paragraph as the link Ophelia took.
Sorry about the typos in the portions Ophelia quoted. It was a mad four hours putting this whole thing together. I have fixed them.
Mm, yummy. The Rust Belt Philosophy’s parental rights discussion gave me some useful ideas, the “who’s ready for a gangbang?” is a little disappointing (I expected philosophers to be better than that), Philosophical Counseling sounds intriguing (anyway wanna lend me retainer money? I’ll pay you back when I’m rich), and I’m too tired right now to properly read the OWS article. I’ll get to that in a day or two.
Clearly, *ahem*, some of it is wankery.
But then I have to put up with Niall Ferguson besmirching my profession…
Also, if ‘philosophical counselling’ leads to “doing what we say, standing by what we believe, living according to our ideals, revising our judgments when these are in error…” I can’t see it gaining much traction in academia. But again, maybe that’s the point.
Oh sure, some of it is wankery, or at least, it’s vocational makework. Bound to be, given academic imperatives. But lots of people think it’s just wankery, without having read any.