Nova PhDs

I am not sure if am being particularly sensitive to this issue -- therefore noticing it everywhere -- or if it is becoming a more widespread chat. Speaking of this issue of "situated knowledge", a guest-bloger on Leiter's blog has a post on this. His conclusion about styles is not either original or convincing (BL also put something on same note in the "Comments"). But I found the first paragraph, particularly the idea of "pragmatic encroachment" to be interesting.

if you haven't yet had the chance to take a look at hubert dreyfus' presidential address in the latest apa proceedings, i'd encourage you to do so. it's a very interesting little piece on reconciliations in analytic and continental philosophy, largely by way of merleau-ponty. he deals there with the issue of "embodied coping" in the world, and particularly "master"-level coping.

in doing so, he actually has recourse to a text that some of us know from walter's "phenomgonlogy and the greek" (sic) class: heidegger's lecture course on plato's sophist, and the discussion of phronesis and the phronimos there. dreyfus' argument is that this coping is not conceptual in character, in fact not even unconsciously so. i.e. the master chess player doesn't act according to conceptual rules that have been made unconscious, or even really any rules at all -- instead, she has recourse to, as aristotle puts it in nic. ethics vi, a kind of perceptual nous, an intuitive grasping of the concrete situation we're in. so when the master tries to describe what made her act as she did, she can only reconstruct retroactively a kind of general account, not actually a set of formal rules.

anyway, he actually cites a couple of interesting empirical studies on this front, as well. his claim is that while analytics have (largely) been working on the "upper floors" of conceptuality (he has a nice version of merleau-ponty's critique of intellectualism that he calls the "Myth of the Mental," which he says preys like a vulture on the carcass of the "Myth of the Given,"), phenomenologists have (again, largely) been working on the lower floors of working out a notion of embodied coping. Both, he argues, would benefit from working out more clearly how the upper floors of conceptuality develop out of the lower floors, however.

i'd be curious to hear what some of you think about the article. i do tend to think that one thing he's missing is a more nuanced view of how language factors in to this embodied coping -- he seems to me to be treating this coping as not only a non-conceptual, but even a non-linguistic kind of thing. i think it would also be interesting to bring kant's account of the genius in the Critique of Judgment to bear on this account.

here's what i see new (excluding the latest web ads i mentioned in the october jfp thread and several holdovers from the october print edition) -- this really does look pretty grim, especially paired with the fair to poor october issue:

hofstra: 19th excluding nietzsche
skidmore: 19th-20th and phil./lit.
uc denver: philosophy of mind and/or phenomenology
toronto: 20th century, particularly phenomenology
bucknell: aesthetics (ammon!)

villanova's environmental search is going again, along with the continental search and a catherine of siena ethics fellow.

francis marion u. in florence, sc (near myrtle beach) has an ad for a generalist. i have a very good friend there in the psych. department that i'd have no problem putting a word in through, if anyone is interested in that position.

good luck to everyone!

the link to the department we have on this blog page still works, but it now sends you to the updated webpage for the department of philosophy -- not a lot of bells and whistles, but significantly more streamlined and professional-looking.

placement info. for the graduate program is still easily accessible, as it has been for the last few weeks, since the provisional redesign of the site. i think this is very good news for appearances' sake.

Here are a few things that I thought were notable about SPEP this year:

1. Selfishly, I will mention first that I thought that the von Trier panel (with Joshua Ramey and myself) went well. The panel was buoyed by the presence of the University of Colorado-Denver undergrad philosophy club, who were fairly enthusiastic.

2. The other Nova-related panels that I attended also went well. Adriel Trott's paper on Plato and Irigaray generated a good deal of discussion, as did Farhang and Greg's panel.

3. Notably, there were a number of Nova-related people who had new books out in the book display area. Continuum had Jamie's Derrida Live Theory book out, Jennifer Gossetti (I forget the second part of her last name) had a book out with Fordham, and Matthias Fritsch had a book out with SUNY. Also in the SUNY display was Walter Brogan's long-anticipated book on Aristotle and Heidegger, and Paul Livingston had a book on display as well.

4. I don't know that I have a good answer as to what is "hot" now, exactly, but it was notable that after a few years without any papers on Sartre, there was a panel commemorating his 100th Birthday (with Bill Martin, Tom Flynn, and Robert Bernasconi, which Tom Busch moderated) that drew a really big crowd.

5. Otherwise, the conference seemed pretty pluralistic in the issues discussed. There was a lot of stuff on Derrida, as one might imagine. There was also, however, a panel on Husserl and Robert Brandom, which has to be pretty noteworthy for SPEP (it was a very enjoyable panel, as well).

6. I also got the sense that it was sort of a small turnout for SPEP, possibly because it was in Salt Lake City. SLC lacks hustle and bustle (and it is really difficult to find a place to eat on Sunday), but is overall an enjoyable place. All in all I thought the conference went really well. Props to our Shannon Mussett (and her colleague at UVSC, Pierre Lamarche), for a job really well done. It will be fun to see how Nova matches up when they host in Philly next year.