Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Blog

Sexism in Philosophy

By Karen Warren

Sexism (and particular ways male-bias in philosophy continues) is indeed alive in Philosophy. For a wonderful, first-person account of the nature, practices and effects of sexism in philosophy on women philosophers (including women past Presidents of the American Philosophical Association), I encourage people to read the (first of its a kind) edited volume by Linda Alcoff on stories of well-known women philosophers, Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). See also a recent exchange on the web-based Inside Higher Education news site: http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/10/philos . The continued problem and reality of "the absence of women in philosophy" is particularly evident in the courses taught and textbooks used in the history of philosophy. The so-called "recovery project"--a scholarly endeavor begun by a handful of women philosophers in the 1980's--continues to unearth the names and texts of several hundred women philosophers that span the traditional philosophical time periods (Ancient, Medieval, Modern and Contemporary philosophy). This project has resulted in increasing numbers of books on women philosophers in the history of Western philosophy.

Nonetheless, to my knowledge, there has not been one book/textbook that includes (in the same book) women philosophers alongside their historical men philosopher contemporaries. (This is in contrast to the exceptionally few textbooks in the history of Western philosophy that include some women philosophers, even though they remain a disproportionately low number relative to the number of men philosophers included in the same book, especially from 600 B.C.E. to 1500 A.C.E.) A book that will correct that--what I think is the first book of its kind in any language--is the book Gendering the History of Western Philosophy: Pairs of Men and Women Philosophers from the 4th Century B.C.E. to the Present, with Lead Essay, Chapter Introductions and Commentaries, ed. Karen J. Warren (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming Spring 2008). The commentaries in this book are written by "commentators" who are experts on "the inclusion" of women philosophers in the history of Western philosophy; many were among those who began or contributed to "the recovery project" at its earliest stage. Their scholarship in this book and elsewhere contributes to the resolution of the male-gender bias exclusion of women in the history of "our" discipline-- an exclusion that continues, often unnoticed, by the majority of those who teach and write in the area of the history of Western philosophy. 

With the publication of Gendering the History of Western Philosophy in 2008, it will no longer be scholarly acceptable or accurate to teach courses in the history of Western philosophy by using familiar but totally or largely gender-exclusive books, as if there were no women philosophers during the past 2600 years.

Chinese Military Hackers Attack Foreign Government Computers?

By  Xu Wu

First Germany, then United States, then France, then Australia. One after another, countries join the chorus accusing that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was behind the recent malicious attempts to hack into foreign governments’ computer systems. Although by no means bullet-proof, most of the reports, or at least their normally anonymous sources, hinted two “facts”: first, these hacking activities were carried out by Chinese military or its affiliated agencies; second, the Chinese government, or more specifically, some top-level officials, knew about and support these operations. Although not a computer expert, I found both the premises, and the logic, not to mention the conclusion, are problematic.

Suppose, (1) that these hacking activities did occur as accused—let’s ignore the suspicious two- to three-month time lag between the crime and the disclosure; (2) that this kind of online activities is universally rejected, forbidden, loathed, and demeaned, and no civilized country on the earth will engage in this type of low-class, immoral information-gathering intrusions; (3) that these attempts did originate physically from China—(let us just pretend the above conditions are all met, for the sake of discussions)—I still could not figure out how they pinpointed China’s military as the guilty party and blamed the Chinese government for the wrongdoing.    

Here are my reasons, from the technologically amateurish to the politically incorrect. 

First, every morning while sitting before my office computer and checking my online inbox, I have to delete those admirably persistent spam e-mails, normally with a weird name and address. The online administrator at my institution has promised and updated many times the filtering software, but, on average, I still receive more trash e-mails than the useful ones. If the spam spreaders can somehow find a way to evade the cat-and-mouse cyber chase and hide their identities, I don’t know why the “quasi-formidable” Chinese military cyber geeks can not hide. If they are technologically savvy enough to break into some of the most sophisticated computer systems in the world, shouldn’t they know how to use proxy software and other hacking tools to erase the trace? 

Second, even if the perpetrators are indeed Chinese citizens living inside China (Guangzhou and Lanzhou, to be more specific), how can the accusers identify with certainty that those perpetrators were PLA agents, operating with the support of the government? Why couldn’t they be a small group of technologically savvy “cyber nationalists” who initiated these rampant and bald moves? Let us not forget, there are over 140 million online users in China, half of them using broadband fast-speed Internet surfing online. If you still think this scenario is unlikely, take a look at several “historical” events occurred not so long ago. In May 1999, when the news broke that Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was bombed by a U.S. B-2 stealth bomber, a group of self-organized Chinese hackers defaced the website of the U.S. Embassy in China within 12 hours, and knocked out of service the White House’s official website, the first time in its history. Two years later, when diplomats from China and United States were busy tangling on the most appropriate way to say “sorry” over the spy-plane collision incident, an estimated number of 80,000 Chinese hackers participated in the so-called “Red May Self-Defense Cyber Warfare,” fighting with an unknown number of American hackers. Several thousands of business, educational, governmental, even military websites on both sides fell prey to this unprecedented massive cyber-nationalistic anger. In a summary report, New York Times reporter even named this online conflict the “World Wide Web War I.”

It has become a thinking pattern among many Western observers that anything happened in China was the result of Chinese government’s or PLA’s calculated maneuver. Even this assumption seems reasonable twenty years ago, it is fairly outdated nowadays, given the breathtaking development and diversification in China’s economic, societal, cultural, and even political decision-making sectors. A couple of months ago, two Chinese young scholars in different occasions voiced their personal opinions on China’s huge foreign reserve. Because their position was different from the official line, a rain of protests, accusations, warnings, demands were filed in front of Chinese government’s doorsteps. If an American economist can have his or her different view on financial policy, why can’t a Chinese scholar? If opposing China’s political policy belongs to the “freedom of speech,” why opposing China’s monetary policy becomes a “foolhardy” troublemaker?

An interesting analogy can also be made between these online hacking incidents and the ongoing safety issues involving the “made-in-China” products. Yes, those defective products were made in China, but they were not made by the “Chinese government.” Although the government shares the burden of enforcing high-quality regulations, it is those tens of thousands of manufacturers or even those American importers who should be blamed for the lack of quality control and inspection. Also, although the label says “made-in-China,” it is, to a large extent, only assembled in China. In other words, just like those evasive online hackers, unless you catch them blood in hands, who knows where they are from, who they are, and what they are doing for?

Xu Wu is assistant professor of strategic media and public relations at Arizona State University and author of Chinese Cyber Nationalism: Evolution, Characteristics, and Implications.

At the Borderline of Armageddon

 

By James E. Goodby

The sixth anniversary of 9/11 coincides with a renewed debate about Iraq. The coincidence should remind us that diplomacy has proved more effective than the use of force in containing the nuclear threat.

In my book, At the Borderline of Armageddon (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006) I described how the current administration campaigned for war against Iraq. It claimed that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting a nuclear weapons program which could only be stopped by force. Even when Secretary of State Colin Powell’s own intelligence analysts expressed skepticism, no real effort was made to get to the bottom of the matter. The war decision had been made. 

My book also shows how determined the administration was to dismantle the legal structure for U.S.-Russian cooperation in controlling nuclear weapons. Fundamental changes in the U.S.-Russian relationship justified a different approach to controlling nuclear weapons, but rejecting the whole idea of joint controls was not called for.

The Bush administration came into office saying that arms control agreements were outmoded. But it has become evident in recent years that a U.S.-Russian effort to reduce their own holdings of nuclear weapons to as close to zero as is possible is necessary to block the spread of nuclear weapons to many other nations. That can only be done through verified treaties, which the Bush administration has rejected.

This administration seems unable either to anticipate events or to recall the past. It is oblivious to history. Anyone listing the most bitterly contested issues in today’s public policy debates would certainly include these: Should the United States have invaded Iraq to block its non-existent nuclear weapons program? Should the United States launch a preventive war against Iran to destroy that nation’s nuclear programs? Should U.S. diplomats negotiate with an authoritarian North Korean leader whose people are suffering under his rule? These questions rank among the handful of life-or-death decisions the Bush administration has faced, but U.S. presidents have faced very similar questions before. Their answers were very different from the ones given us by President Bush.

Eisenhower was asked to consider preventive war to block the Soviet Union’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. He refused. Kennedy and Johnson were asked to consider the same action against China’s nascent nuclear weapons program. They understood the folly of that. Reagan said and he believed that the Soviet government was an “Evil Empire,” yet he negotiated with that government because he saw that the nuclear weapon was humanity’s common enemy. Ultimately, Reagan succeeded in eliminating a whole class of nuclear-armed missiles. We are even beginning to see some progress with North Korea, now that diplomacy has been unleashed. The lessons of history are clear. The judgments of these American presidents saved the world from what surely would have been devastation on a grand scale. More diplomacy and less war will improve the world’s chances of escaping nuclear catastrophe.

 

James E. Goodby is a research affiliate with MIT's Program on Science, Technology, and Society, where he dedicates his research to issues involving nuclear weapons. Goodby has served in a variety of diplomatic and policy positions in both Europe and Washington, placing strong emphasis on international security affairs. He is the recipient of the Presidential Distinguished Service Award, the State Department's Superior and Distinguished Honor Award, and the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit from the German government. In 1995, Goodby received the inaugural Heinz Award in Public Policy.

 

Michael Mann Directs a Nike Commercial

By Steven Rybin

The phenomenon of noted film directors helming television commercials is hardly a new one; everyone from Martin Scorsese to Jean-Luc Godard have made advertisements during their careers, and even the recently deceased paragon of the European art cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni, once lensed an ad for Renault. So the fact that news comes of Michael Mann (the director of Ali, The Insider, and Heat, among other notable films) having directed a slate of new commercials for Nike’s new Zoom product line should come as no terrific surprise. The commercials themselves, which come with the tagline “Quick is Deadly” and which feature high-profile professional athletes such as LaDainian Tomlinson and Steve Nash, are reminiscent of the cinematography and cutting used in the boxing sequences of the director’s biopic Ali: the camera is dropped into the middle of the action, in between defenders and offensive linemen, generating a sense of tension before Tomlinson runs for a touchdown. This sequence is intended to give the viewer a sense of complete immersion in an exciting NFL play – and, of course, a sense that one should run out and buy Nike shoes.

These Nike ads follow the Mercedes advertisement the director made a few years ago, and commercial directing was a part of Mann’s apprenticeship before directing his first film in 1979. But Mann’s recent return to commercials after establishing credibility among cinephiles as well as his own place in the Hollywood industry is somewhat ironic. Many of the director’s initial films, such as Thief (1981) and Manhunter (1986), were compared – derisively – with the superficial patina of commercials and music videos made during the 1980s. Indeed, Mann’s Nike ads remind one of what the French critic Jean-Baptiste Thoret, in a perceptive essay entitled “The Aquarium Syndrome,” once pointed out about Mann’s work in television during the 1980s, when Mann served as executive producer of the popular and visually novel Miami Vice television series. Thoret suggested that commercial television offered the director (who did not actually direct a single episode of Vice, but who closely controlled the visual and sonic sheen of the series in his role as producer) the opportunity to experiment with style before confirming the results with a feature-length film for cinema screens. Perhaps Mann is just using the commercial format to toy with sound and vision until his next proper film begins production.

But given his industry success, Mann hardly needs this sort of template anymore, and given that, except the plug for the shoes, the “Quick is Deadly” series is largely derivative of Mann’s cinema work, it is debatable whether or not this return to television functions in quite the same way as Thoret claimed Mann’s earlier televisual work did. Instead of providing Mann with the room to experiment with image (I know of more than a few people in academia who would bristle at the thought of commercials as a site for any kind of meaningful experimentation), the making of these commercials seems more like the sharpening of already well-honed filmmaking skills.

Mann’s commercials also bring to mind the always tenuous balance held between commerce and art in the realm of Hollywood. Although an idea of the filmmaker-as-author has arguably existed for as long as the cinema itself, modern studies of film authorship were more or less initiated in the 1950s when the film critics which became the future directors of the French New Wave school (Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, among others) argued that Hollywood directors (whom they called ‘auteurs’), although working in a highly regimented and standardized studio system, were able to “smuggle” in their own personal visions in a studio system that, on the face of it, was inimical to the very idea of individual personality. This particularly romantic conception of authorship – sometimes called “the cult of personality” – doesn’t hold much weight in academic circles anymore, partially because of the very tension between commercial interests and artistic vision that much of Mann’s own filmmaking suggests. After all, these days, the words “a Michael Mann film” are nearly as much a part of the marketing apparatus of Hollywood as the presence of Tom Cruise or Will Smith in one of his films.

But these commercials, like the director’s films, suggest that Mann himself probably doesn’t buy into the cult of personality anymore than film academics do; unlike the recent series of American Express commercials directed by Scorsese, Wes Anderson, and M. Night Shyamalan, Mann’s commercials do not make use of the director’s on-screen presence, and despite the familiarity of his name, it is at any rate unlikely that most filmgoers could pick him out of a lineup (unlike celebrity directors such as Scorsese, Woody Allen, or Clint Eastwood). Although Mann has claimed in interviews that he could never have operated as an anonymous figure in the classical Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 40s, his own work (relying as it does upon the framework of familiar genres) suggests that he is comfortable enough with such anonymity, letting the style itself speak for the absent presence of the director. In terms of his film work, style speaks powerfully: in The Insider, a dramatization of 1990s television journalism, Mann was able to use style to reflect upon his own agency (or lack thereof) within contemporary image-making. Such reflection is not really possible within the form of the commercial, which suggest that Nike CEO Phil Knight could just as well be an auteur as could Mann, something that Godard and Truffaut probably would not have been able to predict in the 1950s.

 

Steven Rybin teaches in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University and is the author of The Cinema of Michael Mann published by Lexington Books.

It's Hot in There!: Air Conditioning in Public Schools

By Cheryl Conrod

I read that public school classes were canceled in Cincinnati, Ohio, yesterday and today due to excessively high temperatures. I’m sure that these are not the only schools releasing students this week because of uncomfortable conditions in public school buildings. Millions of other students are sweating away in hot, stuffy classrooms. I would wager that the shut-down schools and thousands of others, both old and new, lack any form of air conditioning.

While serving on a citizen’s committee to win approval for a school bond in the rural Midwest, I was occasionally asked if the proposed school would be air conditioned. The explicit threat was, if the new school design included air conditioning, the referendum would be defeated. In order to get the school bond passed, we assured one and all that the new school would be heated only.

No one questions heating schools. No one wants the little kids to freeze to death at their desks. But most people we talked with were dead set against installing air cooling into the public schools. It was considered a frill. Why?

“Well, I went to school on hot, humid days, and I turned out all right,” was the overwhelming response.

“Why coddle those kids,” was another. “Sweating over one's studies builds character.”

In this day and age, I find it baffling that citizens--parents, grandparents, and non-parents--would wish to deny children a comfortable work environment. Children spend nearly half of their waking weekday hours, nine months each year, in school buildings. Would a retail store, doctor’s office waiting room, government office, or public library subject its customers to a hot, steamy environment? Do more than a few diehard motorists drive around on sticky summer days without air conditioning? Surely everyone is aware that physical discomfort interferes with productivity. Why would people insist on hobbling children’s learning in this way?

Some would argue that the expense is not justified since school is not in session during the summer. But we have begun to experience longer, hotter summers. Also the trend seems to be to start the school year ever earlier, especially in the Midwest.

Many school districts today get around this air conditioning bias by designing heating/cooling systems into the schools “at no extra expense.” Others build in geothermal systems which heat and cool the schools using passive designs. This justifies cooling classrooms with an environmental twist. But the anti-air-conditioning grumbling persists.

The United States has often been accused of being anti-intellectual and suspicious of education. But as President John Adams said, “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people—and must be willing to bear the expense of it.” This expense should include creating a comfortable learning environment, including air conditioning where needed, for our public school students.

Cheryl Conrod is the author of The Winning School Bond: A Citizen's Guide to a Successful School Bond Campaign (ScarecrowEducation, 2002). She was co-chair of a successful school bond advocacy committee in rural Nebraska. She currently resides in Oregon. For more information, contact her at bcconrod@yahoo.com .