by Jon Lackman | 10 April 2009 | Uncategorized
(Belated) News from a sister discipline:
Unlike almost all other academic groups, the American Philosophical Association, headquartered at the University of Delaware in Newark, holds three meetings a year, one each for its Eastern, Central and Pacific Divisions … The Eastern Division meeting is by far the largest, taking place every December between Christmas and New Year’s in a major eastern city. Known in the profession simply as “APA,” it draws about 2,500 attendees each year – 2,200 in this recession year – and serves as the profession’s chief hiring fair …
To be sure, the panel on “Philosophical Perspectives on Female Sexuality” was not your grandpa’s APA. Indiana University’s Elizabeth Lloyd, in her paper on “Analyzing Bias in Evolutionary Explanations of Female Orgasm,” crisply outlined how male assumptions ludicrously distort “Darwinian” explanations of this explosive adaptation.
And the University of South Florida’s Rebecca Kukla – a professor of obstetrics and gynecology as well as philosophy – offered a brilliant analytic comparison, in her “Depression, Infertility and Erectile Dysfunction: The Invisibility of Female Sexuality in Medicine,” of male-directed ads for Viagra and ads aimed at female sexual dysfunction, demonstrating the ongoing belief that female sexuality, unlike male, cannot be located in a specific body part.
At the same time, as at all APAs, major philosophers jousted and expounded. Following a memorial session for Richard Rorty, an American philosopher who broke free of the field into wider public recognition, Princeton’s Cornel West, the noted African American thinker who has done the same, asked how others might do so.
One answer unlikely to satisfy West could be found at the book exhibits, where 40 publishers displayed wares.
Dominating the stand of Open Court, a philosophy press, were volumes in its best-selling, much-imitated series “Popular Culture and Philosophy,” whose constantly appearing new titles include The Matrix and Philosophy and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy – all collections of essays by philosophy profs on the import of their pop-cultural subjects.
“Our all-time best seller,” confided David Ramsay Steele, the house’s top editor, “is The Simpsons and Philosophy – more than 500,000 copies sold.”
