Ingrid

Congratulations to Belgium, which holds since midnight the world record cabinet formation after the elections now exactly 250 days ago. Being the founders of surrealism, the Belgian people decided to celebrate this with people’s parties in open air, especially a big one Gent. The poster says ‘steun onze helden’, that is, ‘support our hero’s’, but this should be interpreted as ironically as possible. The people organising and attending these parties are fed up with the Belgian politicians who are unable (or unwilling?) to form a coalition and govern the country. If you want to see another piece of Belgian surrealism, watch the Flemish comedian Geert Hoste giving an interview to CNN in which he comments on the situation and the festivities.
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For years I have been wanting to write an overview book on the capability approach and it looks like I may find some time to do that in the next 18 months (possibly quicker if I can buy myself out of some teaching). There are a few publishers interested, and one (a major commercial press of academic books) is actually quite persistent in reminding me that they are interested in this project.

But why publish with a publisher? Why not simply put the book open access on the web? I wonder whether an open access book would be (a) feasible, and (b) all things considered a good thing to do.
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“Feminist Philosophers“:http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/ has for some years been conducting a “gendered conference campaign”:http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/gendered-conference-campaign/, a campaign against conferences where all speakers are men. I support this campaign. A conference in which all speakers are men is undesirable in terms of its outcomes: it gives a biased representation of the field, the likelihoods are that wo/men cover different topics and/or use different methodologies, we don’t want to put off (female) grad students by giving them the implicit message that the field is not welcoming to them, and we want women scholars to be given an opportunity to present their work. A conference with only male speakers is also likely to be the result of a biased process in which the organisors have given free hand to gendered stereotypes that influence us when thinking about who the ‘interesting speakers’ in the respective fields may be; although the evidence on these kind of implicit bias processes is by now vast, I still regularly come across instances where conference organisors have not given this any thought.

Now it seems like we’ll have to extent this campaign to include Summerschools: to my surprise, I received a call for participation for “a Summerschool”:http://www.summer.ceu.hu/02-courses/course-sites/justice/index-justice.php on ‘Justice: Theory and Applications’ yesterday, which includes six teachers, all male. Theories of justice belong to my own area of specialisation, and I thus can say with some confidence that there are plenty of interesting, excellent contributors out there who are female. In fact, in my Research Master Course ‘Contemporary Theories of Justice’, one student remarked that he had never had a philosophy course with so many female authors on the reading list.

Clearly there may be additional hurdles: for example, it may be the case that female scholars are more likely to refuse an invitation. Or there may be areas where it really is much more difficult, bordering at the level of the impossible, to find female teachers. But that’s definitely not the case for theories of justice.

A group of scholars at the Freie Universität in Berlin is distributing via E-mail and their website alarming information about downsizing of the EU research funding in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The EU is currently drawing up its 8th framework program, in which it decides how to allocate its money – to which fields, for what type of research, what the conditions are, etc. Apparently it is not only a matter of less money going to the humanities and social sciences (which, to the best of my knowledge, is already a small percentage of what the other sciences get; sadly I forgot the exact figure, but — from the top of my head — less than 20%). In addition, the ‘impact’ or ‘valorisation’ discourse/ideology seems to take hold here too, since according to the information which is spread by the scholars from Berlin, EU funding for the humanities and social sciences would be earmarked for more applied research, and to research that contributes to the competitiveness of the EU on global markets.

It’s the last week of term at my University, and I happen to have a heavy teaching load this term, which means I have no time to properly check this out. So consider this as the mere spreading of information and the opening up of space to discuss these issues in greater depth by those of you who know more about this, and/or have currently more time at their disposal to investigate this. I’ll invite some EU research directors to join the debate.

While the humanities are under siege (in the UK; possibly all over Europe; or perhaps even in the entire world if Nussbaum is right in her book Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities), the Dutch Research Council decided last year to fund two large programs which would add to a strenghtening of the humanities. That said, our new right-wing government immediately decided to cancel their future additional investment in the humanities (whereas under the last government there was some talk that the humanities would ‘catch up’ with the other sciences, since it was clearly demonstrated that they suffered from underfunding relative to the social&behavior and the natural sciences).
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Anyone interesting in debating the future of the (European) universities may be interested in knowing about a symposium on “The University as a Business: Disaster or Necessity?”:http://www.fondationuniversitaire.be/en/forum9.php#prog. This will take place on the 18th of November in Brussels. I will be there, with some of my students.

On the same topic, Chris just posted a link on FB to a paper by Bruno Frey, called “Withering Academia”:http://www.iew.uzh.ch/wp/index.en.php?action=query&id=512, which is well worth reading too.

I was very shocked reading “this account of police brutalities in Belgium”:http://www.mo.be/index.php?id=340&tx_uwnews_pi2[art_id]=29989&cHash=c7f254ce3e. I really have nothing to add, except that I am going to write, tonight, to the two members of parliament I voted for (one for the senate and one for the chamber), and will ask them (1) what we, concerned citizens, can do, and (2) what they can do to make sure this is properly being investigated. I know most Belgian politicians have other things on their mind (the political difficulties of forming a majority coalition look more insurmountable each day), but surely that cannot be an excuse for letting the police getting away with treating innocent people like this.

In May this year, I did an interview with Amartya Sen in Cambridge (the British one) on the Quality of Life. The concrete occasion for this interview was “a workshop/conference”:http://www.nwo.nl/nwohome.nsf/pages/NWOP_86JGUU I was involved in, organized by the Dutch National Science Foundation, on the Quality of Life.
Sen couldn’t come to give a talk at this conference, but was happy being interviewed by me. So if you fancy watching 22 minutes of Sen’s views on how to conceptualise and measure the quality of life, on the Sarkozy report on the measurement of economic progress (Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up) and, at the end, on global poverty and whether the rich people really care about the global poor, you can watch it “here”:http://www.nwo.nl/nwohome.nsf/pages/NWOP_87KDRS.

Myself and some frequent CT commentators are about to leave our homes for Amman, to attend “the 2010 conference of the Human Development and Capability Association”:http://www1.ju.edu.jo/conferences1/oirsite/Home.aspx. It’s a packed program and I’m rushing in and out, so will have very little time for any sightseeing, and no time to travel outside Amman at all. Yet I hope to see at least something else than the University Buildings and my hotel – perhaps visit the most interesting Mosque or historical site of Amman? Any tips?

Here comes my long overdue update on the Dutch government formation (I owe you one on Belgium too, but there isn’t much to report, except the lack of progress, and whatever that could be taken to imply). We had “elections in the Netherlands”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/06/09/dutch-elections-first-results-and-open-thread/ early June, and the right-liberals, VVD, emerged as the biggest party. They first tried to form a coalition with the Christian-Democrats (CDA) and PVV, the party of Geert Wilders (in fact, it is not a party, but a ‘movement’: Geert Wilders is the only member and the other people do not have any formal power, and from what we can gather in the media also not much real power.) But CDA refused to enter any talks/negotiations if VVD and PVV did not first come to some rough agreement between the two of them. So that turned into nothing.
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I have almost nothing with the Tour de France, or with any other big sport event for that matter. The only relation between the Tour and me is that it started in Rotterdam this year, the city where I work. I have no interest, no expertise, no patience. But since Bill Gardner “asked for a Tour de France open thread”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/06/28/world-cup-open-thread-2/comment-page-6/#comment-322950, here it is. Enjoy.

“First results are in”:http://www.deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws/verkiezingen2010/uitslagen, and the victory of NVA is even bigger than expected: They are the biggest party in Belgium, with about 20.8%. In the Flemish region of Belgium they have about 29% of the votes (these are partial results, the latest updates can be found by following the link, and I will post an update tomorrow).

It is difficult to describe the NVA – they are undoubtedly a nationalist party with a seperatist ideal (Flemish independence), but they need to be distinguished from the extreem-right racist Vlaams Belang (which, by the way, has lost considerably). NVA is often qualified as democratic, sometimes even ‘moderate’ – but I guess how one qualifies them depends on one’s own position on the political spectrum. In any case, the first thing Bart De Wever, the political leader, will say in interviews, is that he doesn’t dislike Francophone Belgians, but that he strongly believes that the structures of the Belgian state are rotten and need to be drastically reformed. A remarkable fact is that the ideal of NVA is a strong independent Flanders in a strong Europe – so they are not at all anti-European (in contrast to other conservative/right wing parties in Europe).
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There are two national elections in the Low Countries this week — today in the Netherlands and Sunday in Belgium. The Belgian elections are actually hugely important for the future (or absense of such a future) of the country, since there hasn’t been any real functioning government in the last three years, and the Flemish voters are probably going to vote en masse for NVA, the flemish democratic nationalist party. More on this on Sunday.
In the meantime the Dutch voters had their chance to vote for a new government today, and “the first prognosis”:http://www.nrc.nl/binnenland/verkiezingen2010/article2560933.ece/Exitpoll_PvdA_en_VVD_even_groot, based on exit poll results, is that the VVD (mainstream ‘liberal’ (in the European sense) right wing party) and the PVDA (the social-democrats/labour party) would both be leading, but only with 31 out of 150 seats. The Christian-democratic party, who were the biggest in the last couple of elections, would fall back to 21 seats. PVV, the right wing anti-immigrant party of Geert Wilders would have 22 seats, and other parties 16 (populist socialist party), 11 (Greens), 10 (Left-Liberals), and 7 seats for the orthodox Christian parties. So this is extremely scattered. All this needs to be taken with a serious pinch of salt of course – it’s merely exit polls, but nevertheless still interesting, since it shows how difficult it will be to form a coalition. It’s not unlikely that a four-party coalition will be needed.
For more background information, read “this post”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/06/dutch_elections.html by Erik Voeten. The comments section is open for anything related to the Dutch elections, including predictions on what kind of coalition would be plausible, and actual results as they become available. I’ll add my bit as long as I am awake.

Amartya Sen’s recent book The Idea of Justice is a rich and wide-ranging book, that covers a broad range of issues related to social justice, public reasoning, rationality, human agency, well-being, equality, freedoms, democracy and related concerns. Sen formulates a strong critique of contemporary theorising on justice, and proposes an alternative that focuses more on identifying injustices rather than talking about (perfect) justice, and strongly stresses the importance of deliberation and public debate when addressing questions of injustice.

However, in my discussion here I will limit myself to one major claim that Amartya Sen makes in this book, namely that transcendental theories of justice are redundant (This relates especially to the preface, introduction, and chapter 4 of the book; anyone interested in academic discussions of the other chapters should pop over to “Public Reason”:http://publicreason.net/, which hosts a reading group going through the book one chapter a week). But as said, I will only focus on the ‘Redundancy Claim’, and will argue that it is mistaken, since for justice-enhancing actions we need both transcendental and non-transcendental theorising of justice. Nevertheless I endorse an implication that follows from the Redundancy Claim, namely that theorists of justice should shift their priorities from transcendental theorizing towards thinking about justice-enhancing change. I will argue that this ‘Priorities Claim’ not only follows from the (mistaken) Redundancy Claim, but also from another (correct) claim which Sen advances in The Idea of Justice about the current practice of political philosophy. I will conclude that the Redundancy Claim does need to be rejected, but that this is not a big loss, since what is really important is the Priorities Claim, which is vindicated. [click to continue…]