And Another One ...

This is turning into an unpleasant litany.

Closure of Philosophy at LMU

A meeting of London Metropolitan University’s Academic Board yesterday approved proposals for the closure of Philosophy, along with its fellow Humanities subjects, History and Performing Arts – that is to say, it decided that they will not recruit from 2012/2013. This decision was extremely sudden. Until Tuesday evening of this week, when colleagues on Academic Board received papers for the coming meeting, it seemed that these courses were to be preserved. This was not the decision of the Faculty, which proposed to continue these courses, but of central management.

The ground for the decision was ostensibly that of prospective profitability. However, neither Faculty nor central management have been willing to divulge the figures or the modelling methods used to reach this decision. Crude calculations on the basis of existing student numbers suggest that the University actually will lose more income than can be possibly saved in redundancies. This supposition is supported by the fact that when asked at the sub-committee of the Board of Governors meeting last night how much the cuts were expected to save, the Director of Finance replied that they had not yet made that calculation.

Philosophy has been taught at LMU and its predecessor institutions (the University and Polytechnic of North London) since the 1960’s, and has offered a Single Honours degree since 1973. Since the 1980’s, the course has been distinguished by the fact that it provides equal coverage of both Analytic and European philosophy. Although it is now smaller than in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, it still maintains this breadth of coverage.

Philosophy is extremely popular among its students and in last year’s Guardian student satisfaction survey came 29th out of 47 – far higher than the University overall.

The decision to close History and Performing Arts is just as shocking as the decision to close Philosophy. History also achieves a far better than average satisfaction ranking – 48th out of 93, and Performing Arts is widely regarded as providing training at least as good as the Royal Colleges. The cutting of these three courses, following the decisions made earlier this year to close several other Humanities courses, leaves only a small rump of surviving courses, which will almost certainly be absorbed into other Faculties. It therefore seem likely that LMU will in a very few years be a University without Humanities. This is therefore another instance of that alarming trend, whereby, not only philosophy, but also other Humanities courses are deemed inappropriate for students in the post-1992 Universities.

It is still possible that pressure from inside and outside the University will prompt reconsideration of this decision. If you wish to register a protest, please email:

Prof Malcolm Gillies, Vice Chancellor - m.gillies@londonmet.ac.uk

Roddy Gallacher, Dean of Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Languages and Education - r.gallacher@londonmet.ac.uk

With thanks in advance for your support,

Jim Grant, Course Leader
Dr Adam Beck, Senior Lecturer
Dr Chris Ryan, Senior Lecturer

A petition for an emergency meeting of the Board of Governors can be found here: http://t.co/vq1awor

Another Philosophy Department Closure

This from the Chair and Programme Leader of Philosophy at the University of Greenwich, Kath Jones:

The situation: The management of the School of Humanities has closed recruitment to the Philosophy programme with immediate effect and are writing to students who have already been given places for Sept 2011 to tell them that these are no longer available. The management are recommending that the Philosophy BA be closed down. This recommendation has to pass through the Academic Planning Committee before it is formally set in stone (but this is only a formality unless we can interrupt it). The Philosophy team were not invited to take part in any of the discussions leading up to this decision, and they have not been presented with any written document detailing the argument for the closure of the programme. The partial statistics that were presented at a school meeting yesterday are out of date and do not in any obvious way support the decision. We have requested proper documentation from the Head of School, but have still not received it. The British Philosophy Association is writing a letter asking the University not to close the programme, which will be signed by Heads of Philosophy departments at other Universities. Past and present students are meeting at the Student Union on Monday at 5pm to discuss how best to protest against the decision. Letters from past students are available (from me) to use for letters to newspapers or anything else.

Increasingly I am of the view that thinking is seen as a dangerous luxury item by neoliberalism and capitalism. If it can't turn an obvious/quick profit, or generate short-term wealth, it can and should be sacrificed. Gah ... lifeboat economics of the worst kind. Facebook group here.

Nothing Lasts, not even Goddess

I wake to an interesting post from Tim Morton, wherein he is responding to Hägglund and radical atheism.

...I'm still not convinced that impermanence implies radical atheism. I keep returning to the possibility, which Hägglund simply doesn't consider, that there is a god, and that she is mortal, and that she created the Universe, or that she is the Universe. Such a god would exist as much as a pear or a floating iceberg exists—not that much, according to the deconstructive view, but existence nevertheless.

Inevitable self-promotion here, but this is precisely the position that I develop in Goddess as Nature. Most Goddess feminists and many Pagans, of the Starhawk, Z. Budapest variety, both view and value the Universe/Nature as a mortal, impermanent deity, who is also in some sense female, and whose existence is little different than that of the pear or iceberg that Tim deploys.

This Goddess as Nature and Pagan worldview is most readily characterised as a form of pantheism, a religious/philosophical position that atheists such as Dawkins rapidly dismiss as simply "sexed up atheism". It seems, though, as philosophers such as Michael Levine and Grace Jantzen have argued, that pantheism is an eminently defensible religious and metaphysical worldview that far, far too many simply reject in a knee-jerk fashion.

Quite amazing how many of these new and radical atheist arguments only play out as responses to an ontotheology that is shackled to the triad of Abrahamic monotheisms.

[Addendum: I should add that I am not aware if Hägglund claims or argues that radical atheism follows from impermananence (not being familiar with his work). I merely note that impermanence is assimilated into many theistic worldviews, and the degree of success probably warrants examination on a case by case basis.]

Emergence and Ecoshock in 2011

Just now emerging from a general funk imposed by a confluence of small but unpleasant events, necessary tasks and research reflections over the holiday period. Uncertainty about the state and future of Higher Education in the UK has been one concern, a pervasive worry for anyone in academia, as well as new and old lecturers entering the job market and all potential students (for whom the debt burden is likely to be ratcheted up by 200%). To this one can add the typical mountain of grading that arrives just before the Christmas vacation, plus the need to find some time, somewhere, for one’s own research and writing.

My mood probably hasn’t been helped by the nature of one of my book projects. This entails staring directly into an abyss of projections for the near future: climate change and a world four to six degrees hotter, peak oil and increasing resource scarcity, further economic upheaval and probable collapse, food shortages, flooding, population migrations, terrorism and resource warfare, and even disappearing bees. It’s not comfortable material, but then that’s my basic point. I’m developing some of the arguments made by Clive Hamilton in Requiem for a Species pertaining to the psychological inability of anatomically modern humans to adequately respond to these type of problems and threats (e.g. the psychology of denial, wishful thinking, blame shifting, misplaced optimism etc.) and conjoining this with evolutionary material (evolutionary overshoot and how successful, adaptive species can become maladaptive), philosophy (existential analysis, Speculative Realism and Schopenhauer) and some religious studies and theological material (specifically the manner in which many religions feed the psychology of wishful thinking and optimism). It’s one of those projects that I feel I have to write, perhaps particularly because I have young children, but for any of you who have attended any recent climate change conferences, you probably know that it doesn’t make for happy smiley people.

For those of you interested in political responses to climate change, you should check out John Michael Greer’s review of David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith’s recent book The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy. Shearman and Smith develop the argument that liberal democracies are wholly incapable of responding to anthropogenic climate change and need to be replaced by some form of political authoritarianism that can enforce compliance with the necessary ecological principles. One of Greer’s reasonable and particularly damning criticisms of this line of argument is that it does a huge disservice to climate change activists and the environmental movement. Targeting Shearman specifically, Greer notes:

Did it never occur to him that people who disagree with his views would read the book, and make abundant political hay out of it? They have, dear reader, and it’s a safe bet that they will, as hostile reviews of The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy are already showing up on conservative websites. To be fair, it would demand superhuman forbearance for them to steer clear of what is, all things considered, a climate denialist’s wet dream: a book in which a significant figure on the other side ‘fesses up to an authoritarian agenda extreme enough to support even the wildest accusations of the far right. Climate change activism is already reeling from a nearly unbroken sequence of body blows in the political arena, and an even more serious loss of public support; by the time the climate denialists finish working it over, using Shearman’s book as a conveniently blunt instrument, there may not be much left of it.

You can also find some discussion of the demand for direct, militant eco-activism over at Alex Smith’s Radio Show Ecoshock , notably this week’s Against Civilization interviews with filmmaker Franklin Lopez and deep green writer Derrick Jensen. I suspect that most readers of this blog will be rather critical of the cries for, and the practice of, increasingly aggressive eco-activism. It is, though, one of many understandable outcomes of the ecological, economic and socio-political (i.e. capitalist, neo-liberal) processes that we are "living" through. I have spoken on several occasions about the likelihood of there being a steady increase in the membership of nature religions, such as Paganism, Wicca, Shamanism, Druidry and animisms, as the level of ecological degradation intensifies in the coming years. I think that one can very confidently also predict that eco-activism and eco-militancy will significantly increase during the same period.

Seasonal Good Wishes

Adrian at Immanence got there first with the Happy Solstice greetings of a few days ago (shame on me with my blog prefix for not doing so first), so I will simply offer good wishes to everyone over the Christmas period instead. Hope everyone enjoys this festival of medium-sized object exchange (and Christian celebration and joy too). For those of you with young children, beware the "thing-power" unleashed on the day and the importance of the phrase 'batteries not included'. A good day for meditating on the differences between sensual objects and real objects. Happy translations.

Beyond Belief

Some of you may be aware of the case of the disabled man pulled from his wheelchair by police in the recent protests (here, for footage). However, here is a BBC interview with the victim, Jody MacIntyre. Steel yourselves, any respect you may have for the BBC (I still have a lot) is likely to take a severe hit. It is quite simply beyond belief. MacIntryre acquits himself very well, the BBC journalist though ... well, I leave it to you to decide.

This inspiring piece comes from the Coalition of Resistance Conference 27th November, the speaker, fifteen year old Barnaby, talking very eloquently about his experience of the first wave of protests.

Sinks and NDEs

Not sure if Graham appreciates how his near-miss with electricity and his bathroom sink could have translated him into one of those "amusing deaths of philosophers" stories. I can just imagine the headline: "Father of Object Oriented Ontology killed by Bathroom Sink". Clearly the ultimate revenge of the Latour Litany would be to meet one's end through the mediation of the kitchen sink, but the bathroom sink is nearly as funny. Be careful Graham, you have a lot of books to write and work to do.