As I said in my original posting, I think it's actually a good thing for philosophers involved with SPEP to have set out systematically how the philosophical world looks to them; I just expressed the wish that they be much clearer about what they've done. A couple of readers asked for more information about why I dubbed it the "SPEP Guide," so let me say a bit more.
The SPEP Guide is the creation of three philosophers: Linda Alcoff (Hunter College/CUNY), a former co-director of SPEP; William Wilkerson (Alabama/Huntsville), a current member of SPEP's Sexual Diversity Committee; and Paul Taylor, a philosopher who is not a member of SPEP, but who does teach at Penn State, one of the leading departments in the SPEP universe since its inception. Professor Taylor, given his expertise, probably had the most influence on the contributions to the sections of the SPEP Guide on philosophy of race, which no doubt explains why it is the least SPEP-tinged section of the guide (and probably the most useful). By contrast, at least 90% of the "Advisory Board" for Continental philosophy are SPEP members, with the result that almost all the best-known scholars of 19th- and 20th-century Continental philosophy in the Anglophone world had no input at all into this listing--none of the distinguished scholars at NYU, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, Chicago, Brown, UC Riverside, Indiana, Georgetown, and Illinois, for example, were asked their opinion. That's fine, of course; the PGR surveys relatively few of the SPEP philosophers (it does survey some). But what that means, of course, is that this is a "SPEP Guide" to where to study Continental philosophy, and that kind of guide, while no doubt useful for some students, is fraught with dangers, noted originally.
The section on Feminist Philosophy has a more mixed Advisory Board (about half are SPEPPies), and yet the results, when compared to the PGR results for the same category, suggest once again that the SPEP view of the philosophical universe largely ruled.
The section on American Philosophy was produced by an Advisory Board made up of Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP) members. If folks want to call this new Guide, the SPEP/SAAP Guide, that would seem equally apt too!
One thing that concerns and disappoints me about the new SPEP (or SPEP/SAAP Guide) is that some good "analytic" philosophers interested in gender and race seem to have thrown their lot in with some very weak philosophers who self-identify with Continental philosophy. It is hard not to interpret this as contempt for or indifference towards those of us who take the Continental traditions in philosophy seriously. What a shame.
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