...or the so-called "Pluralist Guide," as they prefer to (misleadingly) call it.
One really couldn't make stuff like this up.
Philosopher Jacquelin Kegley (Cal State/Bakersfield), the President of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP) and herself one of just ten evaluators for the "American Philosophy" section of the fake "Pluralist Guide" (all of whom are also members of SAAP who end up "strongly recommending" programs at the center of the SAAP universe), has written to me and the Guide claiming that I claimed that SAAP produced the Guide and then denying that. Of course, I never claimed that, just as I never claimed that SPEP "officially" produced portions of the Guide either. What I did claim, and which is obviously true, is that all the evaluators for American philosophy are members of SAAP (including the protesting President, Professor Kegley!), and as a result what you get is a set of recommendations that reflects how the world looks to SAAP philosophers, but not to many other scholars of American philosophy. So, too, 90% (maybe more) of the evaluators for Continental philosophy are SPEP members, with similarly predictable results.
Again, I think it's good that the philosophers involved with SPEP and SAAP have shared their view of how their fields look, even if that vision may seem benighted to others. But the fake "Pluralist" Guide could avoid problems by not claiming a completely misleading title, for it has nothing to do with pluralism, as we have now noted ad nauseam. The SPEP/SAAP Guide is a more accurate shorthand under the circumstances, and so I will continue to use it along with "Pluralist [sic] Guide" and "fake Pluralist Guide."
Recent Comments