MOVING TO FRONT FROM JUNE 7 (ORIGINALLY POSTED JUNE 5)--ADDITIONAL COMMENTS FROM PROFESSOR COHEN AT THE END
Professor Cohen asked me to share his full explanation for this decision, which I am happy to do: Download Stewart Cohen resignation. This is a real shame, but Professor Cohen is to be congratulated for editing the journal with great success for the last quarter-century, and making it an indispensable forum for philosophical work.
(I believe the controversy surrounds an article by philosopher Robin Dembroff [Yale] attacking Alex Byrne [MIT]; you can get a sense of Professor Dembroff's "unprofessional personal attacks" [as Professor Cohen calls them] here.)
ADDENDUM: The linked list of "insults" from Professor Dembroff's piece is probably broader than what Professor Cohen had in mind; but comments like these clearly are "personal attacks" which an analytic philosophy journal might reasonably regard as beyond the pale:
“Byrne’s paper is fundamentally an unscholarly attempt to vindicate a political slogan that is currently being used to undermine civic rights and respect for trans persons.”
“All this leads me to wonder about the motives of someone who would so confidently insert themself [sic] into this high-stakes discourse while so ill-informed”.
Great stuff for blogs and Twitter, not so much for Philosophical Studies.
UPDATE: Professor Byrne's reply to Professor Dembroff (the reply that Professor Cohen had solicited prior to being overruled by the publisher and another editor) is available here.
ANOTHER: Apt comments from Professor Byrne on Twitter:
Any academic discipline needs to encourage skepticism and dissent, or it risks lapsing into an ivory tower priesthood where dogma replaces knowledge, heretics are shamed, and good faith disagreement with the pieties of the moment is seen as a sign of moral corruption.
Having now read Byrne's reply, Professor Dembroff comes off looking even more foolish: not because of their mistakes, and their incompetent reading of Byrne's argument at numerous places, but precisely because if you are going to attack someone's motives, you have to be correct that the stated reasons given for the view are unsound.
AND MORE: It's just breathtaking how shamelessly dishonest philosophers are on social media. Aaron Novick (Purdue), Sergio Tenenbaum (Toronto) and others have noted that I enjoy harsh book reviews (especially if they're right!), and somehow think this is inconsistent with a decision to share Professor Cohen's resignation letter. Put aside that my views have nothing to do with my sharing Professor Cohen's reasons for resigning. Professor Cohen objected to Dembroff's attack on Byrne's real motives (not Dembroff's "tone" and not that Dembroff's criticsims were "harsh"), and it seems perfectly reasonable for an analytic philosophy journal to bar such attacks. None of the harsh book reviews I've noted contain personal attacks of this kind. There is no inconsistency here and no "pearl-clutching" (Novick actually used that phrase to describe the post above!). I get that it's Twitter, but professional philosophers could at least try to avoid egregious misrepresentations about others.
JUNE 12 ADDITIONAL COMMENTS FROM PROFESSOR COHEN:
It has been brought to my attention that the way I stated my resignation announcement [above] could be misleading. Springer did, as I said, rescind my offer to the author to reply to the defamatory paper. They are however allowing him to submit the reply through the normal channels. Of course this does not, by any means, guarantee that it will be accepted. Part of the reason I resigned is that I believe we owed him the opportunity to respond. Moreover, Springer is allowing the editor who accepted and defended the defamatory paper, (now promoted to being one of the two new editors-in-chief), to decide (along with the other EIC) whether the reply to the defamatory paper should be accepted. And I was forbidden from playing any editorial role in the evaluation of the reply. In view of how badly the defamatory paper was handled, I was not optimistic.
I would like to mention one further thing. Here is what springer’s own policies say about the matter of personal attacks:
- Authors should avoid untrue statements about an entity (who can be an individual person or a company) or descriptions of their behavior or actions that could potentially be seen as personal attacks or allegations about that person.
I have called this to Springer’s attention on more than one occasion but they have not responded.
Recent Comments