UPDATED BELOW WITH IDENTITY OF ACADEMIC WHO INITIATED THE COMPLAINT
Philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) was invited to speak in a session on "Bodies, Gender Identity, and Misogyny" at a conference, whose main them is "oppressive speech," with a sub-theme on free speech. After first accepting Professor Stock's abstract for the session, the organizer of the panel (a junior person, who was clearly pressured to do this by others) wrote back to say that Professor Stock would not be included, finally admitting that the talk was too politically controversial. (The organizers even changed the theme of the session, I suppose to justify their exclusion of Professor Stock for political reasons.) Professor Stock tweets about it here. I print Professor Stock's abstract below the fold.
If anyone knows who is responsible for this no-platforming of Professor Stock, please e-mail me. And I do hope that the many fine philosophers on these panels will withdraw from the conference in protest. (Some participants are on record as having open contempt for academic freedom, but most are not: I hope they will stand up for principle here. I'll post a follow-up about what happens.)
Here is the abstract for Professor Stock's talk:
When good philosophers do bad things: attempts to control speech about women
Ameliorative accounts of the traditional concept of WOMAN seek to improve something that needs no improvement: a concept without which communication about both scientific facts (e.g. about human biology and reproduction) and many social kinds (e.g. motherhood, daughterhood, grandmotherhood, sisterhood, girlhood, lesbianism, and their male equivalents) would be unimaginably impoverished. There are females who are not human, so we need a concept of human females; and there are human females that are not adult, so we need a concept of adult human females. That concept is WOMAN. Given that humans, understood as a sexually dimorphic species with a capacity for language, will continue to need this concept in hundreds of social circumstance, attempts by philosophers to improve it by removing reference to its central referential purpose can only be oppressive, especially when combined with a high moralising tone.
UPDATE: On Twitter, linguist/philosopher Erin McCready (Gakushuin) takes credit for getting Professor Stock thrown out of the conference. She writes: "I told the organizers that I didn't want to interact with someone who had been personally insulting to me and who I felt uncomfortable around...." Note that this is an online conference, and Professors McCready and Stock were on wholly different panels occurring months apart. More importantly, no details or evidence about the "personally insulting" behavior is adduced (including the context which might have provoked the alleged behavior), and Professor Stock tells, in fact, that she has no idea who Professor McCready is and has never interacted with her. (As an aside, we noted Professor McCready's just case against the Japanese government earlier this year.)
ANOTHER: A funny missive from a senior philosopher elsewhere: "Too rich that Stock was booted from a conference on silencing! An underappreciated affliction of the Social Justice Stasi is their hilariously impoverished sense of irony."
AND ONE MORE: Professor McCready deleted her tweet, but you can see a copy of it here. (Thanks to Tim Gilmour for the pointer.)
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