Beth worked as a doctor for years until a transphobe turned up. Now, she's had to leave her job, leave her home, move to the other side of the world and is still being hounded and harassed by the media and cult.
She did nothing but exist as trans in the orbit of Sandie Peggie.
This story is crazy! The Jim Dolan had a Knicks fan obsessively monitored at games just because she was trans.
I keep saying how trans people have the unique ability to drive some folks insane but this is a perfect example of it. The Knicks owner personally stalked a trans woman going to Knicks games for years using his panopticon surveillance at MSG, solely b/c she's trans.
www.wired.com/story/madiso...
it’s just kind of allowed to happen on the margins and be ignored with opportunities, prestige, influence, power, and resources focus on the other kind of analytic philosophy.
there’s the descriptive fact of methodological pluralism in analytic philosophy, but there isn’t really a respect for and commitment to those with other methodologies; feeling like, while i don’t do that, we need someone who does and we need to read that work and elevate it when done well.
prestige analytic departments don’t feel compelled to cover their methodological bases as much as prestige continental departments seem to (at least from the outside). practice-based bottom up accounts are deemed “non-core” and contributing to core debates is how you advance in the field.
am i allowed to give a pragmatic pluralist account of x? yes, but prestige, power, and influence are assigned to the people who work on trying to give the one true answer to core issues. work on the kinds of questions that issue from the dominant methodology is what counts as a “major contribution”
lot of analytic people using brandom as an example of the fields methodological diversity right now, which is kind of funny to me. as a self-IDed neopragmatist, speaking from within aesthetics, while there is methodological diversity, there is a much more of a tiered system than within continental.
thank you! i feel the same way about what you have said here!
thank you! i’ve noticed the same thing as well!
there’s no real sense of respect for the tradition as a tradition, one with active experts and decades of interpretation. meanwhile, ray brassier’s work on the church lands and sellars engages pitt and respects the tradition (at least in my eyes).
analytic philosophers tend to, like the philosopher gourmet report, treat continental as a historical curiosity to be mined rather than a living tradition. hegel was bad, now hegels okay and it’s the french theory that’s bad, now maybe nietzsche okay but don’t read the stuff from the 21st century.
i hope they talk more, just as i hope there’s more cross talk between western & nonwestern traditions. but the spelunking analytic philosophers do into continental phil. often reads like it follows “grocery store music rules”. they can’t play nirvana in a grocery store in the 90’s but they will now.
i don’t think either side has a monopoly on the good questions, methodologies, conceptual tools, or the clear, quality writing. the same is true for the negative side.
this is, i think, changing, and it is far from universal, but many people still think or at least act as if their project is describing the world/the truth in a value neutral way, the view from nowhere. this is less common, as far as i can tell, among continentals.
i take it this metaphilosophical orientation is trained up through the method of cases in the classroom rather than really stated or argued for for most participants. they also tend to be more optimistic, consciously or implicitly, about the possibility of a value-free mirror of the world.
they have different writing styles but both are capable of being entirely obscure & of writing beautifully. analytic philosophers, while often methodologically varied now, still retain a bit of the moorean shift, treating common sense intuitions as evidence rather than something to be scrutinized.
i think there are differences and both sides do good and bad work at least some of the time. those differences are general and there is also a lot of overlap. they are different traditions and draw on different thinkers often, are motivated by different puzzles.
as someone trained in both, analytic philosophers saying “there is no divide” between continental and analytic philosophy always feels like them making a desert and calling it peace
this but unironically
philosophers will really see a trans colleague facing transphobia during an unfolding trans genocide and leave 167 comments on the daily nous telling all their other trans colleagues “i’m not touching you! i’m not touching you!” like an annoying kid brother on a road trip.
Public Sessions The 2026 APA Pacific Division meeting will include four sessions that are free and open to the public without registration. Descriptions, dates, and direct Zoom links for these sessions appear below. All meeting times are in Pacific Time. Zoom Meeting Password: APAP2026 INVITED SYMPOSIUM: THE ETHICS OF ONLINE CONFERENCING: A TRIBUTE TO HELEN DE CRUZ (5A) Thursday, April 9, 4:00–5:50 p.m. https://us06web.zoom.us/s/81834872823 PHILOSOPHERS FOR SUSTAINABILITY, SESSION 1 (G6A) Friday, April 10, 8:00–9:50 a.m. https://us06web.zoom.us/s/86300660500 TASKFORCE ON CONTINGENT FACULTY REPORT (8F) Friday, April 10, Noon–1:50 p.m. https://us06web.zoom.us/s/83840568597 INVITED SYMPOSIUM: BEING TRANS IN PHILOSOPHY ZINE (13D) Saturday, April 11, Noon–1:50 p.m. https://us06web.zoom.us/s/86219912139
The streaming links for all four public sessions of this week's virtual meeting of the American Philosophical Association can now be found in the program pdf!
the book is clear and easy to read. it’s well organized and flows well given that it is a collection of previously published papers. a very nice companion to Rhythm and Noise which, together, give a pretty complete view of Gracyk’s philosophy of popular music!
there’s always the chapter on cover songs, which will be controversial, but i didn’t want to use the space to relitigate what @news4wombats.bsky.social and others already have! the authenticity stuff is also worth engaging with, but, again, i tried to stay focused on the main thrust of the book.
however, these quibbles are relatively minor. the fact that the biggest bits of content in the book will shock or upset no one is a testament to how popular and assumed giving pragmatics-based accounts of performances is now (even if it may not be the extent of meaning in popular music).
i follow tyler mahan coe in reading “Okie” as a satire, but Gracyk thinks it is straightforward. i can’t help but feel like Gracyk’s reading is motivated by his preconceptions about country music, which only shows up in the book as a kind of boogie man or as a simpler alternative to other music.
beyond this, my quibbles are mostly minor, about how he handles certain cases that are near and dear to my heart. in particular, his analysis of the meaning of the red and blue pill in the matrix (which receives no mention of the trans reading) and his account of Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee”
on gracyk’s view, songs are like sentences, performances are like utterances. but writing & releasing a song is also like speaking an utterance: it happens within a pragmatic context. i want to hear the case for why we shouldn’t think that songs & performances both mean & can mean different things!
Gracyk’s criticisms of the song-centered view are very strong, and his case for performances taking on their own meaning via pragmatics is as well argued. my central concern is whether this divide, between the pragmatics and song-centered view, is exhaustive. in particular, why not be pluralists?
