Sarah Broadie on the Future of Philosophy

Sarah Broadie FBA, Professor of Philosophy at St Andrews University


“It is very good that more and more analytic philosophy is being directed towards the conceptually trickiest practical problems of our time, such as collective responsibility and obligations to future persons of indeterminate identity, to name but two. However, given how our subject has been developing over the last 40 or so years there is real reason to fear that philosophy will die the death of dissolving completely into more technical sub-disciplines. The great challenge is to find ways of educating excellent professional philosophers to keep an active interest in more than one contemporary branch, and in some of the great past philosophers, and to be animated by an open-ended love of adventures in ideas while fully maintaining their obsessional practice of critical clarification. The latter is essential for the subject to move forward, but without the former that subject risks ceasing to be philosophy.”

Trump meets Socrates. Talks about women.

For the sake of cheerfulness, I wrote a Socratic dialogue between Socrates and Trump. It's about women, and first appeared in Daily Nous, here. 

 

Trump Meets Socrates (They Talk About Women)
 

The prospects of having a productive dialogue with President Trump do not seem bright. Here is a man who rejects the norms of rational discourse,furiously insists on being treated with deferential respect, and frequently lies. He even denies obvious truths such as the relatively small crowd size at his inauguration. No wonder the Oxford Dictionary word of 2016 was ‘post-truth’. 

Philosophers have long worried about influential people who do not value truth. Plato thought many orators at his time were of this sort. In many ways, Trump would an ideal interlocutor for Socrates in Plato’s dialogues. Like some of these interlocutors, he’s boastful, a quick-answerer, and he claims he is smart and knowledgeable.

Unlike most of us, Socrates doesn’t run the risk of hastily dismissing views he dislikes. Since he thinks he knows nothing, he keeps asking alleged experts to define the thing they’re supposed to be experts on. He presupposes no right answer from the start. His goal is to think things through with others, rather than for others. 

It seems fitting to wonder how Socrates, the person who has long been the icon of many of the norms of rational discourse, would relate to Trump. Two days after the protest, Trump cut funding for abortion services worldwide. He must think himself competent to make health decisions for women (and others) at risk of unwanted pregnancies. Would he give Socrates the knowledge he longs for?

☙ ❧

SOCRATES: Congratulations on winning the elections, Mr President.

TRUMP: Thank you, Socrates. By the way, you are the first person in the media to congratulate me. Can you believe it?

SOCRATES: Interesting. But I am a philosopher. I am not in the media.

TRUMP: Exactly. Have you seen how the media keeps saying false things about me? I have a running war with the media. Remember when they illegally recorded me talking about women?…Very unfair!!!

SOCRATES: Yet many women voted for you in the end.

TRUMP: Women love me. Very many high quality women want to be with me. Very, very many.

SOCRATES: How fortunate you are, my excellent fellow! I don’t win that much with women, alas.

TRUMP: Let me ask you a question: how many women have you been with?

SOCRATES: A number.

TRUMP: Are you sure? ‘Cause that’s not what I heard. I heard you chase men.

SOCRATES: Who told you that?

TRUMP: Doesn’t matter. I heard it. But if you want to understand women, nobody, nobody understands women more than I do. I know a lot about women.

SOCRATES: Well, this task seems really hard to me. I’ve investigated it for a long time and still don’t know anything about the subject.

TRUMP: Trust me—I am like a smart person. My IQ is one of the highest.

SOCRATES: Oh heavens, how marvelous! What a great blessing! Then do not hesitate and tell me: what is a woman?

TRUMP: That is the dumbest question anyone has ever asked me! Boy, I thought you were supposed to be smart.

SOCRATES: Why is that a dumb question?

TRUMP: Because a woman is what I grab by the p***y. When you are a star, they let you do it.

SOCRATES: By the dog, Mr President, that’s a horrible thing to do and say!

TRUMP: Anything. I can do anything.

SOCRATES: Also answer my question properly. So far, you did not. You told me what you do to a woman. But that’s not what a woman is, is it?

TRUMP: [making a mocking gesture]…bla bla bla…

SOCRATES: Just answer me.

TRUMP: My uncle was an academic at MIT. He was an academic genius.

SOCRATES: Impressive. Maybe he could have helped us.

TRUMP: Nah, I am smarter. I’ll give you one more definition of woman, OK? I am so generous. A woman is Melania. That, I can tell ya.

SOCRATES: Well, I don’t think this works. After all, Melania an example of a woman. But Hillary is a woman too. And we certainly shouldn’t say that she is Melania, should we?

TRUMP: Crooked Hillary is absolutely not Melania! That’s not a pretty picture! Such a nasty woman! I mean, now I got elected and we don’t care. I so much respect her.

SOCRATES: Are you telling me that you actually respect Hillary?

TRUMP: I have tremendous respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do.

SOCRATES: This is excellent, my nice fellow! But how can we say that, if we haven’t yet established what a woman is?

TRUMP: Wrong! We established it twice.

SOCRATES: Help me out one more time, would you? Is there another woman in your life?

TRUMP: I told you: very, very, very many.

SOCRATES: For example?

TRUMP: This is none of your business! My mom, OK? Fantastic mom.

SOCRATES: Great. So Melania, and your mother. What do they have in common?

TRUMP: They are both immigrants.

SOCRATES: ….

TRUMP: Is that it? All women are immigrants?

SOCRATES: I suspect you wouldn’t like the consequences of that.

TRUMP: Try me.

SOCRATES: Before you said you have tremendous respect for women.

TRUMP: The tremendousest.

SOCRATES: So if you have tremendous respect for women, and, uh, “all women are immigrants,” then it follows that you have tremendous respect for immigrants.

TRUMP: I get it.

SOCRATES: You do?

TRUMP: Yes, Socrates. And since I can do anything I want to women—anything!—then I can do anything I want to immigrants.

SOCRATES: Holy Zeus! You actually did some rigorous reasoning right now!

TRUMP: Absolutely. I don’t even have to wait for them to get here. I can grab ’em where they live.

SOCRATES: Such an impious conclusion! This reasoning must have started from false assumptions.

TRUMP: Excuse me?

SOCRATES: We must have accepted some falsehood as true. From it, you correctly inferred a false conclusion.

TRUMP: We have a protester!

SOCRATES: Where?

TRUMP: You! Get him out. Get him out!

SOCRATES: We are outside, Donald.

TRUMP: Were you paid $1500 to be a thug? I’ll pay legal fees to whoever decides to sue you. Lock him up. Lock him up!

SOCRATES: Wait, my friend, don’t send people after me! I am frightened. I was just trying to find out what a woman is…

TRUMP: I guarantee you, I am getting you a special prosecutor. We are having a total and complete shutdown of people like you. You’ll soon be in jail!

SOCRATES: In jail again?!

TRUMP: Out!

SOCRATES: Well, maybe the time has come for me to go. I’ll do better to leave you alone, rather than subject you to further questions and give you pain by such an examination. However, I do have many other things I’d like to discuss with you soon. Things like race, climate change, immigration…

TRUMP: Boring! Can’t we talk about something interesting?

SOCRATES: Like what?

TRUMP: Like me!

SOCRATES: I’m sorry, Donald, but some topics even I find too puzzling.

What Rome's election of its first female mayor says about women in Italian politics →

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[This is the unedited version of a piece which appeared in Fortune.]

According to legend, the last time a woman took Rome, she was in disguise. Pope John VIII is rumoured to have been a Pope Joan who never publicly revealed her gender. One can imagine why.

Things are better now: Italy’s capital just elected its first female mayor. The lawyer Virginia Raggi won her runoff against a candidate backed by the Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in a landslide. Turin, Italy’s fourth-largest city, also elected its first female mayor, the manager Chiara Appendino. “This is the beginning of a new era”, Raggi said in her victory speech. “This is a historic moment”, echoed Appendino.

But these historic results, just like Brexit, look surprising. Italy’s civic life is male-dominated. Women compose 28% of Italy’s Senate and 31% of the House of Representatives, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Those stats put the nation at No. 42 on the IPU’s global list, which ranks countries by percentage of women in the lower house. What’s more, there have been signs that women are actually losing ground in the top level of Italian government; Renzi’s cabinet was fully half female in 2014, but has since slipped to six women out of 16.

So how did Raggi make it?

Many analysts agree that Rome’s mayor was elected because she represents the 5 Stars Movement (as does Appendino). The recent-born party mostly runs on an anti-establishment platform, promising to fight corruption and bring about transparency.

Transparency struck a chord. Gianni Alemanno, Rome’s mayor until 2013, is on trial for corruption, and the recent Mafia Capitale scandal showed that a criminal organization has strong influence with Rome’s municipal services. Raggi held the right flag, at the right time.

Yet Rome doesn’t have a female mayor by coincidence, either. Over the last few years, a number of factors played their part in weakening Italy’s gender bias.

For one, there was a reaction to Silvio Berlusconi, whose four terms as a prime minister were brimming with sex-scandals. The feminist movement If Not Now, When?  (Se Non Ora, Quando?) denounced the “repeated, indecent, flamboyant representations of women as naked objects of sexual trade, produced by newspapers, television and advertising”, and has grown quickly.

Enrico Letta’s post-Berlusconi government signaled a rise of women in Italian politics, making women’s number grow from 20% to 32%. Women of great competence began to appear in visible positions, such as the Minister of Justice and Internal Affairs.

In 2012, gender quotas were approved at the level of Italian city councils. (They have applied to company boards since 2011.) The subsequent double-preference law required one’s first and second choice in council elections to be of different genders. Women’s presence in city councils thus increased of 38.8% in 3 years. Both Appendino and Raggi, too, served in city councils before becoming mayors.

Admittedly, the 5 Stars Movement (5SM) also favors women. Despite lacking a feminist agenda, the party filters out fewer women candidates than other parties do. During its first national elections in 2013, 38% of MPs from 5SM were women. This round, 36% of 5SM’s elected mayors are women – contrast this with the 0% of Renzi’s Demoncratic Party.

5SM hindrances women less because of its firm emphasis on meritocracy and transparency. When decisions are made transparently, women who are competent are more likely to spots they might otherwise be denied. Transparent voting procedures force people to keep an eye on their implicit biases.

Needless to say, women in Italian politics still have challenges to face. Witness the fact that Raggi carefully avoided the woman card. Unlike Hilary Clinton, she never stated that a sign of her progressivism was her being a woman. Her supporters didn’t receive a pillow with the tag ‘it’s time for a woman to be in Rome’s City Council’.

In fact, you might say Raggi exactly the opposite of Clinton. She kind of played the non-woman card. The Italian feminine term for the word ‘mayor’ (‘sindaca’) is officially part of the Italian language, and advocated by prominent Italian female politicians. Nevertheless, Raggi used the masculine (‘sindaco’), deeming it safer.

By contrast, the other female candidate in Rome’s mayoral race, Giorgia Meloni, made gender part of the conversation by announcing her pregnancy. Several political figures (Berlusconi included) and a famous female comedian offered advice: stay home instead of running for mayor. Raggi’s choice of words looked better and better.

But after winning Raggi put her gender in the spotlight too:

I feel like pointing out that, for the first time, the mayor [‘sindaco’, in the masculine] of Rome is a woman. In a time in which gender equality is still a dream, this is a historic moment.

A telling reaction followed: journalists described the mayor as ‘not very sexy’, ‘a doll’, ‘a dark lady’, ‘Ms Nobody’, and ‘a shark’ – the last three labels applied in a single article. Maybe that’s why Pope John VIII—if he really was a woman in disguise—did not out her gender upon taking Saint Peter’s chair.

Media smears notwithstanding, the female presence in Italian politics promises to grow. The UN and the EU just created a partnership for women in politics. The movement If Not Now, When? remains strong. Gender-equality laws continue to do their work in city councils, and have just been extended to regional councils.

Further, 5SM is now the second most popular party in the country. Rome might be a first step towards 2018’s general elections, and more seats in Parliament for 5MS will likely imply more seats for women.

Whether 5SM’s success is good for Italy is a different matter, though. The party’s populist tendencies and unsettled socio-economic policies make Rome’s vote an experiment whose results Italians are awaiting to see.

Thus Raggi’s road ahead, like Rome’s, is full of potholes. You may have heard of “the glass cliff,” a theory that suggests that women are often made CEO of companies in crisis. Rome looks a lot like a company in crisis. While campaigning Raggi estimated its debt amounts to $13.6 billions. “Many colleagues never show up”, tells me a city council employee.

When a company in crisis has a female CEO, the researcher Christy Glass says for the Guardian, there’s more risk of double standards. Women can easily be blamed for being unsuitable leaders in the first place. Raggi faces this risk too. She’ll have to be true to her campaign motto: ‘coRAGGIo’ – ‘courage’.

Actually, Raggi is showing some courage already. Since elected, she has been calling herself ‘sindaca’ (in the feminine) and has announced – in her first international interview as mayor, for Euronews – that “it’s time for gender policies to be at the centre of the political scene”. I feel Pope Joan would cheer to this too.