Susan Haack Etc.
Susan Haack Etc.
I recently learned that Susan Haack has just died. During my six years in the University of Miami philosophy department I never once set eyes on her. Nor did I have any communication with her. I did email her when I arrived to suggest a meeting, but got no reply. I was told she was alienated from the department and had as little to do with it as possible; the rupture occurred before I arrived and the nature of the dispute was never made clear to me. That was a shame as I would have been happy to get to know her. As it happens, I had met her in England years earlier when she gave a paper to my department there, and she had written to me when I was at Rutgers apropos of a review I’d written (warmly not critically). Not a good situation (I cast no aspersions). Anyway, this got me thinking: the department has lost most of its senior members since I was there—me, her, Risto Hilpenen, Harvey Siegel, and Ed Erwin (who was ostracized during his last years there, according to him). No one senior of comparable stature has been brought in to replace us. The only senior member that remains is Michael Slote, now 85 (according to Google). The people that remain are (what shall I say?) not exactly household names. The department wasn’t bad when I was there, though not top tier; now it’s…well, it is what it is. Is it dying? That remains to be seen, but it is hard to see how it can be very attractive to prospective graduate students. I don’t think there was any necessity about this, but my departure can’t have helped. It is not a department I would have joined from my previous post at Rutgers. I will leave my opinion of the philosophical abilities of the people now there unspoken. Suffice it to say that the label “star” does not spring to mind. What I will say is that the dearth of senior people does not bode well for the department. I see no solution to the problem and the prospects do not look good. There was already a problem about recruiting able graduate students in the good old days (there are many better places to go) and the situation cannot have improved. I don’t think things would have reached this point had I not left (unwillingly). Actions have consequences. I have no contact with anyone now in the UM philosophy department (their decision not mine), despite living only a mile away, and I am banned from the campus (no reason given). All round, it seems like a bad state of affairs, and entirely avoidable.
I was sad to see that Susan Haack had died. I have been meaning for a long time now to read what she has to say, because she seemed to be following an interesting track, and not just repeating the conventional nostrums that serve to advance one’s career in the material mode. Her death reminds me that I still need to do this, because I suspect that she has something interesting to say about, e.g., the role of evidence in the determination of the accuracy (or truth, if you will) of empirical claims, such as hypotheses. I’m interested in this because I’m trying to understand the relation of reference in a way that is broader than the way that is usual in philosophy or even linguistics. The logic of support for empirical statements seems to have been overlooked in favour of the rules of inference for formal language statements. I’m wondering if, as a philosopher, you would consider that her thought would repay a careful study, if one is interested in questions of knowledge and metaphysics. So how did she strike you when you met her? She seems from what I can gather to have been a serious truth-seeker, and someone whose soul was at one with the body she was using.
As for the department, that seems like a sad example of a common negative trend in academia lately. Who is making these staffing decisions, and on the basis of what kind of reasoning? In a time when as a community we’re struggling with a general loss of ideals, including intellectual ones, people should be trying to build up the expertise of institutions that can help in this regard.
I’m afraid I can’t help you with this as I have never read her work on evidence. There is a lot of work by others on evidence and hypothesis.
I asked Google AI why Prof. Haack was “estranged” from the Miami Phil. Dept. Here’s its answer: “Prof. Susan Haack’s estrangement from the University of Miami Philosophy Department—and the broader academic philosophy establishment—was a long-standing point of professional identity that she documented in her memoirs and essays. The primary reasons for this estrangement include . . .” It then goes on to offer five reasons (none of which involve any personal feuds), but I hesitate to paste them here because I don’t have time to make sure that they’re all adequately sourced.
She did write a book called Deviant Logic which I read as a student. Maybe she just liked to deviate.
Sad news!
I learned a lot from her Philosophy of Logics as a graduate student in the 1980s. Then, our paths actually crossed a couple of times in the ’90s. I’d attended a guest lecture of hers at the University of South Carolina, my last full-time job. I was an admirer of her critiques of so-called “feminist epistemology” where she maintained that the problems were epistemological, not political.
Later in that decade, when a paper of my own was rejected by a journal for which she was guest editor of a special issue on the subject on the basis of a ditsy, one-liner type review, I contacted her to find out what was going on and she actually remembered me. I was impressed that she admitted to me — privately, of course — that defenders of “feminist epistemology” weren’t held to the same standards as critics.
Never got around to reading her Deviant Logics or Evidence and Inquiry. My bad. She wasn’t a likely candidate for “superstar” status, not PC enough, but what I knew of her work seemed worthwhile; and if she, too, was ostracized, I’m not surprised.
She struck me as someone who could look at herself in the mirror in the morning. Incidentally, if my experience with large departments in the Southeast means anything (four in all), those larger than two or three people– Well, the phrase I’ve heard is “constrained dysfunction.”
It’s a pity I didn’t get to know her during the time I was there, but it was her doing not mine.
Were defenders of “feminist epistemology” held to a higher standard, or lower?
They are held to no standards at all as far as I can see, intellectual or moral. Any amount of bad behavior is acceptable under that banner.