While the status of women in the sciences has received broad national
attention, debate about sexism in philosophy has remained mostly within
the confines of academia. But the revelation this summer that Colin
McGinn, a star philosopher at the University of Miami, had agreed to
leave his tenured post after allegations of sexual harassment brought by
a graduate student, has put an unusually famous name to the problem,
exposing the field to what some see as a healthy dose of sunlight. Mr. McGinn, 63, rose to public prominence in the early 1990s as one of the so-called New Mysterians, a group of philosophers who challenged the notion that human consciousness could ever be fully explained. [but saw nothing supernatural in that either. See my immediately previous post.]
Mr. McGinn said that “the ‘3 times’ e-mail,” as he referred to it, was
not an actual proposal. “There was no propositioning,” he said in the
interview. Properly understanding another e-mail to the student that
included the crude term for masturbation, he added later via e-mail,
depended on a distinction between “logical implication and
conversational implicature.”
“Remember that I am a philosopher trying to teach a budding philosopher important logical distinctions,” he said.
(Or, using deductive logic, IF a pompous harrasser gets caught in the act THEN he will be a smartass.)
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