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Sloppy Scholarship about Love

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Carrie Jenkins is a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia who has built a reputation in the philosophy of romance and relationships. She is a defender of polyamory, the view that the maintenance of intimate relationships with more than one partner is a moral and appropriate life style.

This is always defended with the proviso that the partners are not kept secret from one another.  After all, polyamorous person who allows him/herself to be thought to be a monogamous person by any of the partners is of course, a cheater and a skunk -- I don't understand Jenkins to dispute that.

Anyway, there is some question as to whether Jenkins is to a sufficient extent a lover of the practice of scholarly rigor.

There is, fittingly, a triangular story here. I learned of the recent dust-up about Jenkins from Brian Leiter's blog. Leiter himself holds to a philosophical position I like to think of as "Menshevik." He is an old school leftist who see social philosophy as all about the struggle of class against class, at least when it (the social philosophy) is competently done. He is often at odds with other leftists, the post-modern sort who are more interested in gender, sexuality, or race. He tends to think of all of that as a series of bourgeois distractions from the class-against-class stuff.

The third character in our triangle is Alan Soble, an adjunct professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA. Soble is a founding member of the "Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love," so he and Jenkins might well be expected to be familiar with one another's work. I won't try to expound on Soble's own position within the field, about which I am frankly ignorant. With that warning, I will say that based on some skimming, Soble seems to be a Kantian of a sort, that is, he contends that sex isn't just a matter of what makes people happy and avoids pain, but involves duties. This view doesn't exclude polyamory, but may be a ground for an argument that does.

So we have our scorecard. I refer you now to the following exchange between Jenkins and Soble, with brief commentary by Leiter. Jenkins seems to have opened herself to abuse by some extreme scholarly sloppiness.

Yes, I'm sloppy too. Fairly often. But this is a blog. And I'm a rank amateur in philosophy. Jenkins is a professor at a major university. And of course where I'm working from such things as a mere skimming of texts, I admit as much, as above.

Anyway, enjoy the exchange for your selves.

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2018/01/carrie-jenkins-alan-soble-and-the-chasm-of-crap.html

The photo above is of the University of British Columbia campus.



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