How Nathan Cofnas Took a Page from the Republican Playbook and Won

The first rule of the Republican playbook is: when under scrutiny, start a witch hunt to distract from your own crimes. This is precisely what Nathan Cofnas did, and with great success. Whenever someone points out that Cofnas should never have been hired by the University of Ghent on the merits of his “research” on […]

How Much Dark Money Is in Professional Philosophy? 

One of the purposes of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY is to expose eugenic principles and practices within professional philosophy. As Shelley Tremain has argued persistently since founding this blog, the profession is largely animated by the spirit of “neoliberal eugenics,” such that “few philosophy departments (in the Global North at least) remain untouched by the eugenic vision […]

From Bioethics to AI Ethics: A Genealogy of Philosophical Sell-Outs 

The history of professional philosophy is largely a history of, to use a technical term, sell-outs, people who use their mastery of argumentation and rarefied jargon to defend the rich and powerful: colonizers, fascists, and capitalists, amongst other “moral parasites” (as some non-Western philosophers put it). Just as the victors write history, the victors write philosophy […]

Another Screed against the “Woke Mob” in Academia

Recently, Paul Boghossian and some of his friends at New York University, Princeton, Harvard, and other elite institutions, published a screed against the hostile takeover of academia by the woke mob. The term they used, however, was not the woke mob – Elon Musk’s favourite scapegoat – but rather the “progressive left,” a term they chose because they are […]

Quote of the Week (and It’s Only Thursday): Hypatia’s Ableist Legacy, co-authored with Nora Berenstain

This week’s quote-of-the-week post (though it’s only Thursday) addresses the historical legacy of ableism at Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. To open our discussion in the post, consider an excerpt from Shelley’s introduction to The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability. The introduction, which is entitled “Situating Philosophy of Disability in/out of Philosophy,” offers a summary […]

Disability Justice Is Animal Liberation: Cripping the Ridglan Farms Open Rescue 

On April 18th, hundreds of activists attempted to rescue beagles from Ridglan Farms, an animal research and breeding facility in Wisconsin. David Killoren wrote about his experience as one of those activists, and defended the use of open rescue to liberate animals[i] from carceral settings. This includes Ridglan Farms, where beagles are confined in 2×4 cages for their […]

Philosophical Eugenics: Grievance Philosopher Gets Job at UGhent Despite Shoddy Work, Still Sees Himself as Victim 

In this extremely competitive job market, Nathan Cofnas was recently hired to a postdoctoral position at Ghent University (UGhent) in Belgium. Confas is best known for his research on “race realism” – specifically, the claim that Black people are less intelligent than White people due to genetic inferiority, or, as he euphemistically puts it, there are “group differences […]

Langton on Silencing

Some truisms regarding linguistic communication: 1: The content of an assertion is a function of both the sentence actually uttered and its context.  2: The context is not under the speaker’s direct and total control. 3: The content of an utterance is attributed to its speaker in a way that makes them responsible of their […]