Professor Colin McGinn Resigns After Allegations of Sexual Harassment

It's all about gender equality these days, and dolts like this philosopher sure make it easy for the shakedown feminists.

At NYT, "A Star Philosopher Falls, and a Debate Over Sexism Is Set Off":

Ever since Socrates’ wife was painted as a jealous shrew by one of his pupils, women have had it tough in philosophy.

Thinkers from Aristotle to Kant questioned whether women were fully capable of reason. Today, many in the field say, gender bias and outright sexual harassment are endemic in philosophy, where women make up less than 20 percent of university faculty members, lower than in any other humanities field, and account for a tiny fraction of citations in top scholarly journals.

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.

“People are thinking, ‘Wow, he had to resign, and we know about it,’ ” said Jennifer Saul, the chairwoman of the philosophy department at the University of Sheffield in England and the editor of the blog What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy?

“I think that’s unprecedented,” she added.

Keep reading.

And following the links, here's Feminist Philosophers, "Letter From Concerned Philosophers."

McGinn's reply is here. (Apparently he's been blogging about the whole affair for months.)

And skim over this blog for a bit, What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy?

I don't know. I see mostly men being jerks around women. It's stupid. And it should stop. But the feminist mindset is so stultifying it's ridiculous. The tiniest perceived slight is sexism, so it becomes a no-win situation. Men are jerks. Women are looking for anything that can be called "sexism" to feed their victimization psychology. There's no way out, and again, no one wins.

Added: Althouse has a longer meditation on this, "Sexual harassment in academia: It depends what the distinction between 'logical implication and conversational implicature' is."