Nice rant, but you forgot to mention evaluator 4's ignorance about which questions count as philosophical questions. Questions about the foundations of liberal democracy aren't philosophical questions? Please.

P#4 wrote: "American education doesn't seem to be a philosophical question, although the founding fathers excepted an educated and informed citizenry."
This itself is completely idiotic. Clearly, there is nothing like a philosophical question about what counts as being "educated and informed."
So sorry for your bad luck with the NEH. I guess government agencies don't want to fund projects that force us to reflect on whether the government agencies are doing their jobs, especially concerning whether the citizenry is "educated and informed"...

这是令人震惊的。我希望这是愚人节的玩笑。

我想知道评估者4的原则是什么。我最初的猜测是历史，因为他们被“基础”的事情所困扰，但现在我不太确定了。诚实地说，评估是在阅读提案的同时进行的，因此评估者脑海中出现的每一个想法都被作为评估记录下来，而无需进一步修改或检查它是否与之前的评论一致。例如，一方面“不清楚书写美国历史和多元文化主义与哲学——至少与基本哲学——有什么关系”，另一方面“这似乎是一个特殊的问题，而不是一个基本的问题”，但另一方面“在我看来，应该考虑的话题是相当传统的哲学话题”。
最后关于捕食者状态的思考是非常奇怪的。“美国教育似乎不是一个哲学问题”的奇怪论断也是如此，当时美国20世纪大部分时间里最著名的哲学家(意思是:一个没有哲学博士学位的人可能听说过的哲学家)是约翰·杜威。

NEH is required under the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) to provide all those comments to you. That does not necessarily mean they gave serious weight to all of them in reaching a final decision. The best way to get a good sense of what really went awry is to talk on the phone with the program officer who handled your proposal. They can't tell you everything they know, but they will try to steer you to the most important things you can do to address perceived shortcomings.
I can remember many situations where I was required to send along panelist/reviewer comments that I thought were ridiculous and that had not been taken seriously by NEH staff. Panelist #4 might or might not have been influential.
也请记住，国家人文学科委员会的成员是由总统到6年的任期任命的，该委员会向国家人文学科委员会主席提出了最终的资金建议。这意味着所有现任成员都是由乔治·w·布什任命的。如果这些被任命者是在林恩·切尼(Lynne Cheney)和/或比尔·贝内特(Bill Bennett)(两人都曾是共和党政府的国家卫生和社会健康委员会主席)的非正式建议下被选中的，那也不足为奇。
In my near-decade-long experience at NEH (overlapping different administrations), I saw a wide variety of scenarios that led to funding decisions. Some political appointees from the previous administration might have been influential in the process. Some National Council members are very activist in blocking proposals. Etc., etc.
Call your program officer and see what you can learn.

Thanks for the advice, former NEH Program Officer. Yeah, I've asked to be able to talk with program officer who handled our proposal. We've done that every time and each time, we've tried to take account of his/her feedback in revising the proposal for resubmission. So I'm not terribly hopeful. I do think there is perhaps a little underlying ideological hostility to what we do by some of the panelists. Others are more receptive, though, so I don't want to paint them all with the same brush. Only Panelist 4's comments drove me completely up the wall. I think Kieran Healy is right that P4 put hardly any thought into them. But I also thought maybe it was an historian who equates "foundations" with "historical foundations" which would explain the obsession with dead guys.

my recent rejection from the neh seemed to be based on my inability, or unwillingness, to explain why i was working on davidson instead of dennett.
i have the sneaking suspicion that had i been working on dennett, i would have been rejected due to my inability, or unwillingness, to explain why i wasn't working on davidson.

Wow, that's a truly remarkable betrayal of ignorance. Personally, I expect a lot more than that even from a casual conversation in the bar, even over too many beers. I hope Panelist #4 reads these comments and feels appropriately shamed.

只是更多的证据表明只有哲学家才应该是君主…呃，我是说国立大学的小组成员。

A few more observations: if you got a rejection in the last few months, the panel must have met last year, meaning the final selection of panelists who reviewed your proposal was approved by Bush political appointees. Although the career staff have very high standards of integrity, political leanings can have some influence overall, depending on the administration in charge.
Please also note that the NEH budget is roughly the same now, in actual dollars, as it was in the mid-80s -- about $150 million. Programs are able to fund only a small fraction of worthy projects. In Fellowships, funding only 10% of applicants is not unusual. Anybody who has been on an NEH panel knows how heartbreaking it is to realize they have nowhere near enough money to fund all the worthy projects.
Don't blame NEH. Write to your members of Congress to tell them how important funding is in the humanities. Learn all you can glean from the program officers. Ask to see funded proposals. (They're listed in their news releases and annual reports and must be released under the FOIA. Your campus research office might also have examples on file.) Ask for the list of panelists who reviewed your proposal, if it wasn't provided. And be persistent with resubmissions.

研究人员不得不花这么多钱去争取拨款，而不是做他们的研究，这真是太遗憾了。(当然，哲学家不像其他大多数学科的研究人员花那么多时间。)必须有一个更好的系统。

Reviewer 4's comments are outrageous, partly for their disjointedness, but mostly for the ignorance of current philosophy that they display. This seems to be a symptom of a larger problem: the NEH does not serve philosophy as well as it serves other areas of the humanities. There are very few grant programs under the NEH that we can take advantage of, and even when our work would seem to fall under a program description, funding is very hard to come by because so many of the reviewers are hostile to, or at least ignorant of, what we actually do in analytic philosophy. This is a symptom of an even larger problem: philosophy has become quite estranged from the rest of the humanities. We don't do enough as a discipline to sell ourselves to others, and to explain what we do. The APA is a very weak organization that does minimal PR work for the discipline. Many individual philosophers have an anti-interdisciplinary attitude. The result is that we are one of the least federally supported disciplines in the academy. We generally can't use NSF, NIH, and FDA funds as the sciences do. And we can't take much advantage of NEH funds, scant as they are. This creates a problem within our universities; departments are increasingly relying on external funding sources, and philosophy always seems like it's not pulling its weight.

奖学金项目大概是唯一一个使用特定学科小组成员和评审人员的项目。通常情况下，为了研究资助、公共资助(媒体、博物馆、会议)等，他们会组建一个小组，由该项目在截止日期前收到的各种建议所代表的一系列学科组成。所有学科都要面对这些跨学科小组，不仅仅是哲学。解释这个项目的意义是非常重要的，因为你不仅仅是在和其他哲学家交谈。
Other federal agencies do have some opportunities for philosophers. If you are working in anything related to applied ethics/bioethics/animal welfare, look to NIH for their individual research support. If you address empirical elements or work in interdisciplinary areas that involve empirical elements (e.g., cog sci), look to NSF for support. Political philosophers that involve empirical research can also look to NSF, as can philosophers of science.
Now that we have a sea change in political administrations, people working in environmental ethics should watch the contract/grant opportunities at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy, especially with regard to ethical issues of global warming.
Granted, my examples here are mainly areas of philosophy that verge into empirical and/or applied areas, but many philosophers could take advantage of them.

Ken--
This is outrageous. You might have a look at this book, which I just ran across in a local bookstore.http://www.amazon.com/How-Professors-Think-Academic-Judgment/dp/06740326...
The author's account (starting around pp. 64-65, as I recall) of how panel members in other disciplines view philosophy proposals is quite distressing, but it rings true from my limited experience serving on such committees (never NEH, though). It makes less surprising the phenomena many have observed, such as that Guggenheims rarely go to philosophers other than those who are so well known that the committee feels it can't turn them down. There is a definite problem here for us as a profession I think, although I am not at all sure what we can do about it.
Tim

你的提议被否决，部分原因是一个无知的人提出了愚蠢的理由，这确实令人震惊。就我而言，我认为你的拨款提案非常棒，我会立刻投票支持它。部分问题肯定在于NEH拨款审稿人的遴选过程，以及对哲学是什么、哲学家做什么的普遍无知，甚至在学院内部也是如此。
I have met professors who don't know the first thing about philosophy who have told me, with a straight face, that they are philosophers. It used to be the case that a well-educated academic in, say, history or literature, would be familiar with the rough lines of current philosophical research. There used to be regular gatherings at faculty clubs and other venues where academics from different disciplines could talk to each other about their research. Perhaps this happens at Stanford and the Ivies. But I guarantee you that at other universities it happens far less than it used to.
我还认为，我们的文化整体上对哲学的尊重有所减少。当然，在欧洲，对哲学家的尊重由来已久，其中许多人都是公众人物。广受关注的电视节目包括与哲学家的讨论。(我还记得我住在英国时，约翰·塞尔(John Searle)和布莱恩·马吉(Bryan Magee)的有趣采访。)哲学家们定期在报纸上写专栏!(想想《卫报》的乔纳森·沃尔夫(Jonathan Wolff)和《新闻报》的埃尔曼诺·本西温加(Ermanno Bencivenga)。)哲学家被要求参与政策制定。(想想英国的奥诺拉·奥尼尔(Onora O’neill)和加拿大的查尔斯·泰勒(Charles Taylor)。)这是令人难过的，但我们的文化崇拜那些做的人，而不是那些思考的人。(当然，有时思考是行动的先决条件，这在一定程度上解释了为什么从事新药或新技术研究的科学家受到如此多的尊重。) Of course, in the late eighteenth century, there was a much stronger connection between thinking (about democracy and the conditions of its legitimacy) and doing (fighting the British). But somehow the cultural veneration of the founding generation has not been transmuted into respect for those who continue to think about the same issues that the founders discussed. And part of the reason for this, I think, is that philosophers are not perceived as doers. When they participate in decision-making, it often happens behind the scenes (e.g., on university research-on-human-subjects committees), and so philosophers are just less visible. (And notice how, when it comes to making really important decisions about biomedical research, the powers-that-be tend to go to "experts in biomedical ethics", rather than to respected academics in highly ranked philosophy departments who specialize in normative ethics.)
说到广播，我昨天在听KPBS的一个当地广播节目。这是一个非常有趣的节目，罗伯特·麦克切斯尼在采访中谈到了他最近呼吁对媒体进行内容中立的补贴(通过给订阅报纸的人退税、报纸不收邮费等方式)。麦克切斯尼开始谈到开国一代是如何认为一个充满活力的媒体对一个合法的民主制度至关重要。所以他从政治理论或政治哲学的角度提出了一个论点。然而，在采访过程中，他对哲学和哲学家不屑一顾，说了一些类似于“这很紧急。我们现在必须行动起来拯救媒体。我们不能等待哈佛大学的哲学家在2037年彻底思考所有问题并提出一个计划。”那时我心想:“是的。这是一个新闻学教授，他陷入了哲学家是秃头的大师，每隔一百年就发表一次关于生命意义的宣言的陈旧刻板印象中。”如果麦克切斯尼可以这样取笑哈佛的哲学家，想象一下其他人是怎么看待哈佛的哲学家的，或者斯坦福的哲学家，或者，呸，UCSD的哲学家.....

I'm very disappointed by the NEH's rejection of your proposal - a look at the philosophical foundations of American society is long-overdue and may address a lot of the questions driving the culture wars and the current parties' ideological alignments.
While I'm primarily a student of history, I have experience in media and an abiding interest in philosophy. I'd love to help out, if at all possible!

In the Reagan years I proposed a comparative study of the American opposition to the Vietnam War and the French opposition to the Algerian War and NEH turned me down on the grounds that there was no basis for the comparison. a few years later someone published an excellent book on exactly that topic. NEH reviewers sometimes leave a lot to be desired.

Our department tried unsuccessfully for several years to get an NEH grant. We were finally told by someone at NEH, off the record, to remember that the appointees were Bushies. (The "predator state" comment in your report is the ideological cue there.) Our informant told us to mask any content that seemed remotely left-leaning (Rawls's name being your red flag) and replace it with safe, traditional primary texts. We followed the advice and, like magic, got the grant the next year.
I don't like anonymous posts, but I'll leave my name off to protect the innocent and the guilty.

Panelist #4's criticism is the equivalent of the Emporers comments to Mozart in the movie Amadeus. "Too many notes, Wolfgang!"
Oh wait, what am I thinking...Philosophy has nothing to do with music either.

Dear Ken and Commenters,
Hey, what's with the gratuitous swipe at historians?! Some of us love philosophy---past, present, and future-oriented. Indeed, one of my primary subfields is U.S. intellectual history. Those of us in tune with that field understand that political philosophy is ongoing. And "foundations" doesn't mean, to us, musty (but worthy) great books for the 17th and 18th centuries. Historians of America's intellectual life understand the contributions of Dewey, Rawls, etc. and promote their connections to practical matters in our work.
While the Ph.D. has certainly been devalued over the past 100 years, I take most seriously my obligations as a philosopher who studies history. Indeed, those who don't are over-educated anti-intellectuals. They're credentialists who know nothing of the joys of our distinct intellectual life.
So while your NEH reviewer may have been a conservative Bush appointee, it's just as likely that she/he was an anti-intellectual specialist who happens to hold a PhD. They don't know difference between philosophy and ideological "theory."
Yours,
Tim Lacy
Historian
Chicago, IL

So many of these comments seem defensive versions of "how could they not see how important our project is". None engage or take seriously the very helpful, repeated posts from the former NEH officer. As part of an interdisciplinary grant writing program, we often hear such complaints from philosophy students, many of whom are reluctant (or unwilling) to make serious efforts to communicate with an interdisciplinary review committee, to clearly situate their project and its broader importance. Circulating your draft proposal to a wide range of colleagues can flag some of these problems before you submit it and improve your likelihood of success.

Dear AtlSfe:
Your comment subsumes the very problem that is being complained of, namely, the need for philosophers and philosophy to justify its significance and relevance to, and contributions to, North American culture generally, and academia more specifically.
That you require philosophy students to "clearly situate their project and its broader importance" and your statement that "so many of these comments seem defensive versions of "how could they not see how important our project is" captures perfectly the attitude in North American culture that philosophy as a discipline deserves no more prominence than any other subject matter in a humanities or liberal arts program. The failure on your part to appreciate that philosophy is unlike any other subject area in the humanities - that its subject matter is questioning reality rather than merely describing it, for example - is precisely the sort of opinion symptomatic of the larger problem. Philosophy's two-fold task of discovering our relationship to reality and the elements of a "happy" life ought, to my mind, not require justification as to its significance or relevance to existence, much less North American culture.
As someone with a graduate degree in philosophy currently in law school, I have become habituated to this sort of attitude. Law professors and practitioners dismiss philosophy as theoretical babble on the one hand while relying on it at every turn without even realizing it. The best legal arguments owe a debt to philosophy.
All of this also indicts the North American educational system. Clearly there is something fundamentally wrong with a system where students who appreciate the relevance of philosophy are made to justify to individuals like yourself empowered as you are to decide the success of their project the "broader importance" of their endeavour.

Wow- maybe I'm the only one who thinks that #4 had some decent points to make. I think that his point of departure, which seems to be what the title of your proposal would connote, is entirely legitimate.
When the typical person reads, "Philosophical Foundations of American Democracy"- it is reasonable to believe that they will have the same set of expectations that he suggests, namely that it will deal with the philosophical principles which were important in the founding of American democracy. Your point, which seems to be that the title can mean that you will deal with the philosophical principles which are fundamental to democracy in America, is also correct, but I think that the average person will not read it that way. It is a bit confusing.
You used the term '21st century' more than once. Might, something like "Philosophical Principles in a 21st Century Democracy" be a more fitting title? How about "Philosophical Principles of Modern Democracy"? You could avoid the founding/fundamental ambiguity that comes from using "foundations" that way. Another possibility would be to call it, "Fundamental Principles of Our American Democracy".
I really don't think you're being fair. I'd love to hear a show talking about Rawls and Nozick and all that, but that isn't what I'd expect based on your title. I'd expect to hear about the effect of enlightenment political thought on the founding fathers.

我认为他在历史上也讲得通。我显然还没有读你的提案，但我认为你的想法是要研究政治哲学中的一些观点，这些观点与现代美国民主有着特殊的关联。
The narrative of American history- or it might be more correct to speak of endorsing historiographies- is an important topic, but I think that it is a real stretch to classify it as a fundamental issue of political philosophy. You could say that it is a culturally significant issue which has political implications, but then you'd be getting kind of far afield from what I thought the theme was supposed to be.
此外，如果你想关注多元主义，也许“多元文化主义”不是最好的标签。无论是否应该如此，这个词都与种族密切相关。在一个民主国家中，形成共识更多的是道德多元化的问题，而不是文化(或民族)多样性的问题。两者之间是有关系的，但前者本质上是哲学的，而后者更多的是社会学的。

I strongly agree with you regarding the following comments...
"American education doesn't seem to be a philosophical question, although the founding fathers excepted an educated and informed citizenry. This seems to be a special question, rather than a foundational question.
个人权利和公共责任是一个有趣的问题，哲学家们可能对此有很多贡献，但不清楚这如何成为民主的基础。"
我不知道怎么解释这些。
Obviously how well informed the citizenry is (which is inseparable from the issue of education) well affect how well different types of democracy can function! It at least partly determines the power that representatives and ordinary individuals have over one another. I can't imagine how anyone could deny that this was a factor in the creation of the Electoral College.
Individual rights and public responsibility isn't part of the foundation of democracy? It doesn't matter if one uses the 'founding' or the 'fundamental' sense of the word in this case. Either way, #4's statement is nonsense.

Dear Chloe,
我们不会单独挑选哲学专业的学生，我们会要求所有试图学习写一份可资助的提案的学生清楚地表达他们工作的重点和意义。哲学专业的学生也不能幸免，如果他们想获得奖学金和补助金来支持他们的研究。

Maybe #4 got crappy grades in philosophy while in college. In fact, that seems likely.

这场大火是一个机会。
It's an opportunity for Philosophy to sharpen its focus. If it's a matter of substance, then Philosophy had better stop mentally masturbating and get relevant, but I don't think that's really the problem. "Philosophy Talk" puts the discipline's best foot forward, I think, and highlighting in the title that you are as current as possible, as Ockraz suggests, is very constructive criticism, although to me it attacks Philosophy's image rather than its substance.
如果这是一个公共关系的问题，那么哲学需要一个时髦的改造，放下它的废话-大声和自豪!哲学这个词会让普通人打哈欠。抱歉，我说的都是事实。我喜欢"哲学讲座中国伊朗亚洲杯比赛直播"因为它不是那样的。这个节目很有趣，新鲜，节奏很好，很好地打破了当代短暂的注意力。
哲学需要变成行动主义——对我们来说，这是一种进化，让我们适应并成为多任务处理者，就像现在的每个人一样。如果哲学没有被正确地呈现出来，那么我们就要去对抗它，改变它!
People NEED to care about Philosophy. People NEED the program that was denied. We need to get active about getting it to them! Ideological bias is an affront to everything we stand for. We can fight it with an information-finding and letter-writing campaign. That's what former NEH dude said, and he knows. It's a kafkaesque adventure! Let's go!