Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Why major in Philosophy (J. Stanley)

No matter your political affiliation: either because Stephen Colbert was a philosophy major, or because working for a hedge fund is "like reading Russell, Frege, or Wittgenstein, except it's about money."

Supreme Court in Need of Philosophy of Language Class (J Stanley)

Apparently, a good paper on the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction might be helpful for the Supreme Court.

What Kind of Philosophy Gets in the News? (J. Stanley)

Lately, a good deal of philosophical research is reaching a larger public. It seems like every month a major newspaper or magazine publishes an article on the tremendous progress philosophers have been making on the problem of consciousness. The New York Times magazine just published an article by Stephen Pinker on moral grammar that has become wildly popular, though my sense of the article is that much of its interest to the lay public in fact consists of its lucid explanations of basic material about meta-ethics. Experimental philosophy has also recently crossed the boundary into the popular press. But obviously, there is a ton of philosophy that, by its very nature, is never going to be reported on in such a medium. Indeed, much philosophy that philosophers themselves consider to be extremely interesting and innovative is of this character. The popular press will not be producing articles on Field, Fine, Raz, or Stalnaker’s recent work, despite the fact that these philosophers produce work that is among the most admired by other philosophers. Similarly, one can’t imagine a New York Times article discussing new advances in e.g. actualist accounts of modality, epistemicist theories of vagueness, Humean accounts of reasons, or dogmatist accounts of perceptual justification. It isn’t because this kind of work is narrowly analytical. It’s equally impossible to imagine the New York Times reporting on any of the topics discussed in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (“Hot New Account of Autonomy Founders on Noumenal Mysteries”?). My suspicion is that journalists think that the American reading public can only tolerate philosophy that can be packaged in the format of a popular science bulletin. Much philosophy simply cannot be packaged in this mode. The result is that what is most likely to be conveyed in the popular press about what is ‘hot’ in philosophy is philosophy of a naturalistic bent, which does not always cohere with what many philosophers would regard as most interesting.

Is Natural Language Philosophically Relevant? (J. Stanley)

I regularly encounter philosophers who are puzzled about how language could be relevant in shedding light on philosophical problems that are not primarily about language. But I have genuine problems understanding their befuddlement. I don’t think of appealing to facts about language as a special kind of methodology. Rather, I think of it as a source of evidence that is not subject to many of the familiar worries that arise with (say) the methodology of intuitions. Language allows us insight into distinctions to which our explicit theories may blind us. As Austin writes in Sense and Sensibilia, “…the distinctions embodied in our vast and, for the most part, relatively ancient stock of ordinary words are neither few or always very obvious, and almost never just arbitrary.” Hannah Arendt begins her argument that there is a distinction between labor and work in The Human Condition by appeal to the fact that “every European language, ancient and modern, contains two etymologically unrelated words for what we have to come to think of as the same activity, and retains them in the face of their persistent synonymous usage.” And later in the same chapter, she writes “It is language, and the fundamental human experiences underlying it, rather than theory, that teaches us that the things of the world, among which the vita activa spends itself, are of a very different nature and produced by quite different kinds of activities.” I don’t see anything objectionable about these sorts of appeals to language; they can provide legitimate sources of evidence. Furthermore, though philosophers nowadays are more likely to appeal to grammar than to etymology, I also don’t see anything in contemporary philosophy that appeals in language in anything other than this kind of way.

Philosophers, guard your research (J. Stanley)

It's getting dangerous out there.

“Because the Undergraduates are Better” (J. Stanley)

I spent the first five years of my teaching career at Cornell, and greatly appreciated both my colleagues and my students; if my personal situation had allowed it, I would almost certainly have remained for my career. If someday an Ivy League institution were to develop a philosophy department that could provide the sort of colleagues Rutgers now can, I might want to go there. But I am often surprised at what I hear from some educators at these institutions. For example, one comment I hear from acquaintances who teach at such institutions despite intellectually or personally more beneficial opportunities elsewhere is that they do so “because the undergraduates are better”. I find this comment, especially made by liberal arts professors, disturbing. It uncritically accepts a value system that it is our purpose as educators to challenge and critique. It also reflects a misunderstanding about how many educated youth think.

When I applied for college, I was spending my junior year in high school abroad in Germany. I had no idea how the application process worked, and simply quickly handwrote some essays on whatever forms I could get by mail. At the time, I was a rebellious 15 year old; though I had read (and not understood) a lot of Marx, I fancied myself an anarchist, and was particulary fond of Michail Bakunin. As I was an adolescent, my taste in literature was determined largely by what I thought revealed the most authenticity of experience. When I thought about it (which was rarely), it did not at all seem that attending an Ivy League University was a necessary step in crafting a virtuous life. All of my friends growing up had the same attitude. In the end, I was accepted at SUNY Binghamton. Many of my fellow students were just like me. I don’t recall a single conversation involving status anxiety. But I do recall many about ideas. As a result of the intellectual environment, when I discovered philosophy, I didn’t conceptualize it at as a career path, a way to achieve some abstract marker of success. Rather, the life of the mind seemed both authentic and meaningful.

The kind of student that ends up in an Ivy League Institution nowadays is perhaps not as often someone who rejects conventional definitions of success and achievement. But those who are drawn to books and ideas by their suspicion of conventional values and their desire to lead a life crafted by decisions of their own are no less compelling as students. The few students I have kept track of from my freshman year at Binghamton have gone on to careers that would be considered beneath the station of many Ivy League graduates; for example the one I spent the most time with went on to become a high school English teacher. Perhaps one difference between my fellow students at SUNY Binghamton and the students at Ivy League institutions is that the former for the most part did not grow up thinking of career success as a value in and of itself. Students passionate about career success no doubt will be better at achieving it; I’m sure there are few future high school English teachers at Harvard. But to claim that such students are better is doubly in error. First, it is a misunderstanding of the motivational structure of many talented individuals. Secondly it is tantamount to giving our endorsement to a value system we as educators should be trying to expose.

UPDATE: This post must have been a bit heavy handed, since it has generated my personal record number of anonymous furious comments (which I haven't published) and angry emails. I did not in any sense mean to demean Ivy League students; there are obviously a huge group of terrifically intelligent and morally engaged students at Ivy League schools. The reason I wrote the post is because too many academics act as if teaching at an Ivy League School is obviously a superior teaching experience. In countering this, I produced the absurd unintended implicature that that Ivy League students were in some sense deficient. My only point was that, given the structure of college admissions, some very interesting students do not pursue that life path.

German Academia (J. Stanley)

I am currently in Germany giving some talks. These are my first colloquium talks in German philosophy departments, and so I am just now encountering the state of German academia as a fellow professor, rather than as the ignorant philosophy student I was in Tuebingen in the 1980s. At the time, I had the impression that being a Professor in a German philosophy department was pretty much the highest position imaginable. But I have been shocked by the amount of work that German universities require of German academics. German professors at the highest rank must teach 9 hours of classes per week, which translates to a 5-4 teaching load in two 15 week semesters. Furthermore, they seem to do most if not all of their own grading. Finally, the courses they teach range over many areas of philosophy; even if you occupy the chair in metaphysics, you still need to teach classes on ancient philosophy and Kant's aesthetics. In the states, a 5-4 teaching load is widely considered inconsistent with the possibility of a fruitful publishing career, and I have no idea how they manage it here.

UPDATE: I have received a rather surprising number of emails about what I thought was a relatively innocent post. The most frequent question seems to be about the relation between 9 hours weekly and the 5-4 teaching load. After verifying this again with my hosts, it turns out  this is because a Proseminar or a Vorlesung is two hours per week. So 9 hours weekly amounts to 5 preparations in one semester, 4 in the other. So while many American research universities have teaching loads of 6 hours per week, this just amounts to 2 preps per week, given the 3 hour class times. Furthermore, unlike private liberal arts colleges, the classes can be very large. So it does seem to me be a truly demanding job.

The Challenge of Chmess (J. Stanley)

Chmess, for those of you who haven't heard, is just like chess - except the king can move two squares in either direction. As Daniel Dennett has pointed out, Chmess provides a rich source of a priori truths to explore. However, the a priori truths of chmess are not particularly worthy of exploration. Dennett's challenge of Chmess is to explain the difference between describing the a priori truths of Chmess and practicing philosophy.

Most other disciplines in the university do not face the challenge of Chmess. There is no doubt that there are physical, biological, and social facts, and understanding them clearly can lead to human flourishing. The other humanities don't worry about the challenge of Chmess, for a very different reason. Most humanists do not see their central project as uncovering some domain of truths that have hitherto gone unnoticed. Rather, they see their role as galvanizing students into challenging what they have previously taken for granted, in an attempt to help them construct a value system that is genuinely their own. If an autonomous life is one that is the product of one's own free, informed deliberations, then the goal of the humanities thus conceived is to help young people gain autonomy. The process of challenging and breaking down assumptions and investigating different systems of thought is a necessary step in this process, and here the sciences can only play an indirect role.

In philosophy, as much as any other discipline, one engages in the practice of investigating alternative conceptual structures, be they systems of value or systems of belief. Such investigations may seem like theorising about Chmess, if we conceive of philosophy as a science. But if we regard philosophy instead as an activity intended to help those who learn it acquire the resources to lead a dignified life, it quite clearly does not.

New Book on Yale (J. Stanley)

Here is a review of The Power of Privilege: Yale and America's Elite Colleges, by Joseph Soares. I haven't purchased it yet, but the review makes it seem like it is good companion reading to Daniel Golden's  excellent The Price of Admission: How the Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges -- and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates (available here for purchase for those friends of yours who teach at a boutique "because the undergraduates are better"). Given my experience on the college admissions board at Cornell, I agree wholly with the comments about Ivy League Athletics, which should be a much larger scandal than it is. For those who don't know, the Ivy League doesn't give athletic scholarships, so Ivy League athletics is a mechanism for less accomplished students who don't need scholarships to get into Ivy League schools. Princeton regularly wins the national lacrosse title, lacrosse teams are huge, and lacrosse is not a sport for the underprivileged, unless you're an American Indian. To make matters worse, at some boutiques, the sports programs aren't even integrated yet.

Using Google Scholar to Assess the Impact of Philosophical Work (J. Stanley)

Academics spend much time trying to assess the relative merits of work in an area. There is no sure-fire way to do this of course. But citation indices are one method to assess the impact work has had on an area. Though philosophers are loathe to use them, they are widely used in other disciplines. Citation indices of course do not tell us everything we need to know to make such a judgment. Much work is of very high quality, but sufficiently specialized to be of interest to only a very few. Conversely, someone can write a paper that sparks a great deal of interest for its obvious flaws. Nevertheless, one can hope that citation indices could give us at least some sense of the major themes in a subject area. My sense is that as philosophy has become more specialized, more and more philosophers have simply lost contact with what is being currently discussed in journals and books. One might hope that citation indices could provide a rough objective map of the terrain of an area that can be used in place of word-of-mouth. 

Since I discovered Google Scholar about six months ago, I’ve been comparing its citation results to my general sense of what is going on in fields in which I work. Generally, it seems quite accurate – papers that have had a significant impact in an area have had correspondingly greater hits on Google Scholar than papers that have had smaller impacts. For example, some test cases: two much-admired recent papers that have created significant literatures in epistemology are Jim Pryor’s paper, “The Skeptic and the Dogmatist” and Adam Elga’s “Self-Locating Belief and the Sleeping Beauty Problem”. Google Scholar correctly reveals this; these are two of the most cited papers in epistemology since 2000 (68 for Pryor’s paper, and 40 for Elga’s paper). Keith DeRose’s “Solving the Skeptical Problem” is one of the most influential papers in epistemology written in the past thirty years, and Google Scholar again reveals this; it has 187 hits, despite being published as recently as 1995. Ted Sider’s book Four-Dimensionalism and Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits have been hugely important works, and Google Scholar clearly reveals this (266 hits and 303 hits respectively, despite publication dates of 2001 and 2000, respectively). One paper that has had no impact whatsoever in its field is Jason Stanley’s 1998 contribution to the literature on personal identity, “Persons and their Properties”. Again, Google Scholar correctly reveals this, since this paper has no hits.

There are of course pitfalls to using Google Scholar. First, one should refrain from comparing hit numbers across areas of philosophy. Some areas of philosophy (e.g. philosophy of mind that borders on philosophy of psychology and philosophy of language that borders on linguistics) are cross-disciplinary, and so have created literatures in multiple fields. This naturally increases the number of researchers reacting to these papers, and correspondingly the number of hits. If one wants to compare the impact just in philosophy of a certain work, this makes things difficult. Furthermore, some areas of philosophy seem to involve more citation than others, or simply more researchers. So one must take care to compare (e.g.) only work in history of modern to other work in history of modern, or work in meta-ethics to other work in meta-ethics. Finally, it takes a number of years for the impact of a work to register on Google Scholar. The publication date of an article is a very large factor, as the older an article or book is the more hits it will receive. It is not yet possible to use Google Scholar to assess the impact of publications from 2004 or after. So in judging the relative impact of work, it’s best to compare work that was published at roughly the same time. Nevertheless, after several months of procrastinating with it, in areas such as metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, when used with appropriate caution, it does deliver results that accord with my sense of what papers and books have created some of the major debates in these areas.

What is a Pluralistic Philosophy Department? (J. Stanley)

Some philosophers are proud to belong to philosophy departments they call “pluralistic”. Often, this term is used in opposition to philosophy departments that are exemplars of “mainstream analytic philosophy”. But I have a great deal of difficulty understanding what is meant by “pluralistic”, and how it is supposed to be opposed to mainstream analytic philosophy. It cannot refer to the narrowness of the conclusions argued for in contemporary analytic philosophy, which after all include (just to give a very small random sampling in the non-historical areas) the theses that the problem of consciousness shows that materialism is false; that there is just one thing; that the only existing things are presently existing things; that speech-act theory shows that pornography violates freedom of speech; that infallible access to one’s own mental states is not possible; that the source of all vagueness is ignorance; that there is vagueness in the world; that vagueness shows that no claim has a determinate truth-value; that the content of one’s mental states is determined in part by one’s community; that knowledge is a mental state; that embodied action is a key to understanding the nature of perception; that mathematics/modality/morality/middle-sized physical objects are elaborate fictions; that there is no property of truth; that there is a property of truth; that there are no moral properties; that there are moral properties; that there are no character traits; that the aim of action is self-knowledge; that we know many things; that we know few things; that there are many knowledge relations; that whether we know something can depend upon such recherché issues as whether we have just been offered insurance; that truth and reference are the keys to linguistic meaning; that use is the key to linguistic meaning; that use together with what we ought to do is the key to linguistic meaning; that linguistic understanding is at bottom practical knowledge rather than propositional knowledge; that consciousness is fundamentally a matter of practical knowledge rather than propositional knowledge; that practical knowledge is in fact a species of propositional knowledge; that conditionals have no truth-value; that claims about what might be the case have no truth-value (it’s worth mentioning that a not-insubstantial group of mainstream analytic philosophers under the age of 45 believe that the truth of most claims is relative to a perspective, and this is a key to seeing why e.g. conditionals and claims about what might be the case do after all have truth-values). Mainstream analytic philosophy clearly does not place any limits upon the conclusions that can be defended in its journals.

In any discipline, there will always be a distinction between those whose work (rightly or wrongly) is more widely valued in the discipline, and those whose work (rightly or wrongly) is less widely valued. As a rebel in spirit if not in action, I am very attracted to plausible explanations of the bankruptcy of my discipline’s status quo. But the divide between “pluralistic” and “non-pluralistic” approaches is a particularly poor attempt to provide one.

Strange Youtubing (J. Stanley)

Colorado philosopher David Barnett keeps it weird.

History of the APA (J. Stanley)

Here is a nice post by Brit Brogaard about this history of the APA, reporting on a 1926 paper by Gardiner. The remarks she cites at the end by Gardiner seem just as apt today as then.

Fun at MIT (J. Stanley)

My alma mater is now sponsoring vicious competitive duels between its alumni; the results are of the first duel are reported here (thanks to Richard Zach for the pointer).

Pyke Philosophy Photos on the Web (J. Stanley)

Many philosophers have on their shelves a copy of Philosophers, the 1993 book of photographs of philosophers with the famous photograph of Anscombe and Geach on the cover. Steve Pyke, the creator of that work, is now a staff photographer for the New Yorker. In the ensuing years, he has continued the project, and has just posted on his website not only 25 pictures from the original book, but also 25 newer photos of what are by and large somewhat friendlier looking philosophers.

UPDATE: Pyke has taken many more photos of philosophers; what is now posted on his website is only a randam sampling of what I can only assume must be the best looking ones.

What a Surprise (J. Stanley)

Some systematic confirmation of the obvious. This research continues earlier work showing similar findings for African-Americans (available here).

Rutgers Philosophy in the New York Times (J. Stanley)

Here. I'm pleased to see the article. But there are a definitely some confusions. I was particularly annoyed by the "definition" of analytic philosophy as ahistorical philosophy, and the absurd insinuation that philosophers at Penn State, Northwestern, and Stony Brook are better historians than the philosophers at so-called "analytic" departments ranked in historical areas in the Gourmet Report. Surely it doesn't take too much journalistic fact-finding to discover that this is false. If there were no rankings, would people actually give these claims some kind of credibility?

The Wittgenstein Fallacy Continued (J. Stanley)

I've received a lot of feedback on my post on The Wittgenstein Fallacy. Since I'm in Miami at the Fourth Annual Graduate Student Epistemology Conference, and the semester is about to begin, I didn't open comments. But Aidan McGlynn has continued discussion of the matter on Boundaries of Language, and I've also received many emails about it (for those that are curious, fans of Wittgenstein are for some reason VERY attached to the idea that Wittgenstein wouldn't have landed a job nowadays). At any rate, I'm going to post a couple of the most interesting emails that I have received, together with my replies. If you think you can best explain why Wittgenstein wouldn't get a job in a top philosophy department today, now is your chance to prove it.

The Wittgenstein Fallacy (J. Stanley)

In the comments section two posts down, my friend Aidan McGlynn cites Michael Dummett's famous quote making what I've come to call the Wittgenstein Fallacy. As Aidan writes:

Does the push away from conservative careful publishing mark a change in the attitudes held by philosophers, or is it rather a response to external pressures placed upon them by current system for advancing one's career in philosophy?...Dummett noted in the intro to 'Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics' that Wittgenstein wouldn't have fared too well in the current climate, given his reluctance to publish anything he'd written.

The Wittgenstein Fallacy is the claim that the profession of philosophy as currently practiced is somehow flawed, because a modern day Wittgenstein would not receive recognition or employment.

Would a modern day Wittgenstein succeed in our times? Wittgenstein was a student of Bertrand Russell at the height of his philosophical powers and professional reputation in the field, right after the publication of the Principia Mathematica and before he started publishing popular works. As a graduate student at Cambridge University, he not only dazzled Russell, but also Moore. Previously, he also had greatly impressed Gottlob Frege. He then went off to war, during which he wrote a book. After the war, the book was published, and immediately had a tremendous influence on the next generation of leading younger philosophers (such as Frank Ramsey and the emerging Logical Positivists). A modern day Wittgenstein would be, say, a graduate student at Princeton in the 1980s under David Lewis and Saul Kripke. His letter of recommendation from Lewis would note that Lewis abandoned a nearly finished book manuscript because of his trenchant criticisms. He would also have an outside letter praising his genius from a philosopher not at Princeton, who was admired by the very best mathematical philosophers (perhaps George Boolos?). As a very young man, right after graduate school, he would have written an enormously influential book, one that deeply influenced some of the best of the subsequent generation of younger philosophers and was soon recognized as a philosophical classic. He would also be bad-tempered, rather self-important, and not a very responsible colleague. Is the claim really that a modern day Wittgenstein wouldn't have tenure somewhere really quite respectable? There are various reasons why the Wittgenstein Fallacy is pernicious. It should be put to rest.

Philosophy in the Public Sphere (J. Stanley)

The view within the humanities of the discipline of philosophy as it is currently practiced is that it is an obscure branch of human inquiry, disconnected from the central concerns of the humanities (indeed some philosophers, such as Richard Rorty, have based significant portions of their careers pandering to our fellow humanists' disdain for our discipline). Yet on the rare occasions that central topics in philosophy are discussed in the newspapers, or works of analytic philosophy reviewed that are directed at general audiences, they tend to be received with great enthusiasm. For example, the most e-mailed piece in today's New York Times is an article about free will. The article broaches no new ground, and is basically a short explanation of the problem of free will of the sort one would expect to hear in an introductory philosophy class. Yet it clearly resonates with the ordinary readership of the New York Times. In recent years, some excellent analytic philosophers have written books directed at this readership, not just the ubiquitous Daniel Dennett, but also philosophers who have forged their reputations writing for more specialized audiences, such as Earl Conee and Ted Sider, and Paul Boghossian. The extremely positive reception of the work done by these philosophers provides some evidence that the skill that makes for an outstanding specialist philosopher translates to addressing broader audiences. In fact, I suspect that the philosophers who are considered to be more on the literary humanities end of the philosophy spectrum (e.g. John McDowell) would be particularly ill-suited to the kind of public philosophy that Conee, Sider, and Boghossian have done so well. Though lucid work on traditional topics in philosophy is not well-received (or understood) by humanists in the United States today, we are beginning to see some evidence that there is appreciation for such work outside the walls of the academy.

Strevens on Bayesian Confirmation Theory (J. Stanley)

Often, I am asked by graduate students for an authoritative accessible introduction to Bayesian Confirmation Theory oriented to philosophers. I just noticed that Michael Strevens has placed some lengthy almost book-length course notes on the website for his seminar on Confirmation Theory that fulfill just this need (look under 'Teaching', then under 'Confirmation Theory', then click on 'Notes on Bayesian Confirmation Theory').

Universities and Class, Part 82 (J. Stanley)

In the Sunday Times, there was a short article about Harvard's new magazine, "02138". As the article makes clear, the purpose of 02138 is to further associate Harvard with Cartier watches and second homes in the Hamptons:

In the magazine trade, 02138, which receives financing from Atlantic Media, the parent company of The Atlantic Monthly, is what is known as a luxury lifestyle book. Luxury lifestyle books, like Hamptons Magazine, Palm Beach Illustrated and the subtly titled Rich Guy, are magazines that are essentially about the people who subscribe to them (or, in many cases, who are given complimentary subscriptions) and are easily identifiable by their thick, glossy paper and ads for Polo, Prada and the kind of diamond jewelry that is usually called “encrusted.”

As a child of immigrants rejected from Europe, I have always been extremely proud of various facets of America's self-image that were distinctively non-European. Generally, American society has looked down upon inherited wealth, and our political rhetoric eschews social class. But now, America is developing one of the most impenetrable class hierarchies in the first world, and I find that the institutions I serve are non-trivially involved in furthering just the value system I find most abhorrantly un-American.

UPDATE: Here is a brief Time Magazine interview with Daniel Golden, author of “The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates”, and here is a brief comment on the social value of an Ivy League degree, also from the same issue of Time Magazine (thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer).
UPDATE: Here is an excellent article from this week's Economist on the "new gilded age" in America -- scroll down ("Pushy Parents, Driven Brats") to see a good discussion of the culpability American Universities have in the matter (thanks to  Axel Gelfert for the pointer).

Universities and Class (J. Stanley)

As most non-Americans realize, often, when an American tells you that she attended Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, or Yale as an undergraduate, she is not doing so to give you information about her educational attainment. She is rather informing you of the privileged status of her birthposition. This article, basically a review of Daniel Golden's book “The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates”, is a good brief read for anyone teaching in a US academic institution, as well as for those outside the United States, who wonder about the moral complicity American educational institutions have had in maintaining and strengthening America's increasingly rigid socio-economic class structure.

Kenya in the News (J. Stanley)

Kenya has been in the US news a lot lately. For example, today’s New York Times has an article about Thomas Cholmondeley’s flashbacks to colonial times, the second of which occurred in May when my wife and I were staying with my father-in-law in Nairobi. There was understandably a lot of emotion about the matter. Two days after the killing I attended a Harambee in the Kibera slum for women’s groups in Langata, which also served as a political rally. Politician after politician stood up to denounce Cholmondeley. But in his turn at the podium, William Ruto, a young KANU politician, turned the topic away to an issue that pleased the crowd more than the politicians, namely the endemic corruption that affects all of Kenya today. Ruto placed the blame on the shoulders of the older politicians who have run the country for decades. Kenya is not Zimbabwe before land redistribution. Chomondeley may be an heir to a large fortune, but one of the largest landowner in Kenya (if not the largest landowner) is the Kenyatta family. This brings us to the other reason Kenya has been in the news in the states, which is Barack Obama’s recent visit. Obama’s visit was a love-fest until his speech at the University of Nairobi denouncing the endemic corruption and tribalism. Obama was harshly rebuked by the Kibaki government, including by the Kenyan ambassador to the US. But from what I’ve seen of Obama’s speech, and what I know of Kenya, Obama was simply giving voice to what every Kenyan already knows. Obama seemed to hit every important note, from the corruption of the political classes (MPs in Kenya are among the highest paid in the world, with most of it untaxed), to the rampant fighting for political goods between tribes (the vast majority of Kenyans I met supported a politician who happened to be a member of their own tribe). Obama could have gone to Kenya, received his hero’s welcome, and distributed platitudes in return for good press coverage everywhere. Instead, he used his stature to give an extraordinarily controversial speech full of hard truths (The Standard, one of Kenya’s two main papers, called it “the clearest analysis in recent times of what ails Kenya.”). That took genuine character and intelligence, two qualities notoriously lacking in current American politics.

Some government officials accused Obama of being a tool of the opposition. In the current Kenyan climate, it’s not clear that would be a bad thing. The next presidential elections in Kenya are approaching in 2007. In a country that has only known real elections since 2002, things are quite fluid. But for those who do not know, here is the basic political situation. There are political parties (e.g. KANU, the Democratic Party, the Liberal Democratic Party). But it is coalitions that win elections and referendums. In 2002, President Kibaki, a Kikuyu member of the Democratic Party, won the presidency with the support of the NARC coalition, which included a number of other parties. One of the most important Kibaki supporters was Raila Odinga, an influential politician for the LDP who represents the interests of the urban poor (though everyone also represents their own tribes), and is the MP for Langata (an area of Nairobi). But Kibaki turned on other members of his coalition, and did not follow through on the promises that led to the coalition, choosing instead to favor members of his own Kikuyu tribe. In 2005, Kibaki supported a referendum to change the constitution. Raila Odinga organized a coalition against it, which came to be known as the Orange Democratic Movement, or ODM (and included prominent members of KANU such as Uhuru Kenyatta). The referendum was defeated, and ODM became the newest political coalition; NARC had effectively disintegrated. When I left Kenya in late May, there was considerable sparring between Uhuru Kenyatta (son of Jomo Kenyatta) and Raila Odinga over whether ODM was a viable future coalition for the 2007 elections. Polling over the summer indicated that Kalonzo Musyoka is one early favorite, but Raila Odinga seems to have built an appeal that reaches well beyond members of his own Luo tribe, one that is backed up by the credibility of years in prison in the 1980s for being a member of the opposition, and the selfless act of supporting Kibaki in 2002 when he himself was a logical contender. On the other hand, like Hilary Clinton, Odinga is a politican who stirs strong passions on every side.

Analytic vs. Continental (yet again) (J. Stanley)

In many of his posts about the matter, Brian argues that there is no such thing as analytic philosophy. In large part, I agree. Most of what is said about the putative difference is from an historical, sociological, and philosophical perspective, sheer nonsense (if Shoemaker is an analytic philosopher, so is Husserl). But I do think there is some difference between two kinds of something (there’s a bold claim for you). Soames attempts to make this distinction when he writes that analytic philosophy is characterized by “an elevation of the goals of truth and knowledge over inspiration, moral uplift, and spiritual comfort”. I reject Soames’s categorization, because it makes it sound like the options are to seek truth and knowledge or to find religion. I would rather mark it as the quite different distinction between, on the one hand, philosophy that treats phenomena apart from their cultural and historical context, versus philosophy that looks at phenomena mainly through an anthropological lens.

Here is a passage from Walter Benjamin’s essay, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”. It’s an early essay, written in 1916, and it is not one of Benjamin’s influential works. But it nicely illustrates the distinction I’m trying to make:

It is therefore the linguistic being of man to name things…Why name them? To whom does man communicate himself?...Before this question can be answered we must again inquire: how does man communicate himself? A profound distinction is to be made, a choice presented, in face of which an intrinsically false understanding of language is certain to give itself away…Anyone who believes that man communicates his mental being by names cannot also assume that it is his mental being that he communicates, for this does not happen through the names of things, that is, through the words by which he denotes a thing. And, equally, the advocate of such a view can only assume that man is communicating factual subject matter to other men, for that does happen through the word by which he denotes a thing. This view is the bourgeois conception of language, the invalidity and emptiness of which will become increasingly clear in what follows. It holds that the means of communication is the word, its object factual, its addressee a human being. The other conception of language, in contrast, knows no means, no object, and no addressee of communication. It means: in naming the mental being of man communicates itself to God.

The rest of the essay consists of Benjamin’s explanation of the last line of the quote. Benjamin argues that the first two chapters of Genesis are meditations on the creative power of language; in the second chapter of Genesis, Adam provides THE name for each thing; he is not just arbitrarily and conventionally linking up sounds with things (“The human word is the name of things. Hence it is no longer conceivable, as the bourgeois view of language maintains, that the word has an accidental relation to its object, that it is a sign for things…agreed by some convention”). Benjamin is not silly enough to think that names are essential to things (“…the rejection of bourgeois by mystical linguistic theory equally rests on a misunderstanding. For according to mystical theory the word is simply the essence of the thing. That is incorrect, because the thing in itself has no word, being created from God’s word…”). He is clear that humans encounter objects, classify them according to their knowledge, and then give the objects names (only for God, or Adam before the Fall, is naming a creative act). The problem with the bourgeois picture of language is that it completely divorces naming from the creative act, thereby severing its connection to a certain kind of mystical power, which is reflected in our deepest myths.

So Benjamin isn’t at all confused about metaphysics or the problem of intentionality. He just finds no interest in the question of how, by the use of language, one person can communicate something about the world to another. What’s interesting to him is how language is represented in human mythology, and what that reveals to us about the cultural significance of our practice of naming. This kind of question is one that is not apt to be taken up by a philosopher in the analytic tradition. Someone in my tradition might say that the issues that interest Benjamin are questions of anthropology rather than philosophy. Someone in Benjamin’s tradition might say that the issues that interest me are bourgeois.

Scholem on Frege (J. Stanley)

From Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship:

Philosophy in Jena was rather annoying to me. I despised Rudolf Eucken, who looked unbelievably formal and spoke that way as well....Bruno Bauch's lectures, on the other hand, were mandatory, and to the extent they dealt with Kant, of interest to me, for I read a great deal on Kant that half-year....in the course of the semester I became acquainted with the polemic against Cohen, initiated by a lady, in the journal Kant-Studien, which betokened a nationalistic and mild but unmistakable anti-Semitic orientation on the part of certain neo-Kantians. On the positive side, I was drawn to two very dissimilar teachers. One of these was Paul F. Linke, an unorthodox pupil of Husserl, who induced me to study a major portion of Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen, about which Benjamin had only an indistinct impression from his Munich period. The other was Gottlob Frege, whose Grundlagen der Arithmetik I was reading along with related writings by Bachmann and Louis Couturat  (Die philosophischen Prinzipien der Mathematik). I attended Frege's one-hour lectures on "Begriffsschrift". At that time I was greatly interested in mathematical logic -- ever since I had discovered Schroeder's Vorlesungen ueber die Algebra der Logik in a second-hand bookshop in Berlin. These and similar attempts to attain a pure language of thought greatly fired my imagination. The logic of Hermann Lotze, which we read in Bauch's major seminar, left me cold. For my seminar paper I wrote a defense of mathematical logic against Lotze and Bauch; the latter listened to it in silence. The linguistic-philosophical element of a conceptual language wholly purged of mysticism, as well as the limits of the latter, seemed clear to me. I reported to Benjamin about this, and he asked me to send him my seminar paper. In those days I fluctuated between two poles of mathematical and mystical symbolism -- much more so than Benjamin, whose mathematical talent was slight; he was then and for a long time to come an adherent of mystical views of language.

As for Frege, who was almost as old as Eucken and like him wore a white beard, I enjoyed his unpompous manner, which so agreeably contrasted with Euken's. But in Jena hardly anyone took Frege seriously.

There is a lot to say about the significance of this passage of Scholem, from a memoir about his relationship with Benjamin (even ignoring the tragic irony that Frege was himself an anti-semite, though perhaps, as these pages suggest, a closeted one). Of course Scholem's own work on the Kabbalah led him to be interested in all sorts of attempts to devise universal languages, even ones of the non-mystical variety. But I also think it shows the great gap between the European humanist tradition and current American humanism. It is scarcely conceivable today that an American historian (or cultural anthropologist, or literary theorist), even of Scholem's stature, would write that groundbreaking work on mathematical logic "fired her imagination" as an undergraduate, much less evince such startlingly acute judgment about what philosophical work was likely to bear future fruit (indeed, it is unlikely that the typical contemporary American humanist has even been exposed to mathematical logic as part of his undergraduate education). This accords with my suspicion that the uniquely American attitude in the humanities towards philosophy has much more to do with the very different conception of the humanities prevailing now in the United States than it does with the putatively changing nature of philosophical inquiry.

It's so hard to give (J. Stanley)

I've just been watching Meet the Press, where Robert Novak is being grilled on semantics. The issue is whether Novak's sources used the name "Valerie Plame", or whether his sources simply described Plame using the description "Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife". The powers-that-be have apparently decided that if Novak's sources merely uttered "Joe Wilson's wife is a CIA operative", they did not thereby "give Novak the name of a CIA operative". Novak is being criticized for having said, on two occasions when he was asked about the matter in 2003, that he was given her name by his sources. Now that Novak has been appraised of the Fitzgerald semantics for "give", he claims his previous statements were misstatements.

But Novak's original statements were correct. According (apparently) to Fitzgerald, where y is some bit of information, x does not give y to z if x only intentionally gives a non-trivial uniquely identifying description that allows z to easily obtain y. So suppose I approach a hotel concierge for information about a good place for seafood. She hands me a guide, and tells me to go the place listed on the top left-hand corner of the guide. According to Fitzgerald, I can legitimately complain to the hotel manager that she neglected to give me a name of a good place for seafood. And surely the hotel manager can then reprimand the concierge. But that's crazy; she clearly did give me the name of the restaurant, and it's not in order to reprimand her.

Just as it's not in order to reprimand the hotel concierge for failing to give me the name of the restaurant, so it is in order to reprimand Novak's sources for giving him the name of a CIA operative.

Philosophy and the Humanities in the United States Today (J. Stanley)

In my last few posts, I have been raising a contentious issue. Consider the CVs of philosophers in the United States working in the 1970s and 1980s publishing on core metaphysical and epistemological issues of the sort discussed by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, or issues in philosophical logic and philosophy of language of the sort discussed by Aristotle, Abelard, Ockham, Frege, Husserl, Brentano, and Russell. You will see that they had good success rates in national competitions for humanities fellowships. And why not? After all, philosophy is a distinctive human intellectual pursuit, and a core humanities subject. But if you look at, say, the past ten years, you will find that philosophers working on such issues have been particularly unsuccessful in similar competitions. The philosophers who do achieve some success have been those working primarily in ethics related topics, historians of philosophy, or philosophers who have related their work to art or literature. The latter are subjects which, since Plato’s time, have been traditionally opposing kinds of humanities disciplines to philosophy. Yet the only way for a philosopher working on skepticism or the nature of universals to obtain funding from an American humanities institute is to link her work with literary criticism, painting, or French cultural anthropology.

This is just an indication of a broader problem in the humanities in the United States. The problem is that we have a generation of humanities academics in this country who have no sense at all of what the discipline of philosophy is. They have no sense of what kinds of considerations have been advanced for and against skepticism, no sense of the traditional problem of universals, and no sense of the development of logic beyond the syllogism. Not only do they have no conception of what is happening now with such discussions, they have no understanding of the detailed intellectual work done by the great philosophers of the past; they simply don’t know how to read philosophy. Spending two months trying to figure out the argument in, say, Hume’s “Of Skepticism with Regard to the Senses”, or Kant’s Second Analogy, is a completely foreign pursuit. Far from being ashamed of this lack of knowledge, they seem to revel in it. One might wonder how a successful academic who has worked on T.S. Eliot could boast of their complete ignorance of (say) Bradley’s regress problem, when Eliot wrote his dissertation on Bradley (under the tutelage of Bertrand Russell, among others), but I have met in fact met such a person.

Ignorance breeds contempt. When I meet a philosopher who boasts of her ignorance of (say) Roman history, Wallace Stevens, or Emily Dickinson, I’m embarrassed for her. I’m similarly embarrassed for the professor of comparative literature who boasts of her ignorance of G.E. Moore or is proud that she has no idea what contributions Gottlob Frege has made to philosophy. Of course, it’s perfectly fine for a philosopher to confess that she doesn’t enjoy poetry, and it’s equally in order for a literary critic to confess that she doesn’t enjoy the topics discussed in Aristotle’s metaphysics, or Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic. What would not be acceptable is for a philosopher who doesn’t enjoy poetry to mount a campaign against poetry. But that is exactly what is happening in the United States today; academics with no detailed knowledge or interest in the humanities discipline of philosophy are using whatever resources are at their disposal to delegitimize it. Just as it is embarrassing to be confronted by an American academic who scoffs at the study of Shakespeare or Chinese history, it’s equally embarrassing to be confronted by an American academic who scoffs at the study of vagueness, skepticism, or the problem of intentionality. Ignorance or disinterest in a subject is not something one should seek to legitimize by eliminating the study of the subject matter.

UPDATE: I was away from the internet all day, and checked back in to see a number of very interesting comments. Please scroll down for input from a number of philosophers.

New Blog by Brogaard (J. Stanley)

Berit Brogaard, the talented young philosopher-of-everything at the University of Missouri, St. Louis (Phd, SUNY Buffalo, 2000), has a new blog, called Lemmings. I've read several of Prof. Brogaard's published papers (the ones on philosophy of language) and enjoyed them immensely, so I'm looking forward to reading the blog.

Genius Three Times More Prevalent in American History than in Philosophy (J. Stanley)

Details here. In fact, philosophy seems to attract the lowest rate of geniuses of any humanities discipline.

Could Kant have won a Guggenheim? (J. Stanley)

I haven’t been successful in my attempt to win a Guggenheim. But I don’t feel it’s my fault; far greater philosophers than I will ever be would have stood no chance of winning. Imagine Kant writing a Guggenheim project proposal for The Critique of Pure Reason. Kant would discuss, in his proposal, the need to respond to powerful skeptical arguments recently advanced by the epistemologist David Hume. There would no doubt be some talk about the metaphysics of causality and a lot of discussion of the reality of space and time.

Judging by the selections of philosophers made by the Guggenheim committee over the past decade, Kant’s proposal would have no chance of success. For example, not one of the thirteen (quite deserving) philosophers selected by the Guggenheim committee over the past 7 years work on topics such as causation, skepticism, the nature of the a priori, or, for that matter, any other central philosophical problem in metaphysics and epistemology. Though one out of the thirteen does work on the problem of intentionality, and two on ethics, the work of the others is clustered in three areas: the history of philosophy (five out of thirteen), philosophy of literature or the arts (four out of the thirteen), and intersections between recent continental philosophy and philosophy of perception (in 2003, when two students of Hubert Dreyfus won the award). It seems the Guggenheim committee has decided that the majority of the topics discussed by Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason, Hume in A Treatise on Human Nature, and Descartes in The Meditations are not worthy of funding.

The Guggenheim Committee has not seen fit to fund any projects in philosophy of logic, philosophical logic, or philosophy of mathematics in many years. So a modern day Frege working in the United States would have no chance at all of winning a Guggenheim. However, two philosophers working on historical projects on Frege have won Guggenheim awards in the past eleven years. So, according to the Guggenheim committee, Frege would not be worthy of funding, but historical scholarship on Frege is worth funding...

New Jersey Budget Finalized, People of New Jersey lose (J. Stanley)

Details here. This week's Chronicle of Higher Education also has an article about the matter.

Update: For a helpful report about the past and present state of higher education in New Jersey, see here.

Rutgers and the New Jersey Budget Woes (J. Stanley)

A couple of weeks ago, I spent five days on a bus touring New Jersey with about 30 other new faculty members at Rutgers University. The annual trip is the brainchild of our recently hired president, Richard McCormick. It has several purposes. One purpose is to acquaint new faculty at Rutgers with the state, where 91 percent of our undergraduates were raised. Another purpose is to provide opportunities to link our research with issues of relevance for people of New Jersey, from community based organizations to for-profit commerce. A third purpose is to advertise to the people of New Jersey the fact that they have at their disposal, for a fraction of the cost of a private university, the resources of an outstanding research university.

The third purpose was particularly important this year, given Gov. Corzine's recently proposed budget. In it, Corzine recommends cutting $169 million dollars from the budget for higher education in New Jersey, which would result in the largest budget cuts ever to Rutgers University. Given the positive correlation between the presence of a university in an area and the existence of high-paying jobs, Corzine's budget proposal is fantastically short-sighted, and suggests to me that his interest lies more in pursuing national office than in the long-term health of the state. That such a maneuever is politically possible shows that Rutgers needs to do more to advertise its value to the people of New Jersey.

During the trip, the proper identity of a public university was a constant theme of discussion. Given that we are supported by the taxpayers of New Jersey, is our primary obligation to serve our citizens by supporting the commerce and industry of the state with our research and teaching? Is it to provide job skills for its citizenry so that they can enter the professional workforce? Obviously, there is no single answer here; a land-grant institution such as Rutgers has multiple identities. Nevertheless, I found myself repeatedly arguing that our core mission should be to provide access to a first-rate education to those who otherwise would not be able to afford it.

As income inequality has broadened in the United States, we have developed daunting socio-economic divisions. Universities have had considerable moral culpability in this development. Acceptance to boutique universities is for the most part only possible if one has attended the kind of school that grooms its students in the right way, with SAT prep classes and expensive college coaches. Having a child at Harvard has the same cultural status as having a second home in the Hamptons. Possessing a boutique university degree is a sign of high socio-economic class. In short, boutique universities have played a central role in fostering, perpetuating, and heightening socio-economic class divisions in the United States.

The function of the university in American life should not be to deepen social divisions. Rutgers, in contrast, represents the core values of higher education in a democracy in which equality is central to its self-conception. Our mission is to provide an outstanding, affordable education to the people of New Jersey. In an earlier era, the City University of New York trained a generation of future academics by taking advantage of the talents of a wave of immigrants who were not able to access the boutique educational experiences available to the wealthy classes. As the flagship state university in a highly educated state with extraordinary public schools and a huge immigrant population, Rutgers could be the CUNY of the 21st century.

In my two years at Rutgers, I have had the privilege of teaching some of the best undergraduate students I have ever taught. Perhaps we don't get the children of Harvard MBA investment bankers who vacation in Switzerland. But we do get the children of Indian immigrants from Edison, who work part-time to support their education while double-majoring in math and philosophy. We get people who are the first in their family to attend college, and we get young people who were frankly a little too burdened with personality in high school to spend all of their spare time burnishing their credentials for possible admittance to the upper classes. We will always have trouble recruiting faculty who wish to leverage their academic positions into exclusive invitations at the European chalets of the parents of their students. But, as long as we have the support of the state of New Jersey, we will have the upper-hand in recruiting faculty who wish to share their research with our uniquely inspiring undergraduate community, without sacrificing the kinds of salaries and graduate departments available to them at the boutiques.

Having leading departments at Rutgers has allowed middle-class and poor citizens of New Jersey access to the best post-undergraduate opportunities in academia, medicine, and law. Already, we can offer many of the very same opportunities afforded by the boutiques; by continuing support to Rutgers, the state can broaden access to these opportunities for its citizens even further, at a fraction of the cost. In so doing, the state could also be a national leader in revitalizing the mission of the university as a provider of opportunities to all citizens, rather than just its wealthiest. Or the politicians in New Jersey could decide to reduce our budget drastically, forcing us to raise our tuition sharply, and destroy the momentum we have built towards our goal of recruiting an outstanding faculty interested in providing an education to students, regardless of their socio-economic background.

Why Hire a Philosophy Major? (J. Stanley)

Perhaps because those trained in philosophy are likely to possess a better combination of verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and analytical writing skills than those trained in any other major?

Blogging Hiatus (J. Stanley)

I won't be blogging for the next month, since I will be away visiting in-laws in East Africa. I also won't be able to accept comments on previous posts.

Levine on Academia, Loyalty, and Status (J. Stanley)

Peter Levine, at the Institute of Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland, has an excellent post discussing the issues I raised in my post on generational changes in the academy. Peter links the changes I see to broader changes in the culture (as do Harry Brighouse and Andy Streich, in their comments on my original post). Peter raises a number of issues of importance (many of particular importance to those who teach at public universities, as both Peter and I do). But he also takes up the theme of "competition for status" that I was trying to address in my post, and links it to a broader change in our culture. I was particularly struck by the following remark, which seems dead-on to me:

I think that competition for status is fundamentally unsatisfying. Friedland and Morimoto detect a hollowing-out of adolescence as teenagers spend all their time doing activities they think will look good on their resumes. Many adolescent volunteers cannot explain why they perform particular service activities, other than for career advantage. For faculty, constant jockeying for position makes you into the "man in the grey flannel suit." There is no fundamental reason why you should publish more articles in competitive journals in order to receive offers from higher-status institutions. However, it can be profoundly rewarding to use one's academic freedom and skills to improve the place you are. As Albert Hirschman showed,** we have two strategies for addressing shortcomings in institutions: "exit" and "voice." When you try to use voice even though you could exit, you are loyal. And the best parts of life come from loyalty. I think the fact that modern academics prefer exit is what Jason means when he talks about "market forces." And we're the ones who lose.

Update: Some e-mailers are apparently wondering what the relation of all of this is to rankings in philosophy. I certainly wasn't intending to criticize rankings in philosophy; for one thing programs in philosophy have retained extraordinary strength over time by maintaining core groups of faculty over many years (Michigan and Princeton come to mind). There is also an issue here about status within a discipline and status in upper-middle class society, which are two very different issues. I am inclined to think that the former is mostly healthy, and the latter is mostly not. As Levine points out, US News and World Report University rankings clearly link university affiliation to class status. The competition universities engage in to improve their standings in these sorts of rankings have a bad effect both on society at large and on the academy, which is, after all, supposed to be a place in which students are introduced to values other than that of achieving a high socio-economic status.

This is not to say that rankings in philosophy only have good effects -- not even chocolate only has good effects. Peter Levine's post certainly outlines ways in which all quantifiable rankings have worrisome effects on communities, including disciplinary rankings (see also Becko Copenhaver's comment on my original post). I nonetheless promote rigorous quantifiable disciplinary speciality rankings, because I believe the goods they support outweigh their costs. More specifically, the existence of rankings such as the ones in US News and World Report has made the existence of rigorous disciplinary rankings essential. Faculty members at name-brand, private universities are now more than ever inclined to confuse the heightened class status achieved by association with a wealthy private institution with disciplinary achievement. Without disciplinary rankings, administrators would have greater difficulty making judgments of relative strength of departments. As a result, it would be more difficult for centers of research strength to emerge at (say) public universities which cater to a more economically diverse student body. But it is better for the strength of society and for the strength of disciplines to have excellent departments at public universities. For one thing, while many of the wealthiest business owners and corporate lawyers will continue to come from Harvard, many of the best physicists and mathematicians will continue to come from Brooklyn College.

Academic Generations (J. Stanley)

I was raised in an academic family, with some of the standard features thereof (for example, my babysitters were all graduate students of my father). But my father's attitude towards his career was very different than mine. At various times throughout his career, he was asked to apply for jobs at other institutions, some of them institutions that were higher in the academic status hierarchy than his department at Syracuse. He never pursued these offers, and indeed they bewildered him; he had no idea why anyone would move from the department at which they started. An integral part of the life of the mind was a commitment to a single institution, and spending one's life with the same community of scholars. He tended to value conferences, reading groups, and the development of links between the university and the community at least as much as his own written work. My father had a regular philosophy reading group attended by scholars across the university, and our living room was regularly filled with people who were utterly absorbed with ideas. His own production clearly suffered from his other activities. For example, he spent years working with a poor town near Syracuse on a project concerning the responsibility of companies to the communities they abandon. A lot emerged from this project; a documentary, several town-meetings, and a civics class for high school students in that town. But very few publications emerged from it. He also viewed his obligations to his community as extending to his family. For example, he sent his children to Syracuse city public schools. As a professor at the local good university, he felt an extra obligation to be a member of the community, rather than a lesser obligation.

I don't think my father was unusual at Syracuse University at the time. The local city schools had a number of other children of like-minded professors. Many of these other professors reminded me of my father. Their houses were filled to the rafters with books, and as far as I could tell, like my father, they were interested in almost every branch of human knowledge. Most notably, a hierarchical model of academic advancement seemed utterly foreign to them. They were clearly not in academia to be successes in life. They were academics because they were imbued with an extraordinary sense of importance of their projects to the world.

I have the sense that my generation of academics is quite different. Since many of us either change institutions or dream of eventually changing institutions, we feel less loyalty to the communities in which we reside. I also meet many academics whose social status, salaries and even the furniture in their houses are as important to them as such symbols are to those in the business world. I think my father would have argued that this is due market forces impinging on academia, blurring the distinction between an academic and a businessperson (always his greatest fear about the future of the university). But I think this would be an overly simplistic view.

First, because of far greater sexism, in my father's generation, an academic's spouse (almost invariably female) was expected to go where ever the academic's career led. But this has completely changed. In my generation, the need to move from institution to institution is usually the result of juggling two careers (as it has been in my own case). But when moving from location to location becomes a necessity for preserving one's family, academics begin to develop a more mercenary attitude towards their current institutions; one begins to think of oneself as a free agent, rather than as a member of an institution and a community. Secondly, because of the ease of travel and communication, our academic communities are no longer anchored to our places of employment. I have a strong academic community, whose members I regularly see at conferences and talks, and chat with on e-mail and on the phone. But they are not anchored to my department.

On the one hand, I think both of these changes are positive effects of a more advanced, more equitable society (and furthermore I certainly wouldn't want to trade my salary for that of my father!). On the other hand, I wonder how much of these changes make academics forget those aspects of academia that make it not just another way to be a success.

In Defense of Baroque Specialization (J. Stanley)

(MOVED TO THE FRONT by Leiter from April 17, since it's generated a good discussion.)

A common topic among my friends is the tension between writing for philosophers and writing for a broader audience. A small minority of the philosophers widely acknowledged by philosophers as the greatest philosophers of recent decades (e.g. Rawls, Fodor) have had substantial impact on certain fields outside philosophy. But most have not, and none of them have had a broad impact within the humanities at large of the sort that less respected philosophers such as Derrida have had. Furthermore, the philosophers who are widely acknowledged by philosophers as the greatest philosophers of recent decades have not been public intellectuals. Their audience has consisted of other specialists in philosophy.

There are two issues here. The first concerns discussions within the academy. Judith Butler is not by any stretch of the imagination a public intellectual. But her work has greatly influenced the direction of the humanities. The second concerns non-academic audiences. An academic such as Stephen Pinker writes for a highly literate non-academic audience. Does the fact that philosophers tend to write for other philosophers, rather than for other humanists or for the literate public at large, show that their values are in tension with the core mission of the university?

I tend to be attracted to the following position. The greatest philosophers are those who are able to construct new arguments or new philosophical positions (including new ways of understanding philosophers of the past). These are the contributions that matter most to the development of philosophy; the philosophical importance of a time period and a place will later be judged by their quality and their quality alone. The philosophers we still read from the past were not the public intellectuals of their time. Rather, they are the philosophers who affected subsequent generations of specialist philosophers. But it is just such contributions that will be least accessible to the educated layperson or even the educated academic not in philosophy. They will always seem considerably more baroque and complex than clear re-statements of age-old philosophical arguments and positions.

There should always be a space for philosophers who simplify and translate philosophical positions and arguments for a broader audience. But a university’s primary mission should be to advance the disciplines it represents. In short, a university should seek to promote work that will give that university prestige in the future and not in the present. So, a university’s mission with regard to its philosophy department should be to support those who are attempting to formulate new positions and arguments, rather than those who seek contemporary relevance.

I suspect this point holds across a number of disciplines. Administrators who prefer public intellectuals to specialists are confused about the core mission of a research university. The intended audience of most scholars in a university should be the future scholars of that discipline, not contemporary non-scholars.

UPDATE: Harry Brighouse of crookedtimber has further discussion here.

What's a "crisis"? (M. Stanley)

I'm sort of bemused by the debate between Jason and Brian about whether there is a "crisis" in philosophy.  I don't have a clear idea of what a "crisis" means, unless it refers to a failure to achieve some important purpose.  But what is the purpose of philosophy? 

As some evidence for his belief that there is no crisis, Jason points to a "heady sense of excitement" among people he knows, plus the ability to recruit good new graduate students.  As a sociology of knowledge type thing, I am pretty sympathetic to the argument that the short run goal of a discipline is to convince some group of influential or important or intelligent people that the discipline is important and useful. At least in the short run consensus within the intellectual community is all most disciplines have to go on, since effects take a long time to appear and their relationship to academic inputs is often very questionable.  One can certainly also argue that some disciplines should be serving a certain kind of aesthetic and not utilitarian function anyway.

But the question of what groups judgements about excitement should count is always a political one.  Presumably the people who do not already find the semantics/pragmatics distinction very heady or exciting are not part of Jason's academic reference group.  Plus it does seem strange to divorce your judgement of a discipline's value from benefits outside the core group of knowledge producers.  After all, if philosophy is useless then its ability to attract brilliant graduate students makes its crisis more severe, since it is distracting our best and brightest from doing something more socially beneficial with their lives.

Anyway, as a non-philosopher it would be useful for me to see Jason and Brian outline their debate in terms of what purposes they think philosophy should be serving within the broader intellectual community, or if that is a bad kind of question then to say why it is.