Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

"Why Tolerate Religion?" at the Center for Inquiry in Washington, DC

The video.

Sales of "Bruce" Leiter's book are booming...

...either because of this or this, not sure which.  Money quotes:

"[O]ne of the most troubling and intellectually discreditable books by a serious American scholar in some time."--Family Research Council

"Students and scholars likely will be citing Leiter's clear and powerful arguments for many years."--Choice

(For non-US readers:  Choice is widely used by libraries in deciding what to purchase; the Family Research Council is the main policy arm of the far right Christian movement in the U.S.)

UPDATE:  My thanks to Brandon Conley for posting a sensible reply at the FRC blog.  Still, I am trying to persuade PUP to use the FRB blurb, above, in promotional materials!

ANOTHER (May 5):  There was a second comment pointing out the obvious, that the FRC author had not read the book, but that comment has disappeared.  So just in case, here is Mr. Conley's comment from the FRC site, which, happily, is still there:

This review willfully misrepresents Leiter's aim as one of criticizing freedom of religious practice without persecution when Leiter's actual target is the idea that religious practices should receive preferential treatment by being exempted from laws designed for the common good. Here's a quote from an honest synopsis of the book displaying the kinds of questions it tackles:

" Why, for example, can a religious soup kitchen get an exemption from zoning laws in order to expand its facilities to better serve the needy,  while a secular soup kitchen with the same goal cannot? Why is a Sikh  boy permitted to wear his ceremonial dagger to school while any other  boy could be expelled for packing a knife? Why are religious obligations  that conflict with the law accorded special toleration while other  obligations of conscience are not?"

In other words, Leiter is arguing for equal treatment of all claims of conscience, whether secular or religious. Since by far the most persecuted religious affiliation in the U.S. is atheism (in many states it is illegal for an atheist to hold public office), these questions are important to ask.  The FCR is employing the all to common tactic of painting an argument against special treatment as an argument for persecution.

For those concerned about the future of this blog...

...I want to confirm that I have withdrawn from consideration for the vacant position in Rome.

UPDATE:  Michael Otsuka (UCL) writes:  "Since the last pope had a twitter account, I think the next pope will be a blogger. And you could have declared that everything you post is ex cathedra, in order to shut up Vatican censors."

"Why Tolerate Religion?" on the radio...

...in London from the fall (that segment runs from 32:45 to 42:15).

"Why Tolerate Religion?" Redux

So Princeton University Press tells me they have ordered a new printing of 1,000 more copies of Why Tolerate Religion?, in addition to the 2,000 initial run from October--so while I won't be retiring on the royalties, I must say it's quite a remarkable experience to be on the verge of selling 3,000 hardcover copies of an academic book!  Thanks to those of you out there who have bought a copy!  

In addition to the event in DC in April, I'll be doing something similar for the Center for Inquiry in Los Angeles in early October; more details on that to come.

The book sales have undoubtedly been helped by some favorable publicity in media with a broader reach, like The New Statesman in England and Stanley Fish's New York Times blog.  There was even a surprisingly positive review in the right-wing Jerusalem Post of all places (by Cornell historian Glenn Altschuler) and also a favorable and fair-minded review from David Gordon at the Mises Institute (who raised the reasonable anarchist objection to my final position).  But I have to admit this is the first time I've ever been mentioned in a review of a rock 'n' roll band!   I have not yet signed on as the opening act, but we'll see.

"Why Tolerate Religion?" comes to DC in April

Here.  Sorry there's such a substantial fee, not my doing!

Twenty Million Visits

It was only in February 2010 that this blog crossed the ten million threshold, and now today we crossed the twenty million visitor mark.  It took not quite seven years to hit ten million visits, and less than three years to add another ten million, a tangible indication that, even as the philosophy blogosphere has become busier and more lively, blog readership is not a zero-sum game:  more and more philosophy students and faculty (as well as others) continue to read, and to read more blogs.  I've nothing really to add to my reflections from the 10 million mark, but I will reiterate my thanks to you, the readers, and to the many who send me interesting material and links, which makes it feasible to keep the blog going while doing my actual job!

If you're interested in Google Scholar...

...I've added a few updates from readers to the last post.

Why Tolerate Religion?

The Facebook page, courtesy of PUP (!).  The book will be out in early October.

The mystery of June blog traffic

Usually as summer starts, blog readership declines, but not this month--as of this morning, the blog had already had over 300,000 unique visits and over 445,000 page views during June, compared to figures, respectively, of 283,000 and 421,000 a year ago.  (June traffic is double what it was four years ago, but that is part of a general trend in the readership.)  June traffic this year has been higher than September 2011 traffic, also surprising.  One thing I've noticed is that as the number of philosophy blogs has increased in recent years, overall readership here has gone up--my best guess is that the increasing number of philosophy-related blogs brings more readers with philosophical interests on-line.

Anyway, whatever the explanation, thanks for reading!

Facebook mischief

There is a "Brian Leiter 'interest'" page on facebook, for which I bear no responsibility!  I'm not sure why it's there, except it seems to have its source in Wikipedia mischief.  If you "like" the interest page on FB, then I will be able to skip purgatory and go straight to Heaven.  If you don't like it, then life will go on.  Thank you for your consideration for my eternal soul.

Why Tolerate Religion?

In Milan! 

The 15 million visits mark...

...was passed some time in the last couple of hours according to the Site Meter gods.  It seems like ten million was only yesterday!  Thanks, as always, for reading.

Imagine my surprise...

...to come home on Sunday from a (great) philosophy conference on Friday and Saturday to find that the blog had been deluged with visitors, some sent by right-wing scolds loyal to the plutocracy (reacting to this) and some sent by a liberal blogger loyal to his former teacher Warren Goldfarb (and to Thomas Kuhn!).  Cyberspace is truly weird!

Guess who finally has a personal homepage?

Brian Leiter, that's who--everything you didn't want to know, and a Steve Pyke photo!   Another Brian Leiter (really, some guy in Maryland) got the .com, so I got the .net.  (It appears the .com has been colonized by advertising connected to the .net Leiter, however!)

A great new way to waste time this holiday break: Google Book's New Searchable Database!

Philosopher Zvi Biener (Western Michigan) writes:

This might be of modest interest to some. Google has just released a tool for viewing relative word frequencies in their database of scanned books (slightly more details on the exact subset of books can be found here). I inputted the names of the Top 10 Most Significant Philosophers of Science of the 20th-Century, as polled this October. This is the resulting chart.  Caution must be exercised, of course: this is a chart of full-name instances only, relying on the results of an imperfect OCR process, in books only, across all disciplines, etc., etc., etc. The dataset is available for those with spare time.

Besides the most obvious navel-gazing uses (like searching for you and your famous colleagues!), you can also chart certain philosophical fashions.  Relatively few philosophers today realize that Auguste Comte ("wasn't he a positivist?") was actually one of the cultural giants of the 19th-century--but his fading fortunes are well-revealed in a search of books between 1825 and 2000 in comparison to Kant, Hegel, and Spinoza.  Or consider the shifting levels of interest since 1925 in Ralph Barton Perry and Henry Sidgwick.  Or Hegel's fading influence in German scholarship during the 19th-century, only to recover in the 20th.  Or how prominent American philosophers compare to prominent scholars in other fields.  Have fun.

UPDATE:  Philosopher David Auerbach (North Carolina State) writes:  "Two important points about using the search.  The distortion introduced by it being only books is important, particularly since for most of the 20th century articles were where the action was.   Second, if one of your search terms has high frequency it can swamp the others; get rid of it and the scale shifts so that you can see the details of the less frequent ones."  The former point was certainly true in Anglophone philosophy for much of the 20th-century, though one would expect books to reflect the prominence of certain articles as well.

ANOTHER:  More Google weirdness.  (Thanks to C.E. Emmer for the pointer.)

From the bowels of Cyberspace...

...come bountiful pearls of human wisdom.  Sometimes readers send them, sometimes I happen to follow back a link to the blog and am rewarded with a find.   I've collected a few for your reading pleasure.

The Political Complexion of the Readership of This Blog

So with over 1100 votes cast, here's how it looks:

So how would you describe *your* political views?
Marxian left		13% (143)
Social democratic left		50% (557)
American liberal		13% (143)
American moderate democrat		6% (65)
American Republican		1% (10)
Burkean conservative		3% (37)
Social/religious conservative		3% (31)
Libertarian		9% (102)
Fascist/Authoritarian Right		3% (35)

Nearly two-thirds of the readership is on what I would call the genuine left (social democratic or Marxian), which isn't surprising given, among other things, the fact that a substantial portion of the readership is not US-based (roughly one-third), and that philosophers generally lean left.  Add in the "American liberals" (who would be, admittely, in the center, or maybe the center-right in many other Western democracies), and fully three-quarters of the readership is on the 'left' capaciously understood.   To my ten Republican readers, I appreciate your indulgence!   Libertarians represent another major block (nearly 10%), though as I learned from correspondence, some readers who might have picked "anarchist" were it a choice may have gone with libertarian.   But since philosophers like theoretically well-articulated positions, it's not a surprise that libertarianism, like Marxism, gets significant support from readers.   I'm a tad puzzled by the 3% of those who self-identify with the fascist/authoritarian right--of course, since I do have a whole  category of "authoritarianism and fascism alerts" (I'm unique among blogs in offering that!), it may be they are here for news about their prospects!  More likely is that some jokesters couldn't resist the opportunity to so identify.  On the other hand, the revival of interest in Carl Schmitt may have now translated into more philosophers taking the hard line.  The 6% self-identified conservatives, both Burkean and social/religious, are presumably either here for the philosophy news, or they just like to scratch their heads in wonder at what left academics believe, or both!   (I should note that, even though law professors are officially forbidden from reading my philosophy blog, some do, and so that might be skewing the results a bit, since law professors are certainly more to the right, on average, than philosophy professors.)

Thanks to all readers for taking the poll.

Speaking of commenting policies...

...I have one too, and newer readers might want to take a look at it, though they may have already inferred its contours.

"Rethinking the Genealogy of Morals"

Last October, the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values here at the University of Chicago sponsored a conference on "Rethinking the Genealogy of Morals."  The conference ranged far beyond Nietzsche, to look at other efforts to understanding the origins of our moral values, from Hume and Darwin, to contemporary theories in the social science.  We had six genuinely excellent and fascinating papers by my colleagues Michael Forster and Robert Richards, as well as by Daniel Batson (Kansas), Peter Kail (Oxford), John Mikhail (Georgetown), and Jesse Prinz (CUNY).   Excellent commentary was provided by my colleagues Agnes Callard and Martha Nussbaum, as well as Robin Kar (Illinois) and three PhD students:  Nir Ben-Moshe and Nic Koziolek here at Chicago, and Guy Elgat from Northwestern.

Five of the six sessions are now available on audio recordings (scroll down).  Unfortunately, a technical problem resulted in a failure to record Professor Mikhail's session, though interested readers should can find his rich and fascinating paper here.

Ten Million Visits

Some time in the last 24 hours, this blog had its ten millionth visitor, at least according to the SiteMeter gods.   Whatever the precise number, that seems like an awful lot, given my non-existent expectations that I'd have any readers in the beginning.  The blog started in August 2003, mostly by accident:  the IT folks at the University of Texas created blog software and were looking for faculty to use it.  The IT folks in the Law School asked if I was interested, and I said 'no thanks.'  But a week later I changed my mind, since I thought it would be a good complement to the on-line ranking material, and would be an easy way to do updates and corrections.   So it began.  The disgusting behavior of the "Texas Taliban" and the shills at the Discovery [sic] Institute, as well as the criminality of Bush & his bestiary of madmen caught my attention, indeed, occupied a lot of the blog for awhile, resulting in an expansion of the readership.  (Especially memorable, I suppose, was the scandal of the Harvard Law Review publishing laudatory nonsense by a confused law student about notorious ID apologist Francis Beckwith, followed by one of Beckwith's students doing a hatchet job on me in The National Review.)    Lots of fun, and maybe it even did a bit of good, but it became too time-consuming, and so things migrated back to mostly academic stuff.

Mostly it's been enjoyable working on this blog, though my earliest reflections on the experience still ring true to me.   I've certainly enjoyed the privilege of corresponding with a lot of interesting folks (philosophers, other academics, non-academics) thanks to the blog; I've probably recruited a few extra readers for my actual scholarly work; I'm pleased to have provided useful information and help to many students, many of whom have been kind enough to write over the years; and I've had the opportunity to promote good causes, whether it is stamping out anti-gay bigotry in academia, exposing bad behavior by philosophers, or calling attention to egregious actions by administrators that affect philosophy.  Many readers have found particularly valuable the many discussion threads we've run about "issues in the profession" over the last couple of years. 

You didn't get a copy of The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy for the holidays?

Then surely you will want to get your own copy after reading the review by Andy Hamilton (Durham) in British Journal for the History of Philosophy:

This excellent Handbook presents Anglophone work which aims to familiarize Continental Philosophy to Anglophone practitioners, whilst insisting on its distinctiveness. The term ‘Continental’ is taken to cover post-Kantian philosophy in Germany and France, and traditions including Idealism, Marxism, Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and Structuralism. It is somewhat unusual in giving a thematic treatment in which key figures recur under different aspects. Part I covers philosophical method in relation to the sciences and to its own history; Part II, the response to Kant’s Copernican revolution; and Part III, questions of human existence and ethics.

An outstanding contribution to Part I is Michael Rosen’s ‘The History of Philosophy as Philosophy’, a model of clarity combining novel insights with deep knowledge of English and German philosophical literatures. Rosen outlines how history entered into philosophical method with Hegel, an approach foreign to the English-speaking world....

Alex Callinicos, in ‘Marxism and the Status of Critique’, also pursues Marx’s attitude to philosophy, in a pellucid treatment extending to the Frankfurt School and Habermas’ post-Marxism. He notes that Marx’s rejection of Idealism’s constitutive role for the subject led him not only to naturalistic positivism – which denied both philosophy’s cognitive status, and a normative dimension to the critique of capitalism – but also to the ‘philosophical anthropology’ which surfaced in

Capital and other works of1857–67. In this period, Marx continued to describe his enterprise as ‘scientific’, but also engaged in critique of bourgeois ideology, and Callinicos discerns complex theoretical sources in his resistance tomorally condemning capitalism, among them Hegel’s critique of Kant’s transcendentalism...

There is an unusual level of clarity in this volume, given the nature of the material. Frederick Beiser, a sane commentator on Hegel, charts the complexities of ‘Historicism’: the programme of legitimating history as a science, which rejects both metaphysical explanation of historical action by goals outside history and naturalistic explanation of them as part of nature.  Proponents included von Ranke, Dilthey and Burckhardt, with Hamann, Herder and von Humboldt as precursors....t is an implication of historicism that ‘all human values and institutions change . . . The autonomy of the social-historical world, and the complete historicization of the human world, are the two fundamental principles of historicism’ (158). Although historicism has often been equated with relativism, Beiser argues, no historicist regarded himself as such. However, Popper originated the Anglophone definition of historicism as (Hegelian and Marxist) teleological theory of history – a position precisely rejected byclassical German historicists....

Jessica Berry’s ‘The Legacy of Hellenic Harmony’ examines the philosophical significance of Germany’s long affair with Hellenic culture. 

The central figure is art historian Johann Winckelman, who never set foot in the country whose cultural legacy he established. His pamphlet ‘Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture’ (1755) became enormously popular and led to his A History of the Art of Antiquity (1764).  Berry discusses the ‘Winckelmannites’, Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller, and Kant’s contrasting neglect of Greek heritage. Kant’s few references are vague.When he comments on the utility of Platonic archetypes, Berry writes, he really means ‘if Plato were not in fact Plato, but Kant, he should be imitated’ (608)!....

Sebastian Gardner’s ‘Philosophical Aestheticism’ locates art and emotion in the grounds of philosophical thought. ‘Aestheticism’ here does not refer to, and indeed may conflict with, art for art’s sake, since ‘if art is its own end . . . no cognitive end may be attributed to it’ (76). (Distinguishing direct and indirect function may resolve this tension – Adorno for instance inherits the standpoint of art for art’s sake, whilst stressing art’s truth-content.)  Kenneth Baynes’s ‘Freedom and Autonomy’ addresses freedom as selfgovernance, which he argues produced a Copernican revolution in practical philosophy as important as Kant’s critical epistemology. Positive versus negative freedom is also touched on in Fred Rush’s ‘Dialectic, Value Objectivity and the Unity of Reason’ in which he comments that Adorno was sceptical about both bourgeois, capitalist ‘negative freedom’, and selfactualizing ‘positive liberty’. James Finlayson’s ‘Political, Moral and Critical Theory’ addresses the Frankfurt School’s practical philosophy, commenting perceptively on Adorno’s ‘absent politics’.

I have focused my remarks on Idealism and Marxism, but there is equally wide treatment of Phenomenology and post-war French philosophy in this volume. Thomas Baldwin discusses ‘The Humanism Debate’ between Heidegger and Sartre, and others. He locates the classicist concept of ‘humanism’ as dating only from the later eighteenth century, but confusingly given the centrality of this use, Heidegger treats humanism as a metaphysical commitment to truth as representation. Michael N. Forster’s essay offers a wide-ranging survey of ‘Hermeneutics’.... Other very impressive essays include Robert Stern’s ‘Individual Existence and the Philosophy of Difference’, which contrasts Hegel’s solution of the problem of individuality with Deleuze’s critique; Herman Philipse’s ‘Overcoming Epistemology’; Stephen Mulhall on God’s place in post-Kantian philosophy; and ‘Morality Critics’ by Brian Leiter. This is a well-conceived and edited volume, and an excellent resource.

Some Blog Highlights from 2009

These were posts that attracted unusual amounts of attention and discussion during the past year:

Thomas Nagel Jumps the Shark, Part II (December)

Does Academia, Including Philosophy, Exclude People Based on Class? (December)

"Party-Line Continentalists" versus Philosophical Scholars of the Continental Traditions (November)

Philosophy Referee Hand Signals (November)

Nietzsche and Ayn Rand:  A Brief Comment (November)

Carlin Romano Does It Again (October)

Why aren't there more women in academic philosophy?  (October)

Alex Rosenberg on Cochrane and Economics (September)

Best of the Summer Blog (links to posts June-August)

The 20 "Most Important" Philosophers of All Time (May)

Francis Beckwith:  Intelligent Design Apologist or Not? (May)

Acquiring Substantial Debt While in Grad School:  How Much?  How Common?  (April)

Inside the Mind of Religiously-Inspired Bigots (March)

The Highest Quality "General" Philosophy Journals in English (March)

Which Person Do You Most Wish the Media Would Stop Referring to as a 'Philosopher'? (March)

Gourmet Reports for Other Disciplines? (February)

The APA and Discrimination Against Homosexuals...Again (February)

Do Young Philosophers Have a "Sense of Entitlement" or Are They Just Internalizing the Expectations of Their Teachers? (January)

What happens when a blog does not moderate comments?

You end up with lists like this.

Thanks to the many intelligent readers who guarantee that every comments thread here will be instructive, intelligent, and actually worth reading.

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the link.)

Leiter & Rosen's "Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy"

Now in paperback, just in time for the holidays!  From Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

In sum, this handbook is a remarkable achievement. On the one hand, the scope of the themes and authors is large enough to count as an excellent overview of the many facets of continental philosophy; on the other hand, the creative and critical nature of the contributions provides a thorough and in-depth discussion of the trends making up continental philosophy. It is both a scholarly work providing a large amount of information and a philosophical work testing and assessing the originality and fruitfulness of continental philosophy. If a case had to be made about the relevance, originality, and fruitfulness of the continental approaches, this handbook makes it rather convincingly and brilliantly.

Sorry for the dearth of postings...

...but in the last 7 days I've been at Arizona State, Columbia, and Michigan/Ann Arbor.  Now things are settling down, so expect more regular postings shortly.

"Best of the summer" blog

For those who took a break from blog-reading during the summer, here are a few items from the summer that might be of interest:

Is "Secular Moral Theory" Really Relatively Young? (June)

The New NRC "Methodology" for Ranking Graduate Programs (July)

The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (July)

In Memoriam:  G.A. Cohen (August)

A proposal on referreeing articles for journals (August)

Plus, scroll through here to see other faculty moves and memorial notices announced over the summer (there were several).

Results of the Reader Feedback Poll

Thanks to the 740 readers who completed the poll about the blog from earlier in the summer.  The results were mostly what I expected, except for the strong showing for substantive philosophical postings--we've done relatively few of those, but I infer they are welcome, and so I'll aim for more such discussions.   I was also struck by the very strong interest in "issues in the profession" postings with opportunities for reader comments.  These are undoubtedly instructive, and the main constraint on doing more of them is time to moderate the comments sections, but they will surely continue to be a major continuing feature.  Given the turn away from regular political commentary awhile back, it was not surprising that the political categories were less popular with readers who remained, though they each still enjoyed, somewhat to my surprise, strong support from noticeable minorities of readers (almost 20% of respondents, for example, rated "Texas Taliban" alerts in their top five).  Interestingly, a number of readers e-mailed me as the poll was going on to voice support for more political postings.  And as one reader wrote:  "Interesting that the religion and 'other ignoramus' categories are polling so low, despite the fact that those have huge response/comment rates.  I wonder if the religious and other ignoramuses are voting out of self-interest in the poll…!  I think you should keep excoriating them."  I suppose it is reasonable to think readers who find "Texas Taliban"-style posts hitting too close to home would be less fond of this category.  In any case, I don't expect to significantly increase or decrease those postings.

"Naturalizing Jurisprudence"

Now everyone will surely want their own copy!

Reader feedback sought

What are you favorite features/topics/subject on the blog?  Please vote!  This will help me, perhaps, in knowing where to focus my efforts.  Thanks.

This blog wordled...

Sorry about the light posting...

...but there's a lot going on, including preparing for this excellent event at Riverside.  A bit more next week I expect....

Advertising for May on the Blog--A Discount

Either top spot (left or right) is still available for May, so we're slashing the price to $300 for each spot.  Please contact me ASAP if you're interested.  

There is also at least one top spot available for each month for the remainder of the year, including the peak traffic fall months (Sept and Dec have only one spot open at present, Oct and Nov have both spots available). 

I will also offer a discount for anyone who takes a top spot for all three summer months (which would ordinarily be $810).  Again, contact me for details on the summer discount.

Traffic on This Blog Has Increased Dramatically...

...in the last two months, and I'm not quite sure why.  It began in early January, and then, I think, it was due to previews of the now-published PGR.  But it lasted beyond that, and continued to increase in February.  Clearly the discussion of the petition to the APA, and now the counter-petition, has been a factor.  But January and February were at levels of traffic (average 8,000 hits per day) usually not seen except in April right before decision time for PhD students).  I'll be interested to see whether it lasts.

So people have been saying, "Philosophers are getting on Facebook, you should too."

So I did.  Now what?  

UPDATE:  Well, I've now received lots of invitations to join other philosophers on Facebook as "friends," so that's at least part of the "what"!  Thanks for the invites.  I've also gotten invites from some people I don't know.  Perhaps one of my new Facebook friends will write on my "wall" explaining the protocols of this to me.

Reaching Me via "LinkedIn"

Over the last 12 months, a number of folks have tried to reach "Brian Leiter" via a LinkedIn site I'd created ages ago--unfortunately, I then forgot the password.  But I've now re-established access to it, for those for whom that might be relevant.  I apologize for not replying to those who had tried to contact me that way.

"The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy"

Michael Rosen and I are certainly grateful to Professor Vandevelde of Marquette for this generous review of The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy; his conclusion is particularly welcome, because it states well our aim and the aim of the contributors, and confirms that we achieved it:

In sum, this handbook is a remarkable achievement. On the one hand, the scope of the themes and authors is large enough to count as an excellent overview of the many facets of continental philosophy; on the other hand, the creative and critical nature of the contributions provides a thorough and in-depth discussion of the trends making up continental philosophy. It is both a scholarly work providing a large amount of information and a philosophical work testing and assessing the originality and fruitfulness of continental philosophy. If a case had to be made about the relevance, originality, and fruitfulness of the continental approaches, this handbook makes it rather convincingly and brilliantly.

If Obama Loses, It's My Fault

It's true.   (Well, not really, I would have voted for Nader.)

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the link.)

E-Mail Problems

A shutdown of the electrical system at the Law School on Monday night created some problems for those sending me e-mail at my Chicago address.  It appears everything got through to me, but not till morning.

Please note we're having a repeat of the same shutdown tonight (Tuesday starting around 5 pm Central Time, 6 pm NYC time), and running through Wednesday morning.  It might be best not to try to e-mail me during that time.  The system should be up and running by 6 or 7 am on Wednesday morning.  For urgent matters, leave me a phone message at my office.  Thanks.

A word about my comments policy

As longtime readers know, I open comments selectively when I think reader input is likely to be especially informative and when I have time to moderate comments.  This practice has worked well, in terms of the quality of the comment sections, but it is time-consuming and it also means that relatively few threads have commenting opportunities.   But it seems to me that more laissez-faire policies have significant disadvantages.

First, there are likely to be far more anonymous comments, and anonymity generally encourages irresponsible behavior.  Second, there would be a lot more spam--a lot of older threads with open comments get spam fairly regularly, but that never sees the light of day under the current system.  Third, the quality of threads is likely to be much more uneven--take a look at Crooked Timber threads to get an idea of what tends to happen.  There are some folks who comment rather excessively on any blog where the opportunity presents itself, and what they have in common is rarely skill and insight.  (Search "John Emerson" on Crooked Timber for an example of the problem.)  The comment sections of highly-trafficked blogs are very attractive for those who want attention, and especially if their professional competence does not permit them to get such recognition from established fora outside the blogosphere.  And some nuisance commenters are just literally nuts.  (Pharyngula maintains a whole list of permanently blocked commenters, including some denizens of Cyberspace whom he deems, not implausibly, to be mentally ill--a phenomenon, needless to say, with which I have some familiarity.)   

The question, of course, is how likely it is an "open" comments policy here would devolve in these ways.  When there was more scathing political commentary on the blog, that risk was certainly greater, but these days the quality of submitted comments are pretty good, and I approve at least 90%.  On the other hand, the amount of garbage would surely increase if there were not the specter of comment moderation, so for the foreseeable future I intend to maintain the comments status quo.  If you have thoughts on the issue, feel free to e-mail me.  Thanks.

UPDATE:  Sentiment so far is strongly in favor of continuing moderation.  One student gave apt expression to the case for moderation:

Per your recent post, I think it would be better if you kept moderating comments as you have. The vast majority of discussion on the internet is worthless, your blog being a rare exception. If comments are not moderated it is safe to assume not only that there will be more junk comments, but that this decrease in average quality will cause a decrease in the number of worthwhile comments as well. Many of the most informative and best-considered comments in current discussions come from well-respected, and no doubt very busy, philosophers, whom I imagine would have little desire to spend their scant free time engaging with belligerent internet trolls.

Pretty much my sentiments exactly.

New Contact Info for...

...Brian Leiter.  I'll continue using the Texas e-mail for awhile, but the Chicago e-mail is already working.

My Teaching at Chicago Next Year

Some students have asked; for those who are interested, there is information here.

A Favor, Once Again

I'd ask readers with blogs to please consider adding these blogs to their blogrolls (if they maintain one):

Brian Leiter's Legal Philosophy Blog

Brian Leiter's Nietzsche Blog

Thanks.

Advice Sought on Summer Travel in Southern Europe

I have professional engagements this summer in Northern Italy and Spain, and was hoping to spend some time between events with my family at some appealing place (nice beach, good swimming, great food) on the Italian or French Riviera (i.e., inbetween the Italian and Spanish engagements).  I would be grateful for suggestions!  Many thanks.

The Change in the Formatting on Posts and Comments

I have only just realized that Typepad automatically changed the formatting, limiting the number of posts per page, and the number of comments per page, with the result that these annoying little "next" lines appear at the bottom that you have to click on to continue.  I've now adjusting the settings so that the maximum number of comments and posts appear on a single page, but the maximum isn't that high:  the limit is 50.  Obviously that is a headache for the tenure-track hiring thread, where there will likely be more than 100 comments soon.  I will inquire with Typepad, since this latest "innovation" is clearly not a helpful one for our purposes.  Anyway, my apologies to readers who are finding this a nuisance.

Busy March

This is a rather hectic (but exciting) month for me, as I'm giving the Fresco Lectures in Jurisprudence at the University of Genoa in Italy, the Dunbar Lecture in Law and Philosophy at the University of Mississippi, and participating in an APA session (at the Pacific Division in Pasadena) on Nietzsche.  I may be slower than usual in replying to e-mails, but I will keep udpating the blog with pertinent faculty news, since this is likely to be a busy month for news. 

Good luck to all job seekers and to prospective students, who will also no doubt be getting news in the coming weeks!

It's Tough to Spell "Nietzsche"!

Proof.

It's not often that Ronald Dworkin and I are invoked in support of the same proposition...

..but a reader points out a rare instance, an appropriately scathing review of a childishly stupid book by a childishly stupid author, one Jonah Goldberg (about whom we had occasion to comment in passing long ago).  The passage in question:

Goldberg falsely saddles liberalism not just with relativism but with all manner of alleged errors having nothing to do with liberalism. At one point, he exhumes the likes of Derrida and Foucault in order to pummel them once more for introducing postmodernism, deconstruction, and other continental horrors into the world. What this tiresome routine has to do with liberalism escapes the reader. From the outset, liberals opposed these fads as fiercely as conservatives. Just ask Ronald Dworkin or Brian Leiter. Goldberg, like many movement conservatives, grossly overestimates the influence of postmodernism, doubtless because avowed nihilists make such good straw men (if not good theater, as Derrida and Foucault well knew).

Of course, it always make me sad to see Foucault, a genuinely learned man and creative intellect, lumped together with the charlatan Derrida.  But the reviewer is clearly correct that Derridean silliness has nothing to do with liberalism, and precious little to do with anything in the modern university.

A Google Curiosity

The top result for a Google search of "Leiter" is this blog.  Take that Al Leiter and Felix Leiter!

The "Best" of 2007

Here's some of the blog postings from 2007 that still seem to me most interesting (of course, what do I know?).  If you missed them the first time, you might enjoy checking them out now (most are by me, but I've included a handful by some of the others who occasionally blog here):   

The Changing "Sociology" of the Philosophy Profession (January)

The Proposed U.S. Troop "Surge" in Iraq (January)

Paul Campos's Problem with the First Amendment and Academic Freedom (February)

On Pluralism in Philosophy Departments, Once Again (March)

Using Google Scholar to Assesss the Impact of Scholarly Work (April)

"Because the undergraduates are better" (May)

DePaul's University Attack on Academic Freedom:  The Tenure Case of Norman Finkelstein (June)

Simon Critchley Rides to the Defense of Derrida (July)

Carlin Romano:  Total Ignorance of Philosophy is No Obstacle to Opining about Richard Rorty (September)

Geuss's Skepticism about Rawls (October)

Summary of Major Faculty Moves and Tenure-Track Hires for 2006-2007 (October)

How Do Departments Decide Whom to Interview at the APA? (November)

The Honderich-McGinn Dispute (with links to earlier postings) (October-November-December)

And from my Nietzsche blog:

Nietzsche Studies:  Where the Action Is (October)

Ridley on "Nietzsche and the Re-evaluation of Values" (November)

Where should a beginner start with Nietzsche? (December)

And from my legal philosophy blog:

The Worst Jurisprudential Article of the Year? (September)

Justifying Originalism (October)

Authorities that Perform a Partial Service:  An Objection to Raz's Objection to Soft Positivism? (November)