Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Philosophy Made Easy Through Simple Poems!

This is quite amusing; the poems are by Brian Knudson.

Philosophers named after birds, fish, body parts, occupations, etc.

Who knew?

Politically Correct and Non-Legally Binding Holiday Wishes

Here.

"How the APA Stole Christmas"

Here, courtesy of bioethicist Carl Elliott at Minnesota.

"I've looked at brains from both sides now"

A song inspired by the work of David Chalmers (ANU).  (The photos accompanying the song do raise an important philosophical question:  why did he stop shaving?)

Rated "R" for "Metaphysics"

From The New York Times review of Francis Ford Coppola's film "Youth Without Youth":

“Youth Without Youth” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun violence, sexual congress, female nudity, metaphysics.

If only they'd cut the metaphysics scene, it might have been PG-13!

(Thanks to Charles Huenemann for the pointer.)

Ubermunsch Snacks!

Something to snack on while watching the Kant attack ad.

Immanuel Kant: "Wrong on metaphysics, wrong on ethics, wrong on aesthetics"

I'm not sure, though, that he is "wrong for America."  But this is quite funny.  (Thanks to Amy Kind for the pointer.)

Holiday Greetings from the Philosophers of Action at Florida State

Randolph Clarke, Michael McKenna, and Alfred Mele.  (It may take awhile to load, and seems to work better from Internet Explorer than Mozilla Firefox.)

Are Moral Philosophers Ethical?

At last, the truth:

The majority of philosophers expressed the view that ethicists do not behave better than non-ethicists.  Ethicists themselves were about evenly divided between saying ethicists behave better and saying they behave the same.  Non-ethicists were about evenly divided between saying that ethicists behave better, the same, and worse.

More useful would be to know about the differences between Kantians, utilitarians, and virtue ethicists.  Based on my utterly non-scientific, anecdotal method, my conclusion is that you're safest with utilitarians and virtue theorists, and in mortal danger around Kantians (it's that combination of dogmatic rectitude and lack of judgment, I guess--or to quote Geuss again, "The Kantian philosophy is no more than at best a half-secularized version of...a theocratic ethics with 'Reason' in the place of God" [Outside Ethics, p. 20]).  I assume some Experimental Philosophers will tackle this weighty matter next.

UPDATE:  Professor Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) observes:

I have noticed that everyone I've spoken to so far who thinks there are differences in ethical character between Kantians, utilitarians, and virtue ethicists thinks the Kantians are the worst of the lot. I'd be interested to hear readers' thoughts about this.

Free Will & Determinism Comics

Here.  (Thanks to Saul Smilansky for the pointer.)

The Otago (New Zealand) Supplement to "The Philosophical Lexicon"

Courtesy of Charles Pigden (Otago): here.  Pretty funny...if you know your Kiwi philosophers!

Fodor Parodies Wittgenstein (Leiter)

Weatherson has the details and background, but (via Ned Block) here is a slightly easier to read version of the parody.

"Nano-Philosophy"...

...the search for "very, very small philosophical questions."  Courtesy of Robert Stainton (Western Ontario) and his former colleagues from the University of Waterloo.

Politically Correct and Non-Legally Binding Holiday Wishes (Leiter)

Here.

Job Ad: Lectureship in "Conscious Sedation" (Leiter)

You can't make this stuff up.

How Not to Recruit Students to Your PhD Program (Leiter)

The Economics Department at Harvard actually prepared this video as a recruiting device for prospective PhD students.  It is fair to say that this was not a successful effort.  Students in the Department, in turn, prepared two parodies of the original:  here and here.  I confess I almost died laughing on the second one especially.

Let this be a lesson to all!

German Philosophers vs. the Greeks...

...in this Monty Python classic.  The mistake of the Germans was not to start Marx and play other philosophers who subordinate theory to praxis.  (To their credit, the Monty Python folks understand that:  note Marx's objection at the end to the final goal, in contrast to the others.)

"Nietzsche Family Circus" (Leiter)

Here:  curious and mildly amusing.  (Thanks to Nicholas Daum for the pointer.)

The Oxford "Jurisprudence Census"

If you know something about legal philosophy--especially Oxford-centric legal philosophy--you will find this rather amusing.  (Thanks to Les Green for the pointer.)

Funny Moments in Student Journalism (Leiter)

I generally like The Daily Texan, but this howler from Monday's paper is too good to let pass in silence.  This is from an article on a conference on campus organized by "Historians Against the War":

U.S. citizens must understand the United States' history of empiricism in order to speak out against and stop the war in Iraq, said historian, author and political activist Howard Zinn Friday....

He went on to say the United States has had a long history of civilizing people, or at least claiming to.

"The United States is behaving like all the empirical powers have in the past," Zinn said.

Who knew that if we had only been a rationalist nation, instead of an empiricist one, the U.S. never would have inflicted so much carnage on Indonesia, Guatemala, Iraq, Chile, Nicaragua, etc.?

Personal Ads of the Philosophers: Kant

SWM, 56, university professor, virgin, just finishing big book, looking for expanded social life. Hobbies include walking around town, starry-sky gazing, rational self-governance. I do not enjoy liars, promise-breakers, dogmatic slumbers, doing the morally right thing (but I do it anyway, out of respect for duty) or travelling. Seeks woman (Konigsberg area, please) for non-exploitative relationship based on mutual respect for our rational natures.

(Originally posted December 6, 2003.)

The Onion Zaps Loudmouth Philosophy Students

So many readers have kindly sent me this item that I have to post it.

Philosopher's Tics

A reader sends in this amusing list of "philosopher's tics"--none of which, of course, are ever in evidence on this blog!

Philosopher's Tics: The inability to pass over a faulty inference or fallacy in silence, or to correct it in a spirit of generosity; a relentless need to accuse one's adversary of insufficient 'rigor', or of 'misreading' or 'failing to understand' one's position; and, the worst of all, a constant need to drive home one's greater intellect, at the expense of the merits of the argument. I married a philosophy major...so I may be particularly sensitive to these tics.

But wouldn't the world be a better place if there were fewer faulty inferences, more rigor and better reading, and if everyone were as smart as philosophers?

Tic, tic, tic...

[Originally posted July 2, 2004.]

Personal Ads of the Philosophers: Nietzsche

SWM, 42, retired academic living on modest pension, some health problems but highly resilient. Handsome in a Teutonic way. Enjoys solitude, walking in the mountains, fate, the French, and opera (Bizet, not Wagner!). Anti-religious (both the church and its poison). Seeks woman willing to will the eternal return of our relationship. No Germans, "free thinkers," Anglophiles, or anti-semites. No permanent mailing address, so please respond to Box #1291.

(Originally posted December 4, 2003).

Philosophical Insights in Beatles' Lyrics

This is fairly clever, and philosophers, at least, will find it amusing.  (Spotted via Weatherson's site.)

Jeremy Bentham to Become CEO of Shell Hydrogen

Story here.  Who knew the old Auto-Icon had so much "life" still in him?

(Thanks to Craig Duncan for the pointer.)

Philosophical Joke

A philosopher in Canada sends the following:

What do you get when you cross a deconstructionist and a mafioso? He'll make you an offer you can't understand.

The Prayer of Australian Philosophers...

...or at least those at the ANU. Written by Daniel Nolan, distinguished ANU grad now at St. Andrews, philosophers will find it very funny, everyone else will scratch their heads.

(Thanks to Brian Weatherson for the pointer.)

Love as a "moral" emotion?

It's not often that the journal Ethics (edited by my esteemed colleague John Deigh) publishes funny articles, but the rejoinder by Elijah Millgram to David Velleman's 1999 article "Love as a Moral Emotion" (requires JSTOR) certainly qualifies (perhaps as wickedly funny). If your institution subscribes, you can access Professor Millgram's article here. An excerpt:

"The Kantian element [in Velleman's account of love] is that you are supposed to love that person as a rational being or, more precisely, an 'idealized, rational will' (p. 344); what you are supposed to love in them is 'the capacity to be actuated by reasons,' the 'capacity to care about things in that reflective way which is distinctive of self-conscious creatures like us' (p. 365)....

"Velleman confirms the point I want to make here by calling your rational self your 'true self' (p. 365). It is not a new observation that when someone tells you that x is your 'true interest,' or that x is what we 'truly want,' or that x is someone's 'true home,' we can be pretty sure that x is not actually in your interest, that we don't actually want x, and that x is not actually his home. This use of 'true' might as well be a negation operator, and when Velleman tells us that our rational selves are our true selves, he is (inadvertently) acknowledging that they're not actually our selves at all....

"In a surprising book-length essay, Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle) argues that what he calls 'crystallization' is a central feature of romantic love. One never, he thinks, loves a person as that person is. Instead, one loves an idealized fantasy of perfection that obscures the person from view, in something like the way that salt crystals growing on twigs in the Salzburg salt mines obscure the twigs from view. Velleman has produced an account that...ends up as Kantian crystallization, that is, treating empirical persons as the occasions for fantasies of Kantian practical rationality...."

Tired of Kantian fantasies about love? On a different note, here's what the scientists are saying.

Protect Yourself from Mind Control!

At last, a solution is here: "Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie: An Effective, Low-Cost Solution To Combating Mind-Control."

(Thanks to Ann Bartow for the pointer.)

Hobbes, Iraq, Rumsfeld

Cartoon here.

(Thanks to Adrian Viens at Oxford for the pointer.)

New Nietzschean Diet Lets You Eat What You Fear Most

Various folks were kind enough to e-mail me this morning to call my attention to this amusing item from The Onion. Let me state for the record that the Nietzsche scholarship on which this humor is based is not entirely sound. But it's funny anyway.

Philosophy Cartoon

Quite funny, if unjust--courtesy of Michael Sevel.

Indexicals, Children, and Kant

I was corresponding with a distinguished philosopher about the shared affection of our small children for indexicals and possessive pronouns (such as "me" and "mine"). My anecdote about my oldest, when he was 2:

Father: "I'm me, you're you."

Son: "No, I'm me, and you're you."

Father: No, I"m me, you're you."

Son: "No, no, no, I'm me, and you're you."

etc.

Debates about "me" and "you," this philosopher noted, soon give way to reflections on "me" and what's "mine." This philosopher observed: "Kant got it all wrong about the basic categories of conscious experience. Concepts of possession beat those of causality and substance any day." Indeed!

Ten Books of Philosophy That Will Never Be Written are...

here courtesy of Michael Sevel. Quite amusing. (I'm not sure Sevel has got my title right, though--I'd prefer to not write In Defense of Constructive Interpretivism or The Case for Intuitions in Philosophy or New Philosophical Arguments for Intelligent Design.)

ADDENDUM: And Jerry Cohen is extremely unhaughty and unOxford!

UPDATE: 5 more choice books of philosophy that won't be written, courtesy of Noumenon.

A day in the life of a Princeton philosophy graduate student

But the day happens to be the day of his orals...more here. Very funny. (Thanks to Michael Sevel for the pointer.)

Personal Ads of the Philosophers: Socrates

MWM, age unknown (mature, not elderly), famously ugly but a good talker. I like questions, not answers; reason, not passion; wisdom, not wealth; Euripides, not Aristophanes. Seeks ignorant and irrational woman or handsome youth to do what is wrong.

[Note: Nietzsche helped Socrates write this one.]

(More Personal Ads of the Philosophers are here.)

Personal Ads of the Philosophers: Hume

SWM, age 49, philosopher (unemployed as such, but earn a living other ways), stout Scotsman, sympathetic nature. Ruling passions include literary fame, English history, complex ideas, human nature, and hatred of the a priori. Well-disposed towards dispositions. Seeking woman, forceful and vivacious, who has reason to be the slave of my passions.

(With thanks to Mark Engleson for the idea for this one.)

(Other personal ads of the philosophers are here.)