Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

An Open Letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education: Please, Oh Please, Could You Publish Something about Philosophy by Someone Who Knows Something (even a little!) about the Subject?

Bernard Kobes (Arizona State) calls my attention to the latest travesty about academic philosophy to stain the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education, this one by Russell Jacoby whose qualification for the task--brace yourselves--is that he is a "Professor in Residence" in the History Department at UCLA.  This item is not quite as perniciously ignorant as work by Carlin Romano, or as lazily ignorant as Alan Wolfe writing about Mill, but it is ignorant and misleading nonetheless, and does now raise a real question about editorial oversight at the Chronicle:  why are you folks letting people with no discernible knowledge of the subject write about academic philosophy? 

Now, to be fair, Mr. Jacoby also wants to savage economics and psychology departments.  Here's how he starts:

How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy? Instead these masters of Western thought are taught in fields far from their own. Nowadays Freud is found in literature departments, Marx in film studies, and Hegel in German. But have they migrated, or have they been expelled? Perhaps the home fields of Freud, Marx, and Hegel have turned arid. Perhaps those disciplines have come to prize a scientistic ethos that drives away unruly thinkers. Or maybe they simply progress by sloughing off the past.

This is a quite breathtaking opening, especially because Hegel, Marx, and Freud were, all three, committed to a scientific ethos--Marx and Freud precisely in the modern sense (picked out by the pejorative "scientistic") of trying to construct theories, respectively, of history and the mind that passed muster by the standards of the natural sciences.  One of many reasons little sound scholarship on Hegel, Marx, or Freud emanates from the departments Mr. Jacoby singles out is that those fields too often lack anything resembling a commitment to Wissenschaft, to rigorous methods and standards of evidence.

There is a further irony here, which is that the phenomenon in question is not a recent one, something one might have expected an historian to know.  Hegel is taught far more often in philosophy departments now than he was in Germany in the 1870s and 1880s, when the combination of the popularity of Schopenhauer's anti-Hegelian polemics, the rise of German Materialism, and the "back to Kant" turn in German philosophy left Hegel out in the cold.  And surely Mr. Jacoby must realize that in the heyday of behaviorism in psychology in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Freud was not exactly a welcome presence in academic psychology departments where any reference to conscious beliefs and desires in the explanation of behavior was itself thought suspect.

So part of what is completely untenable about this framing of the issue is that it assumes, falsely, that these disciplines, including philosophy, are "static," that because a thinker at time T self-identifies with a discipline that necessarily any discipline bearing the same name at time T+100 must be the same.  But as the story of Hegel's neglect in Germany just a generation or so after his death rather dramatically illustrates, the assumption has no merit.

Of course, I have yet to raise a question about the factual assumption underlying Mr. Jacoby's critique, namely, about what is actually taught.  Here's what he tells us:

A completely unscientific survey of three randomly chosen universities confirms the exodus. A search through the philosophy-course descriptions at the University of Kansas yields a single 19th-century-survey lecture that mentions Hegel. Marx receives a passing citation in an economics class on income inequality. Freud scores zero in psychology. At the University of Arizona, Hegel again pops up in a survey course on 19th-century philosophy; Marx is shut out of economics; and, as usual, Freud has disappeared. And at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Hegel does not appear in philosophy courses, Marx does not turn up in economics, and Freud is bypassed in psychology.

I assume that most historians have more regard for the use of evidence than is evident in Mr. Jacoby's completely absurd sampling method, one made even more suspect by facts that are quite easy to confirm on-line but omitted by Mr. Jacoby.  The Department of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, for example, has a full-time, tenure-stream young scholar who wrote his PhD thesis on Hegel, and who teaches and writes regularly (and intelligently) about both Hegel and Nietzsche. (Did it occur to Mr. Jacoby that the on-line course descriptions might be outdated?)  This is all the more notable given that the Kansas department is relatively small.  The University of Wisconsin at Madison also has a full-time, tenured member of the faculty (Ivan Soll), who has written one book on Hegel, and many articles on Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, among others.  So much for Mr. Jacoby's report of his random sampling.

Here, off the top of my head, is a list of tenure-stream faculty who teach and write about Hegel in just the top 20 philosophy departments in the U.S. (I assume that will qualify as the "scientistic" mainstream for Mr. Jacoby's purposes):  Beatrice Longuenesse at NYU; Robert Brandom at Pittsburgh; Allen Wood at Stanford; Frederick Neuhouser at Columbia; Karl Ameriks at Notre Dame; Michelle Kosch at Cornell; Michael Forster and Robert Pippin at Chicago; Kathleen Higgins at Texas; Michael Hardimon at UC San Diego.  That's not to mention, of course, all the faculty at these departments who regularly teach and write about Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, among others.

Aquinas, Epicurus, Duns Scotus, Hobbes, Reid, and Spinoza--among other major historical figures--aren't nearly as well-represented as Hegel, I'm afraid.  Where is Mr. Jacoby's anger about this fact?

And should one be angry about it?  Hegel is but one figure in the history of philosophy, regarded by some as of seminal importance, by others (like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, for instance) as worthy mainly of ridicule.  A typical philosophy department, even one with a PhD program, may have only fifteen or so faculty lines, with which it must cover the whole history of philosophy (ancient Greek and Roman, medieval, early modern, Kant and 19th-century philosophy, 20th-century analytic and Continental philosophy--and perhaps even the history of non-Western philosophical traditions) as well as areas of contemporary research in moral, political, and legal philosophy; philosophy of the sciences and mathematics; philosophy of language and mind; metaphysics and epistemology; and perhaps still others (logic, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, etc.).

Why, oh why, should the historical treatment of one figure, Hegel, take precedence over every other major historical figure or important contemporary topic?  That's the actual question that Departments confront.  And given the actual situation, it is rather striking that Hegel fares as well as he does compared to other figures in the history of philosophy.

Mr. Jacoby, however, has a real axe he wants to grind:  namely, what he takes to be the anti-historical or a-historical nature of his target disciplines.  (Imagine that:  an historian is mad that other fields don't pay enough attention to his!)  Here is his hugely ironic critique of psychology on this score:

[T]he ruthlessly anti- or nonhistorical orientation that informs contemporary academe encourages shelving past geniuses. This mind-set evidently affects psychology. The American Psychological Association's own task force on "learning goals" for undergraduate majors makes a nod toward teaching the history of psychology, but it relegates the subject to an optional subfield, equivalent to "group dynamics." "We are not advocating that separate courses in the history of psychology or group dynamics must be included in the undergraduate curriculum," the savants counsel, "but leave it to the ingenuity of departments to determine contexts in which students can learn those relevant skills and perspectives." The ingenious departments apparently have dumped Freud as antiquated. A study by the American Psychoanalytic Association of "teaching about psychoanalytic ideas in the undergraduate curricula of 150 highly ranked colleges and universities" concludes that Freudian ideas thrive outside of psychology departments....

The irony, of course, is that contemporary academic psychology shares the same "scientistic" commitments of Freud:  namely, to discover truths about the mind that can pass muster by the evidential standards that have served us well in the natural sciences.  Physics and Chemistry departments do not spend a lot of time on the "history" of their disciplines, and psychology departments, even if they were now dominated by Freudians, would not either.  Perhaps the fact that psychology is a "soft" science (to put it nicely) should give them pause about such an approach; but, ironically, Freud would not have been an ally on this point.

After then attacking economics, Mr. Jacoby turns to philosophy:

Compared with economics, philosophy prizes the study of its past and generally offers courses on Greek, medieval, and modern thinkers. Frequently, however, those classes close with Kant, in the 18th century, and do not pick up again until the 20th century. The troubling 19th century, featuring Hegel (and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), is omitted or glossed over. General catalogs sometimes list a Hegel course in philosophy, but it is rarely offered. Very few philosophy departments at major universities teach Hegel or Hegelian thought.

We've already noted that this is partly false (many of the leading philosophy departments in the country have Hegel specialists on their faculties) and partly misleading (lots of historical figures are taught irregularly, there is always a question of resources).  But Mr. Jacoby continues:

Philosophy stands at the opposite pole from psychology in at least one respect. In most colleges and universities, it is one of the smaller majors, while psychology is one of the largest. Yet, much like psychology, philosophy has proved unwelcoming for thinkers paddling against the mainstream. Not only did sharp critics like Richard Rorty, frustrated by its narrowness, quit philosophy for comparative literature, but a whole series of professors have departed for other fields, leaving philosophy itself intellectually parched.

That is the argument of John McCumber, a scholar of Hegel and Heidegger who himself decamped from philosophy to German. His book Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era (Northwestern University Press, 2001) savages the contemporary American philosophical profession and its flight from history. He notes, for instance, that 10 years after the 1987 "breakthrough anthology" Feminism as Critique, not one of its contributors, from Seyla Benhabib to Iris Marion Young, still taught in a philosophy department. The pressures that force — or tempt — big names such as Rorty and Martha Nussbaum to quit philosophy, McCumber observes, exert equal force on those outside the public eye. He charges, for instance, that senior editors dispense with peer review and run the major philosophy journals like private fiefdoms, and that a few established professors select papers for the discipline's annual conferences. The authoritarianism and cronyism drive out mavericks.

Professor Kobes, in his note to me, put it well:  "This is a grotesque distortion of the state of our discipline. It is simply not true that the major philosophy journals dispense with peer review and are run like private fiefdoms. And I suspect it is at least misleading to suggest that people like Martha Nussbaum 'quit philosophy' (sic) because the discipline is unwelcoming to people paddling against the mainstream."  Indeed:  I am quite sure Martha Nussbaum, when she joined the University of Chicago Law School a dozen years ago, was "quitting philosophy" as little as I am today.  Benhabib didn't "quit" philosophy either:  she simply found the grass greener in Political Science Departments, where the top departments were keen to hire her when top philosophy departments were not.  The reason, I'm afraid, is pretty simple, but one would actually have to know something to know this:  Benhabib's work on Hegel and the Frankfurt School just is not as good, philosophically, as the best work on these thinkers by Allen Wood, Michael Forster, Raymond Geuss, Michael Rosen, Frederick Beiser, Robert Pippin, and others.

And finally--alas--if Mr. Jacoby had asked around he would have learned rather quickly that  no one (not even the leading scholars of Hegel and Heidegger) considers Professor McCumber an authority on, or even a reliable guide to, contemporary philosophy.  (Professor McCumber does teach in the German Department at UCLA which may explain why he looms so large on Mr. Jacoby's horizon.)  For example, only Journal of Philosophy could be reasonably charged with being run like a "private fiefdom[]," as our earlier discussion of the topic brought out.  In fact, philosophy is notable for the large number of high-profile journals run meticulously and utilizing blind peer review.  Maybe this is driving out "mavericks" (like Professor McCumber?), or maybe it is driving out mediocrities and poseurs?  The evidence on offer is, alas, compatible with both possibilities.  It would take a lot more argument, and knowledge, to establish Mr. Jacoby's preferred reading.

Mr. Jacoby, sadly, is not done smearing a field he obviously has little knowledge of, for he continues:

Philosophy nods toward its past, but its devotion to language analysis and logic-chopping pushes aside as murky its great 19th-century thinkers. Polishing philosophical eyeglasses proves futile if they are rarely used to see.

Some philosophers, no doubt, "chop logic," just as some historians apparently "shovel bullshit," but we would, in either instance, do well to refrain from judging the state of a discipline by its weakest exemplars.  It is true that philosophy that utilizes formal logic is harder for intellectual tourists like Mr. Jacoby to read, but I am afraid this does not establish its value.  "Language analysis" is also, as every reader of this blog knows, contested and in some quarters abandoned as central to philosophical methodology.  But what contemporary philosophers have in common is not "language-analysis and logic-chopping," but rather what they share with almost every other philosopher in history, namely, an interest in understanding--in "polishing philosophical eyeglasses" in order "to see"--the nature of knowledge, reality, truth, mind, meaning, morality, goodness, art, etc.  Hegel is "murkier" than Quine, and also murkier than Hume.  But murkiness has never been an obstacle to philosophical importance, from Leibniz to Hegel to Husserl to Dummett.

There is a lot right and a lot wrong with academic philosophy in the United States these days.  But to even get at the field's virtues and problems one has to actually know something about the discipline, about what work is actually being done, what methods are used, what topics and thinkers are being genuinely neglected, and which ones flourishing even though they are unlikely to bear fruits.  There are, without a doubt, departments that are parochial and narrow-minded, whose faculties are under-educated and under-informed, sometimes about the field's history, sometimes about its contemporary contours, sometimes, remarkably, both.  For my money, I would rather see much more history of philosophy (though not, I confess, much more Hegel), and less intuition-pumping ethics and metaphysics, which may well align my sympathies with Mr. Jacoby's.  But the question is why my preferences, or his, ought to be treated as a pertinent benchmark for the direction the field moves?   If the SPEP folks had not tainted the word "pluralism" a generation ago by using it as the fig leaf for bad philosophy, one might even say that what some departments now need is more "pluralism."  The truth is, however, that most departments do rather well in covering philosophy, a remarkably capacious discipline, with unclear boundaries, and a rich and variegated history that permits of many different tellings. 

As Professor Kobes wrote to me:  "The Chronicle is widely read by deans and other university decision makers. I am not aware of it publishing on a regular basis any better informed commentator on philosophy than Carlin Romano and Russell Jacoby."  The solution is clear:  philosophers need to write clearly and understandably about their work, how it relates to the work philosophers have always done, how it contributes to interdisciplinary projects in linguistics, computer science, biology, psychology, etc., and then submit those articles to the Chronicle.  I doubt very much that malice against philosophy explains the embarrassing run of ignorant pieces CH has been publishing.  I suspect, instead, it is lack of anything else available to fill the pages.   For obvious reasons, intellectual tourists like Mr. Jacoby and Mr. Romano will regularly volunteer their amateurish musings about philosophy to CH, since they aren't going to appear in any forum in which the editors know something about the subject.  That makes it even more imperative for philosophers to present their work and their discipline to a non-specialist audience.

UK Philosophers Tackle the "Business Model" Being Forced on British Universities

Their blog is here.  It deserves a wide readership; the issues it raises are not peculiar to the UK, though, ironically, because there is no meaningful private sector in higher education in Britain it is proving far easier for the government there to enforce the 'business model' on all universities.  In the U.S., at least, the elite private universities can actually exploit their market position (in the market for prestige and certification) to uphold non-business models of learning, and by doing so they create some pressures for the elite public sector of higher education to do the same.

Funny--On Academic Bad Manners

A young philosopher at a top research university writes: "The thing that always astonishes me is that they [bloggers, journalists etc.] put on this air of pained affront if an academic gets short with them - 'I don't expect this tone from an educator' and all that jazz. Jesus, they should have been in a room with Jerry 'I just have one question; was your paper a joke?' Fodor, or Kim 'but there's no fucking evidence for that!' Sterelny. Or most of the economists I know. Where do so many people get this idea that academic discourse is conducted by people wondering if they could regretfully venture to take issue with distinguished colleagues who are respectfully suggesting an emendation?"

Where, indeed?

UPDATE:  Philosopher Tad Brennan at Cornell writes with an explanation:

Journalists are surprised that academics can be short with them because they last met academics in the classroom, and most professors are kind and generous when dealing with students.  Serious academics save their scathing put-downs for colleagues and equals--I doubt that those quotes from Fodor and Sterelny document interactions with students.

Instead of feeling pained and affronted, the bloggers and journalists should take it as a compliment: 'hey, those academics are treating me like an equal!'  That can help to salve the bruises, anyhow. And it also shows why a sharp-tongued critique directed at a non-student is no betrayal of the "tone" appropriate to an "educator". If you are my student, then I have an obligation to be your educator; if not, not.

That certainly describes my own sentiments (and practices) exactly.

ONE MORE: This is also amusingly apt (and timely), referring as it does both to Professor Sterelny and Professor Sarkar's latest takedown of the creationists.  As the author notes:  "anyone who thinks...bloggers should be treated with respect by academics, simply doesn't know shit about academe, and particularly philosophy."

John Rawls Too "Selfish" to Hold Highest Professorial Rank at University College London

Michael Otsuka (UCL) writes about bizarre new rules at UCL and how they would have applied if Professor Rawls had taught at London:

John Rawls managed to write at least one book that deserves to be placed alongside Hobbes's Leviathan, Locke's Second Treatise, and Rousseau's Social Contract. He also devoted himself to the careful supervision of the doctoral work of a stunning proportion of the next generation's best moral and political philosophers.

Under the new professorial banding criteria that the Provost at University College London has just approved, Rawls would, however, have been consigned to the lowest (full) professorial rank and therefore would not have advanced more than £10,000 beyond the (full) professorial minimum. This is because he did not put the writing of A Theory of Justice or Political Liberalism, or the supervision of his doctoral students, on hold in order to find the time to meet at least two of the following three criteria:

(i) ‘Substantial engagement with national or international partners [e.g., Government Departments, NGOs, or the Media] in the public dissemination of information to the benefit of the community, or the population at large or to the commercial sector’;

(ii) ‘Active, ongoing leadership of review (or development of) the curriculum or teaching/assessment methodologies or the management of teaching within’ his university;

(iii) ‘A successful and effective contribution to the achievement of [his university’s] strategic goals beyond the area of research and teaching (for example in widening participation, in implementing the International Strategy, furthering equality and diversity or [his university’s] Capital campaign internally to [his university] or through negotiating complex partnerships, representing [his university] on matters of key importance overseas or in the local community or through fundraising)’.

At Harvard, by contrast, Rawls was promoted to the highest academic rank -- that of University Professor (of which there were only eight such professorships at the time of his

promotion in 1979).

In fact, the vast majority of the world’s best philosophers would be placed in the lowest professorial band at University College London unless they devoted significantly less time to their research and teaching (as opposed to the review or management of teaching) and more time to management and popularizing for which they have no special aptitude.

At a meeting, the Provost justified these criteria as a means of ensuring that the ‘selfish researcher’ is not able to rise up the professorial ranks. I guess Rawls’s problem was that he was just too selfish.   All he ever did was write great philosophy and form the next generation.

Whatever one's view of Rawls (there are, as we have noted, dissenters), it seems utterly mad to substitute PR showmanship for academic excellence as a criterion for promotion, at least at a serious university.  What do readers, in the UK or elsewhere, make of this development?  Is this kind of foolishness spreading to other schools in the UK?

Deciding Between Admissions Offers: The Importance of Visiting/Talking With Current Students

Applicants to PhD and MA programs have now mostly received offers of admission and, if they are lucky, are making choices between different departments.  I want to reiterate a point made in the PGR, namely, that students are well-advised to talk to current students at the programs they are considering.   There are often things you will want to know that you won't glean from familiarity with the excellence of the faculty's work, even if that remains the most important, if defeasible, reason for choosing a particular department.  Here are some examples of information that no ranking, no departmental brochure, and no "official" departmental representive will tell you about; all of these are drawn from stories I've heard from students over the last few years about ranked departments (the departments will remain unnamed, obviously).  You can think of them as representing "types" of problems you should be aware of before enrolling.  I've tweaked some of the details to protect identities.

The Absent Faculty:  Are the faculty who look so good on paper actually around and interested in working with students?  I heard a story about a key senior person in one department who is an alcoholic, and who simply ignores his students.  In another department, almost all the graduate students had to sign an open letter to the faculty a few years ago protesting the failure of faculty to return graded papers and their general lack of interest in mentoring the students.   In yet another department, a well-known senior member of the faculty spent so much time travelling and lecturing around the world, that he rarely had time to review or discuss work carefully with students. 

The Sexual Predator Faculty:  Are women treated as young philosophers and aspiring professionals, or do faculty regularly view them as a potential source for dates and sexual liasons?  It's a bit shocking to realize that this is still a live issue in some departments, but, sadly, it is.  Are faculty-student sexual relations common in the department?  What happens when the relations end?  Are there repeated cases of sexual harassment complaints against faculty in the department?  Do they ever result in discipline?  I suppose it is possible this could be an issue for male students, but all the reports I've gotten over the years have been from women victimized by male faculty. 

The Nasty Faculty:  Talented philosophers and scholars often differ, dramatically, in how pleasant they are personally and professionally.  I recall the story of one department where a member of the faculty was known to reduce students to tears in seminar.  In another department, a faculty member regularly refuses to work with students, even those interested in his areas; he works only with those he deems "worthy," and there are not many of them!  In another department, faculty openly express doubts about the competence of the graduate students and their ability.  Make sure the philosophers who seem most interesting to you don't fall into these categories!

The Factionalized Faculty:  Many faculties are "factionalized," in the sense that there are sub-groups that rarely see "eye to eye" about departmental issues, from appointments to admissions.  Where this becomes worrisome, though, for a prospective student is when certain members of the faculty who share interests and approaches control all the key resources--fellowships, resources for speakers etc.--and use that control to define "in" and "out" groups of faculty and students:  students with the "wrong" philosophical interests or who express an interest in the "wrong" faculty members are denied access to important perks and support.  This kind of ugly factionalization is less common, but it exists. 

I wish it were possible to meaningfuly measure and evaluate faculties along these important dimensions, but, alas, it is not.  I can report, based on accumulated anecdotes over many years, that some departments are really exceptional for how pleasant they are as places to do graduate study:  faculty are engaged, kind, supportive, committed, and professional in their interactions with students.  Arizona, North Carolina, MIT, UC Riverside, and U Mass/Amherst are among those about which one regularly hears these kinds of glowing reports.  I have no doubt there are many others, and the way for a prospective student to discover them is to talk to lots of current students.

Good luck with your decisions!

 

Visiting Professors from Abroad Finding it Harder to Get Into the U.S.

A distinguished academic from the U.K., who has visited a number of times at U.S. institutions, writes:

I'm thinking...of giving up longer visits to the US. Not because I don't enjoy working here. On the contrary. But for various other reasons, not least of which is the Kafkaesque bureaucracy associated with getting a visa and getting through the border and reporting every little thing one does to the feds. The whole nightmare starts with a 15-quid phone call to a rude and sullen call centre operative who handles visa appointments and slaps your wrists for asking questions. Those who live in, say, Glasgow then have to travel 500 miles to sit in the US Embassy in London incommunicado (no phones or laptops allowed, and nowhere to store them if you have the effrontery to have them with you) until someone is good and ready to take all their fingerprints and to look for trivial errors on their numerous repetitive and gratuitously intrusive forms. The cost is astronomical even without all the travel and accommodation costs. Then you never know for sure how long they will hold onto your passport: a distinguished colleague of mine recently had to cancel a long-arranged lecture in another country because the US embassy, which knew of his travel plans, kept his passport for a month AFTER confirming that his US visa had been approved! Europeans have started to refer to US travel, only half-jokingly, as 'going behind the iron curtain'. Actually, this is an insult to the Warsaw Pact countries, several of which had a much lighter touch than today's US. They're now thinking of introducing a rule that you can't buy a plane ticket to the US, even for a quick tourist visit, without advance permission from Uncle Sam! I wouldn't mind any of this if it achieved something, but we all know that it is a competition by US politicians to see who can be the biggest ultra-nationalist bully, preferably by squeezing an arbitrarily-chosen selection of non-Americans until the pips squeak.

In an era when the scholarly community in most areas of philosophy, indeed in most disciplines, is international, this is a quite pernicious development.  Have others encountered problems with getting foreign scholars into the U.S. for extended, visiting/teaching appointments?  Do others overseas share my correspondent's perceptions of the problem?  Non-anonymous comments strongly preferred, as usual, though if I can verify the identity of the commenter from the e-mail address, that will be sufficient (those addresses do not appear on the post).

Jeff McMahan on the State of Normative Ethics

Once again, an excerpt from an interview in Normative Ethics:  5 Questions, this time with Jeff McMahan (Rutgers):

I am highly optimistic about the prospects for progress in normative ethics.  It is evident to me that great progress has already been made since I entered the field in the early 1980s.  Unlike many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, which in recent years were seduced by bad French philosophy into a lot of silly "post-modern" theorizing that hs exposed them to derision and reduced them to irrelevance, analytic philosophy is flourishing.  Part of the reason why analytic philosophy generally is in such a healthy state is that, as Jerry Fodor observed in a recent book review, philosophers no longer tend to have philosophies.  We no longer devote our lives to developing comprehensive philosophical or ethical systems.  We are individually narrower and more specialized, which enables us to focus more carefully and minutely on the problems we study, and as a consequence to produce work that is more rigorous and detailed.  The result is that philosophy has become more of a collective endeavor than it was in the past, in the sense that different people are focusing selectively on problems that are elements or aspects of larger problems.  When the results of individual efforts are combined, we may achieve a collective product that exceeds in depth, intricacy, and sophistication what any individual could have produced by working on the larger problem in isolation.

I agree that some parts of the humanities have been "seduced by bad French philosophy" that has "exposed them to derision and reduced them to irrelevance"; I agree that "philosophers no longer tend to have philosophies"; and I agree that "philosophy has become more of a collective endeavor."  But I disagree with everything else here, especially in the case of normative ethics (what would be the evidence, e.g., for its "relevance"?).  I am curious, though, what other philosophers think about McMahan's assessment.  (I would also be happy to hear from those who disagree with the claims of McMahan with which I agree as well.)  Signed comments are preferred; post only once; comments may take awhile to appear.

Do Philosophers Use Google for Research?

In the current issue of The New Yorker, the historian Anthony Grafton (Princeton) writes about the history of the effects of technological developments on books, concentrating, in particular, on the present.  The following passage caught my attention in particular:

Now even the most traditional-minded scholar generally begins by consulting a search engine. As a cheerful editor at Cambridge University Press recently told me, “Conservatively, ninety-five per cent of all scholarly inquiries start at Google.” Google’s famous search algorithm emulates the principle of scholarly citation—counting up and evaluating earlier links in order to steer users toward the sources that others have already found helpful. In a sense, the system resembles nothing more than trillions of old-fashioned footnotes.

Putting aside Grafton's slightly Panglossian view of how Google works, I'm wondering whether the point about research is true of philosophers?  Do you, philosophical readers, generally "begin[] by consulting a search engine"?  And if it is true, what does that mean for the dissemination of scholarship?  For example, if you google "Nietzsche's moral philosophy," the first entry is my essay on "Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy" from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and if you google "legal realism," the first entry is from Wikipedia, the second my SSRN paper on "American Legal Realism."  Someone searching for "Donald Davidson" gets the SEP entry first, followed by the Wikipedia entry.  The SEP essay also comes up first in a search for "mental causation."

To the extent, then, that philosophers, or philosophy students, start their research with Google, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is going to play a quite big role in shaping the reception of ideas and also, one suspects, in determining what secondary literature becomes part of the "canon" on a particular topic.  Fortunately, SEP is generally of high quality.  The same can not be said of Wikipedia, of course, as we have had occasion to note previously.

But the real question is this, and I'd be interested to hear from undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty:  are philosophers using Google for research?  are you?  if you're using it, how do you use it? 
I can report my own practice.  I don't use Google for research, though I do often start research on a topic I know little about using the search engine at the SEP page.  What I do use Google for a fair bit is if I have a quote, but don't have the precise cite for it:  Googling a distinctive quote almost invariably turns up sites with the full reference (of course, it is advisable to double-check the reference!).

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.

Trends in Higher Education in the UK

Thom Brooks (Newcastle) comments on recent proposals here and here.

Campus Police Torture Student at the University of Florida for Asking Long Question

Did the campus cops at the University of Florida train at Abu Ghraib?  Don't watch this video if you're sensitive to the gratuitous infliction of pain on human beings.  The "statement" by the University President, J. Bernard Machen, that follows is disgraceful:  it's the worst possible example of administrative mealy-mouthness and lack of perspective I've seen in a very long time. 

UPDATE:  The plot thickens!  Though this hardly explains the tasering.  Paul Craig Roberts comments.  So, too, does Ruchira Paul.

Faculty Retention at Public Research Universities

This article contains some interesting data about the increasing pace at which state research universities are being raided for faculty:

The University of Wisconsin at Madison is facing the same type of trouble [as Berkeley]. Of its 2,220 faculty members, 116 outside offers were reported in 2005-6. The prior two years also saw over 100 outside offers reported — which is twice as many as were reported five years ago, according to the university.

Excluding preemptive offers in which no negotiations took place with another university, Wisconsin’s success rate in retaining faculty is about 57 percent, compared with a previous six-year average of 75 percent retained. The average salary associated with the outside offer was about 30 percent more than the faculty member’s current Wisconsin salary. For those the campus did not retain, the competing salary was about 40 percent higher.

Outside offer packages also included more comprehensive start-up packages, more research support and greater research leave and domestic partner benefits, Wisconsin officials say.

“What’s at stake here is the future of public higher education,” said John D. Wiley, Madison’s chancellor. “State universities are where much of the research is taking place, and their ability to keep the top researchers is in jeopardy.”

The situation in philosophy is a bit more complex, since one of the most competitive departments, Rutgers, is at a state university, which has fared well in retaining faculty against, for example, Princeton, and frequently raids private universities for lateral talent.  When Michigan, another top department and a much stronger research university overall, has lost faculty recently, the majority have been going to private universities (e.g., Darwall to Yale, Velleman to NYU--but Ludlow went to Toronto, a public university), but the sample is too small to warrant any generalization.  Of the top five departments in philosophy in the U.S., three (Rutgers, Michigan, Pittsburgh) are still at state-supported research universities.  And if one looks at departments which are not as strong today as they were 15 years ago--examples would have to include Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, Cornell, Chicago, and Northwestern--state universities are hardly over-represented on that list.  Conversely, departments that have made a big push forward during that time (NYU, Rutgers, Columbia, Yale, Texas, North Carolina, UC Riverside) also include a significant number of state research universities.  The dynamics of the market for philosophy faculty may, of course, be singularly affected by the PGR, where state and private universities can demonstrate to university administrations in a fairly timely way the professional impact of appointments.

Close English Departments says Nobel Laureate Naipaul

I can imagine a number of philosophers being sympathetic to this:

Sir Vidia Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, called this week for university English literature departments to close....

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Sir Vidia said the closure of literature departments "would be a great fillip, a great boost to the intellectual life of the country... it would release a lot of manpower".

On the other hand, philosophy departments would not fare well in Naipaul's world:

The novelist believes universities should deal in "measurable truth" and teach only science.

But the quoted rebuttal of an English professor, alas, confirms the wisdom of his first idea:

Patricia Waugh, head of Durham University's department of English studies, said: "His notion of science is completely out of date - there is no simple idea of truth even in the science department. Scientific data can be interpreted in different ways."

But it appears his main complaint is that academics take some of the spotlight off him:

The article traced Sir Vidia's disdain for academe to the publication of his book on Islamic fundamentalism, Among the Believers. He was invited to Harvard University to discuss the book. "They wanted no such thing. They wanted the fellows of their institute to all say their piece of rage and criticism," Sir Vidia said.

Imagine that?  They didn't let him do all the talking!  But this last remark is funny:

In 2000, the novelist was reported to have told the audience at an award ceremony in Bangkok that jargon used in English departments in the UK and the US concealed vacuous thinking. He described academic jargon as "a way for one clown to tell the other that he is in the club".

Wisconsin faces "faculty exodus"

Rather unusual for a story like this to make CNN.  So far, the Department of Philosophy at Wisconsin has not been affected; indeed, just a couple of years ago the distinguished philosopher of biology Elliott Sober returned to Wisconsin after moving briefly to a tenured post at Stanford.

“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.

Some Questions about Philosophy Department Hiring Practices and the Role of Race and Gender (Leiter)

A new assistant professor writes:

PGR has now guided me through grad school and two market cycles. Thanks for the all the hard work.

I wanted to mention that I’d witnessed/heard of a lot of discussion-worthy practices related to demographic attributes of candidates, especially gender and race.  (Demoralizing example: office assistants in the cubicle next to mine trying to guess the ethnicity of candidates from their surnames, which they appeared to be recording in the candidates’ dossiers.)

I’d love to know both people’s considered views and actual practices, particularly concerning whether departments should/do (a) ignore non-academic demographic attributes, (b) consider them in order to pursue/encourage applications from certain demographics, (c) weight demographic attributes but only as a tie-breaker, (d) weight demographic attributes so that an academically superior candidate might be turned down in favor of one with certain demographic attributes, or (e) weight demographic attributes so that a candidate who would normally not be viewed as sufficiently qualified is hired anyway because of demographic attributes.

I will, as usual, give strong preference to non-anonymous comments, though given the sensitivity of these topics may permit some anonymous postings.  Post only once; comments may take awhile to appear, even if approved.

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.

The End of History (According to the Guggenheim Foundation, at least) (J. Stanley)

As Brian announced, Paul Horwich, the eminent NYU philosopher, was the sole recipient in philosophy of a Guggenheim award this year. In contrast, by my count at least 20 historians received Guggenheim Fellowships. Furthermore, Prof. Horwich's own project, like the majority of successful Guggenheim Fellowships by philosophers in recent years, is itself historical (on Wittgenstein). There is clearly some kind of message that the Guggenheim Foundation is trying to deliver here...

UPDATE: I received the following email message from a philosopher who has previously won a Guggenheim Fellowship:

Re your latest Guggie-post, the situation may actually be a bit more sinister. One year recently both philosophy awards went to ancient philosophers. A year or so later two guys at Chicago got the only philosophy Guggies and on topics that can only be described as falling into the same, relatively narrow equivalence class. Haven't done further fact checking.  But as they say go figure.

[I assume that the second year referred to by this philosopher was 2003, when Arnold Davidson, John Haugeland, and Sean Dorrance Kelly won Guggenheim Fellowships.  Their projects, respectively, were titled "Spiritual Exercises in Philosophy", "An Interpretation of Heidegger", and "Phenomenology, Consciousness, and Embodiment". Obviously, these are projects worth funding (as is ancient philosophy!), and the philosophers in question are important scholars. But  I guess the point is that one could expect a more representative sample of current philosophy than the Guggenheim foundation has selected in recent years.]

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.

The Changing "Sociology" of the Philosophy Profession: Presentation Style, "Brilliant Loners" and Group Work, and the Empirical Facts (Leiter)

A senior philosopher wrote with the following interesting observations about "the changing sociology of the field," with particular regard to philosophy of language:

When I was in graduate school [in the 1960s], papers delivered to philosophy departments were almost always read out by the speaker from a typescript. This practice reflected a conception of the field in which it was judged important never to make a mistake—even if this was accomplished by saying little and saying it unintelligibly. This is changing of course, and some prominent younger philosophers are overturning this and other established practices and established ideas of philosophy. This generation is likely to see creativity and provocativeness as more important than being anal about every little detail, and this goes with publishing more and more flamboyantly rather than publishing little and conservatively. Another interesting generational change: the older generation had a myth of the brilliant loner producing insights out of the blue, whereas the younger generation is more communitarian, focusing more about projects that emerge out of group discussions. Another change in philosophy of language in particular is that the younger generation in philosophy of language thinks that philosophical mileage can be gotten out of linguistic facts in a way alien to many older philosophers. And in philosophy of mind and even ethics, there is much more emphasis on empirical work. These developments are not unconnected since practices in linguistics and psychology are much more communitarian than has been the case in philosophy.

Comments are open for other perspectives on these changes, both the extent to which my correspondent has accurately captured them, and the extent to which we should view them as good developments.  As usual, non-anonymous comments are preferred, and comments may take awhile to appear, so post only once.

 

Trouble in the Cal State System (Leiter)

Matthew Davidson, a philosopher at Cal State-San Bernadino, writes:

The California State University system, with 23 campuses, 405,000 students, and 44,000 faculty and staff, is the largest and most diverse university system in the country.  However, with steep student fee increases, stagnating and very low wages for faculty, and executive perks that members of the California Legislature have called an instance of "fraud", the system is in deep trouble.  The CSU turns out more than 50% of the public school teachers in the state.  This makes the disintegration of the CSU all the more troubling.

Here is a link showing executive salaries and perks (including keeping their salaries even after they leave the CSU).  It is truly amazing to behold the corruption, especially when one compares the salaries and perks to the compensation for a full professor who has been in the CSU for 25 years--roughly $87,000.

Here is the San Francisco Chronicle article that first called public attention to the economic crimes in the CSU.

On Nov. 15th, 1500 faculty and staff descended on the CSU Board of Trustees meeting to protest the dire conditions in the CSU.  Here is very powerful footage of the event, including a widely-covered speech to the Trustees by State Senator Gloria Romero

****Protest video, part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMtPqtbLKjU
****Protest Video, part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rapMojPqAIM

I would appreciate any coverage you could give this situation in your blog.  We need all the help we can get in educating these students and producing an informed electorate.  California's Master Plan for higher education is in a shambles.  And this is catastrophic for the state, and potentially for the country, as well.

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.

11 Leading Canadian Universities Refuse to Cooperate with Canadian Version of US News Rankings (Leiter)

The other Brian Leiter has the details.

Velleman on the Newcombe Competitions and How Philosophers Present Their Work (Leiter)

David Velleman (NYU) writes with the following interesting information about the Newcombes and the selection process; I would particularly urge graduate students and young philosophers to heed the points about presenting one's work to non-specialists.  Professor Velleman writes:

Having served on the final selection committee for the Newcombe Fellowships (though not in the most recent years of the competition), I'd like to add some background to your comments on the distribution of the awards.

The Newcombes were funded by an endowment from a nonacademic family, but the inspiration for them came from the philosopher Robert Adams, who was a friend and personal advisor to the family, having been (as I recall) a neighbor when he was young. Bob's role in the early years of the program may explain why it elicited more applications, and better applications, from philosophers than from students in other disciplines. To my knowledge, there has always been a philosopher on the final selection committee, but these days the vast majority of applications come from English, History, Anthropology, Politics, and so on.

In my experience, the applications from philosophers look weak by comparison. The very best applicants from other disciplines display truly stunning feats of scholarship, fieldwork, and intellectual synthesis; they write vivid and stimulating descriptions of their projects; and they can make the significance of those projects clear to nonspecialists. In my years on the committee, its membership was highly inter-disciplinary, but everyone could discuss the merits of all the applications -- except those from philosophers. When philosophical applications came under discussion, the other committee members would often turn to me and say, "Can you explain the point of this -- if there is one?" There were years when the committee said, in effect, "Well, we want to give some fellowships to philosophers -- tell us which ones." 

I'd like to be able to say that these remarks manifested a prejudice against philosophy, but they didn't. The other members of the committee were widely read, highly intelligent, and open-minded. The fact is that in the context of the entire appllicant pool, I too found the Philosophy applications unimpressive, sometimes embarrassingly so. I did my best to advocate for the philosophers, but it was an uphill climb, even in my own mind.

Now, part of the problem may be that graduate students in other disciplines have more experience writing grant applications. Anthropology students, for example, have to apply for funds to support their dissertation fieldwork, and the Anthroplogy applications were among the most impressive. But our applicants tended to do poor job of presenting themselves even when compared with the applicants in English, where grant opportunities are just as rare as in Philosophy.

Another part of the problem may be that doing original philosophy is simply harder than, for example, doing fieldwork in a region or archive that no one else has studied. Ph.D. candidates in Philosophy are understandably immature when compared with candidates in other fields.

Still, I have to attribute much of the problem to our discipline's indifference to making itself understood outside a fairly narrow region of academia. The Philosophy applicants came across as not having bothered to explain themselves. I managed to explain what they were up to, but the mere fact that I had to explain it, when the applicants from other disciplines had done their own explaining, put me at an obvious disadvantage as advocate for the Philosophy applications.

I don't know whether our insularity contributes to our underrepresentation among recipients of other national honors. I suspect that it does.

I wonder what others who have served on these kinds of selection committees think?  Non-anonymous comments will be very strongly preferred.

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.

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 pu