Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Things are bad enough with the swine flu pandemic without the UK Minister of Health...

...revealing that he's not qualified for his job.

The barely literate Cynthia Davis is also opposed to contraception...

...as she eloquently explains.  Stupidity is often a package deal in cases like this, so we've just touched the tip of the iceberg of her ignorance.   Sadly, there were more than a dozen state legislators just like her in Texas.   In a civilized country, people this intellectually and ethically incapacitated would not be let out of their homes without adult supervision.

Cynthia Davis: One of Missouri's "Best and Brightest"

This is no doubt what the drafters of the Declaration of Independence had hoped for:  that 200 years of our democratic experiment would produce brainless and callous neanderthals like Representative Cynthia Davis, a Republican from Missouri, whose web site (link courtesy of Jeff Glick) includes the following "analysis" of a state proposal to expand a school-based meal program in light of the current crisis of capitalism:

Great moments in misspellings

Here.  Some are quite funny.

Is Francis Beckwith a Grown-Up?

A grad student at Brown writes:

Beckwith calls this light humor (at your expense), but it's at the very least unprofessional.

 

I'm sure this is the kind of thing Jesus recommends his Catholic followers do: publicly make fun of people's appearance and compare them to sniveling, conniving cowards from TV shows.

 

Anyways, good luck with these people, and thanks for calling them on their bad behavior.

What is one to say about alleged adults and professionals who scour the Internet to find an insulting photo of someone and then post it to mock the person?  What can one say?   There were lots of photos from my session with Judge Posner, why did Francis Beckwith choose the one he posted?  There are easily available professional photos of me, why would an alleged adult and professional go out of his way to find a bad photograph of someone and post it?  What's wrong with him?  Does anyone know?

SSHRC Embarrasses Itself

Per our earlier item, the SSHRC has asked the conference organizers to supply information about alleged "changes" to the proposal, in response to the political pressures from the conservative Science Minister Goodyear (the fellow who doesn't know what evolution is).  An open letter from York University law faculty to the SSHRC President recaps the latest events and the embararssment this whole episode is for Canadian higher education:   Download Open Letter to SSHRC President.

UPDATE:  Another good open letter from the Canadian Association of University Teachers.  (Thanks to Ingo Brigandt for the pointer.)

Does the NY Times Not Realize That Stanley Fish is Philosophically Incompetent?

It appears not, judging from the fact that they keep running his sophomoric prattle.  I have been ignoring it, but a reader flags today's foray into bad epistemology and philosophy of science:

Evidence, understood as something that can be pointed to, is never an independent feature of the world. Rather, evidence comes into view (or doesn’t) in the light of assumptions – there are authors or there aren’t — that produce the field of inquiry in the context of which (and only in the context of which) something can appear as evidence.

To bring all this abstraction back to the arguments made by my readers, there is no such thing as “common observation” or simply reporting the facts. To be sure, there is observation and observation can indeed serve to support or challenge hypotheses. But the act of observing can itself only take place within hypotheses (about the way the world is) that cannot be observation’s objects because it is within them that observation and reasoning occur.

While those hypotheses are powerfully shaping of what can be seen, they themselves cannot be seen as long as we are operating within them; and if they do become visible and available for noticing, it will be because other hypotheses have slipped into their place and are now shaping perception, as it were, behind the curtain.

By the same analysis, simple reporting is never simple and common observation is an achievement of history and tradition, not the result of just having eyes. And while there surely are facts, there are no facts (at least not ones we as human beings have access to) that simply declare themselves to the chainless minds Hitchens promises us if we will only cast aside the blinders of religion.

Indeed, there are no chainless minds, and it’s a good thing, too. A chainless mind would be a mind not hostage to or fettered by any pre-conceptions, a mind that was free to go its own way. But how could you go any way if you are not anywhere, if you are not planted in some restricted location in relation to which the directions “here,” “there” and “elsewhere” have a sense?

A mind without chains – a better word would be “constraints” – would be free and open in a way that made motivated (as opposed to random) movement impossible. Thought itself — the consideration of problems with a view to arriving at their solutions — requires chains, requires stipulated definitions, requires limits it did not choose but which enable and structure its operations.... 

If there is no thought without constraints (chains) and if the constraints cannot be the object of thought because they mark out the space in which thought will go on, what is noticed and perspicuous will always be a function of what cannot be noticed because it cannot be seen....

Pking gets it right. “To torpedo faith is to destroy the roots of . . . any system of knowledge . . . I challenge anyone to construct an argument proving reason’s legitimacy without presupposing it . . . Faith is the base, completely unavoidable. Get used to it. It’s the human condition.” (All of us, not just believers, see through a glass darkly.) Religious thought may be vulnerable on any number of fronts, but it is not vulnerable to the criticism that in contrast to scientific or empirical thought, it rests on mere faith....

So to sum up, the epistemological critique of religion — it is an inferior way of knowing — is the flip side of a naïve and untenable positivism.

Quine, among others, would no doubt be surprised.  Feel free to discuss.  (And for those curious who the Paul Campos is that thinks Fish "smarter" than Dawkins, he is a law professor at Colorado, with an MA in literary theory and a penchant for foolishness, in both his 'scholarship' and his public pronouncements.)

Chris Shears, "Matt Hart," Ed Feser, and Other Charming Folks

1.  So it turns out that there are people out there who aren't happy if you call folks like Francis Beckwith, who think their religion excuses their bigotry towards gay men and women, "bigots."  One such person is Chris Shears (no idea who he is), who sent me the following enlightening missive:

 Chris Shears [mailto:onandontillthebreakadawn@gmail.com]
> Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2009 4:07 PM
> To: Leiter, Brian
> Subject: Your a hypocrite and a bigot.
>
> I've been reading your law and philosophy reports for years but I'm
> tired of your bigotry towards the positions of those you call bigots
> so I'm done reading your blogs.  I can get 99% of what you offer
> elsewhere.  In the unlikely event that your thoughtful and sensitive
> of others, specifically your readers, view of you I thought I should
> let you know.  If not then carry on with your unhappy, arrogant self.

I suggested to Mr. Shears that a moral objection to bigotry was not properly characterized as itself an instance of "bigotry," but he did not handle that suggestion well.  Alas. 

2.  "Matt Hart," author of this bracing comment in the earlier thread (and even more lunatic ones which I declined to approve), shares the same IP address (86.12.47.64 in Stockport, England) as "Michelle," whose comment in an earlier thread on this issue I had not approved, but which now bears noting:  "But gays are people who deserve to be discriminated against. You wouldn't get any complaints if you turned down a guy because he had, say, murdered someone at some point in his life. So why we complain when it happens to gays? Hypocrites."  When one of my Chicago students told me awhile back that my Wikipedia entry had been vandalized, I didn't give it much thought, but--surprise surprise--it now turns out that Mr. or Ms. Hart also shares the same IP address as the vandal.  Imagine that!  Aint' the Internet grand?

3.  Via Professor Hermes, I learn that the 'counterpetition' is the creation of Edward Feser, whom we encountered long ago, after this remarkably unhinged screed.  He is also the author of this book (which seems to be in the same nonsensical genre as this one, i.e., "black is white" and "war is peace" and "squares are round").  His webpage does assure us, however, that The National Review deems him one of "the best contemporary writers about philosophy."  One can be sure that is a judgment on the merits of his writing, and not on his ideology.

4.  The signatories to the "counterpetition" include three faculty from Texas (Daniel Bonevac, J. Budziszewski, Robert Koons), three from Notre Dame (John Finnis, Alasdair MacIntyre, Alvin Plantinga), as well as Linda Zagzebski (Oklahoma) and Roger Scruton, among other notables.  (Budziszewski is, to be sure, a complete philosophical hack, unlike the others--his main appointment is in Government at Texas.  [Addendum:  someone thought I mentioned Professor Budziszewski's main appointment as evidence that he is a hack, which wasn't at all the claim--my point is that I have friends in the Philosophy Department at Texas who are embarrassed both by this counterpetition and by his showing up as a Phil Dept signatory--I just wanted to make clear that the UT Department is not, as it were, infested with these 'counterpetition' folks.  The evidence that Professor Budziszewski is a philosophical hack is his work.]) One "anonymous" signatory to the counterpetition probably makes what is perhaps the strongest point on its behalf (stronger certainly than the petition's own statement which, as others have noted, is pretty thin, intellectually and otherwise):

Do we really want the APA to push out all the conservative religious educators at a time when there are only 23 jobs listed in the latest JFP? The relationship between individual sexual freedom and freedom of religious belief is very complex and we should not attempt to squelch all disagreement on the topic through schismatic APA policies.

The APA, however, has already adopted a "schismatic" policy, namely, one prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, and the original petition simply calls for enforcement of the policy or its explicit repeal.   Academic freedom would continue to protect the right of philosophers to debate the issue and to disagree about it.   And all of this is quite independent, as Ralph Wedgwood, among others, noted on an earlier thread, of whether or not principles of religious liberty and freedom of association require us to tolerate the existence of institutions committed to religious traditions that sanction bigotry and pernicious discrimination. No one, and certainly not the petition, has challenged that point.

"Christian mathematics"

I don't believe this is intended as a joke, though it should be.  If I'm not mistaken, longtime readers may remember this fellow as one of the brainless blogospheric apologists for Intellient Design creationism we encountered ages ago.  Age has not, it appears, resulted in a maturation of his intellectual faculties.

(Thanks to Daniel Koffler for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Philosopher John Turri (Huron University College) notes the relevance of the Trinity, missed by Mr. Carter:

Mr. Carter's example of 1 + 1 is perhaps not the best one to establish that there is a "particularly Christian view" of mathematics. Better, I think, would have been 1 + 1 + 1. Most think it must be that 1 + 1 + 1 = 3. But certain "distinctly Christian" views have it that sometimes 1 + 1 + 1 = 1.  -

Now We Know Why the McCain Camp Would Prefer There Not be a Vice-Presidential Debate Either

Maybe they'll take Michael Drake's idea, and get Miss South Carolina to step in.

Another gem here and here's the longer video.  (The latter link is Andrew Sullivan, and it's hard to disagree with his comment on the video clip.)

(Thanks to Robert Hockett and Ian Proops for the last two links.)

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.

Steve Poole on Steve Fuller: "It’s intellectual quackery like this that gives philosophy of science a bad name."

Via Chris Bertram (Bristol), I learn of this pleasing excorciation of the remarkably silly and pernicious "philosopher" of science (now a sociologist) Steve Fuller, who is also a shill for Intelligent Design.

Anthropologist Encounters Experimental Philosophy...

...and apparently has no idea what it is, though this does not prevent the author from writing a good deal "about" it and offering lots of opinions.  Someone patient should enter the comments over there to try to set this individual straight.

(Thanks to Matthew Silverstein for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Robert Skipper (Cincinnati) has spoken (in the comments, above):  "Experimental philosophy is an embarrassment to the discipline. It’s not at all clear that, done right, experimental philosophy would move philosophy forward. It’s utterly clear that most of the philosophers doing it have no idea how to do even the most rudimentary social psychological (or anthropological) study."   So there you have it, no need for anyone else to comment.  Also sprach Skipper!

(Thanks to an anonymous X-philosopher for the tip about Professor Skipper's insight.)

ANOTHER:  Having gone away for a few days, I now see that various juvenile jackasses have cluttered up the comments thread, though there is some substantive discussion.  Alas.  If anyone knows who R.A. or any of the others are, let me know.  At least Professor Skipper signs his name to his asinine remarks.

Leave it to a law professor to come to the defense of the honorary degree for Schlafly

The sordid details are here.  Hills is an able scholar in his chosen fields, I've no idea what explains this sorry display.

UPDATE:  A reader asks:  "why leave it to law profs?"  Answer:  because they're more conservative, on average, than philosophy professors. 

Someone Who Thinks Even Less of Leon Wieseltier's Philosophical Acumen Than We Do!

Here.  (Our earlier take here.)  From the text:

How could someone who knows so little philosophy and is so bad at the philosophy he does know conjure up the arrogance required to make embarrassingly misinformed, sweeping generalizations about it?....I think I found the answer in an old Sam Tanenhaus profile of the pompous fraud:

A prestigious Kellett fellowship took Wieseltier to Oxford in the fall of 1974 to study philosophy, but when he got there ''philosophy at Oxford was in transports of logical notation,'' he remembers. ''I had no interest in studying mathematical logic or the logical analysis of language.''

Allow me to translate that: Real philosophy is hard, so rather than even try to do it, Wieseltier spent his fellowship sucking up to Isaiah Berlin and quit grad school a few years later, at a time when it was still possible to become a celebrated public intellectual without having expertise in anything. Over the next thirty some-odd years, having turned enough clever phrases and misappropriated enough philosophical concepts to secure a reputation among easily deceived people as a learned man...Wieseltier came to believe his own delusional self-flattery.

Wow! 

(Thanks to Jason Walta for the pointer.)

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."

The Pointlessness of Arguing with Most Denizens of the Blogosphere

Philosopher John Protevi recounts his own exhausting experience with a random know-nothing.  I empathize!  "The less they know, the less they know it."  Or in the immortal words of Ezra Pound:  "you can't talk to the ignorant about lies, since they have no criteria."

There is no bottom to dumb

A blog devoted to shilling for Intelligent Design has posted a link to the paper by myself and Michael Weisberg critiquing attempts to apply evolutionary psychology to law.  It appears the author of the post, one Denyse O'Leary, a Canadian journalist who is a notorious apologist for ID creationism, thought our article was of a piece with the skepticism about natural selection that is her raison d'etre.  The second commenter appears to have noticed what Ms. O'Leary missed.

Thus Spoke Voltaire

"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."

--Voltaire

Law Professor Smears Scholars Critical of Israel for Political Reasons

Readers concerned about academic freedom (including the case of Professor Finkelstein), as well as those who enjoy case studies of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, may find this discussion of intellectual dishonesty by a law professor of interest.

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

That might have been the more apt title for this embarrassing display of sophomoric confusions and outright fabrications by journalist Carlin Romano.  Let's go through them step by step.  Mr. Romano begins:

When Richard Rorty turned 75 last October, no symposia, conferences, or Festschriften marked the occasion.

That's surely because Festschriften are more common when someone turns 65 or 70; I'm not aware of any case of marking someone turning 75.  Unnoted by Mr. Romano, of course, is that a Library of Living Philosophers volume on Rorty was in the works at the time of his death, a far more dramatic "marking of the occasion" than the typical Festschrift.

Such academic nods require true-believing disciples. Philosophy as a discipline spawns them like trout — middle-aged professors with the souls of eternal teaching assistants — but great originals like Rorty don't attract them.

There is simply no evidence that in philosophy there are more Festschriften than in other fields and, more to the point, Festschriften for philosophers rarely include disciples as distinct from former students, most of whom (being philosophers after all) have gone off in very different directions.  (Quine's two most eminent students, let us recall, were the very unQuinean Saul Kripke and David Lewis.  Such examples can, of course, be multiplied).  Because Rorty stopped working with top-flight PhD students around 1982, it is hardly surprising that there are not lots of former students willing to put together Festschriften.  But more to the point, the Rorty and His Critics volume that appeared in 2000 (right before Rorty turned 70), and looks rather like a Festschrift to anyone actually familiar with the content, did include some of Rorty's former students from his Princeton days, such as Robert Brandom (the editor), Barry Allen, and Michael Williams, among others.  I guess, for Mr. Romano's sake, they should have waited till Rorty was 75.

As to whether Rorty is a "great original," that is a matter to which we will return.  Mr. Romano continues:

For the most high-impact American philosopher of the past 30 years, the silence at 75 confirmed a hoary truth: You can love philosophy, but it will never love you back — not if you piss off the professional philosophers or, worse, endanger them. Even his death this June from pancreatic cancer attracted more notice and encomia from outside the field than within.

We've already noted that "silence at 75" is meaningless, since 75 has never been a milestone calling forth conferences and celebrations.  There is no doubt that Rorty had a greater impact in certain parts of the humanities (especially English and History) than other philosophers, but has his cross-disciplinary impact really been greater than, say, Jerry Fodor's or John Rawls's?  The problem with this kind of gushing is that it assumes that impact in a field like English exhausts scholarly impact.

The big chill began with his 1970s apostasy from positivistic analytic philosophy.

What in the world is "positivistic analyic philosophy"?  Logical positivism was moribund by the 1970s, and Princeton in the 1970s was the fertile ground for new metaphysical theorizing, launched by Kripke and Lewis, which would have been anathema to positivists.  The make-believe label "positivistic analytic philosophy" is the first clear giveaway that Mr. Romano has no idea what he is talking about.

We Princeton University philosophy majors, hatching into the field at the time, watched it happen....Princeton philosophy professors and grad students at that time liked to act as if any work not mimeographed within the past three years, and circulated exclusively in the department, was probably too passé to be worth studying.

Really?  This would certainly come as news to Gregory Vlastos, the great scholar of ancient philosophy in the Department at that time, as well as to Michael Frede who succeeded him in the late 1970s.  It would also be surprising to George Pitcher and Margaret Wilson, distinguished historians of early modern philosophy, as well as to all those teaching Continental philosophy at Princeton in the 1970s, like Raymond Geuss and David Hoy.  And what of all the scholars of the history of philosophy trained at Princeton in the 1970s, such as Janet Broughton, Paul Woodruff, Terence Irwin, Catherine Wilson, Eileen O'Neill, among others:  were they too only studying three-year-old mimeographs?

Rorty, by contrast, stood for reading widely in both historical and analytic philosophy, for not dissing a thinker before you'd read her or him.

As opposed to Vlastos, Wilson, Pitcher, Geuss, and Frede, among Rorty's other Princeton colleagues?  What is unfortunate about Mr. Romano's mindless polemic is that there is a real point that could be made here, namely, that some Anglophone philosophers really were (and are) indifferent to the history of philosophy, and that includes some of those at Princeton:  but it is just a falsfication of the history to saddle the Princeton Department in toto with that attitude.

Rorty's most crucial deviation from colleagues came in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979). In the shrinking Fach of academic philosophy — its territory truncated by psychology, invaded by literature, long ago reduced by natural science — Rorty challenged the theory of knowledge, the last remaining crop philosophy professors could sell to overlord deans and presidents, and declared it practically carcinogenic.

"Academic philosophy" didn't really exist until the late 18th and early 19th-century, when the academy really came into its own as a place where people did philosophy.  By that point, philosophy's field had, indeed, been "reduced by natural science"--indeed, it was arguably so reduced a couple of hundred years before that.  One wonders whether that is what Mr. Romano had in mind?  The idea that "academic philosophy" was truncated by psychology is a curious one.  Certainly many in the late 19th-century thought that, but two rather significant figures in the development of 20th-century philosophy, Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl, resisted that idea, and at least Frege's descendants carry the anti-psychologistic torch today in many departments.  At the same time, the (arguably) dominant tendency has been for philosophers to work in tandem with psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, legal scholars, and biologists, such that the disciplinary boundaries are blurred, not that philosophers have little to do.

Even stranger is the implication that all philosophers were doing in the 1970s was "theory of knowledge."  The 1970s saw the flourishing of moral and political philosophy (including at Princeton, of course, with Thomas Nagel and T.M. Scanlon, among others), as well as seminal work in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of physics, and philosophy of mathematics, among other areas.  Theory of knowledge was a rather small part of the picture.

Perhaps more important, theory of knowledge--and contemporary Anglophone philosophy--was also a rather small part of the target in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (did Mr. Romano actually read the book, one wonders?). As Jaegwon Kim correctly pointed out in an illuminating 1980 essay, the argument of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is directed against three very general doctrines, none of which are peculiar to (or even distinctive of) English-speaking philosophy in the 20th-century.  Kim identified them (again, correctly) as:

(1)  The Platonic doctrine concerning truth and knowledge, according to which truth is correspondence with nature, and knowledge is a matter of possessing accurate representations.

(2)  The Cartesian doctrine of the mind as the private inner stage, "the Inner Mirror," in which cognitive action takes place.  The Platonic doctrine of knowledge as representation was transformed into the idea of knowledge as inner representation of outer reality.  The Cartesian contribution was to mentalize the Platonic doctrine.

(3)  The conception of Philosophy according to which it is the business of philosophy to investigate the "foundations" of the sciences, the arts, culture and morality, and adjudicate the cognitive claims of these areas.  Philosophy, as epistemology, must set universal standards of rationality and objectivity for all actual and possible claims of knowledge. 

As Kim notes, there are many philosophers who would be identified as "analytic" who reject all of these views; but more importantly, there are plenty of philosophers whom no one would dub "analytic" who embrace one or more of these.  (Kant, Hegel, and Husserl, for example, are far more committed to versions of (3) than, say, Quine or Kim or Jerry Fodor, among recent and contemporary philosophers usually deemed to be "analytic.")  Rorty's attack on these three doctrines, then, was not an attack on the now defunct "analytic" philosophy of the mid-20th-century; it was an attack on the central concerns of philosophy going back to antiquity.  Romano's polemic gives the wholly false impression that Rorty was simply overcoming a "recent" blip in the history of philosophy ("analytic" philosophy) in order to return the discipline to its "traditional" concerns.  In fact, the opposite is the case:  Rorty, like Marx (though for different reasons), would have us give up two thousand years of philosophical inquiry in order to do something else.  He pitched part of that case as being against "analytic" philosophy, though the latter was far more continuous with the philosophical tradition than Rorty's (hard to pin down) alternative. 

Romano, however, has no actual interest in or knowledge of philosophy, even of Rorty's critique of it, so he moves right along:

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, followed quickly by Consequences of Pragmatism (University of Minnesota Press, 1982), signaled Rorty's midlife break with his past as a quasi-scientific philosopher who believed that "philosophy makes progress." As if exiting a phone booth, he'd emerged as a red-white-and-blue Nietzsche, philosophizing with a hammer meant to bring down Western philosophy's 2,500-year-old essentialist, ahistorical tradition of dissecting capitalized abstractions such as "Truth," "Knowledge," and "Meaning." One explanation couldn't fit all cultures, times, and languages, he argued, and 20th-century positivistic philosophy's hope that it could be a handmaiden to science had proved an illusion.

One of the pernicious aspects of Rorty's influence is that he led legions of the undereducated to think that capitalization signals a philosophical thesis.  Notice, in particular, the non-sequitur in Mr. Romano's last sentence:  from skepticism about ahistorical accounts (a skepticism many philosophers, of course, share) to skepticism about positivism.  What in the world does one have to do with the other?  Mr. Romano, of course, has no idea.

Rorty further outraged the analytic philosophical establishment by drawing on the work of its most prestigious senior figures, notably W.V.O. Quine, Wilfred Sellars, and Donald Davidson, to construct a tale about modern philosophy meant to stop epistemology in its tracks.

"Outraged"?  Many philosophers, including Quine, Sellars, and Davidson, were a bit puzzled as to the use to which Rorty put their work in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, since Rorty drew conclusions that neither Quine nor Sellars nor Davidson necessarily thought followed.  So, for example, Quine would quite agree with Rorty that we need to give up Kim's (3), above:  philosophy is not, contra Kant, "the Queen of the sciences."  For Quine, we might say, "science is the Queen of what is true and knowable," and so philosophy is, at best, the "handmaiden" of the empirical sciences.  What Rorty needed to explain was why that was not the right alternative to (3)--as opposed to Rortian epistemic promiscuity?

As final salt in the wound, Rorty, true to his syncretic ambitions, suggested that such still-controversial figures in modern philosophy as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, the latter notorious as the opaque German philosopher analysts loved to hate, might possess philosophical wisdom they needed to hear.

Wittgenstein is, of course, part of the philosophical canon throughout the Anglophone world, even if opinion is divided about the import and sometimes the meaning of his ideas.  Heidegger is viewed with much greater skepticism in Anglophone philosophy, though to the extent that is less true now, it is not because of Rorty, but because of those (like Hubert Dreyfus, John Haugeland, Robert Brandom, William Blattner, and John Richardson) who wrote philosophically about his work.

Rorty's new views started off unconventional, and grew more so over the 1980s and 90s. He insisted that the theory of knowledge as mirrorlike representation of the world in language had imploded from within; that scientific method in philosophy amounted to a myth; that we should see philosophy and science as forms of literature; that one could avoid realism without adopting relativism; that philosophy might best be understood as conversation, not a tribunal for judging other types of knowledge.

Several of these ideas were, of course, present (indeed, most systematically developed) in Rorty's work of the 1970s, suggesting, yet again, that Mr. Romano may not really have read the work of the philosopher he purports to be celebrating.  And, of course, in real philosophy (as opposed to Mr. Romano's voyeurism), the question is what can be said on behalf of these ideas.  Can one "avoid realism without adopting relativism"?  That is a topic of great interest to many philosophers, and it is not clear that Rorty had an interesting contribution to make to this question.  But to know that, one would have to actually know something about philosophy.

As a result, his slow distancing from professional philosophers began. He left the Princeton philosophy department in 1982 for a broader humanities professorship at the University of Virginia, then headed to the Stanford comparative-literature department in 1998 for his final years.

But the discipline's attempted marginalization of him didn't work, or, at best, only in its most hermetic precincts.

The discipline did not attempt to marginalize him; there was extensive writing about his work by "mainstream" Anglophone philosophers.  Rorty could rarely be bothered to reply.  He marginalized himself by basically withdrawing from ordinary scholarly and philosophical life, where your ideas and arguments are subjected to scrutiny by other philosophers, and you modify your views or respond accordingly. 

Lifted by both his ideas and his punchy journalistic prose, he won readers across the intellectual world. By the turn of the century, philosophers in cities as diverse as Helsinki, Paris, Oxford, Seoul, São Paolo, and Rome clashed over their positions on his work.

Does this really distinguish Rorty from John Rawls, Jerry Fodor, W.V.O. Quine, Larry Laudan, Thomas Nagel, and Saul Kripke, all of whose work is translated into almost all the languages spoken in those cities?

Broader intellectual honors piled up: a MacArthur Fellowship; the Northcliffe Lectures in London; the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge; endless citations in indexes; a Rorty and His Critics volume; a wave of secondary works. He'd achieved the stature of being, like Habermas in Germany or Derrida in France, a major — if not the major — philosopher of his country.

Rorty deserved to be honored for his provocative appropriations and extensions of the ideas of other philosophers.  But the comparison to "Habermas in Germany or Derrida in France" is quite telling.  Derrida was, in fact, always a more prominent figure outside France than within, while Habermas was regarded as a major philosopher by philosophers, not just by journalists and professors of comparative literature. 

Rorty's death begins the process of asking crucial questions about his legacy. Did he stop epistemology cold? Of course not. Has the Enlightenment stopped otherwise rational people from believing organized religion's most palpable nonsense? No. Does watching American plans self-destruct in Iraq stop our policy? No. Does knowing that seat belts save lives and prevent grave injuries lead a smart fellow like New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine to wear one? No.

Getting things right and getting self-interested people to act on it are two different things. In the face of Rorty's devastating exposure of positivistic philosophy's ahistorical, pocket-full-of-examples approach to knowledge, philosophy professors largely kept to their program for the same reason Afghans keep growing poppies — it's either this, or we're out of business.

The Quinean and Sellarsian critiques of the (loosely) logical positivist program was not that it was "ahistorical":  it was that its semantic and epistemic ambitions could not be realized.  In making that critique, Quine and Sellars made seminal contributions to philosophy of language and epistemology.  Rorty did not:  he borrowed ideas of theirs, offered some new wrinkles upon them, but was obviously not as original or creative a philosophical force as they were.  The response of actual philosophers to the actual philosophical critiques were quite various, but it bears no relationship to Rorty's caricatures or Mr. Romano's meta-caricatures.  Anyone who had even a slight familiarity with the work of, e.g., Jerry Fodor, Stephen Stich, Philip Kitcher, or Larry Laudan (just to pick a few obvious examples) would be embarrassed to smear it as "positivistic philosophy's ahistorical, pocket-full-of examples approach to knowledge."  "Childish" doesn't even begin to capture how Mr. Romano's rhetoric must strike any student of philosophy since Quine and Sellars.

One effort to delegitimize Rorty's work rests on claims that he got everyone crucial to his work — Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein — wrong. But specialist scholars on these figures typically confuse their agenda — trying to mirror and represent their subject's corpus — with Rorty's.

I do commend Mr. Romano here for finding a gracious way to acknowledge that, in fact,  Rorty got almost every historical figure he invoked wrong in some measure.

As a pragmatist, Rorty thus focused not on what a philosopher thought his work meant, but an understanding of that work that fit the larger philosophical vision in which Rorty believed. Philosopher Crispin Sartwell of Dickinson College tells the story of a UVa seminar on the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer to which Rorty invited the great man. Rorty summarized Gadamer's views. Gadamer then protested in heavily accented English: "Dick, you've got me all wrong." Rorty, Sartwell recalls, grinned, shrugged, and replied, "Yes, Hans, but that's what you should have said."

That's an amusing anecdote, but less amusing when we remember that Rorty regularly claims in his writing that "this is what X said" not "this is what X should have said."  Representing the latter as the former is what, ordinarily, is called "bad" or "fraudulent" scholarship.

I'll stop here.  Mr. Romano goes on to celebrate Rorty's rather vapid "liberal" political commentary; if that really is the best philosophers have to offer to political life, then one may hope they do all go back to theory of knowledge! 

But be that as it may, the real question is this (and I direct this, in particular, at the reporters and editors of the Chronicle, whom I know read this blog):  is there any other field in which the Chronicle of Higher Education--a generally high quality and admirable publication--employs as a commentator someone who is so demonstrably (I've just demonstrated it!) incompetent, who lacks even an intellectual tourist's knowledge of the field?  I sincerely hope not.   And I also sincerely hope that the Chronicle will have the fortitude to stop running Mr. Romano's sophomoric musings about philosophy.

UPDATE:  A reader points out that, in fact, the Princeton Department of Philosophy is hosting a conference on Rorty this fall!  I guess they didn't read Mr. Romano's essay and so forgot they were supposed to be mad at him. 

ANOTHER:  For those interested, my original memorial notice for Rorty is here.

Leo Strauss, the non-philosopher, in the News Again

This time in the Chicago Reader.  An interesting piece, though the reporter, Ms. Englander, who was a pleasant woman, seems to have misunderstood my main points, and also misquoted me in a rather significant way.  I submitted the following comment:

I am misquoted in this article, as I have alerted Ms. Englander. I most certainly did not describe Straussianism as "a pathology of American philosophy departments," since it does not exist in any leading American philosophy department. Strauss was not, contrary to the article's heading, a "professor of philosophy," but a professor of political science, and the Straussian pathology and its attendant cult, which I discussed with Ms. Englander, operates exclusively in some American political science departments. Actual philosophers view Strauss exactly as I and Burnyeat describe.

Strauss may indeed have "many critics who persist in connecting him to all that’s wrong with American policy," but I am not one of them, as I made clear to Ms. Englander. It strikes me as rather silly to attribute the venal criminality of the Bush Administration to a not very good scholar of the history of philosophy. Unfortunately, this article, while informative and interesting, tends to contribute to the misapprehension that Leo Strauss and his acolytes know anything about philosophy or the "philosophical life." The more interesting question is the sociological one of how this particular pseudo-scholarly cult has enjoyed such staying power in U.S. political science departments.

Ironically, Straussianism is largely a dead issue in Hyde Park (Professor Tarcov being its last representative), having migrated instead to UT Austin's political science department!

Simon Critchley Rides to the Defense of Derrida

A couple of years ago Simon Critchley, who teaches philosophy at the New School in New York and (part-time) at the University of Essex in Britain, sent me a copy of his book Continental Philosophy:  A Very Short Introduction.  That was nice of him, as we had not had any prior interaction that I can recall.  It is not, alas, a book that I could recommend to others and it was also, unfortunately, consistent with my first impression of him when I was asked a number of years ago to referee the Routledge book on New British Philosophers, which featured interviews with various youngish British philosophers.  Critchley was one of the designated representatives of "Continental philosophy," for which the editors seemed to have gone out of their way to find the weakest representatives, notwithstanding the many excellent UK-based scholars working in that field.  The interview with Critchley was really quite extraordinary for the superficial character of his understanding.  He stated, for example, that:

The goal of philosophy in the continental tradition is emancipation, whether individual or societal,

which must mean, among other things, that phenomenology is not part of the Continental traditions.  (There is also, of course, no "continental tradition" of philosophy, but, again, one would have to actually know something to know how crass such a characterization of two hundred years of post-Kantian philosophy on the European Continent is.)

Critchley went on in this interview to suggest that one can understand "the continental tradition" as emerging out of a way of reading Kant's Third Critique:

It was felt by post-Kantians like Maimon and Jacobi, and by the German idealists, that Kant had established a series of dualisms in the Third Critique--pure reason and practical reason, nature and freedom, epistemology and ethics--but had failed to provide a single unifying principle which would bring those dualisms together.  German idealism, then, can be seen as a series of attempts to provide this principle.  So you get the Subject in Fichte, Spirit in Hegel, art in the early Schelling, and then in later nineteenth and early twentieth century German philosophy, Will to Power in Nietzsche, Praxis in Marx and Being in Heidegger.  These are all attempts to answer this question.

I assume in a normal PhD program, a graduate student who submitted a statement like this as part of a prospectus would be expelled from the program, but apparently such sophomoric blather is thought to constitute scholarly insight in some circles.  Overcoming the dualisms of the Third Critique surely was an animating concern (among others) for some of the German Idealists, but it obviously was not for Nietzsche or for Marx.  Hegel was a dead issue in German philosophy by the 1850s, as materialists, on the one hand, and NeoKantians, on the other, rose to prominence, and Schopenhauer's anti-Hegelian polemics informed a generation's perception of the mad system builder of Jena.  What role "will to power" actually plays in Nietzsche's philosophy is, unbeknownst apparently to Critchley, actually a hotly debated scholarly topic, but there is no significant account of it on which it constitutes an "attempt" by Nietzsche to provide a "unifying principle" for the dualisms of the Third Critique.  Assimilating Marx to this just-so story is even weirder, given Marx's spectacular hostility to the questions of metaphysics and epistemology that animated German Idealism, a hostility encapuslated in the 2nd Thesis on Feuerbach, where Marx deemed all questions "isolated from practice" to be merely "scholastic" questions.  This was no "attempt" to "bring those dualisms together," but an attempt to push them off the table as questions worth anyone's intellectual energy.  (In this respect, Daniel Brudney's learned book on Marx's Attempt to Leave Philosophy [Harvard University Press, 1996] is quite aptly titled, though I disagree with aspects of his account of Marx's motivations for abandoning metaphysics and epistemology.)

Critchley's fairly crude understanding of Continental philosophy appears positively sophisticated, though, when compared to his views about "analytic" philosophy.  After claiming, obviously falsely, that "another thing which is distinctive about the continental tradition...[is that] philosophical questions have to be linked to non-philosophical discourses," he continues that,

What I dislike most about [analytic] philosophers is the idea that they think because they are smart as philosophers they have nothing to learn from anybody else.  You find this repeatedly.  I'd argue that they've got lots to learn, not just from cognitive scientists, but from lawyers, historians, anthropologists and sundry others.  If philosophy isolates itself from other disciplines and from the culture at large it will die....

One must have simply no idea of anything that has gone on in Anglophone philosophy in the last thirty years or so to make a statement like this, since English-speaking philosophy is now the most richly interdisciplinary of all the humanities, interacting with, and often contributing to, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, law, and biology, among other fields.  It is those in the "Continental ghetto," like Critchley, who have isolated themselves from almost all other intellectual fields, certain segments of English and Comparative Literature Departments excepted.

In any case, I recommended to Routledge that the interview with Critchley be dropped from the volume.  Perhaps he found out about this, I don't know.

Now fast-forward to the present, and the Cardozo Law Review, a student-edited publication at the Cardozo Law School in New York City, which has some quite able people on its faculty (including some trained philosophers like Edward Stein and Martin Stone), but also some frauds and intellectual voyeurs who dabble in a lot of stuff they plainly don't understand.  This is obviously an environment in which someone like Critchley fits in nicely, so he was invited to write about Derrida, a recurring topic of bad articles in the Cardozo Law Review.  It turns out that Critchley was agitated by my remarks at the time of Derrida's passing, and for good reason, since to the extent Critchley has a "reputation" in certain corners of the academy it is due to his work on Derrida.  In any case, Critchley wrote:

In the days following Derrida's death, there was a extraordinarily ill-informed discussion on [Leiter's] blog about the ruckus caused by the New York Times obituary, at the end of which Leiter wrote:

If he [i.e. Derrida] had become a football player as he had apparently hoped, or taken up honest work of some other kind, then we might simply remember him as a 'good man.' But he devoted his professional life to obfuscation and increasing the amount of ignorance in the world: by 'teaching' legions of earnest individuals how to read badly and think carelessly. He may have been a morally decent man, but he led a bad life, and his legacy is one of shame for the humanities.

Such breathtaking moralistic stupidity leaves me speechless, and I cannot bring myself to comment on it.

Oh goodness!  Alas, immediately after saying he wouldn't "comment" on it, he did:

I would cite Proposition VII of Wittgenstein's Tractatus in my defense, if that did not risk concealing such muck under sweeter smelling blooms. But that is not all. Not only did Derrida lead a bad life and apparently single-handedly undermine the humanities (quite an achievement, all things considered), he is also the efficient cause of Reaganism and a fortiori of Bushism (I guess Leiter would know, living in Texas).

But I did not say that Derrida was "the efficient cause of Reaganism," though I suppose such spectacular misreadings should be expected from a partisan of Derrida.  What I did suggest--read what I wrote--is that it is probably not coincidental "that the total corruption of public discourse and language" that began with Reagan's triumph "coincided with the collapse of careful reading and the responsible use of language in one of the central humanities disciplines," namely literary studies.  The question, of course, is what broader socio-economic developments explain the coincidence?  (By the way, unlike Simon Critchley, I am an actual New Yorker, but one need not live in New York or Texas to be struck by the parallels between the intellectual collapse in both the public sphere and parts of the academic sphere that occurred at the same time--indeed, David Bromwich has written a book on the subject.)

In any case, having just misrepresented what I wrote, Critchley goes on to quote it:

Warming to his theme, Leiter continues, and I assure the reader that I am not making this up,

Was it entirely an accident that at the same time that deconstruction became the rage in literary studies (namely, the 1980s), American politics went off the rails with the Great Prevaricator, Ronald Reagan? Is it simply coincidental that the total corruption of public discourse and language--which we may only hope has reached its peak at the present moment--coincided with the collapse of careful reading and the responsible use of language in one of the central humanities disciplines? These are important questions, and I wonder whether they have been, or will be, addressed. [FN7]

These are not important questions; they are extremely silly speculations and Leiter should simply be ashamed of himself for equating the interest in deconstruction with the rise of American neo-conservatism. Once again, it might help if Leiter had actually taken the trouble to read Derrida's work before offering philosopher king-like judgments on its merits. And to think that a person that has the arrogance to publish such stupidities sits in judgment on the quality of graduate programs in philosophy and considers himself an authority in Continental philosophy. It is painfully laughable.

I am surprised that the student editors at the Cardozo Law Review did not ask for some citation in support of Critchley's false statement that I had not "read Derrida's work"; I have read rather more of it than is worth reading.  How could Critchley, in any case, possibly know what I have read?  As I noted at the start, we have never met, and he never bothered to ask.  Perhaps what this silly man is thinking is that anyone who had read Derrida would have come away as enamored of the late deconstructionist as Critchley?  That probably is a reasonable inference if one assumes that all readers have Critchley's level of philosophical competence.

Michael Rosen (Harvard) and I recently finished up The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, which includes contributions by twenty distinguished scholars interested in aspects of the Continental traditions in philosophy (some of whom, I should add, have a higher opinion of Derrida than I do).  Critchley, alas, represents that "other" kind of academic too often attracted to Continental philosophy, the intellectual lightweight and philosophical tourist who can't read a text carefully or follow a philosophical argument.   One of our hopes is that The Oxford Handbook, by treating post-Kantian Continental figures as philosophers--and not as museum pieces from the history of ideas--will increase the number of intellectually and philosophically serious scholars drawn to their study.  But until that happens, I fear, philosophical used car salesmen like Critchley will, too often, pose as spokesman for non-Anglophone traditions in philosophy.

The Finkelstein Tenure Case and the Meaning of "Ad Hominem"

On his web site, Professor Finkelstein has posted a very fine letter by a philosopher in the U.K. sent to the President of DePaul University, Dennis Holtschneider (you may e-mail President Holtschneider here regarding the tenure case).  The letter writer notes a point we have touched on in the past, namely, the misuse of the term "ad hominem" to describe certain kinds of criticism.  Our U.K. philosopher wrote, in pertinent part, as follows:

I write to you as a retired teacher of Philosophy, formerly a lecturer in the University of Wales, and a founding member of the Council for Academic Freedom and Academic Standards, to express my dismay at your decision to refuse tenure to Norman Finkelstein and to dismiss him.

In defending your position, you refer more than once in your letter to him to ‘ad hominem attacks’ he has made upon other scholars, thus endorsing the complaint made publicly against him by Alan Dershowitz.

As I’m sure I don’t need to point out to you, ‘ad hominem’ refers to the fallacy of inferring the falsity of a statement from the bad character of the individual making it. But I’m not sure if you and Dershowitz understand the term in its technical sense. The implication of your use of the logician’s term of art is that Finkelstein is guilty of a scholarly offence: but I doubt that you could point to an instance of it in his writings. To the contrary, Finkelstein draws adverse conclusions about an individual’s character from the falsity of what he or she says, a perfectly reasonable procedure (where the falsity can’t be put down to innocent error). In drawing such conclusions Finkelstein is hardly guilty, as you suggest, of not being ‘objective’ in his ‘professional judgement of colleagues’, unless you think that objectivity is the same as neutrality. Nor can you think that he fails to show ‘due respect for the opinions of others’ unless you hold the absurd view that all opinions are worthy of respect.

No one, of course, actually holds "the absurd view that all opinions are worthy of respect."  But many people, unsurprisingly, hold the view that their absurd "opinions are worthy of respect," which is almost always what is at issue when careless accusations of "ad hominem" attacks are bandied about.

UPDATE:  It might be worth noting that the Illinois Chapter of the AAUP has now entered the fray, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education:

On Friday the Illinois Conference of the American Association of University Professors sent a letter to the university’s president, the Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider....In the two-page letter, Leo Welch, the chapter’s president, says the decision to deny tenure to the two assistant professors violated both the association’s standards and those of DePaul’s own Faculty Handbook.

Mr. Finkelstein’s alleged lack of “collegiality” appears to have been the “sole basis” for denying him tenure, Mr. Welch writes. “It is entirely illegitimate for a university to deny tenure to a professor out of fear that his published research … might hurt a college’s reputation,” he says. The association has explicitly rejected collegiality as an appropriate criterion for evaluating faculty members, and has criticized it as “ensuring homogeneity” and undermining the leadership role of colleges and universities, according to the letter.

"A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin" (Leiter)

So reports the New York Times in their trademark he said/she said manner, when, of course, the article might have been more aptly titled, "A Split Emerges as Ignorant Ideologues Discuss Darwin," since ignorance of evolutionary biology is almost evenly divided between the two sides:  on the one hand, the pathological liars from the Discovery [sic] Institute, the public relations arm of the "Intelligent Design" scam; on the other, Larry Arnhart, a professor of political science at Northern Illinois, and John Derbyshire, a pontificator at the National Review (who at least knows enough to know that "Intelligent Design" is bogus), who are championing a different intellectual muddle:

Darwin’s scientific theories about the evolution of species can be applied to today’s patterns of human behavior, and...natural selection can provide support for many bedrock conservative ideas, like traditional social roles for men and women, free-market capitalism and governmental checks and balances.

“I do indeed believe conservatives need Charles Darwin,” said Larry Arnhart, a professor of political science at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, who has spearheaded the cause. “The intellectual vitality of conservatism in the 21st century will depend on the success of conservatives in appealing to advances in the biology of human nature as confirming conservative thought."

This, of course, confirms an observation Michael Weisberg and I made in writing about the misuse and mispresentation of evolutionary biology by some law professors:

As Professor Jones himself has noted, “the favored perspective on the causes of human behavior often reflects ephemeral enthusiasms wafted on the politics of the moment” [footnote omitted].  That summarizes we suspect, in a nutshell, the current fascination with “law and evolutionary biology,” which permits the patina of “science” to be enlisted on behalf of various hobby horses of the right: people are “selfish,” law can’t change everything, nature puts limits on utopian aspirations, and the like. Perhaps all of these are true, but right now evolutionary biology offers no support to any of them. But “ephemerical enthusiasms wafted on the politics of the moment” have made the science irrelevant. We hope to remind people that the science is relevant, indeed, crucial, and that, so far, the needed science is not there.

Professor Arnhart, himself, maintains a blog devoted to his hobby horse, which even permits comments.  Already someone has weighed in with a pertinent observation:

You will be better able to cross the divide if you stop refering to "Darwinism". The theory of gravity is not called "Newtonism".  Go over to the Physics Dept. at NIU and ask someone how gravity works. Now go over to the Biology Dept. and ask someone how natural selection works. Ithink you will find the answers illuminating.

I invite some of the many philosophers of biology out there among the readership to venture over to Professor Arnhart's site to find out to what extent he has a scholarly interest in evolutionary biology and to what extent he is really an ignorant ideologue.  Save a copy of your comments; if he doesn't post them, I'll post them here in due course.  But perhaps we shall be pleasantly surprised?

UPDATE:  A reader directs my attention to a useful short review of one of Professor Arnhart's books by philosopher of biology Roberta Millstein (UC Davis) from Ethics 110 (2000):  653.  As Professor Millstein notes, Professor Arnhart makes two characteristic mistakes of the ideologically motivated in this realm: first, in assuming, without argument, that natural selection is "the primary force in evolutionary change"; and second, in ignoring that variation is both a necessary condition and consequence of natural selection, such that no one set of phenotypic traits can be deemed the "natural" ones.  As she notes:  these points "call into question the appropriateness of grounding his [natural right] theory in modern Darwininian biology."

"When the moral facts are obvious, there is no need for philosophy" (Leiter)

So remarked the political philosopher Brian Barry (as quoted here).  This is a view for which, as longtime readers know, I have some sympathy.  Who can doubt, though, that in an era when every dimwit and moral leper has his own blog that there are, in fact, legions ready to "dispute" Barry's example of a case where no philosophy was needed because "the moral facts are obvious," namely, whether the use of nuclear weapons in war could be justified?

"Hey douchebag!" (Leiter)

Via Pharyngula, I learn of this amusing idea for a regular feature:

My goal is to confront the problems with Slate magazine's contrarianism. They post any number of ridiculous things in the course of a week, and they need more watchdogs. Among their most telling efforts, see Christopher Hitchens' bizarre attack on Juan Cole.  Of course, he chides Cole not for his published writing, but for a comment on a closed discussion board. ...

So why "Hey douchebag!" and not, say, "A reasonable dissent from the tone and style of Slate?"  Because I'm aping their silly contrarianism, the penchant for startling headlines....

For the first installment, let's look at how Slate approaches science:  with dilettante Gregg Easterbrook, who has no qualifications to write on science.  Yet he tries to tell us that String Theory is junk, based on the fact that he's read one (count 'em, one) book....

Slate gives us the review of Smolin's book through the filter of a writer manifestly unqualified to write about science, a writer who clearly has other axes to grind. For example, here's Easterbrook's opening paragraph:

"The leading universities are dominated by hooded monks who speak in impenetrable mumbo-jumbo; insist on the existence of fantastic mystical forces, yet can produce no evidence of these forces; and enforce a rigid guild structure of beliefs in order to maintain their positions and status. The Middle Ages? No, the current situation in university physics departments. I just invented the part about the hoods."

So we know what Easterbrook begins with. All university physicists are trying to protect their narrow, myopic world. (By the way, Easterbrook only recently came around to "believing" in global warming, and he advocates teaching Intelligent Design in public schools. Just fyi.) Easterbrook again:

"If you worry that even in the 21^st century, intellectual fads have as much to do with university politics and careerism as with the search for abstract truth, The Trouble With Physics is a book you absolutely must read."

Yes, folks, that's right, let's base our approach to this book on overgeneralized biases about the state of the university. Because nothing helps out "the search for abstract truth" like overgeneralized biases.

"The physics establishment reacted adversely to Smolin's cosmic natural selection because the idea implies direction: Over time, existence progresses toward a condition more to the liking of beings such as us. In recent decades it has become essential at the top of academia to posit utter meaninglessness to all aspects of physics."

I'd like to note that Easterbrook cites absolutely no one who claims that science must look toward meaninglessness. I'm sure he can find plenty of scientists who note the difference between study of the physical world and study of the metaphysical world (i.e. science and religion). However, noting that separation and arguing for meaninglessness are not the same thing. Of course, then we get to Easterbrook's particular axe to grind:

"Today if a professor at Princeton claims there are 11 unobservable dimensions about which he can speak with great confidence despite an utter lack of supporting evidence, that professor is praised for incredible sophistication. If another person in the same place asserted there exists one unobservable dimension, the plane of the spirit, he would be hooted down as a superstitious crank."

Poor Gregg, unable to tout his religious ideas in a scientific forum. But let me be the first to say: whether or not Easterbrook is a superstitious crank, I don't know. But he's certainly a crank.

It's good they limit it to contributors to Slate, as it would be impossible to know how to pick among the many deserving folks in the blogosphere for a "Hey douchebag!" feature!* 

*Note:  "Hey douchebag" is not be confused with the very different endeavor of satirizing "righteous douchebags!"

Who is Alexandra Heifetz and Why Does She Want to Smear a Nice Guy Like Me (and a Nice Field Like Philosophy)? (Leiter)

MOVING TO THE FRONT from July 11 for the benefit of those who missed it during the summer

N+1 is a new NYC-based publication that styles itself high-brow and left; I am told that kids just out of college hanging out in NYC read it, and read its website in particular.  It was one such reader, who actually knew something about philosophy, that tipped me off to this silly smear piece by an "intern" at the magazine named Alexandra Heifetz who, best I can tell, studied philosophy--or at least attended classes--at Northwestern. 

One can only hope that the other writers for this publication have a more favorable ratio of brains to bile than Ms. Heifetz. 

She starts out gushing about Alain Badiou (who would  presumably be humiliated by the mangling of his ideas by this 20-something know-nothing), and then shifts gears midway through:

In 1989, Brian Leiter, now an analytic philosopher and law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, declared open war on continental philosophy by launching the Philosophical Gourmet Report. In the PGR, Leiter offered a ranking of the top philosophy programs in the US. At first hard copies of the rankings were distributed; then in 1996 the PGR went online. Geared toward prospective undergrads and based on the “quality of faculty” factor, the rankings were clearly, profoundly biased toward analytic programs. Some continental-leaning departments hung near the bottom of the list; most didn’t make it at all.

How is it that these silly people never seem to tire of the same lies and canards?  Nowhere in this smear piece is there any mention of the fact that I've written one book and edited three others on that paragon of "analytic" philosophy, Nietzsche; that I'm the co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy; that easily available on-line information reveals that I've taught, over the past decade, graduate philosophy seminars on "The Continental Tradition," "Marx and Freud," "Nietzsche and Ethics," and "Nietzsche and Foucault," among other topics.  Of course, these facts--that is what they are--would spoil the story line for Ms. Heifetz.  So, too, would the facts about all the PGR Advisory Board members who work on Continental philosophy (Frederick Beiser, Michael Forster, Pierre Keller, Sebastian Gardner, Michael Rosen, Julian Young, Allen Wood):  clearly those folks, like me, have as their goal the destruction of study of the philosophy to which they have devoted major portions of their professional careers.

Alas, there is no bottom to dumb, so Ms. Heifetz continues:

On the PGR website, which is now very fancy, there’s a section called “Continental vs. Analytic Philosophy,” a concise version of the introduction Leiter wrote for the book A Future for Philosophy.

In fact, the argument of the introduction to The Future for Philosophy is different than the section in the PGR, which is left over from years ago, and which I'll revise this fall.  Of course, to know this you'd have to be able to read, or to understand what you read.  My guess is that the lazy Ms. Heifetz--who obviously isn't interested in any facts--simply didn't read the introduction.  But back to the smear:

Here he distinguishes between them as two styles of doing philosophy, rather than categories for the kind of books to be read:

Continental philosophy is distinguished by its style (more literary, less analytical, sometimes just obscure), its concerns (more interested in actual political and cultural issues and, loosely speaking, the human situation and its “meaning”), and some of its substantive commitments (more self-conscious about the relation of philosophy to its historical situation).

Leiter seems to think he’s dropping a bomb—note the disparagements of “obscure” and “loosely speaking”—but the house of philosophy had begun to self-destruct half a century before.

"Loosely speaking" is not a disparagement, it is a way of signalling to the reader that what follows is a bit general and imprecise, in this case, because brief.  Why Ms. Heifetz thinks that I think this is "dropping a bomb" is anyone's guess.

Since the 1950s analytic philosophers have made the same complaints: that continental philosophy has a messy literary quality, that it wastes time with “concepts-in-quotations,” and that it bothers itself with cultural things like genocide and the Internet. And yet, boom! Like a frantic seven-year-old, Leiter defends his kind of philosophy by pushing out people who don’t agree with him.

I, of course, did not say anything about messy literary quality, that is Ms. Heifetz's invention for purposes of her story line.  And one respect in which I think that section of the PGR is mistaken is precisely in mentioning "literary quality" at all:  there is precious little literary about Hegel's Science of Logic or Marx's Capital, let alone Husserl's Ideas.  And speaking of seven-year-olds, I think even mine knows that the Continental traditions in philosophy are not marked by concern for "genocide and the Internet," though at least this suggests Ms. Heifetz has read (or heard about) one book, Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment.  But all this is just a lead-in to her main "idea":

But what the continental has tried to preserve (and what the analytic has tried to run from) is a sense that, even while pursuing self-preservation, philosophers should never give up on answering questions that are important and interesting to everyone.

Ignorance is bliss, and when it comes to philosophy, Ms. Heifetz is apparently ecstatic.  Her ignorance is palpable in two different directions here:  first, she thinks it is only "analytic philosophy" that neglects "questions that are important and interesting to everyone"; and second, she is utterly unaware of those English-speaking philosophers who address such issues. 

On the first point:  is it only the "analytics" (whoever they are) who allegedly gave up "on answering questions that are important and interesting to everyone"?  How does Leibniz's Monadology fare by Ms. Heifetz's criterion?  What about Descartes's Meditations?  Husserl's Ideas?  Hegel's Logic?  Are these folks also "analytic" philosophers?  By Ms. Heifetz's "logic," they are. 

Here is a quote from the introduction I actually wrote to The Future for Philosophy which, if Ms. Heifetz had read it, might have made an impression on this naif:

“[P]hilosophy” has a currency in everyday parlance and ordinary self-reflection that “linguistics” or “sociology” or “anthropology” do not. One doesn’t need an advanced degree to have a “philosophy of life,” and this has bred an expectation, even among those with advanced degrees, that the discipline of philosophy ought to be continuous with ordinary attempts to forge a philosophy of life.

Most of philosophy, both contemporary and--importantly--historical, does not, alas, live up to this expectation. Earlier and contemporary philosophers worry, to be sure, about truth, knowledge, the just society, and morally right action, as well as the nature of science, beauty, death, law, goodness, rationality, and consciousness. From reflections on these worries one might even extract a “philosophy of life,” though it would hardly be obvious, on an initial reading of Aristotle, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Hegel, or Husserl that this is what they were after

It's not clear Ms. Heifetz even got through the "initial reading," given how she conceives of "analytic" and "Continental" philosophy:

The analytic philosopher takes his scalpel to the concept of democracy; the continental presents us with an account of the brutal pacification of the east.

Indeed, attention to "the brutal pacification of the east" is what makes Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger major figures in "Continental philosophy" (you missed that chapter in Being and Time?  You need to read as carefully as Ms. Heifetz).  It's not only, though, that it is false that figures in the Continental traditions are not interested in those technical questions of metaphysics and epistemology that Ms. Heifetz doesn't understand, it's also false that the folks Ms. Heifetz thinks of as "analytic" philosophers are not addressing "questions that are important and interesting to everyone":  what exactly does she think books like Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979) or Harry Frankfurt's The Reasons of Love (2004) are about?  Set theory?  The foundations of quantum mechanics? 

Find an educated layperson who has read any part of either the Nagel or Frankfurt books, as well as, say, the "Sense-Certainty" section of Hegel's Phenomenology or the "Introduction" Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, and then ask Ms. Heifetz's childish question:  which of these philosophers are addressing "questions that are important and interesting to everyone"?  The "Continental" philosophers won't win.  Again, from the actual introduction to The Future for Philosophy:

It is true, to be sure, that philosophy is now a “profession”—just like psychology, linguistics, sociology, physics, and mathematics—and it is also true that the discipline is often technical and unintelligible to the lay person. But only a complete ignorance of the history of philosophy could lead anyone to think that this supports a special complaint about contemporary philosophy: Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, among many other “greats,” are also technical and obscure to the lay person.  Yet no one, other than teenagers and anti-intellectuals, consider this an objection to their philosophy. As Timothy Williamson trenchantly puts it in his essay: “Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth. Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention-spans.”

But enough with silliness about philosophy, it's now time for Ms. Heifetz to misstate facts about the profession:

In universities with hard-core analytic cliques, like NYU or Princeton, continental philosophers end up outside of the philosophy department and find a home in comp lit, women’s, or African-American studies.

This will come as news to the tenured members of the NYU and Princeton departments whose work is centrally concerned with Continental philosophy, like Beatrice Longuenesse, John Richardson, and Alexander Nehamas.  When I pointed out this factual error--that is what it is, a factual error--to the alleged editor of this journal (a grad student in American Studies at Yale, where fact-checking apparently isn't required), he declined to correct it. 

Desperate, apparently, for validation, Ms. Heifetz even manages to drag the Heckling Campaign out of the attic, long after everyone, even Richard, tired of it--and, of course, without mentioning any of the rebuttals, or the fact that 98% of the profession didn't sign the petition, or that many of the signatories recanted, or that many of them now participate in the surveys, and on and on and on.

The total ignorance about Continental philosophy that is on display in this smear piece--and the total unwillingness to acknowledge the facts about my work on Continental philosophy and the extensive coverage of Continental philosophy in the PGR--has a simple explanation:  for this dispute is not about Continental philosophy at all.  "Continental" for these folks does not mean "Continental philosophy," as Ms. Heifetz's spectacularly ignorant remarks well illustrate:  she obviously hasn't a clue about the thinkers, ideas, and arguments that constitute the glorious traditions of post-Kantian philosophy in Germany and France over the last two hundred years.  "Continental," rather, is more of a non-cognitive term, expressing something like the following:  "yeah for left-wing opining about culture and politics, that's philosophy."  As readers know, I'm a big fan of left-wing opining, but it ain't philosophy, Continental or otherwise.  This juvenile usage of "Continental" is widespread, I fear, among those who are philosophically illiterate but fashion themselves culturally sophisticated.

A concluding thought:  I wonder whether any of the random morons in Cyberspace who have picked up Ms. Heifetz's smear piece will be any more interested in the facts than Ms. Heifetz?  I'm not optimistic.

Back to my blogging hiatus....

UPDATE:  Paul Schofield, a grad student at Harvard, writes:

I enjoyed today's blog post. I find the near universal misunderstanding of philosophy quite aggravating. You point to one camp, who thinks that philosophers have lost their way with silly technical questions. I have encountered these folks. But I also routinely encounter people who think that philosophy is "corrupted" by post-modernism, and are more than willing to lecture me about this "unfortunate" turn.

Not only that. People of a religious bent feel free to berate philosophy for being "atheistic." (Real philosophy was done by C.S Lewis, don't you know?) And non-philosophers show up at philosophy talks not to learn about what it is that we do, but to vocally object (during question time) to our entire discipline's way of doing things.

What is stunning is the confidence with which these opinions are asserted. When corrected by me- an actual grad student, in an actual philosophy department- I receive incredulous stares. This makes clearing up the mis-perceptions all but impossible.

Leo Strauss, Authoritarian (Leiter)

The letter by Strauss translated here is certainly revealing, though the comments section is, alas, quickly overun by zombies from the Strauss Cult reciting their mantras against the real scholars and philosophers.  From the latter group, Tad Brennan (Northwestern) gets the prize for the single, best comment, which captures both Strauss and the cult rather well:

No one has any idea what Strauss meant.

But anyone who criticizes him is distorting what he meant.

Got that?

You know, I can see taking Strauss seriously as a cultural phenomenon--the way we might take Madonna seriously as a cultural phenomenon.

But as a thinker? There's just no there there--there's no coherent, comprehensible theory or doctrine that one can identify and assess. And that's what his supporters say in his defense!

(But when I say it, its part of the ubiquitous distortion.)

What there was, apparently, was a certain allure, a certain indefinable aura of intellectual mystery, a combination of disdain and come-hither that played on insecurities and made students want to be accepted.

Cool. And Madonna wore some fab outfits on her last tour, too.

If we're supposed to take this guy seriously as a thinker, his supporters had better try to identify some of his thoughts. Horton [translater of the letter] is at least trying to take him seriously in that way, and, whadyaknow, the thoughts look pretty ugly.

And so we get the retreat into claims of ineffability .

If you pore through all the comments, be aware that, as often happens with Straussians, Nietzsche gets particularly badly misrepresented.  But I don't recommend perusing the comments.

Jeff Goldstein, "the third stupidest guy on the planet" (Leiter)

So says Atrios, and this philosophy student has some fun making the case:   "I get off on seeing people with absolutely no training in linguistics or analytic philosophy of language bloviate about meaning."  His post-mortem reflections on this little "blog war" are also amusing.

Eugene Volokh Fan Club Loses Another Member (Leiter)

Details (and links) here.

Glenn Reynolds (Leiter)

It is becoming irresistible to conclude that this man is really engaged in an elaborate parody of right-wing morons.

Why review a book of philosophy when you can sneer at it? (Leiter)

The New York Times has done it again:  they've enlisted an ignorant reviewer to review a philosophical book.  The reviewer is Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor at The New Republic.  The book is Daniel Dennett's latest book, a "naturalistic" account of religious belief.   Whatever Mr. Wieseltier knows about philosophy or science, he effectively conceals in this review.  The sneering starts at the beginning:

THE question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett's book. "Breaking the Spell" is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.

Perhaps it is correct that the "question of the place of science in human life" is a philosophical, not scientific question, though I wish I could be as confident as Mr. Wieseltier as to how we demarcate those matters.  But "the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical" is not a "superstition," but a reasonable methodological posture to adopt based on the actual evidence, that is, based on the actual, expanding success of the sciences, and especially, the special sciences, during the last hundred years.  One should allow, of course, that some of these explanatory paradigms may fail, and that others, like evolutionary psychology, are at the speculative stage, awaiting the kind of rigorous confirmation (or disconfirmation) characteristic of selectionist hypotheses in evolutionary biology.  But no evidence is adduced by Mr. Wieseltier to suggest that Professor Dennett's view is any different than this.  Use of the epithet "superstition" simply allows Mr. Wieseltier to avoid discussing the actual methodological posture of Dennett's work, and to omit mention of the reasons why one might reasonably expect scientific explanations for many domains of human phenomena to be worth pursuing.

But onward with the sneering of the ignorant:

Dennett flatters himself that he is Hume's heir. Hume began "The Natural History of Religion," a short incendiary work that was published in 1757, with this remark: "As every enquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning its origin in human nature." These words serve as the epigraph to Dennett's introduction to his own conception of "religion as a natural phenomenon." "Breaking the Spell" proposes to answer Hume's second question, not least as a way of circumventing Hume's first question. Unfortunately, Dennett gives a misleading impression of Hume's reflections on religion. He chooses not to reproduce the words that immediately follow those in which he has just basked: "Happily, the first question, which is the most important, admits of the most obvious, at least, the clearest, solution. The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion."

So was Hume not a bright? I do not mean to be pedantic. Hume deplored religion as a source of illusions and crimes, and renounced its consolations even as he was dying. His God was a very wan god. But his God was still a god; and so his theism is as true or false as any other theism. The truth of religion cannot be proved by showing that a skeptic was in his way a believer, or by any other appeal to authority. There is no intellectually honorable surrogate for rational argument. Dennett's misrepresentation of Hume...is noteworthy, therefore, because it illustrates his complacent refusal to acknowledge the dense and vital relations between religion and reason, not only historically but also philosophically.

Has Dennett misrepresented Hume?  Mr. Wieseltier might have availed himself of a fine on-line essay on Hume's philosophy of religion by someone who actually knows something about Hume.  Paul Russell (Philosophy, British Columbia) writes (with some emphases added in bold):

In 1757 Hume published “The Natural History of Religion”, a work that proposes to identify and explain the origins and evolution of religious belief. This project follows lines of investigation and criticism that had already been laid down by a number of other thinkers, including Lucretius, Hobbes and Spinoza. Hume's primary objective in this work is to show that the origins and foundations of religious belief do not rest with reason or philosophical arguments of any kind but with aspects of human nature that reflect our weaknesses, vulnerabilities and limitations (i.e., fear and ignorance). Related to this point, Hume also wants to show that the basic forces in human nature and psychology that shape and structure religious belief are in conflict with each other and that, as a result of this, religious belief is inherently unstable and variable. In arguing for these points, Hume is directly challenging an opposing view, one that was widely held among his own orthodox contemporaries. According to this view (e.g., as presented by Cleanthes), the evidence of God's existence is so obvious that no one sincerely and honestly doubts it. Belief in an intelligent, invisible creator and governor of the world is a universal belief rooted in and supported by reason. From this perspective, no person sincerely accepts “speculative atheism”. Hume's “naturalistic” approach to religion aims to discredit these claims and assumptions of theism.

Dennett's naturalistic approach, even with its different speculative explanatory mechanisms, aims to do the same thing.  What Mr. Wieseltier confidently pronounces Hume's theism is, alas, not so clearly ascribed to Hume according to those who actually know something about Hume.  There has been misrepresentation of Hume, I fear, but not by Professor Dennett.

Mr. Wieseltier's confident ignorance extends beyond Hume scholarship, unsurprisingly.  He continues:

For Dennett, thinking historically absolves one of thinking philosophically. Is the theistic account of the cosmos true or false? Dennett, amazingly, does not care. "The goal of either proving or disproving God's existence," he concludes, is "not very important." It is history, not philosophy, that will break religion's spell. The story of religion's development will extirpate it. "In order to explain the hold that various religious ideas and practices have on people," he writes, "we need to understand the evolution of the human mind."

Just as scientific questions are clearly different from philosphical ones in Mr. Wieseltier's simple world, so too are historical and philosophical questions.  He does not seem to realize that an account of the historical genesis of a belief can have bearing on the epistemic status of that belief, that beliefs with the wrong kind of etiology are epistemically suspect.  But quite apart from the banal epistemic point, the material quoted by Mr. Wieseltier suggests that Professor Dennett's concern is not purely epistemological, but also rhetorical and psychological:  namely, how does one get people to give up on religion?  Like Nietzsche (and perhaps, in a different way, Hume), Dennett apparently puts his hopes in a convincing historical narrative.

As to Dennett's speculative natural history of religion, Mr. Wieseltier observes, fairly enough, that "it is only a story. It is not based, in any strict sense, on empirical research. Dennett is 'extrapolating back to human prehistory with the aid of biological thinking,' nothing more.  'Breaking the Spell' is a fairy tale told by evolutionary biology."  He does not observe that religion is also, by the same criteria, "only a story," a mere "fairy tale," and one which can't even pretend to continuity with explanatory paradigms we have reason to deem reliable.  To call Dennett's story "a pious account of his own atheistic longing," is I think shameless projection:  it is Mr. Wieseltier who has genuinely pious longings, which is why he is reduced to sneering at Professor Dennett while spewing out a tissue of confusions and misrepresentations.

That we are in the presence of the pious (and the very confused) becomes even clearer later in the review when Mr. Wieseltier complains:

It will be plain that Dennett's approach to religion is contrived to evade religion's substance. He thinks that an inquiry into belief is made superfluous by an inquiry into the belief in belief. This is a very revealing mistake. You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content.

It is true that you cannot show a belief to be false by explaining its origin, but it is clear you can show that holding the belief is not warranted by explaining its origin.  (This is an important topic I have dealt with elsewhere.)  If you believe buying stock in High Tech Miracle, Inc. is a good investment based on recommendation of your broker, and then you discover that your broker recommended it because he is an investor in the company and a beneficiary of its rising stock fortunes, you no longer have a reason to believe it's a good investment--though it might turn out to be one, of course, but you no longer are warranted in believing that.  Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, Dennett and many others exploit this form of argumentation, without making any mistakes, let alone abandoning "reason," as Mr. Wieseltier--whose arrogance may even outstrip his ignorance--remarkably claims.

There is more one could say about the muddled particulars of this display of mindless anti-intellectualism and feeble apologetics for religion, but other work beckons this Sunday afternoon.  Mr. Wieseltier concludes that Professor Dennett's book is "shallow and self-congratulatory."  Perhaps it is, but on the evidence of this review one is actually warranted in applying those adjectives only to the review's author.

Being a PhD Economist Doesn't Mean Being Able to Construct an Argument... (Leiter)

[Originally posted on July 15, 2004]

...apparently. The author of this incredibly silly piece (even by the standards of the site on which it appears)--one Arnold Kling--purportedly has a PhD in economics from MIT. The MIT economics faculty can not be happy about this.

Here is the "argument" of the piece. The author purports to refute the view of Congressman Sanders and Senator Edwards "that life is getting harder for working Americans, that things have been going down hill for thirty years, and that our only hope is bigger government." Instead, the author will show "that it is nonsense to suggest that the middle class is disappearing and that the standard of living is eroding for working Americans."

Here is evidence that would seem, prima facie, to have bearing on these claims: (1) income and earning trends adjusted for inflation since the 1970s; (2) hours worked by individuals and households since the 1970s; (3) comparative data on hunger, malnutrition, mortality, and incidence of disease between the well-off and the poor, and between the 1970s and the present; and (4) changes in purchasing power, adjusted for inflation, since the 1970s.

Incredibly, no real evidence on these points is mentioned by the author. Instead, the author offers us the following by way of argumentative support: Today, almost everyone owns a telephone, refrigerator, color TV, et al., whereas in 1970 only the vast majority owned most of these. Many more today now own large-screen TVs too. In addition, 68.6% own their own homes today, in comparison to 64.6% in the 1970s.

It might have occurred to the author, but apparently did not, that one explanation for these changes might be that (1) prices of many of these items went down, and (2) individuals and households now work more. If the former, then consumer goods are more available, but we have not yet shown that life has gotten better along any other pertinent dimension (health, leisure, professional and personal well-being, even overall standard of living); if the latter, then life has gotten worse along one equally tangible dimension.

The closest this Ph.D. economist comes to noting the relevant factors bearing on the interpretation of his litany of consumer goods is the following: "[W]hat explains the fact that, adjusted for inflation, the pay of the lowest-wage workers has not increased much over the past thirty years? There are a number of factors involved, but I suspect that the largest component of the explanation is a shift in the composition of the low-wage work force. In the 1970's, many of the people at the bottom of the wage scale were heads of households. Today, many low-wage workers are providing second or third incomes to families." No actual data is in evidence here, just the author's "suspicion" of an explanation. And still no awareness is shown of the competing explanations for the increasing prevalence of consumer goods in the society at large.

But it gets better.

The author now presents the reader with powerful evidence that people are working much less now, and consuming more goods, than in...the late 19th-century! Since Congressman Sanders and Senator Edwards had not suggested that conditions for working Americans had deteriorated over the last century, but over the last 30 years, the relevance of this evidence is, shall we say, a bit obscure. Even the author correctly stated at the start the claims at issue. Yet he apparently does not realize that a significant portion of his article is devoted to evidence unrelated to any claim at issue in the argument.

But it gets still better.

To show that "we are healthier" now, and that the exploding costs of healthcare are delivering results, we are presented with two kinds of "evidence": first, the population is healthier now than a century ago (indeed, than two centuries ago!); and second, anecdotes about the author's own experiences with medical care, e.g., "My wife's cancer was detected early and treated effectively. My mother's cancer killed her in 1976, at age 53. If you ask me, the 1970's were no golden age of medical care." The first piece of "evidence" is, once again, irrelevant to the argument. The second piece is not even evidence.

I confess that it is tempting to conclude from this irrational display that this man is either criminally dishonest or a stark raving moron.

Meanwhile, of course, the article was cited approvingly by Glenn "no bit of right-wing sliminess is beneath me" Reynolds. I leave to the reader to answer the question which of the disjunctive explanatory possibilities previously noted applies in the case of Professor Reynolds.

UPDATE: You can see all the web sites that are happily endorsing Dr. Kling's "argument" here. "The less they know, the less they know it."

ANOTHER UPDATE: A law colleague elsewhere writes: "If desired consumer goods are indeed getting cheaper, that is in fact a rise in the standard of living for both rich and poor." To which I replied, in part: "There is more to the standard of living than color TVs." Unnoted in the article, except anecdotally: changes in the costs and availability of health care, schooling, housing, personal services, safety, transportation, etc., as well as changes in the amount of time it is necessary for people to work to secure any of these items, including consumer goods.

AND AGAIN: Reader Paul Wolfson from Dartmouth points out that the site on which this article appears is not (as the quality of the article would suggest) a reputable or trustworthy forum: details here.

Keith Burgess-Jackson in His Own Words

[This post from October 14, 2005 contains most of the pertinent background about this disturbed individual.  The letter at the end from one of his former students--which was sent to Burgess-Jackson and cc'd to me, so he knows that it (unlike most of what he posts) is authentic--is especially telling.  Meanwhile, a prospective PhD student alerted me to this parody site which is, at least, good for a laugh about this otherwise pathetic saga.] 

On the Kansas School Board's decision to attack evolution:

Great news for Kansas schoolchildren. The state board of education has voted to require that they be exposed to the same debate that is taking place among philosophers and scientists.  This fight is not about imposing religion on schoolchildren. It is about keeping scientists from imposing their secularism on schoolchildren.

(Bear in mind that Burgess-Jackson was sliced and diced by the philosophers of biology [see esp. the link to Professor Millstein's comments] on this topic a few weeks back--but, as we have had occasion to note, this strange man is "uneducable.")

On the riots in France: 

Is it wrong of me to delight in France's destruction? Any idiot could have seen that allowing Muslims to immigrate would destroy French culture. France is a Christian country, with Christian traditions, Christian values, and Christian culture. Christians and Muslims will never live together peacefully.

As someone remarked, Burgess-Jackson is "a man who will say almost anything without regard for truth or decency."

Keith Burgess-Jackson vs. "Philosophy of Biology" Blog!

(ORIGINALLY POSTED October 14, 2005)

As usual, Keith Burgess-Jackson (hereafter "KBJ"), the oddest man with a PhD in philosophy and a blog is being sliced and diced for one of his recent irrational postings. 

I am often asked, "Who is KBJ?"  I'll tell you what I know. 

KBJ teaches philosophy at the University of Texas at Arlington (Arlington is near Dallas, and UTA is one of the dozen or so branches of the UT system, mostly focused on undergraduate education) and he has a far right blog called "Anal Philosopher" (which, he admits, gets a substantial portion of its visits from people googling for anal sex sites!).  I know of him mainly because every week or two, he goes beserk at my expense:  he defames and insults me, makes scurrilous allegations (usually involving fictional misdeeds and incidents), and so on.  Invariably, someone sends me a link asking, "What's wrong with this guy?  Do you know him?"  (Actually, most of the queries are far ruder about KBJ than this, but you get the idea.)  I don't know him, except via some e-mail, though I finally stopped corresponding with him, since it's clear he does not occupy the space of reasons (I even added him finally to my list of blocked senders--he is, in many ways, worse than spam).  Here's what I do know about him:

  *KBJ is, by his own admission, desperate for attention.  Early on, KBJ had nothing but nice words for my blog.  My greatest sin, apparently, was never to have linked to him in the first year or so after he started his blog.  The reasons I didn't link to him are aptly described by Brian Weatherson (Philosophy, Cornell), who did note the arrival of KBJ's blog two years ago with the following understated assessment:  "I should warn that a large chunk of it doesn't seem to be that good...."  Indeed.  The folks at Crooked Timber have had fun in the past with what passes for "argument" at KBJ's site, for example, here and here.  And as another blogger noted, KBJ has a certain tendency towards "unembarrassed display[s] of irrationality."   It's hard, in short, to find stuff on his blog that one would want to call to the attention of philosophers and scholars, let alone rational, humane and cosmopolitan readers.   

*In any case, KBJ didn't cope too well with Professor Weatherson's understated assessment, and replied (in classic KBJ fashion) as follows:

Some idiot named Brian Weatherson commented early on...that there wasn’t much philosophy (or good philosophy) on my site. He must not know how to read.   

This is par for the course for KBJ:  he dismisses, with contempt, individuals who are, in every tangible and intangible respect, his betters, intellectually and otherwise.  (See, too, his treatment of R.A. Duff, a first-rate philosopher of criminal law whom KBJ dismisses as "obtuse" and "intellectually dishonest" [because he didn't give a favorable review to some of KBJ's work].  By contrast, he merely dismisses me as a "disgrace," a "buffoon," a "nut" and the like.  [He's not much nicer to Paul Krugman:  e.g., here or here or here or here and on and on.]  Someone prone to armchair psychology--not me, of course!--might surmise that the defense mechanism called "projection" explains a good many of these outbursts.  On the other hand, if, as KBJ informs us, "The degree to which [one is] attacked is the degree to which [one is] respected (or feared)," then KBJ must either worship me or be utterly terrified!  [I'm joking, of course:  KBJ is the most psychologically transparent blogger I've ever seen.])

Economics: the Pseudo-Science even Economists Don't Understand

This is quite bizarre.  My general impression has always been that economists are fairly analytically acute, the ideological peculiarities of their discipline notwithtstanding.  I wonder whether there isn't some other explanation.

Another New Orleans Casualty: Poor Thomas Hobbes Falls Into the Hands of Right-Wing Shills

A good example is here, and John Protevi (French Studies, LSU) sends the following apt comments in response:

Rich Lowry, one of the new breed of empty suits masquerading as a conservative pundit, does the utterly expected and, taking rumor and sensationalist media coverage for fact, cites the "massive lawlessness" in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, and then, not to be outdone in his cliched allusions, cites Hobbes. A great philosopher, the poor Englishman, who actually lived through a civil war, would doubtless blanch at the nitwits who cite him whenever they want to indulge a little authoritarian fantasy. The real story of New Orleans is not the scattered criminality, but our willingness to believe the wildest of rumor (like the "riot" at the Riverplex or the "civil unrest" of Chancellor O'Keefe's email to the LSU community or the "carjackings" someone solemnly told me happened "right there on Essen"). The real story of New Orleans is not the every man for himself, "man is a wolf to man," fantasy of Lowry and the other Hobbes-mongers, but the thousands and thousands and thousands of the brave and loving people of New Orleans who refused to leave their old, their sick, their young, their helpless, and who walked miles through the floods to safety, pushing wheelchairs and floating the sick on "looted" air mattresses, along with the hundreds of rescuers, professional and volunteer alike, who found FEMA incompetence a far worse foe than the waters. The real lesson is not that we need order from above to prevent the anarchy that is supposedly close by, but that the solidarity that holds us all together, the civic and human bonds that led all those thousands to stick together, needs only support from a government that needs to be recalled to its proper function as the organized expression of that solidarity. 

What International Law Scholars Outside the U.S. Think of U.S. Conduct

When someone remarked that leading academic figures tend to be cowards when it comes to their own regimes, there was much clucking of blogospheric tongues.  "Oh no," said the children, "everyone knows that leading academics are critical of George W. Bush."  Yes, it was replied, they are (after all, they're not dumb), but, of course, no one said they were all cheerleaders for their regimes; rather, their cowardice is manifest in "a fundamental unwillingness to pursue certain lines of critique, [in] pulling back from certain kinds of challenges to the status quo, [in] being keen to distinguish themselves from 'the lunatic left'....In particular, they tend to offer apologetics for 'inhumanity' and 'illegality':  for example, the criminal and immoral invasion of Iraq."

What do leading academics sound like when they are not being cowards?  Let us listen to this leading Canadian scholar:

This month marked the 60th anniversary of the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal, the basic legal document for the trial of the major Nazi war criminals that commenced in November, 1945, wrote Osgoode Hall Law School Professor Michael Mandel in an opinion piece published in the Ottawa Citizen Aug. 26 and disseminated by US-based Knight Ridder news service.

"One of the great innovations of that charter was the charge of ‘Crimes Against Peace,’ defined as the ‘planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances.’ The very minimum legal consequence of the treaties making aggressive war illegal is to strip those who incite or wage them of every defence the law ever gave, and to leave the warmakers subject to judgment by the usually accepted principles of the law of crimes."

"The crime of aggression is nowhere to be seen in modern international criminal codes and leading the charge against including it has been the United States itself. It's easy to see why," wrote the author of How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against Humanity.  "The war in Iraq, for one example, constitutes the quintessential war of aggression, falling very far short, rhetoric apart, of any justification in self-defence or authorization by the Security Council of the United Nations, the only two accepted legal grounds for war in international law."

"Nuremberg prosecutor Bernard Meltzer wrote soon after the Nazi trials that, 'a modern war, no matter how chivalrous, involves so much misery that to punish deviations from the conventions without punishing the instigators of an aggressive war seems like a mocking exercise in gentlemanly futility.' Perhaps it is worth pondering, in the midst of the immense suffering unleashed by the Iraq war, whether we are engaged in the same mocking exercise when we prosecute those far down the chain of command for violations of the Geneva Conventions and let the unleashers of illegal wars get away with murder," concluded Mandel.

Now here is a question for the children:  how many leading international law scholars in the United States have spoken so clearly on the subject?  I am aware of only one:  Richard Falk, now emeritus at Princeton.  From the rest, we have had shameful rationalizations, obfuscations, or silence.  Am I wrong? 

ID Peddler Dembski Replies to Machery on Evolution

Here.  In brief:  scientific illiteracy in the U.S. is a model for the world!

UPDATE:  Professor Machery writes:  "Thanks for your reply to Dembski’s comment. I note that this comment makes even more salient the similarities between ID and Lysenkism: politically-driven rubbish, zero evidence, rampant nationalism, etc."

Hitchens Hammered

Deservedly so.

More Thoughts on John Howard the Ostrich

A law professor from Australia sends the following generous and interesting comments:

I, like so many others, am an avid reader of your blog. A colleague down the hall here put me on to you last year, and I have since become a daily reader of your political and legal commentary (i've missed you in July!). It's a sharp, funny and refreshing take on so many issues that resonate here in Australia too. So, as an opening, many thanks for the blogging.

I've been prompted to write because of your latest post, singling out John Howard and one of his responses in a press conference the other day. I have mixed feelings about seeing a post about our PM. It is, on the one hand, good to read your riposte to the line on terrorism and Iraq that he trots out on a regular basis. On the other hand, you talking about John Howard seems to suggest that his words have a weight and a credibility that I wish they didn't have. This is not to say that you are giving him credibility, simply that his very appearance on your blog indicates that he has pierced international political consciousness a little, which is disturbing. After 10 years of his conservative government, one of the small things that gives me comfort is the thought that his vision of himself as a world statesman is delusion and that the rest of the world doesn't really give a toss about Australia or, by extension, our Prime Minister. The love-fest we witnessed recently between Howard and Bush, Blair and even Rupert Murdoch, was stomach-churning. And so to have him pop up on your blog, even if only to have you tear his argument apart, was, I guess, a bit confronting. If the rest of world starts to take Howard seriously, then there seems even less chance of the Australian population being convinced to vote him out of office. And that is depressing.

Sorry about the rant. I don't mean to suggest that you shouldn't talk about whoever you want to talk about. Take this simply as the reaction of a non-Howard voting Australian reader.

Your Handy Guide to Right-Wing Lawyers Who Hate Brian Leiter...or the Company that Eugene Volokh Keeps

(This is not likely to interest philosophers, since our profession is afflicted with very few of these kinds of right-wing cranks--with the emphasis on cranks.)

One of my readers had a clever idea that this kind of guide would be amusing for those who browse blogs, since these sorry folks turn up again and again whenever there is a chance to bash poor mild-mannered me.  (Oddly, Eugene Volokh [Law, UCLA] is keen on providing such opportunities...but more on his sleaziness momentarily.)  To their credit, these folks post their smears under their own names, though, in another sense, even with their names attached, they remain anonymous.  My wife refers to the nasty types who carry on like this in the comment sections of blogs as "the bottom feeders of the blogosphere," which certainly seems apt.  Here they are; I would welcome any insight readers have into these peculiar people who you would think, as lawyers, would have better things to do with their time.  And, loyal readers, if you meet them in a comments section somewhere, please post a link to this item!

(1)  Robert Schwartz is a lawyer in Florida.  He's probably one of these five fellows, with apologies to the four who are grown up enough not to spend their time sliming people in the comments sections of blogs.  "Our" Mr. Schwartz has become something of a broken record:  he shows up on almost any thread where my name appears to denounce me as a "blowhard and a bully" (translation:  I criticize the right-wing views and people he likes) and he usually makes up a few things in the process.  (To get an idea of the depth of his obsession, see his pointless intervention on this thread, followed by Paul Gowder's apt question for him:  "are you nuts?".)  He appears never to have recovered from being thrown off Crooked Timber by Henry Farrell for being so insufferable or from this posting of mine recording that and a related event.  For summer fun, one student has started a "Robert Schwartz Watch" to keep track of his blogospheric meanderings.

(2) Kneave Riggall is a tax lawyer in Southern California, who is also an adjunct at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.  He gets credit for the weirdest personal attack I've ever seen (Orin Kerr [Law, George Washington], being a nice guy, deleted it from the Volokh Conspiracy, but I saved a copy):

John Howard the Ostrich

Asked by a reporter last week about the (obvious!) connections between the terrorist attacks in London and British participation in the immoral and criminal war in Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair was fortunate to have the conservative Australian P.M. John Howard on hand to confuse the issues. Here is Howard's response, with my commentary interspersed:

Can I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government and indeed the policies of the British and American governments on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it's given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.

This certainly sounds suitably tough-minded and macho (and, of course, it is easy to be macho when you're surrounded by heavily armed security agents 24 hours per day), and coming from a stubborn adolescent, it would even be perfectly understandable.  But one might have hoped that those entrusted with the welfare of their citizenry would allow that foreign policy ought to be affected by its consequences, including its potential to provoke dangerous enemies.  Imagine if John Howard ran an asylum for the criminally insane, and took the view that no decisions about, for example, how the staff would treat their charges would take into account how their charges might respond.  This would seem a bit odd, would it not?  What if, during the Cold War, U.S. Presidents took the view that the U.S. would do what it wants anywhere in the world, regardless of how the U.S.S.R. might respond?  How is it any different, though, to disclaim even the relevance of all-too-real terrorist responses to foreign policy?

Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq.

Indeed, this is why no one was claiming that the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq was the cause of all terrorism in the world.  Moving right along...

And I remind you that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq.

Indeed, it did, but it also occurred after bin Laden's 1996 declaration of jihad against the U.S., in which the clearly stated objective was the removal of U.S. military forces from Saudi Arabia.  This objective was reiterated in his 1998 fatwa, which also implicated U.S. policy towards Iraq and in the region more generally.  Should the U.S. have withdrawn its forces from Saudi Arabia?  I am hard-pressed to imagine even President Bush telling the nation that it was worth the horrors of September 11 so that we could continue to prop up the fanatics and tyrants in Saudi Arabia.  But even putting that aside, the real points that John Howard the Ostrich obscures are twofold:  first, that no one has claimed that the Iraq War is the cause of all terrorism in the world; and second, it seems clear from repeated statements by the killers that they act with strategic objectives in mind, and so perhaps there ought to be a public and rational debate about how important our objectives (to which they object) are to us, given the very real risk of loss of life at the hands of zealous killers.

Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor. Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn't have done that?

Strawmen make for cheap rhetorical points, but they don't enhance public understanding or public safety.  Critics have focussed on the connection between the Iraq War and terrorist incidents in, for example, London and Madrid, precisely because the Iraq War was illegal and unjust, and thus should never have been undertaken in the first place.  That it also has as a (reasonably) predictable consequence the incitement of more mass murder by religious fanatics is, one might think, a further objection to the policy, at least among those who have not been apologists for war crimes.  Insofar as a policy--say, Australian aid to East Timor--is a legal and just one, then its continuation may be important even in the face of terrorist incidents.  But that, of course, is why no one, to my knowledge, has raised Bali in the wake of the London bombings--except, of course, the apologists for the illegal and immoral Iraq War.

Reason and Rhetoric, Again

When someone made the banal observation that changing views via rational persuasion rarely happens, there was much clucking of blogospheric tongues.  And then along comes this:

According to Lakoff, Democrats have been wrong to assume that people are rational actors who make their decisions based on facts; in reality, he says, cognitive science has proved that all of us are programmed to respond to the frames that have been embedded deep in our unconscious minds, and if the facts don't fit the frame, our brains simply reject them. Lakoff explained to me that the frames in our brains can be ''activated'' by the right combination of words and imagery, and only then, once the brain has been unlocked, can we process the facts being thrown at us.

I confess to being agnostic about Lakoff's claims about what "cognitive science has proved."

The Kid in the White House

An insightful analysis; I had wanted to post a lengthy excerpt, but was having odd formatting problems, so I shall have to simply invite readers to read the entire essay.  But it is worthwhile.

"Ignorance of blogospheric custom and history"

In the conservative pity fest for Mr. Non-Volokh back in late June, this right-wing blogger gets credit for lodging the weirdest charge (in the midst of a lengthy ramble which can only be described, per Steve Stich's apt phrase, as an exercise in "condescension from below"):  this blogger charges me with having displayed "ignorance of blogospheric custom and history." 

Ignorance of blogospheric custom and history? 

How old is someone who writes things like this, and apparently means it seriously?

I am also ignorant of the customs and history of CB radio, not to mention Dungeons & Dragons, Pokemon, fantasy baseball, and so on.  I plead guilty.

I have a blog because it's an easy way to communicate with thousands of philosophers and students of philosophy, legal academics and law students, and others who share my political concerns.  "Blogospheric customs and history" are for children or the deeply alienated who think blogs are anything other than an efficient way to circulate information to real people.

Has anyone else noticed that the blogosphere is full of folks who don't seem to have real lives?  (Actually, Garry Trudeau has.)  They don't appear to have real-world status, accomplishments, skills, knowledge, attachments.  Blogs and their relationships with others who have blogs appear to be their lives.  And if they're suitably reactionary, as this joker clearly is, then InstaIgnorance links to them and gives them a "life."

What weird times we are living in.

The Irrational Right-Wing Ranting Gets Louder

With all the terrible and all-too-real consequences of last week's attack in London—the lives lost, the bodies and spirits wounded and traumatized, the families and relationships torn asunder—it is depressing to realize that another consequence (avoidable in a civilized country) is also upon us:  the increased, irrational ranting of the right-wing war mongers, who can not let a day pass without making the world more dangerous and public discourse more irrational.  It is not just the anonymous bottom-feeders of the blogosphere (like those at this hugely popular right-wing blog site).  There, on the very day of the attacks, on Fox News (it was on in the gym…I complained--you should too!) was the delusional drunk Christopher Hitchens attacking those opposed to the Iraq War.  (Relevance?  Who knows?)  (And see this account of other gems from Fox TV reporters and anchors the same day.)  And true to form, the morally repulsive Andrew Sullivan emerged to denounce any rational response to the latest atrocities:

Of course, George Galloway had to offer the following statement:

The loss of innocent lives, whether in this country or Iraq, is precisely the result of a world that has become a less safe and peaceful place in recent years.  We have worked without rest to remove the causes of such violence from our world. We argued, as did the Security Services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the government ignoring such warnings.  We urge the government to remove people in this country from harms way, as the Spanish government acted to remove its people from harm, by ending the occupation of Iraq and by turning its full attention to the development of a real solution to the wider conflicts in the Middle East.  Only then will the innocents here and abroad be able to enjoy a life free of the threat of needless violence.

The opposite, of course, is true. If we give in to these forces of murder in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, their determination to attack us will only grow. While Brits may well have strong disagreements about the war and the conduct of the war, as Americans do, I do not believe that they are in any doubt as to who is responsible for these barbaric acts; and will not flinch from fighting the real enemy. That enemy is not our own flawed, fallible but elected governments. It is the people who would remove our ability to elect anyone.

It is not, however, “appeasement” to do what is, in any case, the right thing—namely, end and make amends for a criminal and immoral war—when doing so may also have the benefit of reducing the likelihood of similar atrocities being committed against one’s civilian population.  (Contrary to Mr. Sullivan, one might note that Spain has not been attacked since March 11, 2004, after having withdrawn from Iraq.)  After all, as those notorious al-Qaeda sympathizers, the analysts at the United States Pentagon, noted quite some time ago, animosity in the Islamic world appears to be related to actual policies and actions of Western states.  It's true that religious zealotry plays a special role in most of these incidents (the dirty little secret that can't be openly discussed, for obvious reasons, in the U.S.), but that does not rule out concrete objectives and instrumental rationality on the part of the perpetrators. 

Even some on the far right have noticed the inane stupidity of the rhetoric of Bush & co. regarding terrorism:

Pharyngula Chews Up Another Volokh Conspirator and Spits Him Out

Deservedly so, I'm afraid.  Perhaps when Michael Weisberg and I finish our piece on evolutionary biology and law, we can put a stop to this kind of nonsense.

UPDATE (MOVING TO THE FRONT AS WELL):  Although Professor Myers appears to have had the misfortune to attract some lovely bottom-feeders from the Volokh site, the basic problem with Professor Zywicki's post remains quite simple.  It is not reasonable, given what we know, to express doubts about Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, nor is it reasonable, given what we know, to think Intelligent Design creationism deserves equal time with Darwin's theory in secondary school science classes.  That some conservative pundits expressed both unreasonable views is to their lasting embarrassment. 

By contrast--and this is why Professor Zywicki's original posting is so inapt--it is extremely reasonable, given what we know, to express doubts about evolutionary psychology and its selectionist hypotheses about differences between the sexes, since none of these hypotheses (as in none) have been confirmed by standards that approach those in biology.  The fundamental difficulty is that there exist important non-selectionist evolutionary mechanisms (for example, genetic hitch-hiking or genetic drift), so that one can not, as evolutionary psychologists do, treat the selectionist explanation as the default one.  This is just bad science.  This point is also the stuff of baby biology textbooks; herewith Stearns & Hoekstra (OUP, 2000), p. 8::  “much of the variation in DNA sequences [over time] is neutral with respect to selection.”  The challenge for evolutionary biologists studying, e.g., sex differences, is to figure out what role selection, if any, is really playing.  Evolutionary psychology is silent on this problem.  (There is a separate problem, of course, pertaining to the role of non-biological factors in observed sex differences.)

Consider some actual evolutionary biologists who do research on the evolution of mating preferences [Kirkpatrick, Mark and Michael J. Ryan (1991).  “The Evolution of Mating Preferences and the Paradox of the Lek,” 350 Nature 33-38 (March].  Kirkpatric & Ryan identify 14 possible evolutionary mechanisms that account for these preferences, only 7 of which involve selectionist mechanisms, and only two of which even figure (by analogy) in the evolutionary pscyhology literature (namely,  “males provide resources to females or offspring” and “costs of searching for mates”).  As Kirkpatrick & Ryan observe:  “the primary factors responsible for the evolution of [mating] preferences remain controversial” (1991:  33).  And they are talking about the evolution of mating preferences in lizards, frogs, guppies, insects, and birds, not humans! 

The danger of assuming selectionist explanations is well-illustrated by the preference of some female animals for males “with the most extreme plumage, vocalizations, and displays,” preferences that are so strong in some cases that the male “secondary sexual characters have evolved to such extremes that they decrease male survival” (1991:  33).  The crude adaptationist, like an evolutionary psychologist, might postulate that females prefer such traits in males because they signal that the male in question will be able to provide resources for offspring and to protect offspring, and will likely be highly fertile, and so on (David Buss's 1994 book on human female mating preferences is typical). 

It turns out, however, that in many animals, natural selection has nothing to do with it:  “Because females use their sensory systems for other tasks besides mate choice, these systems will often be subject to natural selection for other reasons, such as foraging ability or predator detection, with the side-effect that preferences for traits that decrease male survival are likely to be established” (Kirkpatrick & Ryan 1991:  36) (i.e., it is due to pleiotropic hitch-hiking):  “One example comes from studies of insectivorous anolid lizards.  Their visual system is exquisitely adapted to detect the motion of prey.  The male ‘pushup’ courtship display seems to have evolved to match these sensory biases in order to attract the attention of females.”  (Id.) This means the scientific question is to distinguish the cases involving natural selection and those involving other evolutionary mechanisms.  Evolutionary psychology fails to come to terms with this central issue, and so it is quite reasonable to doubt its hypotheses; indeed, it is probably unreasonable not to doubt them.

This doesn't mean evolutionary psychology will not progress from speculation to science, as it were.  It's clearly an important research program, but the quality of its results at present are not up to those of evolutionary biology.  Therefore, it is simply preposterous for Professor Zywicki to equate them.

I have addressed the wholly appropriate reaction to the remarks of Larry Summers previously.  Since, as we have noted, rational agument has little effect, I note that some on the right still want to pretend there was a weighty academic freedom issue in that case.

On Rhetoric, "Persuasion," and Tone...or Knowing the Difference Between Hard and Easy Questions

[Note:  I started drafting this almost a year ago, in response to reader queries, but only returned to it recently.  At last, before my summer hiatus begins, here it is.]

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It has, on occasion, been noted that gentleness is not the hallmark of my postings on this blog, at least on matters of a political nature. The fans call it the "no bullshit" approach, pungent, acerbic. This law student calls me, aptly enough, "the man who blogs with a hammer," while Jeremy Stangroom at Butterflies & Wheels says I am "everyone's favorite Rottweiler." (I'm not sure about everyone's.) Dispassionate discursiveness is not the medium in which I generally operate here, a fact for which some of my philosopher friends occasionally take me to task.

Yet philosophers, of all people, should know from experience how hard it is to change anyone's fundamental commitments and beliefs through rational discursiveness--and that's true when we're talking philosophy, not politics! (Does this align me with Dreben's view of philosophy?  Perhaps in some measure, though it is really Nietzsche's idea.)  When it comes to politics, things get far worse: reasons and evidence appear to play almost no role in changing anyone's views.

Take the case of Arnold Kling, the economist whose transparently irrational argument became the rage of the blogosphere last summer:  that it was irrational did nothing to impede its impact.  Or look at how Tom Smith (Law, San Diego), someone who is otherwise a serious legal scholar, responds to Jeff McMahan's careful analysis and dissection of the moral case for the war in Iraq. This is a case study in "why bother?" with dispassionate argument, if your goal is to persuade. (There are other reasons to undertake dispassionate argument, to be sure: for example, the author may want to figure out what he or she thinks. And, of course, there are occasionally folks whose views can be shifted by such efforts, though I've yet to find a single instance in the blogosphere.)

I am sometimes presented with the following criticism: "Your rhetorical style won't persuade anyone who doesn't already agree with you." That is no doubt true, but, as we've just remarked, it is quite rare to persuade anyone by a careful, reasoned argument--indeed, so rare, that I don't see it as worth the effort to try to do so on a blog. Even quite intelligent individuals, people with PhDs from MIT no less, turn out to be completely unable to follow a rational argument!

But the criticism also presupposes that I want to persuade. I shall let the readers in on a secret (though I suspect it is obvious to my regular readers): I am not interested in persuading anyone.  Bear in mind that we know relatively little about how persuasion in general works.  It may well be that the specter of an educated person giving the back of his hand to the mass-media-sanctioned wisdom of the moment is, in fact, much more persuasive than dry, disapassionate argument. Who knows for sure? In any case, my goal in posting on various political topics is simply to alert like-minded readers to ideas and evidence and arguments which help strengthen their convictions regarding the truths they've already understood or glimpsed, as well as to give some expression to our collective outrage and dismay.  I really wish that the unlike-minded folks would simply "go away" and read something else.  (Nietzsche puts it better, of course.)