Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

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