Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Steamhammer, "When All Your Friends are Gone," 1969

Part of the British blues explosion (and one of our "top five" finds in 2021), here they are live on the German show Beat Club performing a great number from their debut album:

 

Peter Singer comes out as a moral realist and hedonist...

...in this podcast.  The Swedish moral philosopher Torbjörn Tännsjö (also in the podcast) writes:  

Peter Singer and I have had similar views on many topics, but while he has been a prescriptivist I have for decades been a moral realist, and while he has been a preferantialist, I have also for decades been a hedonist. He now agrees with me on both these accounts. The latter should be of importance for his view on disability. We discuss this at the end of this podcast.

Now Professor Singer has two more mistaken views!

(Just to be clear, Singer has embraced these views in print previously, but now it's official, since it's a podcast!)

Battle of the economists: Judd v. Heckman

Aggrieved authors (Judd) are not the most reliable sources, but Heckman and others gave permission to share the correspondence about the disputed article.  Judd doesn't seem to realize that he does not come off well in this exchange.  Very weird!

Driverless trucks are coming

That will mean the loss of about three million well-paying human jobs that do not require a college degree.

CDC guidelines give the unvaccinated substantial priority for antiviral treatments for Covid

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--INFORMATIVE DISCUSSION IN THE COMMENTS!

This seems surprising; an excerpt:

Current therapies such as Sotrovimab, a monoclonal antibody with activity against omicron, and the oral agents, Paxlovid, and Molnupiravir, exist in very short supply. Already the demand has far outstripped our capacities raising the specter of rationing and a host of medical, social and ethical issues. 

The use and administration of these therapies — funded by the federal government without cost to the end user — are governed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state prioritizations. Although immunosuppressed patients are appropriately atop the list, most unvaccinated patients will be granted the next highest level of priority.  

For example, a 35-year-old unvaccinated former smoker with asthma gains priority over a 66-year-old vaccinated cancer patient. Similarly, an unvaccinated 25-year-old smoker with depression takes precedence over a 64-year-old vaccinated patient with chronic pulmonary disease. Indeed, the highest priority on the CDC list does not include a single profile of vaccinated patients other than the immunosuppressed, regardless of other comorbidities. Based on current supplies, unvaccinated patients will receive most of these lifesaving medications.  

Beyond its inherent unfairness, the decision to prioritize unvaccinated patients for scarce therapies is based on assumptions regarding risk factors, and the data regarding which risk factors contribute to a poor prognosis is weak at best. It is this very paucity of evidence that explains the lack of clear prioritizations in the initial vaccine rollout. 

I'm curious what readers, and especially those working in and around bioethics, think about this.

Most cited Anglophone books on Hegel and on Nietzsche...

...according to Google Scholar.

Total citations--Hegel books in English

Rank	Author	Book	Year published	Citations
1	Charles Taylor (McGill, emeritus)	Hegel and Modern Society	1979	1480
2	Robert Pippin (Chicago)	Hegel’s Idealism	1989	1260
3	Terry Pinkard (Georgetown)	Hegel’s Phenomenology:  The Sociality of Reason	1994	1120
4	Allen Wood (Indiana)	Hegel’s Ethics	1990	1110
5	Robert Pippin (Chicago)	Hegel’s Practical Philosophy	2008	760

Citations by year

Rank	Author	Book	Year published	Citations per year since publication
1	Robert Pippin (Chicago)	Hegel’s Practical Philosophy	2008	59
2	Frederick Neuhouser (Barnard/Columbia)	Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory	2009	53
3	Terry Pinkard (Georgetown)	Hegel’s Phenomenology:  The Sociality of Reason	1994	42
4	Robert Pippin (Chicago)	Hegel’s Idealism	1989	39
5	Allen Wood (Indiana)	Hegel’s Ethical Thought	1990	36

Blast from the past: most important philosophers of language since WWII

Back in 2016, with a discussion of the results.

America is doomed, an ongoing saga

During 2021, American voter party identification shifted from the Democrats to Republicans. 

"Civic engagement" projects in philosophy classes

Philosopher Mylan Engel, Jr. (Northern Illinois) discusses his pedagogical approach.

"Science can't state all the facts"

Philosopher Tim Crane (CEU) discusses at IAITV.

Richard Marshall interviews Nancy Sherman (Georgetown)...

...at 3:16 AM.

A newly discovered 1964 speech by Dr. King about the civil rights struggle in the U.S. and apartheid in South Africa

At Democracy Now.

AFA letter to Penn regarding Amy Wax

Here.

UPDATE:  The Penn Law Dean has announced today that he will initiate a process that could result in sanction of Professor Wax (what that sanction might be is unclear).

Lawyer for University of Florida in First Amendment case has a bad day in court

A propos this, this latest development is rather amusing:

H. Christopher Bartolomucci, a partner at a Washington D.C.-based firm representing the UF defendants, threw a curveball. Bartolomucci, of Schaerr Jaffe LLP, told the court that “just two days ago” facts came to their attention that “should fundamentally change” how the court views this case....

“We now know,” he said, that Smith, Austin, and McDonald [the UF political science professors whose request to be expert witnesses against the state in voting rights litigation] were actively working as experts before they submitted their requests, and that they continued to work as experts after the university denied their requests. Bartolomucci proceeded to recite a number of dates on which the scholars had contributed to work on the litigation.

Yet these facts are “nowhere to be found” in the plaintiffs’ complaint or in their submitted declarations, Bartolomucci said. They have “misled” their employer, the defense counsel, and this court, he said. And their “misconduct,” he said, affects the case in several ways. For one, the plaintiffs have “unclean hands,” he said. Also, “there’s no chilling effect,” as the plaintiffs have argued, because “the policy didn’t chill them.”...

Walker, the judge, was clearly taken aback by Bartolomucci’s abrupt turn. The judge said he was “perplexed” that Bartolomucci would suggest these were newly discoverable facts when the defense had not formally asked for discovery, and the information, as far as the judge could tell, was all part of the public record. “I gotta say, I’m flummoxed.” He pressed Bartolomucci on how this was possible....

"Virtual reality" and reality

Philosopher David Chalmers (NYU) thinks the distinction will go away.  I'm skeptical...

Skrymsian Signalling Simulations

Now you can run them yourself.

Ahmed, Bertram, Bird

Philosopher Arif Ahmed (Cambridge) complains in Unherd about ideological indoctrination at the universities.  Philosopher Chris Bertram (emeritus, Bristol), who keeps track of scholars who write for publications with "incorrect" views, tweets:

Alexander Bird, a Cambridge philosopher, replies:

Blast from the past: "My five favorite Americans of the 20th-century"

Back in 2018.  Many readers voted for MLK, unsurprisingly.

"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies."

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Riverside Church in Manhattan, April 4, 1967:

Unfortunately, there has been no "revolution in values," except perhaps a counter-revolution.  As a 19th-century German thinker might observe, there can be no revolution in values without a revolution in material circumstances.

The classics "boom" in China

That's the good news--the bad news is that there's also strong interest in Leo Strauss. 

(Thanks to Chris Morris for the pointer.)

An interview with the psychologist Richard Nisbett

Nisbett's work has been important for many philosophers. He talks about his recent memoir at The Brains Blog.

 

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Epitaph, "Changing World," 1971

German progressive rock band, this is the concluding track on their debut album:

 

Smarmy Jonathan Ichikawa still dissembling

Somehow Ichikawa (part of the miscreant team from Vancouver) thinks that the unfortunate disagreement (and, in part, misunderstanding) between the PGR editors, Professors Brogaard and Pynes, and Wiley-Blackwell, shows that I'm not honest (!).  (A reader sent me his tweet [we are mutually blocked on Twitter] stating, "Brian Leiter is not an honest person, and the PGR is intellectually bankrupt.")  Since I literally have nothing do with any of this (I appointed Brogaard as a co-editor in 2014, and then Pynes as another co-editor for 2017, at which point they were in charge, and I have only offered them advice about the PGR when asked, and that's it), this really is a stretch even by Ichihkawa's standards of dishonesty, which are, to be sure, peerless.  (Recall that when Ichikawa and Carrie Jenkins were challenged over their defamation of me, their own lawyer would not defend their statements as true [see #5], arguing only that they were "lawful.")

There are two other ironies here, beyond the "pot calling the kettle black."

Do Graeber and Wengrow know what they're talking about in "The Dawn of Everything"

MOVING TO FRONT, ORIGINALLY POSTED JANUARY 6--CONTINUING, INTERESTING DISCUSSION!

When it comes to Rousseau and French Enlightenment, not at all.  Their mistakes conform to Graeber's ideological agenda, however, which has to raise a red flag about the rest of their story.   I'm curious whether readers have seen scholarly assessments of the archaeological claims in the book?

Lottocracy...

...at Vox.  An excerpt:

Representatives selected by lot don’t have to campaign and don’t need campaign funds, goes the argument, limiting opportunities for corruption. As [Alex] Guerrero [Rutgers] puts it, “Lotteries excel at preventing corruption or undue influence in the selection of representatives.”

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

U.S. Free Speech Union calls out proposed Oklahoma legislation that would turn every parent into a state-appointed censor of school libraries

Really wild, even by the standards of the ass-backwards parts of America.

Galen Strawson on moral responsibility, free will, and other illusions...

...at IAITV.

Difficulty accessing the blog via Google Chrome?

I got several reports from earlier today from readers in different parts of the globe about being unable to access the blog using Google Chrome, but being able to access it with other browers.  A reader on Twitter now tells me he is able to access it via Google Chrome, so the problem may be over.   You can comment here if Google Chrome still does not work for you (it's 11:10 am in Chicago), but other browers do.  Thank you.  (You can also email me at bleiter-at-uchicago-dot-edu.)

Seven philosophers win NEH Fellowships (or equivalent) for "advanced research in humanities" (CORRECTED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--CORRECTED

They are:   Sara Bernstein (Notre Dame), Teresa Kouri Kissel (Old Dominion), Lisa Miracchi (Penn), James Reid (Metropolitan State U), Joseph Stenberg (San Jose State), Thomas Ward (Baylor), and Rachel Zuckert (Northwestern). 

(Note:  this year, for the first time I've seen, there are two categories of awards for 'advanced research in the humanities" (usually meaning writing a book):  the traditional Fellowships (that I've always noted) and "Awards for Faculty" which are essentially Fellowships, but reserved for faculty who teach at historically Black colleges, or primarily Hispanic-serving or Tribal-serving colleges.)

(Thanks to Bob Pasnau and Abe Roth for corrections.)

 

A note on Carolyn Dicey Jennings and her compilation of placement data

Professor Jennings (UC Merced) gets credit for being the only person to not simply grouse about the PGR rankings (although she does plenty of that), but to actually try to offer an alternative resource--kudos to her for that.   The job placement data she and her team collect are useful, but she chooses to present some of it in a tendentious and misleading way, as I (and others) have noted before:  she treats placement success as landing a tenure-track job your first year out on the market, thus failing to distinguish between getting a postoc (even a fabulous postdoc) and getting nothing.  As many have also noted ad nauseam, by now, job placement data is a backward-looking measure:  Southern California didn't have very good job placement when the PGR first recorded the department's rise, now it does (which is why PGR rank correlates pretty well with tenure-track placement a few years later). I would urge students to examine the raw data on placement, not the tendentious rating of placement success.  (Of course, the reason all departments post placement data is because I "cajoled" them into doing so twenty years ago.)

The "student reputation" data Jennings et al. collect, by contrast, is far more dubious. 

Students should be aware that Professor Jennings has a history of producing extremely misleading placement rankings; of trying to use data to attack her enemies; and of not having a good command of statistics (here and here).   The recent work, fortunately, looks better, subject to the reservations noted above.

Emory Law Journal's rejection of an invited symposium piece as "hurtful" and "divisive"

There's more at my law school blog.  Note that the Emory Law Journal is edited by students, not faculty; as often happens with student-edited law reviews, they have no idea what they are doing.

America is doomed, part 415: even the Canadians think so!

A sobering (but not surprising) read; an excerpt:

By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship....

I’m a scholar of violent conflict. For more than 40 years, I’ve studied and published on the causes of war, social breakdown, revolution, ethnic violence and genocide, and for nearly two decades I led a centre on peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto.

Today, as I watch the unfolding crisis in the United States, I see a political and social landscape flashing with warning signals.

 

Blast from the past: when English professor Jennifer Doyle (UC Riverside) actually came to the defense of Judith Butler's defense of Avital Ronell

Back in 2018.  I still puzzle about how people like this made it into universities, since it's all so crazy.

"What is happiness?"

Interesting CHE interview about a course taught by philosopher Bernard Reginster (Brown) and one of his colleagues in psychology.  As Professor Reginster aptly says:

On the one hand, the empirical investigation of a topic like happiness is only going to be as good as the initial conceptualization that frames the hypothesis guiding the inquiry. If you ask the wrong questions, the answers you get are not going to be very helpful. On the other hand, if the hypothesis your initial conceptualization supplied isn’t confirmed by empirical inquiries, then your initial conceptualization probably missed something.

Blast from the past: The "slave revolt" in philosophy, redux

Back in 2016 (with a new PGR, it is timely again).

Richard Marshall interviews Karl Marx (independent scholar and journalist)...

...at 3:16 AM.

University of Florida's motion to dismiss First Amendment lawsuit by professors denied permission to be expert witnesses...

...is denied by the federal court, as well it should be:  Download UF Motion To Dismiss DENIED (003)

Update on the 2021 PGR from Professor Pynes

Professor Christopher Pynes asked me to share the following, which I am happy to do:

I would like to thank Dr. Berit Brogaard for her essential work with the PGR in 2014 and 2017.

The Brogaard/Jennings joint statement omits the fact that this past summer and fall Dr. Brogaard informed me she would be unavailable during two major and extended periods. These two periods included the bulk of the PGR work: first, compiling and revising faculty lists, updating evaluator emails and category list, and the second period in which we ran the survey and generated the report. This put almost the entire burden of producing the 2021-2022 Report on me (with the assistance of the Advisory Board).

On September 27^th Professor Brogaard informed me of her APDA advisory board membership, which she equated with our PGR co-editorship.  The contract Brit and I signed with Wiley-Blackwell has always included a non-competition clause, and based on the contract language and Brit’s characterization of her work with the APDA, I believed this work violated that contract.  As such, I asked Wiley-Blackwell to review our contract and advise us on how to proceed. Wiley-Blackwell determined Professor Brogaard’s work on the APDA did violate the non-competition clause in our contract. My only concern was ensuring the integrity of the PGR and our work on it.

"Agency and Responsibility Research Group": Spring schedule of online events...

...is now available.

Four tenured faculty fired by College of Saint Rose prevail in a lawsuit to get their jobs back

A welcome bit of news, given the frequency now with which schools use financial reasons to fired tenured faculty (short of financial exigency).

"Migration Ethics": a new podcast...

....here, from political theorist Kieran Oberman (Edinburgh).

It's amusing when the critics of the philosophy rankings inadvertently reveal the need for them

A reader flagged for me the following gem from cyberspace by one David Hyder, who opined as follows:

While I will only comment here on one of my own subfields, Kant, quite a bit can be said.

1. Of the top-ranked programs, only one, Brown, actually has a leading Kant-scholar (Guyer) worth studying with. But he is close to retirement.
2. The other leading Kant scholar in US/UK has now returned to Paris.
3. Princeton has no Kant coverage. None. Princeton has been in the news recently only for linking Kant to critical race theory.
4. This is traceable to the evaluators. Most are associated with the “top ranked”programs themselves.

Princeton, in fact, has not one, but two, of the leading Kant scholars of their generation:  Andrew Chignell and Desmond Hogan.  (One could ask Paul Guyer, even.)   Among the other top-ranked programs for Kant studies that Professor Hyder deems unworthy are Stanford University (take that Lanier Anderson and Michael Friedman!), University of California at San Diego (what do you know, Clinton Tolley and Eric Watkins?), and the University of Pittsburgh (so much for Stephen Engstrom and Nandi Theunissen).    Professor Guyer, by the way, is 73; I'm sure if he is about to retire he will so inform prospective students. 

"The Epistemology of the Internet and the Regulation of Speech in America"

The final version of the paper (which will appear in a symposium issue of the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy) is now on SSRN.   I've been gratified by the interest this paper has already attracted, and how useful many legal scholars, especially, have found the notion of epistemic authority.  Here is the abstract:

The Internet is the epistemological crisis of the 21st-century: it has fundamentally altered the social epistemology of societies with relative freedom to access it. Most of what we think we know about the world is due to reliance on epistemic authorities, individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe about Newtonian mechanics, evolution by natural selection, climate change, resurrection from the dead, or the Holocaust. The most practically fruitful epistemic norm of modernity, empiricism, demands that knowledge be grounded in sensory experience, but almost no one who believes in evolution by natural selection or the reality of the Holocaust has any sensory evidence in support of those beliefs. Instead, we rely on epistemic authorities—biologists and historians, for example. Epistemic authority cannot be sustained by empiricist criteria, for obvious reasons: salient anecdotal evidence, the favorite tool of propagandists, appeals to ordinary faith in the senses, but is easily exploited given that most people understand neither the perils of induction nor the finer points of sampling and Bayesian inference. Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe about what. The traditional media were crucial, in the age of mass democracy, with promulgating and sustaining such norms. The Internet has obliterated the intermediaries who made that possible (and, in the process, undermined the epistemic standing of experts), while even the traditional media in the U.S., thanks to the demise of the “Fairness Doctrine,” has contributed to the same phenomenon. I argue that this crisis cries out for changes in the regulation of speech in cyberspace—including liability for certain kinds of false speech, incitement, and hate speech--but also a restoration of a version of the Fairness Doctrine for the traditional media.

In Memoriam: Kwasi Wiredu (1931-2022)

One of the leading figures of African philosophy, Professor Wiredu taught at the University of Ghana for more than two decades, before moving to the University of South Florida in the late 1980s, where he was emeritus.  The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an informative entry about his work.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

"Stop caring about consciousness"

Philosopher Peter Carruthers (Maryland) argues we should.

A new website for discussing philosophy pre-prints...

...courtesy of philosophers Filippo Contesi and Giulio Pietroiusti (both Barcelona); they write:

In some academic disciplines, publication and discussion of articles
before journal submission is generally much more widespread than in philosophy. Indeed, most journal publishing houses are publicly
committed to considering pre-archived papers for publication. You can double-check this for your journal of choice here:

https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

Philosophers already can make their pre-prints publicly available at
any point on at least one pre-print repository: PhilArchive.org.
However, currently existing web platforms for public discussion of
scientific pre-prints (e.g. PubPeer.org) cannot be used to discuss PhilArchive-d papers.

So, we have created a website that allows anyone to comment freely on
papers present on PhilArchive and/or PhilPapers:

https://freelosophy.github.io/

On Freelosophy, scholars can add comments to a paper (and read them) by using its PhilPapers/Archive ID, an identifier present on the page
of each paper on PhilArchive. Each paper on PhilPapers also has its
own PhilPaper/Archive ID (in the URL).

Everyone interested is most welcome to start using our service, which
is currently in public beta. Please do not hesitate to contact us at
philfreedback@gmail.com for any comments or feedback.

Professor Contesi tells me they will moderate the discussion forum to make sure it does not degenerate into a metablog!

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Blonde on Blonde, "All Day All Night," 1968

Another great tune from the Welsh band we featured last fall; very 1968, complete with sitar!

 

In Memoriam: Hugh S. Chandler (1930-2022)

Professor Chandler, who wrote on a wide range of philosophical issues (including in ethics, philosophy of religion, and metaphysics) taught for decades at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  The Illinois memorial notice is here.

(Thanks to Jeff McMahan for the pointer.)

Orwell on reviewing books

This is funny and apt:

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be “This book is worthless”, while the truth about the reviewer’s own reaction would probably be “This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to.”

Advertising update

The next top spot available is in April (there may be one also in March), but there is one second and/or third spot open over the next couple of months.   Because I won't be doing much blogging in May this year (busy teaching quarter in Spring), I won't be selling advertising exclusively for that month, but will offer, on a first-come, first-serve basis, those who book for April or June the opportunity to run their ad through May as well.  E-mail me for details.