Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Philosopher Cheyney Ryan (Oxford) to receive honorary doctorate from Quinnipiac University...

...in recognition of his "impact as a leading scholar on the frontier of peace and conflict studies and numerous awards for human rights activism." 

AFA statement on the San Diego case and one other

Good work by the AFA!

List of colleges now requiring students and/or employees to be vaccinated

At CHE.

Blast from the past: Does Wall Street produce anything of value?

Back in 2010.  Still relevant, unsurprisingly.

Major Linfield U donor resigns from Board of Trustees over unlawful firing of English professor

The latest developments at Lindfield University in the wake of the massive breach of academic freedom and tenure rights by the university.

Academic freedom prevails at University of San Diego

Details.

Co-editor of Schlick's collected works now flirting with crypo-fascism...

...which would have been appalling to Schlick.   Philosopher Martin Kusch (Vienna) kindly gave permission to share this statement:

JOINT STATEMENT REGARDING HANS JÜRGEN WENDEL'S PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR THE GERMAN FAR-RIGHT "ALTERNATIVE FOR GERMANY" (AfD) PARTY

As has been widely reported in the German media, the current co-editor of the Moritz Schlick Gesamtausgabe, prof. em. Hans Jürgen Wendel, has joined the German far-right AfD party, and given interviews in support of the AfD. This action completely contradicts the life and work of Moritz Schlick and the philosophy of the Vienna Circle generally. The Institute Vienna Circle and the Vienna Circle Society are committed, in their objectives and principles, to the values of the historical Vienna Circle. Together with the Moritz Schlick Forschungsstelle at the University of Rostock and the Springer Verlag Wiesbaden, we are aiming to reorganize the editing of Schlick's works.

Prof. Martin Kusch, Institute Vienna Circle

Prof. em. Friedrich Stadler, Vienna Circle Society, Co-editor of the Schlick Gesamtausgabe

 

Blast from the past: How to prepare for job interviews at schools with a primary emphasis on teaching?

Back in 2008.

A 1961 lecture by A.J. Ayer on "the concept of a person"

(Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)

How effective are the COVID vaccines?

Really effective.  (There's more at biologist Jerry Coyne's blog, where I first saw this.)

Survey about online teaching (UPDATED WITH RESULTS)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM APRIL 27--UPDATED WITH RESULTS

Philosopher Thomas Nadelhoffer (Charleston) writes:

Like many departments around the country, mine is discussing which policies (if any) we should adopt concerning online teaching moving forward. Since there is a dearth of evidence on teaching philosophy online, I thought it made sense to collect some preliminary data about the experiences of as many philosophers as possible! The survey just takes a few minutes, so I hope people are willing to take it. As I explain, I will make the findings publicly available once I am done collecting them. Perhaps others will find the survey results useful for the purposes of discussions at their home institutions.

Here is the link: 

https://cofc.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eE86YleCg0gV2Iu

UPDATE:  There were shy of 400 responses to the survey.  Various charts representing the results are here:   Download Nadelhoffer Online Philosophy Survey results.   And the raw data is here:  Download Nadelhoffer Online Philosophy Survey raw data

I've invited Professor Nadelhoffer to say more about the results when he has a chance.  I'll open comments here as well.

When "experts" disagree

Philosopher Anandi Hattiangadi (Stockholm) comments.

Changes in the Zeitgeist

Not sure if "everyone" knew these, but philosopher Dan Kaufman (Missouri State) is definitely on to something interesting about the evolution (or devolution) of cultural norms (in part due to the Internet).  As I'm also a New Yorker, I can confirm that a lot of these would have been widely shared norms and expectations of the 1970s and 80s (some do seem to me to capture more the kind of ideological compromises stressed middle class existence requires).  Some norms do change, for the better, but certainly not all.  Here's a few notable ones that particularly resonated with me:

[4] Confronting strangers with a raftload of stipulations as to how they must engage with you assumes that they care to engage with you in the first place, which may be untrue. And if they do, they probably will cease wanting to, unless you bring something so extraordinary to the table that it justifies all the trouble....

[15] Offense, insult, and hurt feelings are not particularly important, other than to oneself and to one’s intimates. This does not mean that you should go out of your way to offend others but rather that if you are offended, you shouldn’t be surprised if those outside your friends-and-family circle aren’t inclined to make a federal case out of it.

[16] You don’t accost random strangers on the street and unload your personal meshugas on them, because it’s not their business and they don’t give a damn. Nothing about these reasons fails to apply when you replace ‘street’ with ‘internet’.

[17] Scores of millions of people, most of whom neither know nor live near one another cannot constitute a “community"....

[22] The most virtuous people are the quietest about it. The least are the loudest.

[23] Terrible people have produced and continue to produce great works of art and popular culture, the value of which persists, regardless of the character or conduct of their creators.

Yale report on the "economic status" of the faculty in arts & sciences in 2017-18

This is an interesting document, for those curious about the economics of elite higher education.  It is mostly concerned with how Yale salaries and benefits compare with its competitors (including Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Columbia, and Michigan, among others).  Basic salaries are about in the middle of the pack for Yale's private competitors, although I strongly suspect the comparison with some of these schools is misleading, since places like Stanford, Chicago, and Columbia are also including law and business school faculty in the mix, not just "arts & sciences" faculty as I take it the Yale report is.  (A giveaway is that at the "Associate" rank, median Chicago salaries trail Yale's, even though Chicago comes out ahead at the rank of "Professor" and "Assistant Professor."  But there is no "Associate" rank in the Law School, and very few "Associate Professors" in the Business School, so I strongly suspect the higher salaries in law and business are driving up the medians.  This also makes Princeton's median salaries especially notable, since they have neither a law school nor a business school.  Given how breathtakingly wealthy Princeton is, this isn't surprising.)

COVID indoor safety guidelines

This is interesting (it allows you to calculate risk and "best practices" for different scenarios).

(Thanks to Jeff Roland for the pointer.)

Ted Cruz announces he "may" no longer accept bribes from "woke" CEOs...

...in return for cutting their taxes.  A man of principle at last in the Senate!

Cancel culture watch, Human Rights Watch edition

A lawyer, discussing legal regulation of hate speech, did nothing wrong by mentioning the N-word, not using it.  Yet she's still been fired by a group that is supposed to protect human rights, which presumably includes rights of expression.  She didn't engage in hate speech, she was talking about hate speech.  In the current insane environment, even I'm not going to mention the actual N-word (I would of course never use it).

ADDENDUM:   A statement from the fired lawyer's attorney (sadly, having lost her job, she's now apologizing, despite having done nothing wrong):

Ms. PoKempner has dedicated her entire career to the protection of human rights. She used the n-word while teaching a class, solely for pedagogical purposes. She was providing a verbatim retelling of an incident involving the deposition of a KKK witness—by the Southern Poverty Law Center—that she had witnessed as a young legal intern. In that story, a lawyer used the word in questioning a KKK witness, to provoke a like response from the witness and get it on the record, which was important to winning the case. Her pedagogical purpose was to inspire a discussion of whether it is ever appropriate to use such language for the purpose of eliciting hate speech, even for the goal of exposing and combating racism. Following the telling, she told the students that when she heard this over 30 years ago that it shocked her. Unfortunately, she did not consider the shock her students would feel and how this stifled the very discussion she sought to generate. She deeply regrets the impact of her words on students and apologized to them repeatedly in class for her insensitivity, and continues to regret her language.”

Great moments in live rock 'n' roll: Allman Brothers, "One Way Out," 1971

We'll take a break for a couple of months from our usual "obscure" fare in favor of some great live performances, mostly of non-obscure songs, but hopefully some readers haven't seen some of these clips.  We'll start with a gem from the Allman Brothers, from their famous show at the Filmore East in 1971, not long before Duane Allman (on slide guitar) died in a motorcyle accident.  And that's Dickey Betts, of course, on lead guitar.

 

American College Health Association recommends all colleges mandate vaccination for COVID before fall enrollment

This is obviously sensible, and will give ammunition to schools in benighted states who will no doubt face opposition from local politicians of a certain flavor.  Colleges already mandate vaccinations for many illnesses, the only thing new here is the disease.

(Thanks to Jeff Roland for the pointer.)

On the etymology of the "N-word"

This is fascinating and informative.

Philosopher Manon Garcia (Yale) discusses her new book on...

..."why women’s submission in a patriarchal system is understandable, rational, and pleasurable, though not in their best interests."

Linfield University is a disgrace

MOVING TO FRONT FROM THIS MORNING--UPDATED

It is not "cause" for firing a tenured faculty member that he was "insubordinate" and harmed the university's reputation by making allegations of sexual misconduct.  I hope a lawyer can help vindicate his legal and contractual rights.

ADDENDUM:  Reactions to Lindfield's outrageous misconduct.

(Thanks to Jonathan Kramnick for the pointers.)

UPDATE:  There's an open letter protesting this firing, which I would urge faculty to sign.  (Thanks to Matt Kramer for the pointer.)

Excess mortality due to COVID (directly or indirectly)

Useful representation of the data by sociologist Kieran Healy (Duke).

Dembroff v. Singer

The Twitter smear merchants have been working overtime since The New Yorker interview with Peter Singer, but this exchange is really something:

The anecdote sounds aprocryphal to me, inconsistent with everything I've heard about Peter Singer.  (This is a more likely explanation.)  I have no shortage of harsh criticisms of Peter Singer's work (for example), but what is wrong with people that they stoop to repeating alleged anecdotes to impugn his character?  (Even if it were true, what is the point of repeating it?)   It really is one of the sicker aspects of Twitter.

UPDATE:  A philosopher elsewhere writes:

The Dembroff story about Peter Singer strikes me as very likely to reflect a misinterpretation.  In my times visiting at Princeton, I've been in a lot of seminars with Peter, and I never saw him playing anything like the "I'm extremely famous" card. On the contrary, he was unfailingly self-effacing, wryly funny, constructive, and very good at philosophy; in short, a model citizen.  I'm sure lots of people who have been around the Values Center can confirm this. 

The actual contents of the "Journal of Controversial Ideas" reviewed...

...by Leslie Green (Oxford & Queen's/Canada).  From his apt conclusion:

There are immoral and outrageous ideas that cause no controversy whatever, raise no twitter-storms: ideas that not only don’t put your job at risk, but that actually lead to promotions, chairs, salary increases, and fellowships in our academies. As we learned from Gramsci—and Mill—there is as much danger in these as there is in transitory, popular controversies. Perhaps we need a Journal of Hegemonically Uncontroversial Ideas.

In Memoriam: Katherine Hawley (1971-2021)

Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, Professor Hawley was known for wide-ranging contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of science.  She died, tragically, of cancer.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

(Thanks to Matt Kramer for letting me know about Professor Hawley's passing.)

UPDATE:  Professor Hawley talks about her book How to be Trustworthy here.

On the Blake Bailey biography of Philip Roth

This is the best piece I've seen about this controversy, by Katha Pollitt at The Nation.

Death threats for denying free will?

Sadly, some philosophers have received them, but it provides the occasion for an informative article in The Guardian about free will, quoting many philosophers.

(Thanks to Joshua Selby for the pointer.)

More signs of the times, this time from San Diego State University

Social media is driving this nonsense, and in two ways:  social media facilitates mobbing based on selective reporting; and social media shows others that by seeking out occasions for faux offense, they too can occupy the limelight, get administrators, more often than not, to capitulate, etc.

(Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)

Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" evaluated in light of the replication crisis in social psychology

Interesting.  Thoughts from readers?

"Derrida made simple" and other Twitter delights

As I've noted before, I do post links to items on the blog on Twitter, so you can follow the blog there (if you participate in that godforsaken medium of the resentful and never-ending condescension from below!).  And I post a few other things that don't make it to the blog, like "Derrida made simple."

Peter Singer interviewed...

...in The New Yorker.  Some interesting bits, although I was sorry to see Professor Singer took the bait on this absurd question:

A lot of your works cite white male academics who, for lack of a better phrase, take up a lot of space in intellectual conversations: Joshua Greene, Steven Pinker, Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Sandel, Benedict Anderson, John Rawls, to name a few. Because so much of your work is fundamentally about equity, I wonder if that is something that’s on your radar.

That’s the manner in which I was educated, I suppose, and which still is very influential in the ideas that I’m involved with. I’ve certainly worked with a lot of philosophers who are not male, but they have been white generally [then goes on to name some of them from outside the Anglophone world].

The correct answer would have been:  "No, it's not on my radar, and it has nothing to do with equity.  My citing more Black writers would not contribute to equity; reparations for the descendants of the victims of slavery and de jure segregation would contribute to equity.   Scholarship is not about equity, it is about engaging evidence and arguments that are relevant and worth engaging.  If you have in mind some evidence and arguments relevant to my work that I have neglected, I would be interested in them, independent of the race or nationality of the authors.  But it is pernicious ideological obfuscation to act like keeping a tally of the race of authors you engage contributes anything to equity or human well-being."

UPDATE:   Something I posted on Facebook in response to a comment from a colleague elsewhere might also be relevant here: 

My position is that racial or demographic equity in citations is not a value in scholarship; truth and knowledge are the only values. If past racism has resulted in neglect of scholars who can contribute to truth and knowledge in a particular domain, then the demand should be to name those scholars so that they can be studied. But equity-qua--demographic-diversity per se is not a scholarly value. It has a stronger claim to be a value in pedagogy, policing, and other contexts of course.

Want to rise in the QS university rankings? Paying QS for "consulting" services may be a good bet!

We've noted the "Quirky Silliness" rankings before (and see also), but this new study is an eye-opener:

Results show that universities with frequent QS-related contracts experienced much greater upward mobility in both overall rankings and in faculty-student ratio scores over five years in the QS World Rankings. Positions of Russian universities that had frequent QS-related contracts increased on .75 standard deviations (approximately 140 positions) more than they would have increased without such contracts," the study says. "In a similar way, QS faculty-student ratio scores of Russian universities that had frequent QS-related contracts increased on 0.9 standard deviations more than they would have increased without frequent QS-related contracts. Taken together, these findings suggest that conflicts of interest may produce significant distortions in global university rankings."

Chirikov calls these changes "the first empirical evidence to date that rankers’ conflicts of interest may negatively impact outcomes in university rankings."

"Public philosophy" is not scholarship (and not simply because most of it is bad qua philosophy)

Lawyer/philosopher Tommy Crocker (South Carolina) calls to my attention a recent blog post by philosophers Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin (both Vanderbilt) arguing that public philosophy should not be part of the institutional criteria for promotions and salary increases.  They observe:

[O]nce a faculty member’s public-facing work is folded into the usual schemes of recognition and reward, its quality will become a focus of professional assessment. However, most public-facing scholarship is not subject to peer review, and thus its content often does not have the endorsement of the scholarly community to which the faculty member belongs. What this means is that, in crediting public scholarship, administrators will need to apply their own conception of the relevant metrics for evaluation. The danger is that, once it is introduced into the formal channels of professional advancement, one’s contributions to public philosophy will be assessed according to administrators’ ideals concerning the branding and public face of the university.

Professor Crocker added his own apt observation:

[T]he link I see with the “new ptolemaism” discussion is that it might seem to invite encouragement of social activism in lieu of traditional scholarship in ways that create possible pernicious incentives for administrators to encourage public facing advocacy along favored lines of say promoting diversity and inclusion, and for it to count as scholarship, and by implication to be able to evaluate as non-meritorious non-favored advocacy say of criticisms of university investments for their climate impact and the like. If a faculty member can get merit raises or scholarship credit for favored public facing advocacy that aligns with the administration’s favored views, then such writing will be more likely to be skewed accordingly.

Howard University plans to eliminate its Classics Department, the only one at an HBUC

Happily, there is an uproar in opposition.

(Thanks to Kathleen Ryan for the pointer.)

More on the "Journal of Controversial Ideas"

As we saw, there were some dismissive responses to the new journal from the usual suspects (see also), but now philosopher Robert Gressis (Cal State/Northridge) has given a considered defense of the value of such a journal.

What the experts still want to know about COVID and the virus that causes it

Alas, there's still a lot to learn, from how long immunity lasts, to how variants will affect vaccines, to why some suffer "long COVID" while others don't even develop symptoms.

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

University of Toronto censured by Canadian Association of University Teachers...

...over outside political interference in hiring at the law school.   More details, including a lengthy account by law professor Denise Reaume (Toronto), are available here.

Three tenure-track philosophers win ACLS Fellowships

They are:  Renee Jorgensen Bolinger (currently Princeton Politics, moving to Michigan); Georgi Gardner (Tennessee), and Wendy Salkin (Stanford). [Link now fixed.]

(Thanks to Liz Jackson for the pointer.)

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Bang, "Feels Nice," 1973

Another great number from the Philadelphia hard rock band that never made it to the big time (but made our "top five" finds for 2020):

 

America is doomed, part 411: even David Brooks is noticing!

From a recent NYT column of his:

Since the election, large swaths of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.

The first important survey data to understand this moment is the one pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson discussed with my colleague Ezra Klein. When asked in late January if politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it,” 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.

The level of Republican pessimism is off the charts. A February Economist-YouGov poll asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”

Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”

In Memoriam: Kai Nielsen (1926-2021)

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM APRIL 7--UPDATED

Professor Nielsen wrote widely in social and political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion, and metaphilosophy over the course of his long career, which included teaching positions at Amherst College and New York University in the United  States and, then, for many years at the University of Calgary in Canada, where he was emeritus.  You can learn more about his work here.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

(Thanks to Nick Sagos for the information.)

UPDATE:  The Calgary memorial notice is here.  (Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

ANOTHER:  A memorial by Professor Gasper at New Politics.

"Journal of Controversial Ideas"

The inaugural issue is here.  Not all contributors chose to use pseudonyms.  (Earlier coverage here and here.)

UPDATE:  Smarmy Jonathan Ichikawa (British Columbia) is already smearing the new journal and its contributors!  Perhaps this is exactly why the journal is needed?  (See this funny rejoinder too.)

Wittgenstein exhibit, online

Philosopher Franz-Peter Griesmaier (Wyoming) kindly called to my attention that,

...on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Wittgenstein's death, and the 100th anniversary of the publication of his Tractatus, the Austrian National Library has put together an on-line exhibition of some of his manuscripts, photos, letters, etc. The narration is currently only in German, but perhaps they'll add an English translation at some point. As evidenced by his earliest surviving letter, which he wrote at age eight, Wittgenstein's nickname as a child appears to have been Luki (pronounced Lookee).

University of California and California State University systems will require COVID vaccine as condition of enrollment...

...as well they should.  Every university in the country should follow suit, although I'm sure public universities in benighted states will face obstacles.

(Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  And now the University of Maryland.  (Thanks to Peter Carruthers for the pointer.)  Feel free to add more in the comments.

Employment declined 11% in higher education in the US during the pandemic

CHE is profiling various people who lost their jobs due to pandemic-related cutbacks, including a member of the housekeeping staff at a hotel owed by Northwestern University:

Espinosa, 48, left Colombia 20 years ago, fleeing violence in her home country and seeking opportunity in a new one. Here she married an American, became a citizen, gave birth to a daughter, and eventually got divorced. She worked for a few years at manufacturing plants, then landed a job at the hotel in the early aughts through a cousin who already worked there. At the time, Aramark ran housekeeping in the hotel, and Espinosa was paid about $9 an hour, with 10-cent-an-hour raises every year. Her health insurance cost $500 a month.

Espinosa was active in organizing the union, in 2013, a cause supported by students and faculty members at Northwestern.

“The union came, everything was different,” she says. Before she was laid off, she was paid $14.75 an hour by the Compass Group, which took over Northwestern’s services contracts in 2018, and her benefits fees went down to $85 a month.

Eight philosophers elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

They are:  Cristina Bicchieri (Penn), Ruth Chang (Oxford), Angela Davis (UC Santa Cruz), John Etchemendy (Stanford), Michele Moody-Adams (Columbia), Frederick Neuhouser (Barnard/Columbia), Stewart Shapiro (Ohio State), and R. Jay Wallace (Berkeley).

Arkansas Taliban...

MOVING TO FRONT FROM APRIL 20--UPDATED

...trying, again, to inject creationism (not simply "Intelligent Design" creationism) into the science curriculum.

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

UPDATE:   Fortunately, the bill was (narrowly) defeated in committee.  (Thanks to Glenn Branch for the pointer.)

BJHP Article Prize for 2020

Philosopher Alix Cohen (Edinburgh) asked me to share this announcement, which I'm happy to do:

The British Journal for the History of Philosophy has awarded the 2020 Rogers Prize—its annual prize for the best article it publishes—to Khaled El-Rouayheb (Harvard) for his paper ‘The liar paradox in fifteenth-century Shiraz: the exchange between Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Dashtakī and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī’ (volume 28, issue 2).

This Prize, awarded for the first time in 2012, was established in honour of Prof. John Rogers, the Founding Editor of the journal. It is worth £1000, and will be announced in the next issue of the journal.

Here’s the abstract of his article:

Two rival scholars from Shiraz in Persia, Dawānī (d. 1502) and Dashtakī (d. 1498) engaged in a bitter and extended dispute over a range of metaphysical and logical issues. One of these was the liar paradox. Their debate on this point marked the most extensive scrutiny of the paradox in Arabic until that time. Dashtakī’s solution was to deny that the statement ‘What I say is false’ is true or false, on the ground that there is one statement and one application of the falsity predicate. Given that – ex hypothesi – there is no other statement, there is no basis for a reiteration of the truth or falsity predicate and describing the statement itself as true or false. Dawānī’s solution was to deny that ‘What I say is false’ is a statement at all, and he argued that it is instead akin to a performative utterance such as ‘I hereby sell you this’.

The runner-up for the prize is Ursula Renz (Graz) for her paper ‘Cassirer’s enlightenment: on philosophy and the ‘Denkform’ of reason’ (volume 28, issue 3).

Shaun Nichols (Cornell) discusses the philosophy and psychology of morality...

...with Ricardo Lopes at The Dissenter.