Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The latest escalation of the war in Ukraine

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JANUARY 31--A LIVELY, AND GENERALLY QUITE INTERESTING DISCUSSION IN THE COMMENTS, AS BEFORE

Provision of tanks to Ukraine in the West's proxy war against Russia is another dangerous escalation of the conflict.  We haven't discussed the Ukraine situation, and the risk of nuclear conflict, in awhile, and reader Brendan Moran suggested another discussion might be illuminating.  So what do readers make of these developments?  Do they bring us closer to nuclear conflict?  Will they "help" end the conflict or prolong it?

Raz memorial service at Balliol, Oxford...

...is now available online.

Why British university faculty are striking

A pretty grim state of affairs.  What the author does not note is that the so-called "marketisation" of higher education in the UK was actually the worst of both worlds:  universities continue to be under the control of state bureaucrats, and can't charge "market" prices," only state-set prices.  The state can then justify spending less on universities, while still meddling in every aspect of university life.

Comments are open for reactions to this piece, especially from UK faculty.

(Thanks to Paolo Sandro on twitter for calling this to my attention.)

"Endings," professional and personal

Philosopher Daniel Kaufman comments, and it's a very interesting read.

A documentary about "free will"

The trailer:

Among those I recognized were the philosophers Daniel Dennett, Robert Kane,and Gregg Caruso, as well as the physicist Sean Carroll and biologist Jerry Coyne.  Oddly, the trailer features Dennett saying, incorrectly, that we have had the problem of free will since the Prescoratics.  But our concept of free will comes much later, and dates from the Stoics, not the Presocratics, as Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede have shown (although they have some disagreements about which Stoics).

 

Blast from the past: when Jordan Peterson threatened to sue philosopher Kate Manne....

...back in 2018 (with a guest appearance by the dishonest weasel Jonathan Ichikawa).

Scholars of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy rally to the side of Viktor DeSantis in Florida

Not really, but there may be a silver lining for them in the latest rain cloud:

DeSantis’s proposals include requiring that students at the colleges take certain core courses “grounded in actual history, the actual philosophy that has shaped Western civilization"....

Last year, the state passed a bill that allowed Florida’s Board of Governors to require professors to go through post-tenure review every five years. On Tuesday, DeSantis proposed giving college presidents more power over faculty hiring and allowing presidents and boards of trustees to call for a post-tenure review of a faculty member “at any time with cause.”

The governor said he would recommend the legislature set aside $100 million for the state universities to hire and retain faculty members. He recommended $15 million for recruiting students and faculty members to the New College of Florida, a small, public liberal-arts college whose governing board DeSantis recently overhauled with the appointment of six new members. One of the new trustees then wrote that he intended to see if it would be legally possible to fire everyone at the college and rehire only “those faculty, staff, and administration who fit in the new financial and business model.”

“We are also going to eliminate all DEI and CRT bureaucracies in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said without specifying what “DEI and CRT bureaucracies” were. “No funding, and that will wither on the vine.”

DeSantis presented eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion projects as a way of saving wasted money, although a previous Chronicle analysis found that such projects make up 1 percent or less of the state universities’ budgets.

Lateral moves/retirements (etc.) since the 2021 Philosophical Gourmet Report: 2023 edition

In addition to the separate posts announcing (generally tenured) faculty moves, I will keep a running list of all lateral moves (and retirements and deaths) not reflected in the faculty lists for the last PGR (some moves that took place after the last PGR were reflected in the faculty list, because the editors knew of them).  I will start a new list for each academic year, so that the list does not get unwieldy.  (The 2022 list is here, with a couple of late additions in bold.)  Unless otherwise noted, the appointment (or retirement) takes effect in 2023.  I will move this to the front periodically, putting recent additions in bold.  Untenured lateral moves will be noted as such, otherwise the move is with tenure.  A lateral move is one from one tenure-stream position to another either into or out of a program offering the PhD or terminal MA.  In addition I will list retirements and also deaths of non-emeritus faculty.  Please e-mail me with additions or corrections.

*Richard L. Arneson (political philosophy) is retiring from the University of California, San Diego at the end of the 2022-23 academic year.

*William Bechtel (philosophy of cognitive science and neuroscience) is retiring from the University of California, San Diego at the end of the 2022-23 academic year.

*Patrick Connolly (early modern philosophy and science) from Lehigh University (untenured) and University of Wisconsin, Madison (visiting) to Johns Hopkins University (effective January 2023).

*Rachel Fraser (philosophy of language, epistemology, feminist philosophy) from Oxford University to the Dianoia Institute, Australian Catholic University.

*Charles L. Griswold (18th-century philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, ancient philosophy) is retiring from Boston University at the end of the 2022-23 academic year.

*Paul Guyer (Kant, aesthetics) is on phased retirement at Brown University (he will retire fully no later than the end of June 2025, and perhaps sooner).

*Thomas Hurka (ethics), who has been on phased retirement at the University of Toronto, is retiring at the end of the 2022-23 academic year. (This information was included in the 2021 PGR surveys, so should, in principle, have been taken into account by evaluators.)

*Katharina Kraus (Kant, philosophy of mind and psychology) from the University of Notre Dame to Johns Hopkins University (effective January 2023).

*Harvey Lederman (logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, Chinese philosophy) from Princeton University to the University of Texas, Austin (effective January 2023).

Richard Marshall interviews Ludwig Büchner...

...at 3:16 AM.  Büchner was something like the Richard Dawkins of his day, a proseltyzer, not for Darwin, but for physiology and materialism.  His Kraft und Stoff was the best-selling book in Europe in the second half of the 19th-century after the Bible.  A young Einstein reportedly read it and was inspired by it.  Büchner is also the "old doctor" Nietzsche derides in Beyond Good and Evil, although as usual with Nietzsche it was a matter of the narcissism of small differences:   Nietzsche was deeply influenced by the German materialists, but rejected wholly their eliminativism about psychological phenomena.

Charlie Kirk "solves" the Euthyphro dilemma

It's not fair to idiots to observe that Mr. Kirk is one, but this video certainly drives it home:

(Thanks to David Livingstone Smith for the pointer.)

A nice write-up about philosophy at Wake Forest University...

...where the major is thriving!

In Memoriam: Kent Greenawalt (1936-2023)

Philosophers who work in moral, political and legal philosophy will no doubt be familiar with Professor Greenawalt's work; there is a notice and links at my law school blog for those interested.

The NYT tunnel vision about race comes up against reality

Perhaps someone there should look at the evidence:  "The fact that the five officers charged with Mr. Nichols’s murder are Black complicates the anguish."  That's because in police killings, race is the not the primary variable, but rather class (as with Mr. Nichols:  a high school graduate and unskilled laborer with very little money)--class, plus the pathologies of police culture.

ADDENDUM:  As one reader points out, blacks are three times as likely as whites to be killed in police encoutners.  That is, alas, not surprising given the economic disparities between blacks and whites in America, with its history of apartheid:  "In 2014, about a quarter (26%) of blacks were poor, compared with 10% of whites. The black-white poverty gap has narrowed somewhat since the mid-1970s, when 30% of blacks were living below the poverty line – a proportion nearly four times the share of whites living in poverty (8%)."   The hard empirical question is disentangling the effects of race and class in police violence, a point the murder of Mr. Nichols by black officers drives home.

 

Class, not diversity

Kenan Malik comments at The Observer:

If debates about poverty have become warped by a longstanding view that attributes blame to the individual, debates about inequality have become distorted by a more contemporary trend: the increasing tendency to look at equality in terms of “diversity”. “When you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity,” observes the American academic Walter Benn Michaels. “But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity.”

Did you know you have a "right" to "revelatory autonomy"?

Me neither, but if you make up such a right, The Guardian will write about it.  It does seem a bit odd to think friends and family act wrongfully by offering advice about major decisions in life, but the ever-evolving etiquette manual of academic philosophers is full of surprises!

UPDATE:  Philosopher Farbod Akhlaghi, whose work was being discussed in The Guardian, kindly shared a clarification about his views:

On the neoliberal identity politics of the fake "left" in America

This essay makes a number of good points (although readers will notice echoes of Adolph Reed, the essay overall lacks his more sophisticated theoretical framework); an excerpt:

[Ne]oliberal identity is u]sing one’s identity or personal experience as a justification for a political position. You may hear someone argue, “As a working-class, first-generation American, Southern woman…I say we have to vote no.” What’s implied is that one’s identity is a comprehensive validator of one’s political strategy—that identity is evidence of some intrinsic ideological or strategic legitimacy. Marginalized identity is deployed as a conveyor of a strategic truth that must simply be accepted. Likewise, historically privileged identities are essentialized, flattened, and frequently—for better or worse— dismissed....

In Memoriam: Edward Erwin (1937-2022)

This seems to be the year for belated death announcements, but Michael Tooley just alerted me to the fact that Professor Erwin, a longtime member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Miami, died last spring.  He was particularly well-known for his philosophical investigations of the foundations of psychotherapy, especially Freudian psychoanalysis.  He also had the misfortune to be wrongly named a defendant in a lawsuit (dismissed with prejudice by the court as against Erwin) growing out of the controversy surrounding sexual misconduct allegations against Colin McGinn, of whom Professor Erwin was the lone defender in the department.  I was surprised that the Miami Department did not post a memorial notice, although was told one was circulated locally.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Erwin or who would like to comment on the significance of his work.

Great moments in (extremely) obscure rock 'n' roll: Creepy John Thomas, "Down in the Bottom," 1970

Reader Dave Wasser kindly flagged the long-forgotten Mr. Thomas for me; born in Australia, he recorded this number in London for his second album and it's not bad!  He later played with the Edgar Broughton Band and with his own band in Berlin.

 

Nyholm from Utrecht to LMU Munich

Sven Nyholm (applied ethics [esp. ethics of technology], ethics), currently Associate Professor in the Ethics Institute at Utrecht University, will become Professor of the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence on the philosophy faculty at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich this summer.

And the prize for proposed legislation that would most clearly abolish tenure and academic freedom with it...

...goes to North Dakota.  Yikes!

Lanier Anderson to be new Chair of the APA Board

It is with genuine sadness that I must report that philosopher Lanier Anderson, an exceptionally nice guy and serious scholar, will have to be the next Chair of the American Philosophical Association Board.   My condolences to Lanier and his loved ones.

Karl Jaspers and the origins of existentialism

A short popular account here of the now little-read Jaspers.  The last time I read Jaspers it was his book on Nietzsche, which is uneven, but better than Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche!

The most checked-out books from the New York City public library system

I confess I've heard of none of these books and almost none of these authors  Apart from old rock 'n' roll, I'm a poor consumer of popular culture.  What do readers make of this list?  Are some of these books worth reading?

"Ameliorative"

Awhile ago, I observed that "whatever ameliorative analysis is, it's not an analysis," but philosopher Alan Thomas has done me one better on Facebook (which he gave permission to share):   "I long for the good old days, when we just called 'ameliorative conceptual engineering' 'Newspeak'."

Blast from the past: In defense of English departments!

Back in 2014, with discussion.

Where professors come from

An article in Nature a few months ago documented where professors across all fields got their PhDs; the study found:

Overall, 80% of all domestically trained faculty in our data were trained at just 20.4% of universities. Moreover, the five most common doctoral training universities—UC Berkeley, Harvard, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford—account for just over one in eight domestically trained faculty (13.8%; Fig. 2a and Extended Data Table 3). Even when disaggregated into domains of study, 80% of faculty were trained at only 19–28% of universities (Fig. 2b).

A couple of observations.  The fields studied were the humanities, social sciences, applied sciences, natural sciences, mathematics & computing, medicine & health, engineering, and education.  While the "big five" producers (above) are all excellent research universities they are also distinguished by being comprehensive in a way that, e.g., Princeton or MIT are not (the latter, for example, do not offer PhDs in education, or medicine; and MIT does not offer PhDs in all the social sciences and humanities).   

Why did Bostrom's "apology" for the racist email mention eugenics?

This author offers an hypothesis. (Earlier coverage, including a link to the strange apology.)  I don't agree with all of this analysis, but it's worth a look.

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

Richard Marshall interviews Friedrich Lange...

...at 3:16 AM.  Lange was an immensely important figure in German philosophy in the second half of the 19th-century.  His major work on materialism became so well-known that Bertrand Russell wrote an introduction to an English edition in the 1920s.  The "interview" is both amusing and quite informative.

Montana Taliban trying to wreck science education

Religiously inspired stupidity isn't dead yet, as a new draft bill in Montana makes clear, which states that, "a scientific fact is observable and repeatable, and if it does not meet these criteria, it is a theory that is defined as speculation," and can't be taught in the public schools.  Oy veh!  Does the draft bill have any chance of enactment?   Comments from knowledgeable readers welcome.

(Thanks to Bradley Wood for the pointer.)

 

Blast from the past: Twitter "believe it or not" part 3: the Twitter kids can't figure out why no one is taking them seriously

Back in 2019.  I imagine most of these benighted folks are as ridiculous and clueless today as they were then.

Kraus from Notre Dame to Johns Hopkins

Katharina Kraus (Kant, philosophy of mind and psychology), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has accepted a tenured offer as Miller Associate Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, where she will start this term.

In Memoriam: Joseph Agassi (1927-2023)

A student of Karl Popper, Professor Agassi was a prolific writer in philosophy of science and social science, among other areas.  He taught for many years at Boston University, and then at York University, Toronto and Tel-Aviv University (concurrently for a long time at both).  You can learn more about his career and work here.   I will add links to memorial notices when they appear.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Agassi, or who would like to comment on the significance of his work.

(Thanks to David Gordon for alerting me to Professor Agassi's death.)

Mandatory "diversity" training doesn't seem to work

We've touched on this before, here's the latest debunking of the DEI industrial-complex:

“We have been speaking to employers about this research for more than a decade,” wrote the sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in 2018, “with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around.” (To be fair, not all of these critiques apply as sharply to voluntary diversity trainings....

Some diversity initiatives might actually worsen the D.E.I. climates of the organizations that pay for them....

In the case of D.E.I., Dr. Dobbin and Dr. Kalev warn that diversity trainings that are mandatADory or that threaten dominant groups’ sense of belonging or make them feel blamed may elicit negative backlash or exacerbate biases.

Many popular contemporary D.E.I. approaches meet these criteria. They often seem geared more toward sparking a revolutionary reunderstanding of race relations than solving organizations’ specific problems. And they often blame white people — or their culture — for harming people of color. For example, the activist Tema Okun’s work cites concepts like objectivity and worship of the written word as characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility” trainings are designed to make white participants uncomfortable. And microaggression trainings are based on an area of academic literature that claims, without quality evidence, that common utterances like “America is a melting pot” harm the mental health of people of color. Many of these trainings run counter to the views of most Americans — of any color — on race and equality. And they’re generating exactly the sort of backlash that research predicts.

ADDENDUM:   Professors Dobbin and Kalev discuss their diversity research here.   Amusingly, they note that most management practices are not evidence-based.

(Thanks to Roger Albin for the pointer.)

Savulescu from Oxford to NUS in 2022

Reader Valentin Weber points out to me that the well-known bioethicist Julian Savulescu, previously Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at Oxford, took up a Chair in medical ethics at the National University of Singapore last year.  NUS, which pays competitively with the best American universities, has recruited senior faculty from the UK (and sometimes even from the U.S.) in many fields in recent years.

Great moments in (not so obscure) rock 'n' roll: David Crosby memorial edition

David Crosby, who enjoyed great success with The Byrds in the mid-1960s and then with Crosby, Stills & Nash (and sometimes Young) from the late 1960s onwards--and occasional success on his own and with Graham Nash--was a fine singer, capable especially of brilliant harmonies, but never as good a song composer as those he worked with.  Here's a few notable songs he either authored or co-authored during his long career that are among my favorites:

He co-wrote one of The Byrds's biggest hits and most memorable songs, "Eight Miles High," from 1966:

My favorite Crosby composition is "Long Time Gone," from the CSN debut in 1969:

A petition in support of philosophy at Utica University

They are, alas, the latest philosophy major under threat.  

(Thanks to Christian Miller on Twitter for calling this to my attention.)

Blast from the past: the most significant moral philosophers in the history of Western philosophy

A poll and discussion, back in 2013.

Harvard Kennedy School Dean reverses decision, and extends offer to Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch

Professor Risse tells me that Mr. Roth has accepted the Senior Fellowship.  (Earlier coverage.)  The Dean, in his letter to the faculty, wrote:

In the case of Mr. Roth, I now believe that I made an error in my decision not to appoint him as a Fellow at our Carr Center for Human Rights. I am sorry that the decision inadvertently cast doubt on the mission of the School and our commitment to open debate in ways I had not intended and do not believe to be true. The broader faculty input I have now sought and received has persuaded me that my decision was not the best one for the School. I have spoken now with a colleague at the Carr Center, and we will extend an offer to Mr. Roth to serve as a Fellow. I hope that our community will be able to benefit from his deep experience in a wide range of human rights issues. 

Blast from the past: Why academic freedom?

Back in 2017, but still relevant, needless to say.

Fraser, Menon to Dianoia Institute at the Australian Catholic University

Rachel Fraser (philosophy of language, epistemology, feminist philosophy), Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University, and her husband Tushar Menon (philosophy of science and physics), currently a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University, have accepted appointments at the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University:  she will be Associate Professor, and he will be appointed as "Research Fellow" (the equivalent, roughly of an "assistant professor" in the U.S. system).

In Memoriam: David Harrah (1927-2022)

Another belated memorial notice, this one for Professor Harrah, who was emeritus in philosophy at UC Riverside, and who died last year.  In the 1960s and 1970s, he was especially well-known for his work on the logic of communication and questions.  He was also an accomplihsed alpinist, which is a focus of this obituary in The Seattle Times.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Harrah or wish to comment on his philosophical work.

(Thanks to Graeme Forbes for the pointer.)

Philosophers at Leibniz University Hannover receive four million euros from the German Research Foundation....

...for "a new Centre for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences...The group SOCRATES based at the Institute of Philosophy of LUH will focus on the credibility of science. SOCRATES stands for 'Social Credibility and Trustworthiness of Expert Knowledge and Science-Based Information'. The project is in receipt of funding amounting to approximately four million euros provided over an initial period of four years (2023-2027). SOCRATES is led by Prof. Dr. Mathias Frisch (spokesperson) and Prof. Dr. Torsten Wilholt."

(Thanks to Professor Wilholt for the information.)

Five philosophers win NEH Fellowships for book projects

They are:   Jacob Beck (York University, Toronto); Jeffrey Brower (Purdue); Stephen Darwall (Yale); Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern), and Emily McRae (New Mexico).

"Artificial Intelligence [sic] forever inanimate and dumb"

This is funny and probably right (and timely, given yesterday's thread):

The cognitive scientist Gary Marcus has been the most active when it comes to showing that, contrary to some of the claims referenced above, LLMs [Large Language Models] are inherently unreliable and don’t actually exhibit many of the most common features of language and thought, such as systematicity and compositionality, let alone common sense, the understanding of context in conversation, or any of the many other unremarkable “cognitive things” we do on a daily basis. In a recent post with Ernest Davis, Marcus includes an LLM Errors Tracker and outlines some of the more egregious mistakes, including the manifestation of sexist and racist biases, simple errors when carrying out basic logical reasoning or indeed basic maths, in counting up to 4 (good luck claiming that LLMs pass the Turing Test; see here), and of course the fact that LLMs constantly make things up.

Spring virtual dissertation groups

Sign ups for Spring are now open.

Two weeks until the submission deadline for the 6th meeting of the International Society of Nietzsche Studies in Atlanta

Details here.  Many PhD students have had their papers chosen in the blind review process, including graduate students from Purdue, UC Riverside, Princeton, Chicago, Oxford, Warwick, Boston University, and Duke, among others.

"Intelligent design" creationism basically finished

Biologist Jerry Coyne reviews the state of affairs.   My "Texas Taliban" alerts category was created some two decades ago precisely because of the efforts by those folks to wreck biology education in Texas!  (Years ago, a member in good standing even came to visit me in my office!  And see also.)

Blast from the past: Applying twice to the same graduate program?

A discussion back in 2008.

Will AI change teaching?

Curious piece in the NYT about growing worries about students using AI to produce written work:

While grading essays for his world religions course last month, Antony Aumann, a professor of philosophy at Northern Michigan University, read what he said was easily “the best paper in the class.” It explored the morality of burqa bans with clean paragraphs, fitting examples and rigorous arguments.

A red flag instantly went up.

Mr. Aumann confronted his student over whether he had written the essay himself. The student confessed to using ChatGPT, a chatbot that delivers information, explains concepts and generates ideas in simple sentences — and, in this case, had written the paper.

Alarmed by his discovery, Mr. Aumann decided to transform essay writing for his courses this semester. He plans to require students to write first drafts in the classroom, using browsers that monitor and restrict computer activity. In later drafts, students have to explain each revision. Mr. Aumann, who may forgo essays in subsequent semesters, also plans to weave ChatGPT into lessons by asking students to evaluate the chatbot’s responses.

Across the country, university professors like Mr. Aumann, department chairs and administrators are starting to overhaul classrooms in response to ChatGPT, prompting a potentially huge shift in teaching and learning. Some professors are redesigning their courses entirely, making changes that include more oral exams, group work and handwritten assessments in lieu of typed ones....

In higher education, colleges and universities have been reluctant to ban the A.I. tool because administrators doubt the move would be effective and they don’t want to infringe on academic freedom.

Just as an aside:  while banning AI may not be effective, it would not violate "academic freedom."  There is no "academic freedom" right of students to cheat.  So putting that confusion aside, I am curious what readers make of this.  Given some of the nonsense AI generates, I confess I'm surprised by this.

MLK speech in 1962 on the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation

I'd never heard this one before: