Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Whoever murdered the CEO of UnitedHealth in midtown Manhattan the other day...

...has brought out into the open how much people hate health insurance companies, many of which are extremely predatory and exploitative.  The Facebook post announcing the CEO's death (murder) has some 50,000 "laugh" emojis on it.  That's pretty gross, of course, but it is also telling about how deeply people resent being denied coverage for their medical problems, which is what insurers do a lot (UnitedHealth has a particularly bad reputation).   The immediate effect of this assassination will be an increase in security for CEOs but perhaps it will even have an effect on the public discourse about healthcare in the benighted states of America.

A single mutation would make the bird flu virus well-suited for humans

Not a hopeful bit of news.

(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer.)

An interview with T.M. Scanlon about his moral philosophy

Here.  This I found particularly striking and interesting:

AR: You were part of a discussion group of maybe 10 to 12 people back in your Princeton days, with luminaries such as Tom Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Nozick, and many others. In an interview with The Utopian, you called this the most important thing in your philosophical development. What made it so important? 

TS: Well, it was like having this gang of great teachers, for one thing. In my career, I was mainly doing logic, philosophy, mathematics, things like that, although I was interested in moral and political philosophy, and I got more drawn into it because I was doing a lot of teaching in that area. So this was partly a way of developing more expertise in the field because I was just in the process of getting into it. Second, it was something that provided me with confidence in two ways: One, there really was a subject matter there that you could learn more about because in the 1950s, moral philosophy had a kind of skeptical air to it. It was sort of conventionalist or emotivist, non-cognitivist, and so on, and so we were drawn together by the fact that most of us in the group tended to think that there were real facts about right and wrong, and that just by thinking really hard and clearly about them, you could make progress, and that wasn’t what was going on in most of philosophy at the time. It wasn’t where the action was in philosophy; it was mostly in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, things like that.

So the group gave me confidence that there were other people who think that we’re not just banging things up, that there’s something there. And second, that gave me confidence in myself, because these people were willing to talk to me, and so I could be a member of this group, which was amazingly flattering. I was kind of a junior partner in the group, so I felt, wow, this is amazing. So it really was important in my philosophical development in those ways, giving me confidence in the subject, and, to some degree, confidence in myself.

Top 11 programs in Philosophy of Biology for 2024-25

Full results at the PGR site.  A list of evaluators, and some comments, below the fold.

Institution	Rounded Mean	Median	Mode	Group
Australian National University	4.0	4.50	5	Group 1
Cambridge University	4.0	4.00	4	Group 1
University of California, Irvine	4.0	4.50	4.5	Group 1
University of Pittsburgh	4.0	4.00	4	Group 1
University of Sydney	4.0	4.00	4	Group 1
Washington University, St. Louis	4.0	4.00	4.5, 4, 3	Group 1
University of Bristol	3.5	4.00	5, 4	Group 2
University of British Columbia	3.5	3.50	3.5	Group 2
University of Calgary	3.5	3.50	4, 3, 2.5	Group 2
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul	3.5	4.00	5, 2	Group 2
University of Utah	3.5	3.50	3.5	Group 2

"Schedule F": Trump's plan to eviscerate civil service job protections for government employees

Here's a good explainer--if Trump fires 50,000 government employees (and he may fire more), it will not only wreak economic havoc in the Washington, DC metro area, it should impair the ability of government to function competently.  That may be one of the points, of course, although I assume Trump's main motivation is to have the government populated with Trump loyalists.  But since "Trump loyalist" and "competent professional" are not categories that overlap a lot, this bodes ill for the quality of federal services.

The three most alarming Trump Cabinet picks (so far)

Two obvious ones have gotten much attention:  Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary, and Kash Patel for FBI Director.  Both evince a fascistic or authoritarian temperament and ambitions.  Putting either in charge of people with guns and authorized violence would be very dangerous in the extreme.  Ironically, as of this writing, Hegseth seems likely to be rejected not for being a Christian nationalist and authoritarian, but for being a sexist and a drunk.  I'll take that if that's the reason.  That may allow attention to shift to Patel, who is quite unhinged.

At least as dangerous, but in a different way, is the prospect of an ignoramus like RFK Jr. becoming Secretary of Health & Human Services.  Public health is the kind of social good it's easy to take for granted, until it's gone.  RFK will accelerate declining uptake for vaccines, and promises to direct research funding away from infection diseases--God forbid there's another pandemic.  Fortunately--at least for those in civilized states--the states still set legal requirements for mandatory vaccinations, but even if Illinois has 21st-century public health policies, it will be a problem if neighboring Missouri or Iowa do not.  Viruses don't respect state lines.

Unless the U.S. is very lucky, the next four years could see massive outbreaks of infectious disease, with no coherent federal response; political arrests and prosecutions (maybe murders?); and a politicized military occupying Democratic cities in search of immigrants and "preserving law and order."

Top 13 programs in History of Early Modern Philosophy (18th-Century)

This is meant to exclude Kant (which is a separate category).  Programs with a rounded mean of 3.0 will appear in the full report.  Evaluators in this specialty are listed below the fold.

Early Modern: 18th Century 

Institution	Rounded Mean	Median	Mode	Group
New York University	4.5	4.25	4	Group 1
Oxford University	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2
University of Toronto	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2
Harvard University	3.5	3.00	3	Group 3
Johns Hopkins University	3.5	3.00	3	Group 3
National University of Singapore	3.5	3.75	4	Group 3
Ohio State University	3.5	3.50	3.5	Group 3
Princeton University	3.5	3.50	3	Group 3
University of California, San Diego	3.5	3.50	3.5	Group 3
University of Edinburgh	3.5	3.50	3	Group 3
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	3.5	3.50	3.5	Group 3
University of Virginia	3.5	3.00	3	Group 3
Yale University	3.5	3.75	2.5	Group 3

More on Trump and college accreditation

A propos our earlier discussion, this CHE piece is informative about accreditation and the difficulties that may attend tampering with it; some excerpts:

The federal Higher Education Act (HEA) includes specific measures that accreditors must take into account, such as the fiscal viability and educational quality of programs. The law also explicitly prohibits the government from imposing any kind of academic requirements or dictating what colleges can teach in the classroom.

Under that law, the Trump administration can’t remove any current requirements regarding what accreditors review or add new ones — such as only allowing accreditors to evaluate institutions based on student-outcome measures. Accreditors, which are independent, nonprofit associations, also have some flexibility in current law to set standards that go beyond federal regulations.

Dupre on Dawkins...

...at the Los Angeles Review of Books.  A good read.

Top 9 programs in Metaphysics, 2024-25

Full results, including schools with rounded means of 3.0 and 3.5, will appear on the PGR site soon.  Evaluators are listed below the fold.

Institution	Rounded Mean	Median	Mode	Group
New York University	5.0	5.00	5	Group 1
Rutgers University, New Brunswick	5.0	5.00	5	Group 1
Oxford University	4.5	4.50	5, 4	Group 2
Princeton University	4.5	4.50	4.5	Group 2
University of Southern California	4.5	4.50	5	Group 2
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	4.0	4.00	4	Group 3
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	4.0	4.00	4	Group 3
University of Notre Dame	4.0	4.00	4	Group 3
University of Virginia	4.0	4.00	4, 3.5	Group 3

"The right-wingification of UT Austin"

Alarming developments that, if they continue, will make it harder to sustain a top philosophy department.

More specialty rankings coming this week...

...including metaphysics, early modern philosophy (18th century), philosophy of biology, and perhaps others.  I'm awaiting confirmation of when the full PGR will go live.

I've moved from Twitter/X to BlueSky and all new links to blog posts will be there

If you use X or similar social media to follow the blog, please follow me there.  Thank you.

ADDENDUM:  Here's why you should move too:   Musk is manipulating the algorithms on his platform in service of Trump and the Republicans.  (ADDENDUM:  A reader points out the referenced study fails to account for the effect of the attempted Trump assassination, which is a rather serious variable!  On the other hand, anyone who has been on Twitter knows that the amount of right-wing garbage in one's feed has increased since Musk took over.)

ANOTHER:  Join the exodus to Bluesky:

The platform formerly regarded [by ignoramuses-ed.] as a utopian market square for exchanging information has suffered its largest exodus to date.

Bluesky, emerging as X’s newest rival, has amassed 16 million users, including 1 million in the course of 24 hours last week. Hundreds of thousands of people have quit the former Twitter since Donald Trump’s election victory on 6 November.

The catalyst is X’s owner, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who transformed the social media site and used it as a megaphone to blast Trump into the White House.

Top 11 programs in Political Philosophy, 2024-25

The full list, including programs with rounded means of 3.5 and 3.0, will appear at the PGR site.  Below the fold is the list of evaluators for this specialty.

Institution	Rounded Mean	Median	Mode	Group
New York University	4.5	4.50	5	Group 1
Oxford University	4.5	4.50	5	Group 1
University of California, Berkeley	4.5	4.50	5	Group 1
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	4.5	4.00	4	Group 1
Brown University	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2
Harvard University	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2
Rutgers University, New Brunswick	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2
University of Arizona	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2
University of California, Los Angeles	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2
University of Southern California	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2
University of Toronto	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2

Philosopher Laurie Paul profiled...

...at The New Yorker.  It's a nice write-up!

 

How not to be popular with your colleagues in English

Write things like this:

Over the past 10 years, I have watched in horror as academe set itself up for the existential crisis that has now arrived. Starting around 2014, many disciplines — including my own, English — changed their mission. Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.

In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms. This interpretation of a novel or poem, that historical intervention, is valuable because it will contribute to the achievement of progressive political goals. Nor was this change limited to the humanities. Venerable scientific journals — such as Nature — now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects.

I think this turn from teaching and scholarship to political activism is much worse in some fields, like English, than in many others, but, alas, the worst offenders may have poisoned the public understanding of the universities.  "Disciplines" (it's not clear they are scholarly disciplines) that fit Professor Clune's characterization do not belong in the Humboldtian university.  See, e.g.  (And recall some of the nincompoops quoted here, all communications and English faculty.)

Evaluators for the 2024 PGR

Below the fold is the complete list of evaluators who participated in the 2024 PGR, either in the overall rankings or the specialty rankings, and most often, both.  Warm thanks to the roughly 240 philosophers who lent their expertise to this year's PGR.

Great moments in rock 'n' roll covers: D.O.A., "Taking Care of Business," 1987

This Vancouver punk band (the "Canadian 'Dead Kennedys'" as they are sometimes called) did this distinctive version of the great 1973 BTO rocker in 1987:

Feel free to post links to your favorite punk rock covers of more conventional rock and pop songs.

University of Sydney's bizarre new "free [sic] speech" policy

Reader Will Moisis writes:

You may be interested in the University of Sydney’s extraordinary hamfisted attempt at limiting free speech on their campus.

They received 51 submissions, and the report recommends:

“Mr Hodgkinson acknowledges that academic freedom and freedom of speech are fundamental to the University and that these rights are limited by the law. While freedom of speech does not permit the use of hate speech or vilification, the report notes that difficulties arise when different parties have divergent views on the legitimate use of words or phrases because the intended meaning of the speaker has not been made clear.  

The report proposes that the University implement a new civility rule that requires any speaker using University facilities to make the meaning of contested words and phrases clear to the audience.”

How would they go about this? 

Top 15 Philosophy Ph.D. Programs in the U.K., 2024-25

MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOVEMBER 15, FOR THOSE WHO MAY HAVE MISSED IT

Ranked by rounded mean---medians and modes will be published on the PGR site.

Region Rank	UK	Rating
1	Oxford University	4.6
2	Cambridge University	3.7
3	University of Edinburgh	3.5
4	University of St. Andrews/Stirling Joint Program	3.4
5	University College London	3.2
6	King's College, London	3.1
	University of Leeds	3.1
8	London School of Economics	3.0
	University of Bristol	3.0
10	University of Warwick	2.9
11	University of Glasgow	2.8
12	University of Durham	2.7
13	University of Sheffield	2.6
	University of York	2.6
15	University of Birmingham	2.5
	University of Nottingham	2.4

Closest to the top 15 was the University of Manchester, with a score of 2.2.

Top 9 Programs in 19th-Century Continental Philosophy, 2024-25

Full results, including the programs with a rounded mean of 3.0, will appear at the PGR site.  Evaluators and a few commetns below the fold.

19th Century Continental	Rounded Mean	Median	Mode	Group
Boston University	4.0	4.00	4	Group 1
New York University	4.0	4.00	3.5	Group 1
University of Chicago	4.0	4.00	4, 5	Group 1
Yale University	4.0	4.00	5	Group 1
Brown University	3.5	3.50	4, 3.5	Group 2
Northwestern University	3.5	3.75	4	Group 2
Oxford University	3.5	3.50	3, 3.5, 4	Group 2
University College London	3.5	3.50	4	Group 2
University of Warwick	3.5	3.50	3, 4	Group 2

NYT account of how the Congressional assault on Universities last Spring...

...led the schools to crack down on lawful political expression that House Republicans did not like.  Universities were running scared before Trump's election; imagine what next year will bring.

UPDATE:  Dr. Roger Albin at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor writes:

Thanks for posting the NYT piece on the crackdown on protests at universities. While I agree with much of what was written, I think this piece neglects an important component. The pro-Palestinian protest movement had many of the features of a typical undergraduate fad.  Participants graduate, fervor diminishes once away from campus, and much of the impetus dissapates.  In addition, what I observed here was a good deal of immature conduct. This was not the disciplined Civil Rights movement. To a considerable extent, our University administrators gave the protestors enough rope to hang themselves and the protesters did enough stupid stuff to make shutting them down fairly easy. 

Australia bans social media for those under 16

We can now run a natural experiment and see if rates of depression and anxiety change in young people there.

Top 12 programs in epistemology, 2024-25

Full results will appear at the PGR website; evaluators are listed below the fold.

Epistemology (incl. formal epistemology)	Rounded Mean	Median	Mode	Group
Oxford University	4.5	4.50	4.5, 5	Group 1
Rutgers University, New Brunswick	4.5	4.50	4.5	Group 1
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2
New York University	4.0	4.50	4	Group 2
Princeton University	4.0	4.50	4.5	Group 2
University of California, Irvine	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2
University of Southern California	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2
University of Texas, Austin	4.0	4.00	4.5	Group 2
University of Toronto	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2
Yale University	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2

The rise and fall of "The Future of Humanity Institute" at Oxford

Interesting account of the mostly bad scifi passing as philosophy.   "Effective [i.e., short-term, measurable] altruism" also makes an appearance.

Top 9 programs in philosophy of law, 2024-25

Here are the top two groupings in philosophy of law, based on rounded mean.  The full results, including the programs with a rounded mean of 3.5 and 3.0 will appear at the PGR site.  Evaluators and some comments are beneath the fold.

Philosophy of Law	Rounded Mean	Median	Mode	Group	Group String
New York University	4.5	4.50	5	Group 1	Group 1 (1-2) (rounded mean of 4.5)
University of California, Los Angeles	4.5	4.50	5	Group 1	Group 1 (1-2) (rounded mean of 4.5)
Cambridge University	4.0	3.75	3.5	Group 2	Group 2 (3-9) (rounded mean of 4)
Cornell University	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2	Group 2 (3-9) (rounded mean of 4)
Oxford University	4.0	4.00	5	Group 2	Group 2 (3-9) (rounded mean of 4)
University of Chicago	4.0	4.00	4, 3.5	Group 2	Group 2 (3-9) (rounded mean of 4)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	4.0	4.00	3	Group 2	Group 2 (3-9) (rounded mean of 4)
University of Toronto	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2	Group 2 (3-9) (rounded mean of 4)
Yale University	4.0	4.00	4	Group 2	Group 2 (3-9) (rounded mean of 4)

Top 15 Programs in Moral Psychology for 2024-25

The full ranking, including the programs with a rounded mean of 3.0, will appear at the PGR site.

Moral Psychology	Rounded Mean	Median	Mode	Group
Cornell University	4.0	4.50	4.5, 4	Group 1
University of California, Los Angeles	4.0	4.00	3.5, 4, 5	Group 1
University of Chicago	4.0	3.50	3	Group 1
Yale University	4.0	4.00	4	Group 1
Brown University	3.5	4.00	4	Group 2
Duke University	3.5	3.50	4	Group 2
Johns Hopkins University	3.5	4.00	4	Group 2
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	3.5	3.50	3.5	Group 2
New York University	3.5	3.00	3, 2, 2.5, 4	Group 2
Oxford University	3.5	3.50	3.5, 4	Group 2
Princeton University	3.5	3.50	3.5	Group 2
University of California, Berkeley	3.5	4.00	4, 3	Group 2
University of California, San Diego	3.5	3.75	4	Group 2
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	3.5	3.50	3.5	Group 2
University of Southern California	3.5	3.50	4	Group 2

An amusing polemic about the academy by an ex-academic whose specialty is...

...pissing on academia.  Some of it, admittedly, is self-serving and stupid, but some of it has enough truth in it to be amusing.  For example:

Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.

It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.

Clearly some truth to this, though this stuff is mostly confined to the feebler parts of the humanities and social sciences [sic], plus of course the schools of education and social work, and the various "studies" programs.  It has made inroads, sadly, into philosophy over the quarter-century, as we have had occasion to document on many occasions.

An interview with Simon Blackburn about moral philosophy and quasi-realism in particular

Here.

Top 5 programs in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, 2024-25

Full results will appear at the PGR site; a list of evaluators and some comments are below the fold.

Ancient	Rounded Mean	Median	Mode	Group	Group String
Oxford University	5	5	5	Group 1	Group 1 (1) (rounded mean of 5)
Cambridge University	4.5	4	5	Group 2	Group 2 (2-5) (rounded mean of 4.5)
Cornell University	4.5	4	4.5, 4	Group 2	Group 2 (2-5) (rounded mean of 4.5)
Princeton University	4.5	5	4.5	Group 2	Group 2 (2-5) (rounded mean of 4.5)
University of Toronto	4.5	5	5	Group 2	Group 2 (2-5) (rounded mean of 4.5)

A review of the Edmonds biography of Parfit...

...in The Philosopher's Magazine.  The review starts by sounding a Nietzschean note:  "Philosophers tend to tolerate a high degree of personal strangeness in one another. More specifically, they tend not to worry – at least explicitly or on the record – about whether the weird philosophical beliefs and the weird non-philosophical actions of a colleague might have a common source."  For Nietzsche, of course, the philospohical systems of at least the great philosophers admit of psychological explanation.  Regarding the Edmonds biography, the reviewers note that,

The book is largely an entertaining, and highly revealing, exercise in psychological portraiture by means of anecdote. Parfit, Edmonds tells us, would peddle in the nude on his exercise bike, reading philosophy; he would brush his teeth for hours, reading philosophy; every day he would eat the same breakfast of muesli and yoghurt and the same dinner of carrots, cheese, lettuce, and celery, to maximise his time for philosophy; he would make coffee using water straight out of the tap, to maximise his time for philosophy; he would take a mixture of vodka and pills every night to help him sleep, since he couldn’t stop thinking about philosophy.

Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense is a fairly open religious authoritarian

This is not normal.

Top programs in Philosophy of the Psychological, Cognitive & Brain Sciences, 2024-25

MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOVEMBER 20--THE PROBLEM WITH HOW MEDIANS WERE DISPLAYING HAS BEEN FIXED

This was clearly a specialty where evaluators had divided views about what was most important and which programs were best:  thus the "Group 1" programs had a rounded mean score of 4.0.  As before, higher or lower medians and modes give some idea of how divided opinion was.  I list the top two groupings; all programs with at least a rounded mean of 3.0 will appear in the full PGR.  Evaluators are listed below the fold.

Let me add--and this applies to all the specialty rankings--is that they provide students with a quick way to identify programs that may be good fits, but I would not advise picking a program to attend based on a difference between, e.g., Group 1 and Group 2.  Meet faculty, learn more about their research, assess the program environment, then choose without regard to any differences here.

Philosophy of the Psychological, Cognitive, & Brain Sciences	Rounded Mean	Median	Mode	Group	Group String
City University of New York Graduate Center	4.0	4.00	4	Group 1	Group 1 (1-7) (rounded mean of 4)
Johns Hopkins University	4.0	4.50	5, 4.5	Group 1	Group 1 (1-7) (rounded mean of 4)
New York University	4.0	4.00	4, 5	Group 1	Group 1 (1-7) (rounded mean of 4)
Rutgers University, New Brunswick	4.0	4.00	5	Group 1	Group 1 (1-7) (rounded mean of 4)
University of Pittsburgh	4.0	4.00	4	Group 1	Group 1 (1-7) (rounded mean of 4)
Washington University, St. Louis	4.0	4.00	4	Group 1	Group 1 (1-7) (rounded mean of 4)
Yale University	4.0	4.00	4	Group 1	Group 1 (1-7) (rounded mean of 4)
Australian National University	3.5	3.00	3	Group 2	Group 2 (8-19) (rounded mean of 3.5)
Cornell University	3.5	3.50	3	Group 2	Group 2 (8-19) (rounded mean of 3.5)
Duke University	3.5	3.00	3	Group 2	Group 2 (8-19) (rounded mean of 3.5)
Monash University	3.5	3.25	3	Group 2	Group 2 (8-19) (rounded mean of 3.5)
Purdue University	3.5	3.50	4.5	Group 2	Group 2 (8-19) (rounded mean of 3.5)
Stanford University	3.5	3.50	4	Group 2	Group 2 (8-19) (rounded mean of 3.5)
University of California, San Diego	3.5	3.75	3, 4	Group 2	Group 2 (8-19) (rounded mean of 3.5)
University of California, Santa Barbara	3.5	3.75	4.5, 4	Group 2	Group 2 (8-19) (rounded mean of 3.5)
University of Edinburgh	3.5	4.00	4	Group 2	Group 2 (8-19) (rounded mean of 3.5)
University of Maryland, College Park	3.5	3.50	3	Group 2	Group 2 (8-19) (rounded mean of 3.5)
University of Sydney	3.5	3.50	3	Group 2	Group 2 (8-19) (rounded mean of 3.5)
York University, Toronto	3.5	3.50	4	Group 2	Group 2 (8-19) (rounded mean of 3.5)

Are we about to see the use of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine?

After Ukraine used long-range missiles supplied by the US, Russia fired an intermediate-range missile at Ukraine, a missle that could carry a nuclear warhead.  This was a warning:  if Ukraine continues to fire long-range missiles into Russia, then the next one Russia fires....  Even the NYT has noticed.

UPDATE:  An Australasian philosopher writes:

I gather that it's not just that the ATACMS and Stormshadow missiles fired from Ukraine into Russia are *supplied* by the US (and UK), it's that the actual firing of them requires the *direct participation of US/UK military personnel* - so from the Russian perspective these missiles are actually being fired by the US/UK (albeit with Ukrainian involvement). The Russians have made this point numerous times, including in Putin's latest statement:

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/75614

As far as I'm aware, this claim hasn't been challenged by the US/UK, so I'm surmising that it's true.

So, to be perfectly clear about this: a Democratic President whose party has just been decisively beaten in a presidential election is using the dying weeks of his administration to fire long-range missiles into the world's most heavily armed nuclear country.  When I think back to the fear we all felt during the second cold war in the early 1980s, I'm astonished that there seems to be so little concern about this: this is genuinely insane ("stupid" doesn't quite cut it!).

In Memoriam: Arnold Koslow (1933-2024)

A longtime member of the philosophy faculties at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he was emeritus, Professor Koslow wrote widely in philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and logic. He died last month.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Koslow or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.

(Thanks to Mark Zelcer for the pointer.)

 

A note about Indiana University, Bloomington and the PGR

Edouard Machery called to my attention a very unfortunate omission in the last PGR surveys.  Ordinarily, philosophy and HPS faculties at the same university are amalgamated in the faculty listings.  It turns out that this did not happen for Indiana University, Bloomington this year.  Their strong HPS faculty includes leading scholars in areas like philosophy of physics and philosophy of the psychological, cognitive & brain sciences, but Indiana will not appear as ranked in these areas due to the inadvertent omission of these faculty.  The published PGR will contain a note to this effect.

Some medians in the posted rankings may have been incorrect...

...due to the spread sheet rounding up from .5 when it should not have done so.  I'll post corrected versions of those specialty rankings as soon as the editors have an opportunity to fix the problem and send me new versions.  The groupings (based on rounded mean) will not change.

Top 50 Philosophy Ph.D. programs in the U.S. for 2024-25

MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOVEMBER 13, FOR THOSE WHO MAY HAVE MISSED IT

Below the fold are the top 50 U.S. programs, listing their rounded mean score, based on the recently completed survey of more than 200 philosophers in the Anglophone world.  (The scoring scale went from 0 [inadequate for a Ph.D. program] to 5 [distinguished].)   Full results (including median and mode scores) will appear at the PGR URL, perhaps before Thanksgiving, almost certainly in the first week of December.    I'll have the results for Canada, the U.K., and Australasia later this week as well as some of the specialty ranking results later this week and continuing into next week.  My thanks to Professors Pynes and Kar for all this!

72% of U.K. universities forecast to be running deficits by 2025-26

Seriously.  The list of redundancies and other budget cutting measures at UK universities is already long, and likely to get longer.  Note that the list of redundancies includes many leading UK universities outside Oxbridge, and even some of the London colleges.  Raising tuition a couple hundred pounds is not a solution.  The UK needs some combination of more government funding, higher tuition, and more foreign students or higher education is going to collapse into a shell of its former self.

Advertising update

Things filled up pretty quickly for the next few months.  There's still one 3rd from the top spot available in February, but everything is booked.  There are more openings come March and afterwards, including at least one top spot still open in March and April.  Please email me for more information.

How Trump can attack higher education: a guide

The Trump Administration will have four main weapons, one that will target wealthy private universities, the others that will affect all colleges and universities to varying degrees.   They are (1) taxing endowments; (2) adding conditions to eligibility for federal funding; (3) investigating universities for Title VI and other civil rights violations (e.g., using race in employment decisions), with possible Justice Department action and loss of federal funding; and (4) changing accreditation standards.  Some of (2) will be tied to (1), so I'll treat those together, although access to federally funded student loans and federal research funding is implicated under the others as well.

Targetting private, secular universities with large endowments

(1)  Endowment Tax.  The 2017 Trump tax cuts already introduced a tax of 1.4% on net investment income from endowments for schools with at least 500 tuition-paying students and assets valued at over $500,000 per student.  This affected only about three dozen schools, although with more moving into that category every year.  The two main lines of attack here would involve increasing the tax rate and/or expanding the number of schools affected by the tax.   So, for example, Ohio Republican Representative David Joyce has introduced a bill that would raise the endowment tax to 10% while lowering the threshold for taxation to endowments valued at only $250,000 per student.  (Georgia Republican Drew Ferguson proposed a bill excluding non-US citizens/permanent residents from the "per student" calculation!)  Perhaps most notably Senator (soon to be Vice-President) J.D. Vance introduced a bill that increases the endowment tax to 35% for private, secular institutions with at least $10 billion (which conveniently exempts Notre Dame, the only non-secular private institution which is that rich). 

And it gets worse:  Senator Tom Cotton and a California Republican in the House have introduce the "Woke Endowment Security Tax" which imposes a one-time tax of 6% on the entire 2022 assessed value of endowments at secular, private institutions worth at least $12.2 billion.  This kindly exempts the University of Chicago, but targets at least Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Penn, Northwestern, Columbia, and Washington University in St. Louis (Sen. Cotton's office says it will also affect Cornell, but I'm not sure where those numbers are coming from).  On this proposal, Yale would have to make a one-time payment of about $2.5 billion to the federal government.   Even Yale would find that difficult to pay without a firesale of assets, I expect.

What is a certainty is that the endowment tax will go up, and it will probably be applied to more schools.   For the super wealthy (like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, MIT) this will have minimal effects; for the rich but less wealthy (like Northwestern, Chicago, Cornell, Johns Hopkins etc.) this will have tangible effects on budgets and perhaps academic programs.  (In 2017, Congress also toyed with taxing educational benefits offered by universities to faculty and staff; that failed then, but I wouldn't be surprised if came back now.)

Historian Mazower on European fascism and its aftermath...

...and how that history marks an important difference between the U.S. and Europe.  Historians like Timothy Snyder have given the profession a bad reputation in many intellectual circles with their crude simplifications; Professor Mazower's nuanced analysis should help redeem that reputation!

 

Boston University suspends PhD admissions across humanities (including Philosophy) and social sciences...

...it appears because graduate students won higher wages.  I supsect concern about what the Trump Administration has planned for higher education may also be in the background of their concerns.

If you are staying on Twitter/X, why?

Philosopher Jc Beall raised a question which I also wonder about:  "It would be very interesting to know whether any philosophers are staying on Twitter and -- this is what I'm curious about -- *why*."  So readers who use social media, if you're staying with X, what are your reasons?  This is asked out of genuine curiosity; I can imagine reasons, but would like to hear what philosophers are thinking.

 

Biden stupidly authorizes use by Ukraine of American long-range missiles for targets inside Russia

Putin's response is not surprising.  On the other hand, one has to think that Putin realizes the whole situation will go his way once Trump is in power, so why annihilate the world?  Right?

Top Philosophy of Physics programs, 2024-25

Full results will be on the PGR website (i.e., all programs with a rounded mean of 3.0 or higher will be listed).  The list of evaluators for this specialty is below the fold.  Programs are ranked by their rounded mean score; also listed are the median and mode.  When the median or mode is very different from the rounded mean that is indicative of some notable differences of opinion among evaluators.

Philosophy of Physics	Rounded Mean	Median	Mode	Group	Group String
University of California, Irvine	5	5	5	Group 1	Group 1 (1-3) (rounded mean of 5)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	5	5	5	Group 1	Group 1 (1-3) (rounded mean of 5)
University of Pittsburgh	5	5	5	Group 1	Group 1 (1-3) (rounded mean of 5)
Oxford University	4.5	5	5	Group 2	Group 2 (4-6) (rounded mean of 4.5)
University of California, San Diego	4.5	4	4	Group 2	Group 2 (4-6) (rounded mean of 4.5)
University of Western Ontario	4.5	5	4.5	Group 2	Group 2 (4-6) (rounded mean of 4.5)
Johns Hopkins University	4	4	4, 4.5	Group 3	Group 3 (7-12) (rounded mean of 4)
London School of Economics	4	4	4	Group 3	Group 3 (7-12) (rounded mean of 4)
New York University	4	5	3, 5	Group 3	Group 3 (7-12) (rounded mean of 4)
Princeton University	4	4	4	Group 3	Group 3 (7-12) (rounded mean of 4)
Rutgers University, New Brunswick	4	4	3	Group 3	Group 3 (7-12) (rounded mean of 4)
University of Bristol	4	4	4	Group 3	Group 3 (7-12) (rounded mean of 4)

Political theorist Paul Sagar on adjusting to severe paralysis after a climbing accident

A gripping read about a horrible situation.

Steven Walt on Chomsky and U.S. foreign policy

Mostly laudatory, as one would expect from a realist.  On the other hand, a standing weakness of internationa relations realism is its failure to investigate the "elite" who decide the nation's "interest."  Chomsky can be right about the role the capitalist elite in America play in defining the nation's interests, while a different elite determined Soviet foreign policy.  Walt's piece is, in any case, worth a read.

2024 PGR: what's up next?

Last week, I posted the overall rankings for the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australasia, as well as for the Anglophone world.  Professor Pynes tells me he will be able to share various specialty ranking results starting later today or tomorrow.  I expect to have results for a variety of areas, including philosophy of physics; philosophy of the psychological, cognitive &b brain sciences; ancient Greek and Roman philosophy; political philosophy; and others.

Heidegger against the philosophical tradition

A pleasingly clear short essay at IAITV, that has some affinities with the Dreydegger familiar in the Anglophone world, but is also importantly different and probably closer to the spirit of Heidegger.