Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The Australian federal election

The "Liberal" party (the party of the right, although as we 've noted before, they're basically Democrats in U.S. terms) was roundly defeated, while a Labor Prime Minister was elected, albeit without a majority in the legislature.   The Greens and the "Teal Independents" both showed an increased share of the vote, allegedly reflecting increasing anxiety about climate change.  (Of course, if Achen & Bartels are right, this explanation is too simple.)   At a time when some countries (the U.S., the U.K., Poland, Hungary) are veering to the right, it's nice to see another veering to something resembling the left.

Princeton moves to fire classics professor for what look to be pretextual reasons

Two years ago, Princeton classics professor Joshua Katz wrote an inflammatory essay in Quillette criticizing the idiotic letter from many of his colleagues proposing a massive violation of academic freedom for the sake of "anti-racism."  His essay offended many people at Princeton, resulting in serial denunciations, including by the President Christopher Eisgruber.  Now the University is moving to fire Katz, it claims for a previous relationship with a former student for which the university had already sanctioned him earlier (a one year suspension without pay).  (Note that the University itself agreed it was consensual and exonerated Katz from allegations of sexual harassment.)  

2022 Lakatos Prize goes to...

...Catarina Dutilh Novaes (VU Amsterdam) for her book The Dialogic Roots of Deduction.

 

On Raz's political philosophy

An essay by Steven Wall (Arizona).

The Trolley Problem's trolley ride, reviewed by a passenger...

...who didn't like it one bit!

(Thanks to Moti Gorin for the pointer.)

Publishers no longer providing hard copies of books for review?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM MAY 16--AN EYE-OPENING SET OF COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME

A philosopher elsewhere, who is also a book review editor at a journal, writes:

Over the last few years, publishers having been increasingly pushing a policy of only providing digital copies of books for review in journals. This is making the book reviews editor’s job more difficult, since it is now quite common to find that a potential reviewer refuses to review the book if only digital copy is made available, thus further reducing the already small pool of potential reviewers. The fact that people are refusing of course also indicates that it makes the reviewer’s job more onerous. It is difficult to think of a good faith rationale for this on behalf of the press other than a money-saving one, and it is the already unpaid reviewer who is paying a further price for doing an important job.

I was unaware of this development.  How common is this?   I would certainly decline to review any book for which there was no hard copy.  I'm not surprised to hear I'm not alone on that front.

Enemy of academic freedom watch: Old Dominion University President Brian Hemphill

That's the only conclusion one can draw from this CHE story.  A shameful failure of academic leadership.  (Note that President Hemphill's PhD is not in a real scholarly field, but in "higher education administration.")

In Memoriam: Bruno Celano (1961-2022)

I was very sorry to learn (via Prof. Mauricio Maldonado) that Professor Celano, who taught at the University of Palermo for many years, has died.  He was undoubtedly one of the most gifted legal philosophers in Europe, and we were very glad to publish one of his English-language papers in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law.  There is more about his work here.

Blog platform problems

Typepad, the blog platform service I use, has been having trouble periodically the last few days.  My apologies for the inconvenience.  Alas, I have no control over it.  Usually they fix these problems fairly quickly, and I hope that will be the case this time.  If you can't access the blog at a particular time, please wait a couple of hours, and then try again.  Thank you.

"Ethics in Action"

A philosophy podcast by Nir Eisikovits (U Mass/Boston).

Survey for academic philosophers regarding "exploitation"

I was asked to share information about this survey, which academic philosophy readers are invited to take:

We are conducting a survey about academic philosophers' (academic faculty, emerita, lecturers, post-docs and graduate students) views of what exploitation is, by judging how exploitative you feel various abstract scenarios are.

It takes roughly ten minutes to complete the questions, with the option to answer more if you like. If you complete the survey, we will send you a copy of the eventual working paper summarizing the results and we will enter you in our prize draw to receive one of ten $200 (or local currency equivalent) Amazon vouchers (unless you opt out).

Click here to take our survey:

https://esmt.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8xoBXMOuNd3w30W

Thank you for contributing your expertise!

We have been granted ethical approval by review committees at our institutions. We are Benjamin Ferguson (Warwick), Peter Matthews (Middlebury), David Ronayne (ESMT Berlin), and Roberto Veneziani (Queen Mary University London).

"Why should capitalism self-destruct? Marx's account reconsidered"

This paper will be presented at a conference at the University of Amsterdam in late June; some of this material will migrate into the book on Marx I'm co-authoring with Jaime Edwards.  Here is the abstract:

Marx, partly due to the malign influence of Hegel, often expressed the view that capitalism would necessarily collapse. One of his arguments for that conclusion, the supposed tendency of the rate of profit to fall, fails. I focus mainly on the more important argument: the incentive for all capitalists to promote and embrace technological innovations means that human labor power will become less and less necessary in capitalist societies. Since most people depend on the ability to sell their labor power, consumption will inevitable decline in capitalist societies. Since profit is only realized when commodities are consumed, capitalists will have less and less reason to utilize their productive power to generate what humans want and need. Although this state of affairs--which is gradually being realized in the era of global capital--will result in economic depression, it need not, contrary to Marx, result in capitalism's collapse.

A propos nothing...

...but the Internet threw this at me, and I must say it's very weird!  Bottom line:  do not forage for mushrooms, ever.

Adolph Reed on "antiracist" politics: neither left, nor egalitarian, nor democratic

His latest here; an excerpt:

The class character of antiracist clientelism is even more transparent than its fin-de–siècle progenitor’s. Its proponents can defend the assertion that racism is the fundamental determinant of life chances for black Americans only via a sleight-of-hand that divests slavery and Jim Crow of their historical specificity as discrete systems of economic and social relations and construes them as almost incidental extrusions of a transcendent racism or white supremacy or, even more tendentiously, in a devil theory positing that all human history has been driven by an ontological anti-blackness. Having transmogrified material social relations into attitudes, putative evidence that such attitudes persist supports assertions that “nothing” has changed since 1619 or 1919.18 It is telling that commitment to that argument subordinates providing concrete causal accounts of how current inequalities are thereby produced and reproduced to taxonomizing apparent racial disparities as instances of the workings of trans-historical racism or white supremacy. This perspective minimizes the significance of political-economic changes since 1965, including deindustrialization, the panoply of regressive policy developments associated with neoliberalization, and the significance of the marked increases in occupational, income, and wealth stratification among African Americans.19 The point of this politics is not to identify and pursue strategies to attack inequalities or injustices affecting black Americans but to make certain that they are understood as stemming from an evanescent racism. An implication is that only inequalities that can be attributed to specifically racial sources are a proper matter for concern. Combined with the central focus on addressing racial disparities within the existing capitalist class hierarchy, those characteristics of contemporary antiracism underscore the extent to which it is a class program.

REF 2021 results for philosophy

The periodic Research Excellence Framework in the UK is significant because it affects the allocation of funding to the universities.   While in its origins it focused exclusively on research output, it has since incorporated criteria like "public" impact, which does not mean the impact of one's scholarship on one's field, but rather, e.g., how often one gets media coverage.   The "top ten" in the UK overall are, perhaps unsurprisingly, somewhat bizarre: 

1.  University of Birmingham

2.  University of York

3.  University College London

3.  London School of Economics

5.  University of Kent

6.  University of Southampton

7.  University of Manchester

8.  University of Warwick

9.  University of Glasgow

10. Cambridge University

Oxford, in case you're wondering, was 19th.  Less bizarre (and more like the PGR results) was the top ten based on "research power":

Bertrand Russell and the "realist" revolt in metaphysics

Philosopher Fraser MacBride (Manchester) discusses.

Abortion, involuntary servitude, specific performance

Philosopher/lawyer Alec Walen (Rutgers) comments.

Lateral moves (and retirements) since the 2021 Philosophical Gourmet Report

In addition to the separate posts announcing (generally tenured) faculty moves, I will keep a running list of all lateral moves 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).  The year in parentheses at the end of each listing indicates the year the appointment (or retirement) takes effect.  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.  Please e-mail me with additions or corrections.

*Sara Aronowitz (philosophy of cognitive science, epistemology) from the University of Arizona to the University of Toronto (untenured lateral) (2022).

*Caroline Arruda (ethics, metaethics, philosophy of action) from the University of Texas, El Past to Tulane University (2022).

*John Bengson (epistemology, philosophy of mind and action, metaethics, metaphilosophy) from the University of Wisconsin, Madison to the University of Texas, Austin (2022).

*Sean Carroll (philosophy of physics, metaphilosophy [esp. naturalism]) from California Institute of Technology to Johns Hopkins University (2022).

*Colin Chamberlain (early modern philosophy) from Temple University to University College London.

*Juan Comesana (epistemology) from the University of Arizona to Rutgers University, New Brunswick (2022).

*Nilanjan Das (epistemology, Indian philosophy) from University College London to the University of Toronto (2022).

*Kevin Dorst (epistemology, logic, cognitive science) from the University of Pittsburgh to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (untenured lateral) (2022).

*Daniela Dover (ethics, moral psychology, social & politcal philosophy) from the University of California, Los Angeles to Oxford University (untenured lateral) (2022).

*Owen Flanagan (moral psychology, ethics, philosophy of mind and cognitive science) who had been on phased retirement at Duke University will retire fully in August (2022).

*Miranda Fricker (ethics, epistemology, feminist philosophy) from the City University of New York Graduate Center to New York University (2022).

*Courtney Fugate (Kant, pre-Kantian German philosophy) from the American University of Beirut to Florida State University (2022).

*Manon Garcia (feminist philosophy, 20th-century Continental philosophy, moral & political philosophy) from Yale University to Free University Berlin (untenured lateral) (2022).

*Charles L. Griswold (18th-century philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, ancient philosophy) will retire 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).

*Jenann Ismael (philosophy of physics, metaphysics, cognitive science) from Columbia University to Johns Hopkins University (2022).

*Patricia Marechal (ancient philosophy) from Northwestern University to the University of California, San Diego (untenured lateral) (2022).

Philosopher Erin Kelly (Tufts) wins Pulitzer Prize...

...for a co-authored biography of an African-American artist who survived the Jim Crow South.

(Thanks to Afton Greco for the pointer.)

In Memoriam: Joseph Raz (1939-2022) (Updated)

MOVING TO FRONT--ORIGINALLY POSTED MAY 2, MANY NEW UPDATES

After H.L.A. Hart (his teacher), Raz was the most important figure in Anglophone legal philosophy, and also made significant contributions to political and moral philosophy.  During his long tenure at Oxford, he trained many other legal philosophers, including John Gardner, Leslie Green, Andrei Marmor, Denise Reaume, Julie Dickson, Brian Bix, and Scott Shapiro, among others.   I will write more and add links later today.  As it happens, I am teaching his seminal paper "Authority, Law, and Morality" in jurisprudence this very day.

SOME MORE:   Raz's three most important books were Practical Reason and Norms (1975), The Authority of Law (1979), and The Morality of Freedom (1986).  Many entries at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discuss Raz's views:  his argument for exclusive legal positivism; perfectionism (and generally); and obligations and reasons.  A concern with the nature and kinds of reasons runs throughout his work, and figures, for example, in the paper I mentioned I'm teaching today (authoritative directives give exclusionary reasons for acting, and since all law claims authority, law must satisfy certain non-normative prerequisites for claiming authority...which rules out the inclusive positivism that Hart endorsed in the "Postscript" to The Concept of Law.)   Although much indebted to Hart, Raz explicitly rejected both Hart's naturalism and his skepticism about the objectivity of evaluative judgments.  (I'm with Hart, not Raz on this issue!)  My former student Michael Sevel (Sydney) is finishing the first comprehensive treatment of Raz's entire philosophy for OUP, which shall shed new light on the deep connections between his work in moral, political, and legal philosophy.

I'll add some more personal recollections later.  Readers are welcome to do the same in the comments.  (Submit comments only once, they may take awhile to appear, given my schedule today.)

ANOTHER:  Despite some debilitating health problems the last few years, Raz continued doing philosophical work.  His most recent book just appeared this past February, edited by his former student, the moral philosopher Ulrike Heuer (UCL).

SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS:  I first met Joseph in the summer of 1995 at Oxford, at an informal conference organized by Oxford and University of Southern California.  I presented some of my work on American legal realism.  Having never met him before, and being a youngster, I was rather taken aback by the aggressive nature of his questioning (and I had gone to Michigan, the place where students would sometimes cry in seminar!).   There was no hostility in Raz's style of questions, but he also had no "bedside manner."  While surprised (having never engaged with him before), I didn't mind, and the questions helped me clarify and revise the paper.  I held my own well enough, I guess, that John Gardner, who was also there, asked me to review Neil Duxbury's philosophically feeble Patterns of American Jurisprudence for Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.

Abortion, religion and SCOTUS, redux

A propos this, Professor Rick Garnett (Law, Notre Dame) writes:

[I]t is not clear why the claim "human fetuses are moral subjects and this fact constrains what should be done with and to them" is any more "religious", or any less "moral", than the claim "all human beings are moral equals, regardless of race, and should be treated as such in law." 

The only people who are obsessed with protecting fertilized eggs and early stage fetuses are religious people, usually of a certain orthodox variety (mostly Christian in this country).  Professor Garnett is correct that his second claim about human equality also has a religious origin, which is why Nietzsche hoped that kind of moral egalitarianism would die along with God.  Unlike Nietzsche, I'm a moral egalitarian, despite being the least religious person in every other respect:   as Nietzsche also understood (in other contexts), moral attitudes are matters of deeply ingrained habits of feeling, that easily outlast their supposed justifications.   Fortunately, the egalitarian attitudes have, so far, survived the death of God:  in that sense, moral egalitarianism has become secularized.  But the pro-embryo movement has not become secularized in that way (where are its secular adherents?  why are 99.9% of its proponents religious?), and it really defies credulity for anyone to suggest that a conservative Catholic upbringing would not produce profound antipathy towards abortion that would influence, perhaps not consciously, how a judge approaches any case that presents an opportunity to restrict its legal availability.

ADDENDUM:  Here's what conservative Catholics would really like the super-legislature to do!  I trust even Professor Garnett would acknowledge the role of religious conviction in that position.

Joseph Raz's final wishes

Joseph's longtime partner, Penelope Bulloch, kindly gave permission to share this message she had sent to various friends (earlier memorial notice):

Joseph did not want a funeral. 

He left his body to the London Anatomy Office, for education or research, and it has been accepted. They know he was a Professor, and told me ‘now he can go on teaching’.

Plato makes Socrates, on trial for his life, tell the jury why he will not stop talking about philosophy: ‘it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living’ (Apology 37e-38a).

In Memoriam: T.K. Seung (1930-2022)

My friend and former colleague, the philosopher A.P. Martinich (Texas), called to my attention that Professor Seung, who taught at Texas for nearly fifty years, passed away in February.  There is a memorial notice (and other information) here.  

I knew "Tom" Seung, but not as well as some others.  He was sui generis, both in the breadth of his philosophical and literary interests and his personal style.  When animated in a philosophical discussion, he would often slap the leg or arm of the person he was talking to!  There was no hostility in the gesture, it was like a physical punctuation point.  Al Martinich's recollection gives a nice sense of the person Tom was.

Jennifer Ruth, enemy of academic freedom

And she's now continuing her war on academic freedom (under the guise of protecting it) with Michael Berube in a very bad book reviewed here:

It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom...is a maddening book. It raises many important questions but is so chock-full of unresolved contradictions; gross misrepresentations; and wild, unjustified claims that it ultimately makes you wonder how the manuscript made it into print.

It's a serious embarrassment for the AAUP that Ruth is allowed anywhere near its committee on academic freedom.

"Abortion and Women's Rights," a 1970 film

Via Rogers Smith (Penn) on Facebook, I came across this striking, short documentary, about a past that may yet become the future in large parts of the country.

If Roe is overruled, what's next?

Illuminating discussion from law professor Michael Dorf (Cornell).

2022 Newcombe Fellowships for PhD students

Just two philosophy graduate students, one at Boston College and one at University of Wisconsin, Madison.  Some background on the Newcombe Fellowships and why philosophers fare so poorly, even though at the start philosophy PhD students typically got five or six of the awards each year.

Ismael from Columbia to Johns Hopkins

Jenann Ismael (philosophy of physics, metaphysics, cognitive science), Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, where she will begin this fall.  That's a major appointment for Hopkins, which ought to push the program into the overall U.S. top 25, as well as making the program an attractive choice in philosophy of physics (Ismael and Sean Carroll join other Hopkins faculty in this area).

May blogging

As I mentioned awhile back, this is a very busy month--with the end of our Spring quarter looming, grading, and various other deadlines.  As a result, I will be doing less blogging this month, although I will still put things up.

On the now likely prospect that Roe v. Wade is overruled by SCOTUS, i.e., the super-legislature

The leaked opinion overruling Roe v. Wade (1973) (and also the later Casey opinion [1992], affirming the "core" holding of Roe) written by the right-wing Catholic justice Samuel Alito of the U.S. Supreme Court was most probably leaked by an abortion opponent worried that some of the other conservative Catholics who had joined the draft of Alito's opinion (Justices Coney Barrett, Gorsuch*, Kavanaugh, and Thomas) might defect (Thomas was certainly not a risk for defecting, the others possibly).  (see Joey Fishkin [UCLA] on Twitter for this hypothesis.)   As my colleague Geoffrey Stone observed regarding a badly reasoned 2007 anti-abortion decision by SCOTUS:

What, then, explains this decision? Here is a painfully awkward observation: All five justices in the majority in Gonzales are Catholic. The four justices who are either Protestant or Jewish all voted in accord with settled precedent. It is mortifying to have to point this out. But it is too obvious, and too telling, to ignore.

This time around one conservative Catholic (Chief Justice Roberts) was missing, but as recent years have shown, he is nervous about the  Supreme Court being treated as the super-legislature it is.  Stone's analysis generated an uproar, but it was correct then, as it would be correct now:  someone with a conservative Catholic upbringing will of course regard abortion as verboten, and will thus find attractive--even without recognizing their real motivations--any colorable legal arguments that return the question of its permissibility to the legislative process (knowing full well, of course, that its availability will be restricted as a result).  (To understand how reactionary Justice Alito is please note that as a young alumnus in his 20s of Princeton University he joined in the early 1970s the "Conservative Alumni of Princeton," a group formed in reaction to Princeton admitting women!)

More reasons to worry about nuclear war: Russia's system for detecting attack is not as good as the American's

From the Washington Monthly:

Russia and the United States are the most heavily armed of the nine nuclear powers....But only the U.S. has comprehensive surveillance of the globe, provided by three active geosynchronous satellites, with two in reserve, whose infrared receptors can spot missile plumes. That data is supplemented by radar, which gives the U.S. the capacity to double-check that a launch has actually occurred.

Specialists call this verification by both satellite and radar “dual phenomenology.” The Russians don’t have it, at least not reliably. They lack adequate space-based monitoring to supplement their radar.

What they have is a “terrible and dangerous technology shortfall,” according to Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology, and national security policy at MIT and a former scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations.

The universe is not a wave function

Philosopher Eddy Keming Chen (UC San Diego) comments.

UPDATE:  Philosopher David Wallace (Pittsburgh) writes:

I saw you flagged Eddy Chen’s recent paper on the blog. A quick observation in case you’re interested: the article is engaging and provocative but risks encouraging a regrettably-common confusion, in that it mostly conflates 'the wave-function is representational' with 'the wave-function is real'. Consider: there are c.10,000 students at Pitt, and they take four courses per semester, so the academic results of the undergraduate body each semester are represented by a single point in 40,000-dimensional 'grade space'. Is the grade-space point representational? Does it represent objective mind-independent features of the world? Yes, obviously; indeed, we know what those features are - I'm supposed to be determining some of them now instead of writing this note. Is it real? That depends on your philosophy of math, but at most it's real in the sense that numbers are real. Is there an *object* it represents? No. Do Pitt undergraduates, collectively, live in 40,000-dimensional space? Obviously not.

It probably is the majority view in physics that the wave-function is representational, indeed that it represents inter alia the ordinary macroscopic features of the world. But that doesn't entail that the wave-function is real, or that the universe is a wavefunction. You can motivate that as a further move - it's not silly in the way that reifying grade space is silly - but it doesn't in any way follow automatically. It's a very substantive (and in my view incorrect) additional metaphysical move, by no means a consensus view in philosophy of physics and very heterodox in physics proper, even among those who agree that the wave-function is representational. Many physicists of a cosmological bent might assent to 'the wave-function represents all the dynamical properties of the Universe'; few indeed would assent to 'the universe is a wave-function'.

Chen himself appreciates the distinction, I'm sure, and the article occasionally acknowledges it ("One dominant interpretation of the wave function is that it in fact represents physical reality – some even argue that the universe as a whole is just a quantum wave function") but they're often conflated in the text and even more so in the headings and provocative title, though I appreciate Chen might not have written these himself.

More on Russia, Ukraine and nuclear war

A propos yesterday's post, a reader sends along these quotes from "experts" about the likelihood of nuclear weapons being used--it is hardly reassuring.   This scholar warns of the dangers of using Ukraine as a "proxy war" (as the U.S. has now admitted it is doing), and also suggests that ceding Donbas is one way to minimize the risk of Armageddon:

(Thanks to S. Wallerstein for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Here's a more optimistic take, although it involves induction over a relatively short period of time and very few incidents.  But I hope he's right!

ANOTHER:  Philosopher David Wallace (Pittsburgh) writes with a useful clarification about the Democracy Now interview:

More on Princeton's wealth and the "reality on the ground"

A Princeton professor writes:

Regarding https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2022/04/per-student-value-of-endowments-of-american-colleges-and-universities-2021.html , unfortunately you played right into the Princeton administration’s strategy of saying that life could not be better than being on faculty at Princeton. They have told me that for many years, as I struggled to make mortgage payments, to find time to advise dozens of senior theses and junior papers, to prepare brilliant lectures for the scions.

Several full professors, even endowed chairs, in philosophy earn significantly less than the Princeton average, and so significantly less than philosophy professors at Rutgers, NYU, or UCLA.

I appreciate your using your blog as a platform to highlight economic injustice.

Seven philosophers elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (CORRECTED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY

They are:  Jeffrey Barrett (UC Irvine), Elisabeth Lloyd (Indiana), Jeff McMahan (Oxford), Nancy Sherman (Georgetown), and Linda Zagzebski (Oklahoma).

UPDATE:  Two non-Anglophone philosophers were also elected:  Beate Roessler (Amsterdam) and M. Emanuela Scribano (Ca' Foscari).   (Thanks to Stefano Bacin for catching the error of omission.)

Richard Marshall interviews Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Berlin)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Per student value of endowments of American colleges and universities, 2021

The extreme inequality in resources is getting more and more dramatic.  Here's some of what Princeton's gargantuan endowment (below the fold) buys for faculty:   a teaching load of three courses per year; a $15,000 annual research and travel budget, but in fact faculty can get more money usually if they exhaust the budget; a semester off after every five semesters of teaching; special mortgage deals to help with housing; and the highest average salaries for full professors at a university without a law school or business school to inflate the average numbers!

It's really time for the U.S. and NATO to stop arming Ukraine, and cede the Donbas region to Russia, as they have already ceded Crimea

The reason is simple:  we are sleepwalking into Armageddon:

Putin has broken a post-Cuba taboo on threatening to go nuclear. That, in itself, puts us in new territory. Without most people being aware of it, the world is entering its most dangerous period since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The majority under the age of 50 have grown up thinking the nuclear spectre is a relic of the last century. In the past few weeks, the prospect of a nuclear exchange has become the most live threat to this century’s peace...

If there were a 5 per cent chance of Putin detonating a battlefield nuclear weapon, the world would be at more risk than at any point in most people’s lifetimes. In the past few days, Moscow’s signalling has arguably raised the chances to one in 10. Putin described last week’s test of the Sarmat hypersonic intercontinental ballistic missile as giving the west “food for thought".... On Wednesday, Putin said: “We have all the instruments for this [responding to an existential threat to Russia] — ones nobody else can boast of. And we will use them, if we have to.” The natural response is that Joe Biden and his European counterparts have made it plain Nato will not fight in Ukraine. The west, in other words, poses no “existential threat” to Russia — its threshold for use of nuclear weapons. But that is only how the west sees it. Putin’s threats, and those of his officials, have been made in the context of claiming Russia is already at war with Nato. Russians are being told every day that they are in a fight for national survival against western-backed Nazis. This level of rhetoric exceeds anything from the cold war....

Last time I checked, this site wasn't getting many visits from the White House.  So one can only hope that sensible people in the corridors of power are weighing these catastrophic risks, but so far, there's little indication of that.

UPDATE:  More perspectives on Ukraine and the risk of nuclear war.

ANOTHER:   The original point (above) has already been made by Chomsky:

I’m not criticizing Zelensky; he’s an honorable person and has shown great courage. You can sympathize with his positions. But you can also pay attention to the reality of the world. And that’s what it implies. I’ll go back to what I said before: there are basically two options. One option is to pursue the policy we are now following, to quote Ambassador Freeman again, to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian. And yes, we can pursue that policy with the possibility of nuclear war. Or we can face the reality that the only alternative is a diplomatic settlement, which will be ugly—it will give Putin and his narrow circle an escape hatch. It will say, Here’s how you can get out without destroying Ukraine and going on to destroy the world.

 

Linguistic Society of America moves to adopt the Chicago Principles on Free Expression

Here.   Will the American Philosophical Association do so?  I'm skeptical, but let us see.

ADDENDUM:  Some of the comments that follow make clear that Linguistics is afflicted by the same mindless identity politics that afflicts philosophy:

An interview with Professor Santurri about St. Olaf's violation of his academic freedom rights

Here.

Some skepticsm about grouping Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch together philosophically

Philosopher Jennifer Frey (South Carolina) makes some very good points in this review essay of the recent books we have noted previously; some excerpts:

On both accounts, each member of the quartet was able to reach her full potential as a philosopher because the Big Men on Campus—A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Richard Hare and others—were away fighting the war. Their absence was critical, these books argue, because these men, who dominated the intellectual scene at Oxford, were hell-bent on destroying traditional philosophical reflection into metaphysics and morals...

This narrative frame comes from Mary Midgley herself, who, in 2013, wrote a letter to the Guardian arguing that she and her friends were able to thrive as philosophers because “there were fewer men about then"....

While this account fits with Midgley’s idea that women are bound by their sex to do philosophy differently (and perhaps better) than men, and surely reflects her own experience of Oxford, it strikes me as out of joint with what we know about the personalities of some of her friends. The insistence of all three authors on shoehorning these women’s stories into an all-too-familiar pop-feminist narrative distorts the unique nature of the bonds these women forged together. It also insinuates, insultingly, that they needed to be treated with kid gloves in order to mature intellectually. I find it difficult to believe that Anscombe needed to be sheltered from the clever men of Oxford in order to cultivate her legendary philosophical habits, or that Murdoch would have lacked the boldness to hold her own in a room full of men who plainly lacked the imaginative vision she herself possessed...

Das from UCL to Toronto

Nilanjan Das (epistemology, Indian philosophy), currently Lecturer in Philosophy at University College London, has accepted appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.  Toronto was already probably the strongest program in the Anglophone world for Indian philosophy, but now there can be no doubt!

Fugate from American U of Beirut to Florida State

Courtney D. Fugate (Kant, pre-Kantian German philosophy), currently Associate Professor of Philosophy and Civilization Studies at the American University of Beirut, has accepted a tenured appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University, where he will start in the fall. 

60% of the U.S. population has now had Covid

I've love to see the class breakdown on this.  We all know the age breakdown, of course (my own father was an early victim of the Covid disaster in this country, which is wholly attributable to Trump and the Repugs).  Recall this post from early in the pandemic.  We hardly knew what was coming...

Florida man, taking advantage of new "parental rights" law, asks school libraries to remove the Bible

Exactly right:

"My objection to the Bible being in your public schools is based on the following seven points, offered for your learned consideration," Stevens wrote.

Stevens proceeded to question whether the Bible is age-appropriate, pointing to its "casual" references to murder, adultery, sexual immorality, and fornication. "Do we really want to teach our youth about drunken orgies?"

He also took issue with the many Biblical references to rape, bestiality, cannibalism and infanticide. "In the end, if Jimmy and Susie are curious about any of the above, they can do what everyone else does – get a room at the Motel Six and grab the Gideons," he wrote....

"If you want to teach morality and ethics, do you really want to turn to a book that wants you to dash babies against rocks?" he told NPR, pointing to Psalm 137:9.

FIRE on Professor Santurri's mistreatment by St. Olaf

Here.

Art and offense at Vermont Law School

Historian Amna Khalid (Carleton) comments.

In Memoriam: Aaron Smuts (1975-2022)

MOVING TO FRONT, ORIGINALLY POSTED MARCH 25--UPDATED

I was very sorry to learn of the untimely passing of Professor Smuts, who wrote widely in value theory (including both aesthetics and ethics), and was, at the time of his death, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at Rhode Island College.  You can learn more about his work here.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

(Thanks to Noel Carroll for the information.)

UPDATE:  An obituary here.

ANOTHER:  A memorial notice in the newsletter of the American Society of Aesthetics is here.

2021-22 philosophy job market

Philosopher Marcus Arvan (Tampa) offers his informative annual assessment, with useful comparisons to prior years.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is still real

Dunning responds to critics.  Every day on Twitter confirms its existence, of course.