Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The return of Mandeville (in the Wall Street Journal, of course)

Political theorist David Lay Williams (DePaul) comments.

New editor at "Locke Studies"

Philosopher Daniel Layman (Davidson College) hash been appointed as the new Editor of Locke Studies.  . 

(Further information about Locke Studies is available here: https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/locke/)

(Thanks to Shelley Weinberg for the information.)

Raz as a political philosopher

Philosopher David Owens (King's College, London) offers an illuminating synoptic account, of a kind Raz himself never produced.  An excerpt from near the start:

What most clearly distinguishes Raz's social thought from its surroundings is the absence of justice. The agenda of Anglophone political philosophy of the last few decades was set by Rawls's ‘A Theory of Justice’ when he wrote that ‘justice is the first virtue of social institutions.’2 Rawls thereby made justice the master value of political philosophy. By contrast, in the index of Raz's most realised work of political and moral philosophy ‘justice’ merits no entry.3 What is at stake here? How does making justice your master value shape your thought about society and why would anyone take a different tack? The notion of justice has long been important to political theory and prevalent in political discourse but its current pre-eminence among Anglophone political philosophers is, at least in part, due to many of them conceiving of it as what I shall call a formal rather than a personal value.4 Whilst I take the notion of ‘personal value’ from Raz, ‘formal value’ is my coinage. Raz's theoretical motivations become clearer once we read him as denying the existence of formal values.

Sinclair from Roehampton to Queen's U/Belfast

Mark Sinclair (post-Kantian Continental philosophy, history of modern philosophy, metaphysics) was offered a new position at Roehampton during the recent administrative assault on the unit (and others), but has chosen to take up instead a post in philosophy at Queen's University, Belfast. This is the cost of trying to dissolve a unit and making people re-apply for their jobs:  many of the best people will leave.  (Professor Sinclair, by the way, did the very nice Bergson volume in my Routledge Philosophers series.)

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.)  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.

*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.)

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

NYU fires organic chemistry teacher for being too demanding, after student protest petition

I wish there were another gloss on this, but that seems to be the only one that is plausible.  It's not that the guy is emeritus at Princeton (until recent years, Princeton was not very strong in chemistry), or that he authored a widely used textbook.  It's that the guy taught organic chemistry for 15 years at NYU (after retiring from Princeton), without a problem, until....well, here's what the aritcle says:

After retiring from Princeton in 2007, he taught organic chemistry at N.Y.U. on a series of yearly contracts. About a decade ago, he said in an interview, he noticed a loss of focus among the students, even as more of them enrolled in his class, hoping to pursue medical careers.

“Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate,” he wrote in a grievance to the university, protesting his termination. Grades fell even as he reduced the difficulty of his exams.

The problem was exacerbated by the pandemic, he said. “In the last two years, they fell off a cliff,” he wrote. “We now see single digit scores and even zeros.”

After several years of Covid learning loss, the students not only didn’t study, they didn’t seem to know how to study, Dr. Jones said.

A lot of students have been suffering because of the pandemic, no one doubts that.  And the Internet certainly started making people stupider and lowering their attention spans in the early 2000s.  But firing a professor who has been teaching for 15 years because of al this stinks to high heavens, and means the "inmates" (sorry, the "clients") run the "asylum" (sorry, the "business").

"Race reductionism" threatens to doom the left

This is the best piece I've seen in Counterpunch in awhile; an excerpt:

A debate rages on the left between the practitioners of identity politics and alleged “class reductionists,” but the latter seem to be decidedly in the minority. This is unfortunate, because in order to defeat the threat of the far-right—whether it’s called white nationalism, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, neofascism, or proto-fascism—we’re going to have to build a movement on the basis of class struggle. This doesn’t mean denying the legitimacy of the grievances of groups defined by race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality, but it does mean incorporating them in a broader movement organized around the old Marxian dualism: the working class vs. the capitalist class.

Advertising update

There's been a flurry of bookings recently, so now the next open top spot is in March (one left), and the next open spots (2nd or 3rd) are in February.  Please email me (bleiter-at-uchicago-dot-edu) for more information.  Thanks.

Blast from the past: Philosophers, eating, ethics--a discussion of poll results

Back in 2012.

Norbert Hornstein (Maryland) on linguistics, rationalism, Chomsky, and more

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 28--A VERY INTERESTING COMMENT FROM A LINGUIST IN RESPONSE TO MY (ADMITTEDLY) OPEN-ENDED REQUEST.  I HOPE OTHERS KNOWLEDGEABLE WILL WEIGH IN NOW.

The interview continues (earlier).  I would be interested in reactions from readers knowledgeable about these issues.

"The Life of Arthur [Schopenhauer]"

The video game!

(Thanks to Boris Dagaev for the pointer.)

Crustaceans, insects, sentience, well-being

An interesting talk by philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith (Sydney) at IAITV, especially the last twenty minutes (after some initial stage-setting, much of the first ten minutes was given over to what I found a rather unsatisfying discussion of meta-ethical questions, but tastes may vary!).   Crustaceans are sentient, insects probably are, plants are probably not.  But what if we dropped sentience as the sole consideration of moral relevance, and asked about "well-being" regardless of conscious experience, perhaps, in terms of "health" or "preferences"?  That would get plants, bacteria, indeed all cellular life into the circle of moral concern.   To be clear, Godfrey-Smith does not treat that as a reductio of the position, although one could imagine someone going that route. Anyway, I found that discussion interesting and, as one would expect, empirically well-informed.

A big day for Brazil

For all my friends there, I dearly hope the fascist loses on the first round, and that he goes more peacefully than our monster-child.

UPDATE:  Unfortunately, there will have to be a run-off in a month between Lulu and the fascist.  I hope the next month is not as bad as some fear it will be.

Sleepwalking into Armageddon: Russia, Ukraine, and nuclear weapons continued

I would urge readers to at least look at comments #76 and after on the earlier, extremely informative thread about Russia, Ukraine, and nuclear weapons.   This is a very grave situation, and I now think it's highly likely Russia will use tactical nuclear weapons.  That was one natural takeaway from Putin's speech the other day:  if the U.S. can use nuclear weapons to make a point towards an enemy (the U.S. use of atomic bombs in Japan), so can Russia, to put it rather simply.   I'm going to open comments here for further discussion of these issues, since the last thread has gotten very long, although I commend all the participants there for the high level of discussion and invite them to continue here (and to offer a more optimistic interpretation).

As I'm teaching Thucydides tomorrow, I'll just conclude with a comment he made about the horrors of the civil war in Corcyra:  "The cause of all this was the desire to rule out of avarice and ambition, and the zeal for winning that proceeds from those two” (p. 92).  That was the cause of Athens's downfall as well, and it may be the cause of ours and Russia's.

Typepad, the blog service provider, was out from yesterday evening until midday today, more or less

It was a system-wide problem, so all Typepad blogs were down.  Apologies for the inconvenience.  This was the worst outage in nearly 20 years of using this blog platform, so hopefully it won't happen again.  

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Dizzy Man's Band, "Truck Driver," 1970

Dutch rock band of the 1970s, this decent number comes from their debut album:

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

Things are about to get much worse when it comes to Ukraine

MOVING TO FRONT FOR LAST TIME, ORIGINALLY POSTED SEPT 21--THERE CONTINUES TO BE TIMELY UPDATES AND INTERESTING LINKS AND COMMENTARY ON THE EVOLVING SITUATION 

Start with this:

Russia on Tuesday paved the way for the formal annexation of swathes of Ukrainian territory, backing referendum plans in areas of Ukraine its soldiers control in a direct challenge to the West that could sharply escalate the war....

In what appeared to be choreographed requests, Russian-backed officials across 15% of Ukrainian territory - an area about the size of Hungary or Portugal - lined up to request referendums on joining Russia.

The self-styled Donetsk (DPR) and the Luhansk People's Republics (LPR), which Putin recognised as independent just before the invasion, and Russian-installed officials in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions have asked for votes over less than 24 hours.

Luhansk, Donetsk and Kherson officials said the referendums would take place in just days - on Friday Sept. 23 through to Monday Sept. 27. Russia does not fully control any of the four regions, with only around 60% of Donetsk region in Russian hands.

If Moscow formally annexed a vast additional chunk of Ukraine, Putin would essentially be daring the United States and its European allies to risk a direct military confrontation with Russia, the world's biggest nuclear power.

"All this talk about immediate referendums is an absolutely unequivocal ultimatum from Russia to Ukraine and the West," said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik.

Blast from the past: Gutting on "analytic" and "Continental" philosophy

Back in 2012.

AFA letter to the University of Idaho...

...after the General Counsel advised faculty that--to comply by an Idaho law prohibiting public employees from promoting abortion--faculty in discussing abortion had "to remain neutral" in classroom discussions.  The AFA is plainly correct, and Idaho, which is within the jurisdiction of U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, will almost certainly lose a legal challenge to the General Counsel's "guidance" (especially if applied).

Survey on disagreement among ethicists

UPDATED (SEE BELOW)

Professor Boespflug asked me to share the following with readers:

Jonathan Spelman and Mark Boespflug are empirically measuring consensus and disagreement in ethics and they need your help to do it! They need philosophers--especially ethicists--to complete their survey on a variety of ethical issues. If you are able to spend 15 minutes completing it, they would greatly appreciate it.

You can find the survey here. 

A little more about the survey:

 

The study of philosophy in law schools, and JD/PhD programs in the U.S. (and elsewhere), 2022 edition

This follows up on a 2017 post on this topic, which takes as its starting point the 2017 PGR section on the study of philosophy in law schools.

Some terminology:  by "general jurisprudence," I mean the core philosophical questions about the nature of law, the relationship between law and morality, and the nature of legal reasoning; by "normative jurisprudence," I mean the myriad philosophical attempts to make normative sense (or provide normative rationalizations) of different substantive areas of law, like torts, contracts, criminal law, property, anti-discrimination law, free speech, and so on.

1.  The main reason to consider a JD/PhD program at the same university is that it almost always involves saving time on your coursework--that is one of their main advantages, along with a better chance of continuity of supervision and interaction with faculty mentors.

2.  Many students, however, do the law degree at one place, and the PhD somewhere else.  This can make good sense, depending on a student's interests and the strengths of differing schools.  (In the law school here at Chicago, we have had terrific students with PhDs (or DPhils) from Oxford, Princeton, NYU, Brown, Michigan, and CUNY, among other places; in addition, outstanding law graduates from here are now pursuing PhDs in philosophy at Princeton, Pittsburgh, and Cornell, among other places.)  (As an aside, a student with a common-law law degree and a suitable background in philosophy can do a 2-3 year JSD here in the law school at Chicago focusing on general jurisprudence.)

3.  Legal academia is more pedigree-sensitive than academic philosophy (and I'm sure many of you think academic philosophy is way too pedigree-sensitive!).  Four law schools dominate the market for new law teachers:  Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.  (With the exception of Stanford, these are also three of the top four faculties in scholarly influence, as well as the four schools that graduate the most Supreme Court clerks.)  On a per capita basis, Yale is ahead of the other three in placement in law teaching (a selection effect), and these four are ahead of everyone else (see, e.g., this from 2011 and this from 2007, although not much has changed in the interim).  On a placement success rate basis (i.e., percentage of academic job seekers who actually get tenure-track jobs), Chicago and Yale generally dominate.  Stanford Law has no serious interest in legal philosophy, so is not worth considering.  Harvard Law has recently added junior faculty in normative jurisprudence (in addition to senior faculty with philosophical interests--like Richard Fallon and Cass Sunstein [constitutional theory], John Goldberg [tort theory], and Henry Smith [property theory]), so it is a better choice than previously (it still has noone in general jurisprudence, however).

"A university is not a kindergarten."

Biologist Jerry Coyne (Chicago) comments on a famous remark of the former UChicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins, who was a strong defender of academic freedom.

On certainty and uncertainy in our lives

Philosophers Simon Blackburn (emeritus, North Carolina and Cambridge) and Ruth Chang (Oxford) discuss, along with the owner of IAITV.

Blast from the past: "Jewish poker" philosophy

A classic from 2010.

Richard Marshall interviews Eddy Keming Chen (UC San Diego)...

...at 3:16AM.  Reader comments on issues raised in the interview are welcome. (LINK NOW FIXED.)

Socialism lite

This essay excoriates (from the left) what passes for "socialism" in certain circles these days, as reflected in the recent 2022 "Socialism Conference" in Chicago, which even included some philosophers (I missed it, happily).  Some excerpts, with some interspersed observations:

The vast majority of panels were on topics related to police/prison abolition, antiracism, reproductive rights, opening borders, and other progressive movements and causes with precious little to do with socialism proper. And while there were panels billed under the categories of “labor movement” or “socialist theory and strategy” (for example, “Class Struggle Unionism,” featuring union negotiator and labor lawyer Joe Burns, and “The ABCs of Marxism”), these topics received no more time, and often far less attention, than abolitionism or various kinds of identity politics. In other words, the Socialist Conference treated the labor movement—and even socialism itself—as just one of many progressive causes, and class as just another identity around which to organize....

[M]uch of the conference was devoted to making the case that any progressive cause or movement actually is socialism. Keynote speaker Ruth Wilson Gilmore, professor and a center director at the City University of New York, claimed that abolition is communism, race the modality through which class is lived, and mass criminalization class war, pretty much all in the same breath.

Columbia University's US News ranking embarrassment

The math professor who "blew the whistle" on fake data reporting to USNews.com reveals some rather embarrassing facts here:

The public was told for years, for example, that Columbia had a higher proportion of small undergraduate classes (those with fewer than 20 students) than any other leading university. Last week, the truth that Columbia faculty and students have long known was confirmed: our undergraduate class sizes are by no means remarkably small. In fact, Columbia’s proportion of small classes is the second-worst in the Ivy League, not the best as Columbia had claimed.

Likewise, our administration had claimed that the overwhelming majority of faculty on our main campus was full-time, but now we learn that this, too, was false. In reality, the numbers of part-time faculty and full-time faculty are almost the same....

Lateral moves (and retirements etc.) since the 2021 Philosophical Gourmet Report: 2022 edition

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 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.

*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).

*Jamin Asay (metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science) from University of Hong Kong to Purdue University (2022).

*Nathan Ballantyne (epistemology) from Fordham University to Arizona State 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).

*Sharon Berry (philosophy of math & logic, epistemology) from Ashoka University to Indiana University, Bloomington (untenured lateral) (2022).

*Sabina Vaccarino Bremner (Kant, value theory, Continental philosophy) from the University of Groningen to the University of Pennsylvania (untenured lateral) (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 (2022).

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

*Steven Galt Crowell (19th- and 20th-century Continental philosophy) retired from Rice University (2022).

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

*Guillermo Del Pinal (philosophy of language and cognitive science) from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (untenured lateral) (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).

*Frances Egan (philosophy of mind and cognitive science) will retire from Rutgers University, New Brunswick at the end of calendar year 2022 (2022).

*Katrina Elliott (philosophy of science, metaphysics) from the University of California, Los Angeles (where she was tenured) to Brandeis University (untenured position, but will come up for tenure soon) (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).

*Nathan Howard (ethics, metaethics, philosophy of language) from Texas A&M University to the University of Toronto (untenured lateral) (2022).

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

*Zoe Johnson King (ethics, metaethics, epistemology) from the University of Southern California to Harvard University (untenured lateral) (2022).

*Brian Kogelmann (political philosophy) from the University of Maryland, College Park to West Virginia University (Business School) (untenured lateral) (2022).

Saul Kripke (philosophy of language, logic) at the City University of New York Graduate Center passed away (2022).

On addiction...and recovery

An interview with philosopher and clinician Hanna Pickard (Johns Hopkins) about her quite important work on addiction.

Viktor DeSantis's lawyers go for broke: public university curricula are "government speech"!

If this argument isn't rejected wholesale in court, public universities in Florida are finished (and academic freedom at all public universities may be finished):

The State of Florida asserted on Thursday that faculty members’ curricula and in-class instruction at public universities are “government speech” and “not the speech of the educators themselves.” Therefore, such expression is fair game to be regulated by state lawmakers.

“A public university’s curriculum is set by the university in accordance with the strictures and guidance of the state’s elected officials,” lawyers for the state wrote in a court filing. “It is government speech.”

Florida is relying on the 2006 Garcetti case, as I suspected they would; as I wrote previously (regarding Florida's attempt to prevent faculty from offering testimony adverse to the state):

Blast from the past: Most important/influential philosophical articles of the 20th-century

Back in 2012, with many contributions from readers.

Is a change to Australian defamation law coming? A Murdoch lawsuit may be the impetus

Australia, like the U.K. and Ireland and most other democracies, is far less protective of defamation than the United States.  But it's clear that Australian law needs some modification:  can it really be defamation to accuse the Murdochs and their Fascist News network of helping incite the stormtrooper riot at the Capitol building last year?  From a recent article:

Rupert Murdoch's eldest son -- who is also chief executive of Fox News parent Fox Corporation -- is suing Crikey over an opinion piece that linked his family's media empire to the January 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump.

The media scion's lawyers claimed their client was defamed over a dozen times in the article, which accused "the Murdochs and their slew of poisonous Fox News commentators" of being "unindicted co-conspirators" in the Capitol riot....

Crikey's defence, filed with the Federal Court Tuesday, denied it defamed Murdoch and flagged it would lean on two new defences created by [recent law] reforms.

"One is a serious harm threshold... the plaintiff now has to prove that they not only suffered some harm to reputation, but that it was serious harm to reputation," Rolph explained.

Crikey will also seek to argue that the opinion piece, by writer Bernard Keane, was in the public interest.

"I suppose the difficulty here is that defence is entirely untested. This will be a test case of that," Rolph said.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Stepson, 'Lil' Bit,' 1974

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 6, 2018--DIDN'T FIND ANYTHING NEW WORTH POSTING, SO THOUGHT I'D START REVISITING SOME GREAT NUMBERS FROM THE EARLY YEARS OF THIS FEATURE.

This Portland-based hard rock/blues band recorded but one album, from which this great rocking number comes (the whole album is worth a listen):

 

Another triumph for diversity: Italian fascist set to become Prime Minister is also a woman

It's amazing that the New York Times is so pathologically invested in "diversity" that they can't shake the fixation, even when reporting on a not-so-crypto fascist with an infantile hobbit fixation.  The article is headlined, "Giorgia Meloni Could Be the First Woman to Lead Italy," instead of "First fascist since Mussolini set to lead Italy."  The article continues:

As happy as women’s rights activists are about that fact that a woman could finally run Italy, many wish it was essentially any other woman in Italy....

“It’s not a gain at all and, indeed, a possible setback from the point of view of women’s rights,” said Giorgia Serughetti, who writes about women’s issues and teaches political philosophy at Bicocca University in Milan.

There's no evidence in the article at all that "women's rights activists" are "happy" about Meloni:  the NYT just made that up, projecting their own ideology on to the Italian political landscape.

This really is a new low for "diversity blather."

Blast from the past: Underappreciated philosophers in the U.S. active (roughly) in the first half of the 20th-century

Back in 2012, with discussion.

Society for Personality and Social Psychology ceases to be a scholarly society

This is shocking:

[M]y main professional association — the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) — recently asked me to violate my quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth. I was going to attend the annual conference in Atlanta next February to present some research with colleagues on a new and improved version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. I was surprised to learn about a new rule: In order to present research at the conference, all social psychologists are now required to submit a statement explaining “whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.” Our research proposal would be evaluated on older criteria of scientific merit, along with this new criterion.

These sorts of mandatory diversity statements have been proliferating across the academy in recent years. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the Academic Freedom Alliance, and many professors have written about why they are immoral, inappropriate, and sometimes illegal. I’ll just add one additional concern: Most academic work has nothing to do with diversity, so these mandatory statements force many academics to betray their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth by spinning, twisting, or otherwise inventing some tenuous connection to diversity. I refuse to do this, but I’ve never objected publicly.

The SPSP mandate, however, forced us all to do something more explicitly ideological. Note that the word diversity was dropped and replaced by anti-racism. So every psychologist who wants to present at the most important convention in our field must now say how their work advances anti-racism. I read Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist in the summer of 2020, so I knew that I could no longer stay silent. 

A short interview with Peter Singer about his meta-ethics and some misconceptions about his views

Not philosophically deep, but interesting nonetheless.   Here's his final comment:

I wish more philosophers would work on things that matter. I regret the fact that so many very bright and hard-working philosophers spend their time on issues that are of interest only to other philosophers, and will never have any impact on anyone outside philosophy.

I guess I don't think having an impact on people outside philosophy is necessarily a good marker that the things being worked on actually "matter."  Popular uptake for certain philosophical ideas is often a symptom of current ideological peculiarities that admit of other explanations (vide "Effective [sic] Altruism").  On the other hand, I would agree that uptake by scholars in other fields (at least serious fields) is often a good indicator that the philosophical work deals with stuff that "matters."

An essay in the NY Times that uses the idea of "reification" (correctly)

Its general point about the "medicalization" of what are political problems is also correct.  An excerpt:

A crisis that affects mental health is not the same thing as a crisis of mental health. To be sure, symptoms of crisis abound. But in order to come up with effective solutions, we first have to ask: a crisis of what?

Some social scientists have a term — “reification” — for the process by which the effects of a political arrangement of power and resources start to seem like objective, inevitable facts about the world. Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one; it’s how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become “social media addiction,” how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a “heat wave” — and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become “inflation.” Examples are not scarce.

In Memoriam: Saul Kripke (1940-2022)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 16--UPDATED

Professor Kripke was one of the 20th-century's major figures in philosophy of language and logic (see, for example).  There are a handful of analytic philosophers who will likely be read a century from now, and Kripke is one of them.  Most recently, he taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, but he spent most of his career at Princeton University.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear. 

Twitter is a cesspool of stupidity, ignorance, malice, ressentiment, and virtue-signalling, part 319...or Kripke was not a plagiarist

What's irresponsible is to accuse someone who just died of plagiarism without having any idea what one is talking about.  Quentin Smith did not cover himself in glory with this nonsense, and it was dispatched years ago by serious philosophers of language.  Stephen Neale's authoritative assessment of the debate is perhaps the most accessible account, and is certainly decisive.

The ethics of abortion, the political & civil equality of women, Roe and Dobbs and SCOTUS

I discuss all of the preceding (and more) with Mark Oppenheimer and Jason Werbeloff at Brain in a Vat.

A whole generation of the "greats" of post-WWII "analytic" philosophy is now almost entirely in the past

Kripke most recently, but since 2000, we have also lost Quine, Rawls, D.K. Lewis, P.F. Strawson, Dummett, Putnam, Davidson, B. Williams, Fodor, among others.  From that generation (born 1940 or earlier), the only philosophers of comparable stature who are still with us are David Kaplan, Thomas Nagel, and T.M. Scanlon.   I am reminded of this observation by Harry Frankfurt from a few years back:

In the United States, even after interest in William James and John Dewey had receded, there was lively attention to contributions by Willard Quine and Donald Davidson, John Rawls and Saul Kripke. In addition, some philosophers were powerfully moved by the gigantic speculative edifice of Whitehead. Heidegger was having a massive impact on European philosophy, as well as on other disciplines--and not only in Europe, but here as well. And, of course, there was everywhere a vigorously appreciative and productive response to the work of Wittgenstein.

Letters to the editor of the NY Times after the 1977 article on Kripke

I mentioned the 1977 NYT article about Kripke in connection with the memorial notice posted last week.  As it happens, that article generated a number of letters to the editor which are here; they are a curious assortment, including the usual sneering at analytic philosophers that has continued until the present.  There is a lot wrong with so-called analytic philosophy, to be sure, but taking it out on Kripke, who is as good as any analytic philosopher in the last 100 years, is bizarre:   analytic philosophy, like many other traditions, has contributed to knowledge and understanding of its topics (even if others did not care about those topics!), and Kripke contributed more than almost everyone.

Inflation, from the perspective of the working classes

The contrast with mainstream capitalist media coverage is instructive.

University of Tulsa gets new President, and reinstates B.A. degree in philosophy

That's good news!  (Prior coverage.)

(Thanks to Jennifer Frey for the pointer.)

An interview with Norbert Hornstein (Maryland) on Chomsky as philosopher

Here.

America is doomed, part 511...

...and it's all thanks to the Repugs (and, of course, Fox News):

“By any indication, the Republican Party — upper level, midlevel and grass roots — is a party that can only be described as not committed to democracy,” Mr. Levitsky said. He added that he was significantly more concerned about American democracy than when his and Mr. Ziblatt’s book, “How Democracies Die,” came out in 2018.

Juan José Linz, a political scientist who died in 2013, coined the term “semi-loyal actors” to describe political officials who typically do not initiate attacks on democratic rules or institutions but who also do not attempt to stop these attacks. Through their complicity, these semi-loyal actors can cause a party, and a country, to slide toward authoritarianism.

That’s what happened in Europe in the 1930s and in Latin America in the 1960s and ’70s. More recently, it has happened in Hungary. Now there are similar signs in the United States.

"Marx's Economics and the Transition from Capitalism to Communism"

A draft of Chapter 4 (which, at this stage, is all my fault!) of the forhtcoming Marx book I am co-authoring with Jaime Edwards is available here.  (This is revised since presentation last week at the NYU Colloquium.)  Here is the abstract for those who might be interested:

This chapter offers an overview and interpretation of Marx’s economics and his account of why capitalism should eventually yield to socialism. Topics covered include: the background of Marx’s labor theory of value in Smith and especially Ricardo; the failure of the labor theory of value as an account of production prices; the irrelevance of the labor theory of value to Marx’s most important claims about capitalism (e.g., the pursuit of more money [profit] as the raison d’etre of all capitalists [agreeing with Milton Friedman, among others]; the unparalleled power of capitalism to produce technological development; the constant displacement of human labor by technology, etc.); “exploitation” as a technical, rather than moral notion; the “fetishism” of commodities; the failure of the “falling rate of profit” account of the demise of the capitalism; the plausibility of the mass immiseration and underconsumption model of capitalist crises; the preconditions of revolution (massive productive power, mass immiseration), which have never obtained and still do not obtain; the role of self-interest in revolution and the irrelevance of moral philosophy or appeals to altruism; and Marx’s conception of “freedom” as work freed from the necessity of laboring in order to survive (“wage slavery”). We argue that socialism (i.e., the use of massive productive power to meet human needs and free people from “wage slavery”) is not, contrary to Marx’s teleological rhetoric, inevitable, and that the choice between “socialism or barbarism” (as Luxemburg framed it) could go either way.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Buffalo, "United Nations," 1974

We haven't featured this Australian hard rock band (who never really made it outside the homeland) in quite some time.  Here they are doing the live version of what became the concluding number of their third album:

BA.2.75.2: natural selection marches on

This new Omicron variant appears to have much greater ability to escape antibodies.   How it will fare against the new bivalent Covid vaccines (tailored to BA.4 and BA.5) remains to be seen, I guess, although the data reported in the linked article does not make one optimistic.  This variant just recently climbed past the 1% mark in U.S. prevalence.  Links to additional literature on this latest variant welcome.