Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

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.

Lateral moves (and retirements etc.) 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 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).

*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 (2023).

*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).

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

*Thomas Hurka (ethics), who has been on phased retirement at the University of Toronto, will retire at the end of the 2022-23 academic year (2023). (This information was included in the 2021 PGR surveys, so should, in principle, have been taken into account by evaluators.)

*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).

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.

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

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.

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.

Martha Nussbaum discusses "The Fragility of Goodness" with Bill Moyers...

...back in 1988.

(I found this link via Matt Kramer on Facebook--I'd never seen this clip previously.)

William Buckley, enemy of academic freedom

A useful reminder.

Blast from the past: Philosophers behaving bizarrely in cyberspace, Dan Hicks edition

Back in 2019.  Happily, there's been no similarly disturbed repeat performance since this expose.

"Feedburner" is defunct

For those who enjoy receiving blog posts delivered to your email account each day, I'm sorry to report that the service known as Feedburner has been discontinued by Google.  As an alternative, you can use an RSS reader, and still subscribe to this blog via Feedly, NewsBlur, or Inoreader.

New York City these days

MOVING TO FRONT FROM THIS MORNING:  UPDATED (AND COMMENTS OPEN FOR THOSE ALSO FAMILIAR WITH NYC OVER TIME TO SHARE THEIR VIEWS)

Last week I was at the NYU Colloquium in Legal, Social & Political Philosophy presenting work on Marx (that was great, the best intellectual experience I've had in a long time [special thanks to Sam Scheffler and Jeremy Waldron for making it so!]), and as part of the invitation NYU kindly gave us an apartment for the week, which was the first time my wife and I had been in NYC together in quite a number of years (it was also the first time I was there since the pandemic).   Now I was born in Manhattan, and still have distinct traces of the Brooklyn/Manhattan accent I acquired from my father and listening to a lot of Lenny Bruce as a kid, and I later practiced law in NYC and lived there again between 1991-1993 with my wife while finishing my PhD.  So I have warm feelings towards my hometown, although it has changed a lot since the 1960s/early 1970s of my youth.  (Films that give you a feel for the "look" of Manhattan then include Serpico, The 7-Ups, and, most notoriously, Death Wish.)   

As global capital continues its evisceration of the working classes in the U.S....

...approval of labor unions rises to a high not seen since 1965.  Unfortunately, labor union membership today is only 9%, compared to 28% in 1965.   The capitalist class in the U.S. has been quite successful, largely through changes in the law, in suppressing union membership.

Creativity: its sources, its varieties, and the conditions under which it appears

Philosopher Peter Carruthers (Maryland) discusses.

Why do some people never get Covid, despite significant exposure?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM THIS MORNING--I OMITTED THE ARTICLE LINK, MY APOLOGIES!

This does seem like a rather important question!  Links to other literature on this topic welcome.

In Memoriam: Don Marquis (1935-2022)

Professor Marquis taught philosophy at the University of Kansas from 1967 until his retirement in 2014.  He was, of course, best-known for his widely anthologized paper "Why Abortion is Immoral" (Journal of Philosophy, 1989), and he wrote widely in bioethics.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Marquis.

(Thanks to Dale Dorsey for the information.)

University of Toronto, Scarborough campus curriculum review suggests confusion about what a university is

The summary (and the full document) are here; an excerpt:

The review was launched in the Fall of 2020 with the goal of ensuring that programs and pedagogical approaches at UTSC reflect the diversity of our students and the histories, epistemologies, and pedagogies that have been devalued and violently erased by settler colonialism and systemic injustices. The review’s focus is on Indigenous knowledges and knowledge systems, Black knowledges, racialized perspectives, and international and intercultural perspectives. In addition to these named areas, the review has prioritized an intersectional approach, recognizing that individuals hold multiple identities that shape experiences of oppression, including gender, sexuality, and disability.

Realism about democracy, part 192

According to a recent study of the American electorate:

Americans’ understanding of basic facts about the U.S. government declined for the first time in six years, as fewer than half in a new survey could name all three branches of government..... 

About a quarter of Americans surveyed could not name a single branch. 

The survey also found a decline in the number of respondents who could name any of the five freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment.  

Freedom of religion was named by 24 percent of those surveyed, falling from 56 percent from the previous survey. Those who named freedom of the press also declined sharply down by 30 percentage points from 50 percent in 2021.  

Around 26 percent of respondents could not name any First Amendment freedoms. And the percentage of respondents who listed the right to bear arms — a right protected under the Second Amendment — as a First Amendment protection tripled from 2021 rising to 9 percent.

Martha Nussbaum discusses "disgust"...

...at Brain in a Vat.  (By chance, this just dropped two days ago.)

Martha Nussbaum wins 2022 Balzan Prize...

...for her contributions to moral philosophy.    The Balzan Prize is awarded in a number of different areas, including sometimes philosophy.  Past philosophy winners have included Emmanuel Levinas, Norberto Bobbio, Paul Ricoeur, Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, and Ian Hacking.

Best of the summer blog, 2022

As blog readership returns to normal levels, I thought I'd compile some links to highlights from the blog this past summer (June-August) for those who may have missed them:

June

The new "cadre" of putative experts on "academic freedom" who are, in reality, its enemy

"Identity politics" neoliberalism meets millenial narcissism

A comment on the current pathology of the U.S. legal system

Bad journal practices:  the case of rejection without reasons after R&R

Inflation and graduate-student stipends

July

A poll about Covid (and who has had it)

Travels abroad, and some observations about philosophy

In Memoriam: Sydney Shoemaker (1931-2022)

MOVING TO FRONT, ORIGINALLY POSTED SEPTEMBER 6--UPDATE

Professor Shoemaker, who spent almost his entire career at Cornell University, was a leading figure in metaphysics and philosophy of mind, who trained many well-known philosophers including Richard Moran (Harvard), Susanna Siegel (Harvard), and Alan Sidelle (Wisconsin), among others.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Shoemaker.

(Thanks to Brian Ogilvie for the information.)

UPDATE:  Comments are now open, my apologies.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  The Cornell Department's memorial notice is here, and the University's memorial notice here.  (Thanks to Carl Ginet for the pointer.)

"Academic philosophy and the meaning of life"

Philosopher Helena de Bres (Wellesley) comments.  Professor de Bres earned her Ph.D. at MIT, which no doubt colors her approach to this topic, but it is one that will resonate with many trained at analytic departments.

(Thanks to Jonny Thakkar for the pointer.)

The latest university to mishandle a faculty speech controversy: CMU and the case of Professor Anya

I suppose it was inevitable that the death last week of the Queen of England would lead to a Twitter controversy, and it did.  There is a full account, with screen shots, at CHE.  Professor Uju Anya (Carnegie-Mellon), upon hearing the news that the Queen was on her death bed, wrote:  “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”

It is hard to quarrel with the first sentence.  Indeed, the New York Times even made note the other day of the brutal events in Kenya at the time the late Queen ascended to the throne.  Of course, the Queen, or King, has had little to do with running the Empire in a rather long time; Elizabeth may have been its symbolic head, but she was not the instigator of its policies.  

Heck on philosophy of pornography

A podcast discussion with philosopher Richard Kimberly Heck (Brown).

In Memoriam: David H. Sanford (1937-2022)

A longtime member of the Duke faculty, where he was emeritus, Professor Sanford wrote widely in metaphysics, as well as epistemology and logic.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Sanford.

(Thanks to Alex Rosenberg for the information.)

Wittgenstein, metaphysician

A.W. Moore (Oxford) comments.

Blast from the past: Could Mencken write for a newspaper today?

Back in 2006.

Advertising update

All the top spots are booked through the end of the calendar year, but there remains one top spot (only one) available each month through June in 2023.  For the rest of the fall, there is at least one second or third spot still open each month.  Email me at bleiter-at-uchicago-dot-edu for more information.  

How faculty changes since last year's PGR surveys are likely to affect the overall rankings in the U.S.

How are all the faculty changes since last year's PGR surveys likely to affect the rankings?  I don't think changes in the top 11 are likely (although there were some movements in and out), but after that, I'd estimate the "top 25" would look something like this given senior moves/retirements in the interim:

University of Florida's academic freedom crisis

CHE has done a detailed investigative report, and the problem runs deep!  From the start of the article:

Last September, a professor at the University of Florida wanted to sign a scientific consensus letter about kratom, a tropical tree with pain-relieving properties. The faculty member’s proposal was forwarded to Gary Wimsett Jr., the university’s assistant vice president for conflicts of interest, who had a question: What did Ron DeSantis, the state’s Republican governor, think about kratom?

Kratom has been the subject of controversy, as scientists and policy makers weigh its potential benefits against the possibility of addiction and abuse. Oliver Grundmann, the UF professor, had concluded that kratom, at least for the time being, should not be reviewed for global classification as a controlled substance; he sought approval to sign a letter in his role as a faculty member stating as much. But Wimsett wasn’t sure it was a good idea.

"Contemporary race theory" and the question of class versus race

Another interesting piece from Nonsite.org, where Professor Reed frequently publishes as well.  An excerpt:

Because all of these theories take for granted that racism is not only permanent but also the fundamental contradiction of American life, they all proceed from the assumption that racial groups are coherent and discrete entities with easily definable and shared interests. In other words, they conflate racial categories with racial groups and racial groups with political constituencies. Bonilla-Silva’s “structural interpretation” of racism posits that racial groups are “social collectivities” with shared “life chances” that form the basis for their collective “racial interests” (RR 471). One of the foundational concepts in Critical Race Theory, developed by Derrick Bell, is “interest convergence,” which maintains that “the interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will only be accommodated when it converges with the interest of whites.”6

"The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives" by Adolph L. Reed, Jr.

Verso kindly sent me Professor Reed's latest book, which is a very good read and illuminating.  (He discusses some of its themes in this podcast with his son, an historian.)  Reed, born in 1947, grew up in New Orleans during the final years of the Jim Crow era.  One of his aims is to record for posterity the lived experience of that time for one black person, but another is to demonstrate both the class politics of Jim Crow and how class differences among African-Americans affected their experience of the racism of the era.  Here's how Reed sums it up near the end of the book (these excerpts are from pp. 139-140):

The Jim Crow racial order has been vanquished.  That is clearest at the level that defines daily life and aspirations.  Removal of the strictures of official apartheid has radically altered opportunity structures and patterns of work, quality of life, and social relations in small and large ways that aren't readily apparent to those who didn't know the old order.  Working together as equals encourages socializing together, which is also enabled by elimination of the petty apartheid of Jim Crow in public accomodations.  Occasionally, when I notice an interracial group of co-workers or friends out in a restaurant, bar, or the like, I recall how utterly impossible that would have been as late as 1960....

But passage of the old order's segregationist trappings throws into relief the deeper reality that what appeared and was experienced as racial hierarchy was also class hierarchy.  Now blacks occupy positions in the socioeconomic order previously available only to whites, and whites occupy those previously identified with blacks.  And the dynamics of superordination and subordination, patterns of appropriation and distribution, and dominant understandings of which material interests should drive policy remain much as they were.

This underscores the point that the core of the Jim Crow order was a class system rooted in employment and production relations that were imposed, stabilized, regulated, and naturalized through a regime of white supremacist law, practice, custom, rhetoric, and ideology.  Defeating the white supremacist regime was a tremendous victory for social justice and egalitarian interests.  At the same time, that victory left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms affirmed it....

Do those confronting a terminal illness have insights that will help those who are not?

Philosopher Jesse Summer (Duke) is skeptical; an excerpt:

One lesson that the dying are supposed to teach is to live every day like you’re dying. But I’ve tried it: I’ve ordered coffee like I’m dying, gone for a walk like I’m dying, had conversations like I’m dying. Carpe diem, sure, but this attitude is hard to maintain. If I seriously tried to live today as my last, it would make tomorrow awful. I would have messes to clean up, a hangover, and concerned voicemails to respond to. Even if I approached it somberly, would I assemble my family for some last words, final reflections, and my passwords? And then, what? Make everyone show up again tomorrow?...

Prioritizing with death in mind is like working under a deadline, where all but the most important things fall away. That’s good when you’re dying, but it’s non-transferable. A full life has less important priorities in it, too: friends who are good to see but who wouldn’t be at one’s deathbed, casual hobbies, work projects and home projects and books to read and meals to eat and movies to watch, none of which individually would grow in that shadow of death, but all of which, together, make a life good.

Is moral responsibility an illusion?

Philosophers Galen Strawson (Texas), Massimo Pigliucci (City College of New York) and others discuss. (Link now fixed.)

Blast from the past: John Martin Fischer on "where the action is [was]" on Free Will and Moral Responsibility...

...back in 2006, with reader discussion.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Incredible Hog, "Going Down," 1973

Another number from the British hard rock trio, this is their distinctive cover of the Freddie King classic: