Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Donald Davidson dies

IN MEMORIAM

Donald Davidson (1917-2003)

Professor Davidson died yesterday in Berkeley. As soon as memorial notices are available about his distinguished philosophical career and seminal contributions, I will post them here and on the Update Service. Much useful information about Davidson and valuable links to philosophical work about him are available here.

US News Undergraduate Rankings

The new U.S. News rankings of undergraduate institutions once again tie the University of Virginia and the University of California at Berkeley as the top state schools in the country...which brings to mind something I wrote on an earlier occasion, inspired by the parochial journalists at The New York Times.

The University of Pennsylvania also once again tied with Stanford (at 5th), and just a notch behind MIT at 4th, both schools that are so substantially better than Penn, that one wonders at the audacity of the editors to perpetrate this fraud on the reading public. (Same goes for putting Duke up there as well.) Penn, alas, is notorious for gaming the rankings; as one former Penn Dean said to me, "I'd hate to be around if they ever audited the books." Indeed.

The Taliban Aren't Only in Texas

That's what makes this present moment in American history so scary. For example...

Correction

Cornel West's PhD was earned in philosophy at Princeton. Since the other points stand, all I can say is: so much the worse for the Philosophy Department at Princeton. Of course, the University of Texas has the misfortune (during the Silber era, long ago, happily) of having awarded a PhD in philosophy to William "shame on you, now I'll raise you a thousand" Bennett. And Yale awarded a PhD in philosophy to Judith "I too give bullshit a bad name" Butler. And so it goes. Compiling a list of philosophy PhDs that departments regret awarding might make for an amusing exercise. I welcome additional suggestions.

UPDATE

Distinguished Princeton philosopher Gilbert Harman writes: "Cornel [West] is probably the best person to talk to on the Princeton faculty, in my view. I have no idea why you have a negative impression of him." Well, I have never talked to him, only read him. And just as you can't judge a book by its cover, perhaps you can't judge an intellectual by his written work.

Larry Summers and Harvard Law School

The New York Times Magazine here profiles Larry Summers, the unusually blunt President of Harvard University. Two aspects of the article are likely to be of interest to readers of this site:

(1) The discussion of the dispute between Summers and Cornel West makes for a good read, though West is described, I am dismayed to see, as a "philosopher," though his PhD is not in philosophy, his work is (at best) really bad philosophy, and he has never held an appointment in a philosophy department. (I'm sure the Straussians will be up in arms about my latest "argument from authority.")

(2) The most interesting part of the article for law professors is Summers's clearly apt diagnosis of the pathologies afflicting Harvard Law School. The article reports:

Derrida and Bullshit

It was John Searle who famously remarked that Derrida's work is the kind of stuff that gives bullshit a bad name. And now we have yet another case in point, thanks to interviews with Habermas and Derrida about the September 11th attacks on the U.S. Although I have my reservations about Habermas as a philosopher, there is no question that he is an important public intellectual and critic, especially in Europe (there are no public intellectuals in the U.S., since there is no public intellectual discourse, but that's a topic for another day). And the integrity of Habermas on this score, and the ridiculousness of Derrida, comes out very
nicely in this interview (which comes to me courtesy of Matt Kramer at Cambridge). Here is the pertinent excerpt:

"Some Philosophers are Really Strange," Part II

I confess I'm with Brad DeLong: Richard Heck is very strange, and he gets stranger as time goes on. I was perplexed initially when the guy who claimed--after the fact, of course (Richard is the master of post-hoc revisionism)--that he simply wanted to "initiate a discussion" then failed to discuss almost all my detailed responses to his arguments.

Now Richard is miffed because I don't permit comments on my blog, and for a simple reason: I have a real job and a real life, and don't want to spend all my time blogging.

In response to my question, "Whatever Happened to the Heckling Campaign?",

Other Arguments for Intelligent Design

My colleague Herb Hochberg has reminded me of Ben Franklin's argument for intelligent design:

As for the human elbow, Franklin explained, it was important that it be located at the right place, otherwise it would be hard to drink wine. If Providence had placed the elbow too low on the arm, it would be hard for the forearm to reach the mouth. Likewise, if the elbow had been placed too high, the forearm would overshoot the mouth. "But by the actual situation, we are enabled to drink at our ease, the glass going exactly to the mouth. Let us, then, with glass in hand, adore this benevolent wisdom; let us adore and drink."

Major Law Faculty Moves, 2003-04 (with corrections)

THIS IS A CORRECTED VERSION OF AN EARLIER POSTING

Here it is, by school, for 2003-04. This list attempts to be comperehensive for the top 30 schools (as measured by faculty quality); updates or corrections would be welcome. (Most, but not all of the moves noted below, took place before the survey on faculty quality; a few exceptions are noted at the end.)

An Exchange with Holt, Rinehart about Changes to Their Biology Textbook

Judith Fowler, President of Holt, Rinehart, defends the decision to make changes in their biology textbook (up for adoption in Texas) in response to suggestions from the Discovery [sic] Institute here: Download file

I have replied to Ms. Fowler here: Download file

A New Letter to the State Board of Education

My colleague Sahotra Sarkar is professor of both philosophy and biology here at UT Austin; indeed, he is, to the best of my knowledge, the only philosophy PhD in the U.S. to have published work of such significance in peer-reviewed biology journals that he has now been appointed half-time and with tenure in a top biology department.

Although Professor Sarkar and I have our disagreements (most notably, about ducks--just wait to the SBOE starts reviewing zoology textbooks!), I must commend his thoughtful revisions to the Discovery [sic] Institute letter to the Texas State Board of Education from Texas professors.
You may review the redlined version here: Download file.

UPDATE: Another colleague from the Department of Government, upon reviewing Professor Sarkar's judicious editing, remarks:

"I commend you for the additions to this letter to the State Board of Education. There is, however, a serious omission in failing to address the fashionable, widely-taught and politically correct Spherical Earth theory, which anyone walking flat on the ground knows could not be true. I refer to you to the important work of the Flat Earth Society ."

Why the Holt Biology Textbook Change Matters

Philosopher John Holbo has a useful post documenting exactly why the change Holt is proposing to make in its biology textbook in response to a "suggestion" from the Discovery [sic] Institute is so worrisome. (I will be posting Holt's letter to me, and my own response once I'm back in the office.)

Why is it so easy to get tenure in law schools?

So asks a colleague in philosophy, who was recently a tenure referee for a law professor at a very reputable law school who got tenure, notwithstanding what struck the colleague as quite weak work. The answer is somewhat complex, and perhaps a bit speculative, but it goes something like this:

(1) Up until roughly the 1970s, law schools were essentially "trade" schools, tightly linked to the profession and to practice: law professors digested what judges were doing, and explained it to lawyers and judges, and to their students.

The Discovery [sic] Institute, R.I.P.

We bid farewell to the conmen and pathological liars at the Discovery [sic] Institute, who, like history itself, began in tragedy, but have now ended in farce.

Their August 19, 2003 press release informs us that "two dozen professors from seven Texas universities have signed an open letter to the State Board of Education...urging it to ensure that biology textbooks present both the scientific strengths and weaknesses of biological and chemical evolution."

Who are these two dozen professors? Although by my conservative estimate there are some 300+ biology professors at the seven universities represented--and close to 1,000 at all universities in Texas--only one (yes, one) signed the letter--an emeritus professor of biology at a liberal arts college, Southwestern University. Not to be cruel, but Vicente D. Villa, the emeritus professor in question, is not, it turns out, a significant figure in the field of biology.

So there you have it: biology textbooks are doing such a bad job presenting evolutionary biology that 1 mediocre biologist out of 1,000 biologists in Texas has called on the State Board of Education to remedy the situation. And thanks to the Discovery [sic] Institute, we now know it. Thanks!!!

What of the other 22 signatories? Let's see now:

We have three Baylor professors (two non-scientists, both of whom are regular poster boys for creationism, plus a retired professor of engineering).

Three professors of kinesiology (that's "exercise science" for the unitiated).

Two professors of engineering.

Two professors of philosophy.

One political theorist.

One journalism professor (yes, journalism).

A professor of marketing (yes, marekting).

A professor of housing research (yes, housing research).

A professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Assistant professors of forestry, agricultural education, and family medicine.

And three individuals who don't even hold tenure-stream positions (though one is a Cadet Training Officer at Texas A&M).

Yes, indeed, this is an impressive outcry from the scientific community in Texas. And, thanks to the Discovery [sic] Institute, we now have clear proof that there is no significant scientific dissent to the way evolution is presented in biology textbooks in Texas.

Now to be fair, there is one real scientist, of some accomplishment, who signed the letter: James Tour, the Chao Professor of Chemistry at Rice University. I humbly suggest that of the two hypotheses about why he signed the letter--well-grounded scientific doubts about the theory of evolution vs. strong and sincere religious faith that has corrupted his scientific judgment--one is rather more plausible than the other. For those uncertain, Professor Tour offers some help.

Bruce Chapman, the President and apparently liar-in-chief at the now ridiculous Discovery [sic] Institute, says the letter refutes the claim of Darwinists that "there is no academic debate over Darwin's theory, and that the only objections are religious." But Darwinists never denied that there are academics who dispute evolution--after all, academics include professors of journalism, marketing, housing research, and kinesiology. What Darwinists have claimed, obviously correctly, is that there is no significant dispute among those qualified to judge, i.e., biologists, about Darwin's theory of evolution. And the Discovery [sic] Institute's latest effort, happily, confirms the truth of that proposition ten times over. The Discovery [sic] Institute, R.I.P.

More Real Scientists Wiping the Floor with the "Discovery [sic] Institute" Creationists

There is an amusing exchange in the Boston Review between biologist Allen Orr and Discovery [sic] Institute propagandist William Dembski. (The debate begins with Orr's demolition of Dembski's latest book here.) Orr, who is a good writer as well as smart, delivers this scathing and apt conclusion to the exchange:

"Dembski, Behe and associates may in the end prove a thorn in the side of not only biologists but also the devout. By promising devastating objections to evolution but delivering half-baked technobabble that disintegrates upon close inspection, they subject certain religious persons to unnecessary and traumatic cycles of expectation and dashed hope. The point is that all skirmishes involve risk of friendly fire and the faithful will, sooner or later, have to ask who poses the greater actual danger: those who merely suggest that life evolves or those who routinely announce “proofs” of the handiwork of an interventionist Designer—proofs that have, so far, been fantastically flawed, noisily imploding almost immediately after their much publicized debuts."

Readers of the New York Review of Books will know Allen Orr as the biologist who also wiped the floor with Steven Pinker's nonsense in The Blank Slate, an entertaining but fanciful bit of polemics on behalf of evolutionary psychology. At least the evolutionary psychologists don't want their stuff taught in high schools.

How Students Use the PGR

The following letter from a student (who gave permission to post it) well expresses how students actually use the PGR in my experience and the experience of everyone I've talked to about this (except, of course, that "really strange" guy). Here is what the student wrote:

"I am a reader of the Philosophical Gourmet Report and its update service, as well as a follower of the online controversy surrounding it. This fall, I will begin graduate study in philosophy at [a well-ranked department, name omitted].

"For the most part, I am suspicious of rankings. Too often, I think, rankings distort or neglect to assess the qualities that make education worthwhile. I have in mind, of course, the US News undergraduate rankings, which have very little to do with the quality of undergraduate education. Obviously, the PGR commits fewer sins than the US News rankings do, but at the same time I've wondered which qualities of philosophy departments, which factors that will play important roles in my graduate experience, the PGR hides.

Vanderbilt Prof Says "No" to Northwestern

Vanderbilt University's Nancy King, one of the leading criminal procedure scholars of her generation in the legal academy and co-author of the leading treatise in the field, has turned down an offer from Northwestern University School of Law. That's a big coup for Vanderbilt, which in the past has tended to lose hiring battles with schools slightly higher in the pecking order.

New Development in the Texas Textbook Wars

I have just received, via e-mail attachment, a letter from Judith Fowler, the President and CEO of Holt, Rinehart, responding to the criticisms here.It is a long and detailed letter, which I won't be able to digest right away because of other pressing duties (involving my *real* job). If I can secure her permission, I will post her reply on this site.

It is good to know that sometimes the blogosphere reaches out in to the real world. And much credit and thanks goes to Jonathan Ichikawa who organized the petition to Holt, Rinehart. The Texas Taliban are well-organized, and it's important for the publishers to know that the other side is too.

Debating Intelligent Design

[Note: a first version of this posting disappeared from the site, for reasons I don't understand...This is my attempt to recreate it.]

Some readers have remarked on my recommendation of Michael Rea's book World Without Design, a stimulating critique of philosophical naturalism that suggests, ultimately, that ours may be a "world with design." At the same time, it is rather obvious that I am livid about the attempt to teach intelligent design in public school science classrooms.

Am I contradicting myself? No, and here's why:

(1) Of course, university researchers and students should be debating Intelligent Design, philosophical naturalism, the nature of evolution, and so on: that's what universities are for, and that's why one of my other obsessions is academic freedom. Rea's important book helps philosophers enter these debates. It's too bad, though probably revealing, that intelligent design theorists don't enter the scholarly fray with biologists in peer-refereed biology journals, or that when their scientific arguments (like those in Michael Behe's book) are refuted, they don't pursue a scientific defense in appropriate scientific fora. But no one ought to object to universities being sites of such debates, if the intelligent design proponents would enter them (again, it is revealing, I think, that they prefer to enter the fray with laypeople on boards of education and state legislatures, rather than with real scientists).

(2) The important academic freedom of university researchers and students to debate all manner of ideas has no bearing, however, on the question what should be taught in textbooks to be used by schoolchildren. There is an important issue here about division of epistemic labor. Textbooks, in all fields, ought to present the expert consensus in a way that is intelligible to those new to the subjects. Where there is expert divergence of opinion, textbooks should present that too. But what I object to is lying about the state of scientific opinion in order to inject religious views in to the science classrooms in the public schools. That is venal and reprehensible.

Who can say what the scientific consensus will be in 50 years? There is no evidence, of course, it will move in the direction of intelligent design, especially given the failure of the proponents of the latest version of creationism to engage in scientific debate. But today's textbooks ought to convey, clearly and unmistakably, that there are no serious scientific doubts about Darwin's theory of evolution. As David Hillis, a distinguished evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas, remarked during a press conference today:

"There is no debate about evolution in college textbooks, where scientists
select the best books for use. The debate is at the level of secondary school textbooks, precisely because that is where non-scientists can exert influence. These objections to the textbooks are not about science or facts; they are about pushing a political and religious agenda."

Let the intelligent design theorists prevail, or even make an inroad, in the marketplace of ideas among scholars and researchers, the marketplace that academic freedom makes possible. Until then, they ought to stay out of the highschool classroom, and save it for Sunday School.

Christian Philosophers and Creationism

Keith DeRose—famed philosopher at Yale, valued member of the PGR Advisory Board, and creator of the Epistemology Page (highly recommended!)—writes with the following comments on one of my earlier posts about the attack on biology textbooks in Texas:

”Regarding your recent post on the treatment of evolution in textbooks by the ‘Texas Taliban’: Since you have the ears of many philosophers, there is another course of action you might fruitfully call for. I think it might help a lot if more Christian philosophers would come out publicly and honestly call things as they see them with respect to various forms of creationism.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them--Intelligent Design round 3

Francis Beckwith, Associate Professor of Church-State Studies at Baylor University, owner of a ".com" homepage (!), and a frequent poster boy for the Discovery [sic] Institute, is the "new face" of the Intelligent Design scam run by the Institute. Quite presentable, he almost sounds reasonable, though he turns out to be as big a liar as "John West, PhD", albiet a bit more subtle. (West's PhD, by the way, is in poli sci, from the Straussian Claremont Graduate School!)

Professor Beckwith writes to a Texas newspaper as follows:

"In his letter to the editor Thursday, Oak H. DeBerg made the completely audacious claim that those who testified at the July 9 State Board of Education hearings on behalf of textbook accuracy in the biological sciences were pushing 'a conservative religious view . . . at the expense of good science.'

"Because I am one of those who testified, I can assure you that DeBerg is making this up out of whole cloth.

"In my testimony I offered the uncontroversial suggestion that textbooks that address the topic of evolution offer to their readers, the state's students, accurate portrayals of current scientific data as well as thoughtful questions that have been raised against the Darwinian paradigm by credentialed scholars whose works have been published by university press monographs and in peer-reviewed periodicals.

"As I have pointed out in my latest monograph, ''Law, Darwinism & Public Education'' (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) and three recent law review articles, in Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy, and San Diego Law Review, offering arguments critical of Darwinism, or even scientific alternatives to it, in a public school science classroom is not religious as long as the lesson plans rely exclusively on publicly accessible, or secular, reasons."

Let's run through the lies, bald-faced and otherwise, one by one:

More PGR Feedback

In today's in-box, a graduate student at a top 50 department writes:

"I should also pass along my thanks to you for all your work on the
Report. Naturally, as a student at [a program not ranked more highly], I'm somewhat disgruntled about the rankings. Nevertheless, I have found the Report extremely informative and helpful, and I would have been absolutely ignorant about graduate schools in philosophy were it not for what I learned
by reading your website. I went to a small Catholic college, and the
faculty there really just couldn't help me at all with the selection of an 'analytic' program, for they were all educated outside the analytic tradition. In fact, it was the update service that brought me to [name omitted]. I didn't apply here during the regular application season, since (by that time) I wanted to do [field omitted]: I applied [later in the season], following the raid of the [name omitted] department by [name omitted] and the job offer from [name omitted] to [name omitted], both of which I learned about only because of the update service. Fortunately, [the department I applied to] wound up having a fellowship to offer me.... So I am deeply indebted to your Report for a number of reasons. Thank you!"

You're welcome. This correspondent also raised some important issues about how the faculty lists are compiled for purposes of the reputational survey, an issue that I will surely be taking up with the Advisory Board next spring.

"Some Philosophers Are Really Strange"

Professor Brad DeLong, noting one of Professor Heck's arguments, describes it, from the viewpoint of economics, as being "completely, ludicrously, laughably false." From the viewpoint of philosophy, too, I assure you.

Yet Another Student "Harmed" by the PGR

Now they're really coming out of the woodworks--another "victim" of the PGR speaks out here.

More Students "Harmed" by the PGR

Add Juan Comesana, a recent PhD graduate of Brown, and his wife Carolina Sartorio (PhD, MIT), to the purportedly long, but so far invisible, list of students "harmed" by the PGR. Comesana and Sartorio were two of the top candidates on the philosophy job market last year, and have now accepted tenure-track posts at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. On their group blog, Juan writes, in reference to the Heckling campaign:

"the PGR was absolutely essential to us when Carolina and I were applying to grad schools. I think this was mentioned somewhere, but it is worth repeating: for foreign students, the PGR can mean the difference between having a decent experience in grad school on the one hand and coming close to ruining your life on the other."

I've heard this same sentiment from dozens of foreign students over the years--and tens of dozens of undergraduates at out-of-the-loop departments, and (dare I say?) tens of dozens of undergraduates at in-the-loop departments who realized via the PGR that they were getting a rather idiosyncratic view of their options from their teachers.

But it's gratifying when someone says it "in print" in a (kind of) public forum.

Leo Strauss Redux and How Others See Philosophy

My introduction to the blogosphere came as a result of my May 5th posting to the Update Service, commenting on the tiresome fact that the media continue to portray Leo Strauss and his acolytes as though they're serious thinkers, when, as philosophers know, they're just the right-wing versions of Judith Butler: intellectual poseurs and frauds, purveyors of shoddy scholarship and arguments (when there are arguments at all). (There's an interesting question why, with the exception of places like Princeton and a couple of others, U.S. Political Science departments should have become the repository for so much bad philosophy? But that's a subject for a different day.)

Thanks to attentive readers, I was soon alerted to my vilification in the blogosphere for dissing the master. I discovered, for example, that members of the Strauss cult have their own on-line group therapy blogs (such as here), where they can reaffirm all their prejudices and reassure each other that they're really OK.

I commented on this phenomenon previously, where I took the opportunity to reply to one juvenile blogger, whose whole site illustrates the dangers of the blog medium ("the less they know, the less they know it").

Straussians, alas, are a bit testier than the usual victims of my pugnacious polemics. They also appear to be much creepier, as this charming bit of correspondence from Robert Light, a recent graduate of Middlebury College, illustrates.

More Iraq

A reader provides the following apt link to the wicked satirists at The Onion, who make far more effectively the point I was driving at here.

Pathological liars at the Discovery [sic] Institute Caught Red-Handed

Here's a nice example of the chronic and pathological dishonesty of the Intelligent Design proponents at the Orwellian "Discovery [sic] Institute." John West from the Institute ("John West, Ph.D.", as he's always keen to list himself--by the way, I'm "Brian Leiter, Ph.D., J.D."--don't you feel more confident already in what I have to say?) had the audacity to pen an article in a Texas newspaper called "Institute Supports Accurate Science"!

Since no defenses of intelligent design ever appear in peer-refereed science journals, a favorite trick of these "supporters of accurate science" is to misrepresent the content of articles that do appear in peer-refereed biology journals. Happily, West got caught in his flagrant lie, since the author of the article West misrepresented replied here.

I will wager that West, and the other pathological liars at the Obfuscation Institute, will nonetheless recycle this same misrepresentation of scientific work before long.

Petition in support of sound science in biology textbooks

Many thanks to Jonathan Ichikawa, a recent graduate of Rice University, who has put together a petition aimed at Holt, Rinehart, the publisher of biology textbooks that appears to be caving to political pressure from anti-Darwinians, as I discussed here.

The on-line petition is available here.

I hope many readers will sign the petition, and will pass on the link to it to others. This is a national issue, because of the size of the Texas market: remember, the textbooks that Texas approves tend to be the textbooks that get used in dozens of other states. Please let Holt, Rinehart know that lots of people want sound science textbooks in the nation's high schools. Thanks.

More on Citations to Philosophers

Brian Weatherson, a philosopher at Brown University, writes with the following additional data on cites to philosophers at the SEP cite:

"If you do a search for David Lewis you get 80 mentions in 44 entries.
It's hard to know how to compare this to other rankings, but here's some other
searches for full names

Saul Kripke: 23-17
Hilary Putnam: 25-22
Ludwig Wittgenstein: 22-11
David Hume: 78-35
Gottlob Frege: 43-24
Rene Descartes: 43-21

I imagine that Lewis's full name hits are higher simply because he had a
common name, but still by that measure he stacks up pretty well against
other people on the list. (I imagine he's the most commonly cited
philosopher on the SEP who doesn't have his own entry yet. Which implies
someone should write the said entry. Ted Sider maybe? Or Dean Zimmerman?)"

Norms of the Blogosphere

One week and 1300 visitors later, I'm learning a few things about the norms of the blogosphere. An important one is you don't put your e-mail address on your blog, or you get spammed to death. Another is that if you link to only a few blogs (I had linked to exactly three), rather than dozens of blogs, you get complaints, queries, injured feelings, and so on.

When the law school told me they could set up a blog, it seemed like a good way to separate the news function of the Update Service from more polemical and editorial comments about cognate matters. It also allows me to vent on occasion about things that piss me off to no end, like the Texas Taliban. (The venting may have done some good, as one reader is organizing a petition on the textbook business, for which I'm very grateful.) But the point was not to set up a navel-gazing diary, or to get embroiled in fleeting debates with other bloggers.

I've seen about 50 or 60 different blogs, and I had linked to three that had some content. No doubt there are others that I just have never seen. But since I don't want to spend a lot of time editorializing about other blogs, or explaining to bloggers why I'm not linking to them, I'm just not going to link to any. In any case, I don't think the three I had linked to needed my links to maintain an appreciative readership.

Most Cited Philosophers?

In law, as in many social and natural science disciplines, extensive use is made of citation studies as a measure of the impact and importance of scholarship. Such approaches have their drawbacks (those in law are discussed here). The drawbacks are even greater, I expect, in philosophy. But out of curiosity, I decided to take advantage of the search engine provided by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (link to the left). SEP is a work-in-progress, but there are a sufficiently large number of entries now that an interesting search is possible.

SEP searches return two pieces of information: the number of mentions of the philosopher’s name, and the number of files (entries) in which the name is mentioned. For any philosopher who is the subject of an entry, the number of references will be quite large just from that single entry. So for purposes of even remotely meaningful comparisons, one has to take in to account the number of entries as well as the number of references. (Maybe no meaningful comparisons are possible—this exercise was strictly for amusement, not deep insight in to philosophy!)

In addition, it would be impossibly time-consuming to search very common names. As a result, some philosophers who would no doubt have substantial counts (e.g., David Lewis) weren’t searched. (But George Berkeley was, but it wasn’t too hard to cut out the references to Berkeley the school or press. Same for Russell.)

The searches were conducted on August 1, 2003.

Here are the most frequently referenced philosophers who were mentioned in at least 50 different entries; the total number of references (not entries) appears in parentheses following the name:

1. Aristotle (2529)
2. Plato (1260)
3. Descartes (1232)
4. Kant (1049)
5. Frege (1044)
6. Hume (1008)
7. Socrates (1001)
8. Russell (910)
9. Locke (733)
10. Leibniz (638)
11. Aquinas (567)
12. Spinoza (551)
13. Hegel (528)
14. Wittgenstein (468)
15. Augustine (452)
15. Rawls (452)
17. Quine (399)
18. Kripke (315)
19. Putnam (295)

By contrast, here is a non-ranked list of philosophers mentioned in at least 25 files; it’s not ranked because I’m sure there are other philosophers who weren’t searched who got at least as many references.

Fichte (383 mentions in 17 files)
Herder (350 mentions in 19 files)
Nietzsche (340 mentions in 26 files)
Jerry Fodor (336 mentions in 37 files)
Brentano (301 mentions in 22 files)
Husserl (292 mentions in 27 files)
Schopenhauer (268 mentions in 10 files)
Alvin Plantinga (246 mentions in 36 files)
Malebranche (237 mentions in 22 files)
Carnap (193 mentions in 40 files)
Marx (187 mentions in 42 files)
Gadamer (160 mentions in 9 files)
Jaegwon Kim (150 mentions in 29 files)
John Searle (147 mentions in 33 files)
Berkeley (140 mentions in 40 files)
Michael Tye (140 mentions in 28 files)
Heidegger (137 mentions in 26 files)
Michael Dummett (136 mentions in 30 files)
Robert Nozick (134 mentions in 45 files)
Nelson Goodman (111 mentions in 34 files)
Sartre (109 mentions in 24 files)
Dewey (98 mentions in 25 files)
Tyler Burge (88 mentions in 20 files)
Philip Pettit (87 mentions in 27 files)
Carl Hempel (86 mentions in 18 files)
Sydney Shoemaker (84 mentions in 18 files)
Christopher Peacocke (73 mentions in 16 files)
Jurgen Habermas (69 mentions in 25 files)
John McDowell (62 mentions in 25 files)
Epicurus (48 mentions in 17 files)

So what do we learn about philosophy from all this? I’d be happy to post reader comments, if you e-mail me (the e-mail address is at my homepage--I've been advised not to post it on the blog, lest I attract even more spam!).

More on the Heckling Campaign

One correspondent asks: "Since the arguments on the Heck site are pretty bad, why do you think philosophers signed the letter? Is it all the Baker reason?"

I think Baker hit the nail on the head about something important. But I do think there is another important factor, that is discussed briefly in my reply to Heck, since one of the signatories raised it (though, again, the Heck site does not). This other concern, shared by many I suspect, is well-illustrated by two anecdotes.

A Swedish philosopher presented a paper at a Wittgenstein conference in Europe a couple of years ago, lamenting the marginalization of Wittgenstein in contemporary philosophy. In a footnote, he also wrote the following: "I am also told about an American philosopher of law, Brad [sic] Leiter, who, in collaboration with a pool of philosophy professors, devises a well-known and highly influential ranking of American philosophy departments. It is reported--I cannot vouch for the truth of this--that departments ask his advice in hiring new faculty, since his word has the power to make or break departments. Evidently, his pool does not look favourably on departments with an interest in the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. Another sign of the times, perhaps."

The second anecdote involves comments relayed to me by a former student, comments made to him by a very famous philosopher at a ranked department. This philosopher purportedly said: "No one can get hired without knowing Brian Leiter. Brian Leiter controls the Philosophy world. Do you know who I'm talking about?"

What these anecdotes illustrate is that some people attribute to me rather fantastic powers, and then, quite correctly (if they really believe I have these powers), resent it. I don't, of course, have these powers, although it is true that the PGR is influential, and influences where students apply and go to school. (Harvard got tired of losing students to Rutgers, and I'm afraid that explains rather a lot. But except for a few areas, like ethics--and even there the gap is closing--Rutgers is better than Harvard these days.) It is also true that I am often asked about hiring, but lots of people get asked about hiring, and I've seen no evidence that my opinions translate in to outcomes. I think I'm asked mostly because I'm aware of who might be moveable, more so than many others.

But I do think many signatories to the Heck letter were motivated by a sense that it is unjust that one person should have this amount of power, with the sense of injustice being proportional, of course, to whether the powers are thought to be the imaginary ones or the real ones. Let us call this the "democratic" objection to the PGR.

I should say I'm completely sympathetic with the democratic objection, and I hope that the Advisory Board and the ever more extensive opinion surveys will alleviate this concern. Even before the Advisory Board, I consulted very widely, but as the influence of the PGR has grown, it clearly became more imperative to have an official Board, to do better surveys, and to make the process more transparent. I believe this has been accomplished, and the feedback I get, including from signatories to the Heck letter, suggests I have been.

Many philosophers signed the Heck letter for transparently self-serving reasons, as I take it everyone acknowledges. Others signed it because they're sanctimonious jerks. Still others signed it because they're control freaks, and are angry that I've taken away some of the control they had over their students. (This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list, needless to say.) But others--I think a large number--signed it because of variations on the democratic objection. I believe theirs is a just objection, and I've tried to meet it, without compromising the PGR's core purpose of providing candid and timely information on graduate study in philosophy.

Iraq

Noam Chomsky is that rare philosopher who actually has something substantial to say about the world beyond philosophy (contrast: Hilary Putnam or Richard Rorty, significant philosophers who are politically and morally trivial). For a typically trenchant and provocative set of comments, that cut through the usual sanctimonious bullshit, see this recent short essay on Iraq. As Chomsky notes, correctly, the Bush doctrine of "preventive war" was also a fascist doctrine, condemned at Nuremburg.

In what passes for "independent" media in the US--why is the media in the US so much inferior to the media in, say, the UK?--it has become customary, of course, to preface any criticism of the US-UK invasion of Iraq with due reference to how wonderful it is that the people of Iraq are now "liberated." Among the people not "liberated," however, are the Iraqis recorded on this site, which provides a useful reminder about what wars actually do. For the remainder, it is, shall we say, a bit premature to describe them as being "liberated," since large parts of the country are in chaos, disarray and even more misery than before, and the new political structure that will replace the old one is still unclear. Is not Islamic fascism on the Iranian or Saudi Arabian model still in the offing? Or an authoritarian puppet state of the kind the US has historically supported in the countries it has invaded? The liberation of the people of Iraq--those that weren't killed, that is--is, alas, something to be accomplished, not something that has happened.

Biology textbooks under attack

Texas is the second largest buyer of school textbooks in the US and, unfortunately for the nation, the power to approve and reject textbooks is vested in the hands of a small State Board of Education, which is dominated by the Texas Taliban, that frightening brand of Texas politicos who are committed to making the law of (their) God the law of the land. The publishers frequently cave in to pressure from the Texas Taliban, and edit and revise their textbooks to appease them, since they can't afford to have their books rejected from the Texas market. The result is that the Texas Taliban affect the content of textbooks in dozens of other states.

Currently, the Texas Taliban are waging war on biology textbooks, and already some of the publishers are caving, as discussed in this article. The "Discovery [sic] Institute" is an organization devoted to reviving creationism as a "scientific" theory, which they've renamed "Intelligent Design." That the theory of "Intelligent Design" generates no testable claims, and that no papers defending it have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals is not thought to be a problem by the Texas Taliban, since, of course, they're not the least bit interested in science, and are quite interested in promoting their particular brand of religious belief.

What can be done? To start, I'd urge anyone with children in public schools ANYWHERE to contact Holt, Rinehart to demand that their biology textbooks reflect the existing scientific consensus about the theory of evolution. Here is information on the latest dispute courtesy of the heroic Texas Freedom Network:

"After the first public hearing on Biology textbooks, publishers had two weeks to respond to oral and written comments submitted by the public. Textbook publisher Holt, Rinehart & Winston caved to pressure by creationist censors attempting to weaken the study of evolution in the Biology textbooks. Holt made changes at the request of the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based organization promoting the teaching of “Intelligent Design” nationwide. The changes include a paragraph in the chapter review recommending students use the Internet to research “alternatives” to evolution and the origin of life.
The overwhelming majority of expert testimony at the hearing called for
accurately presenting proven scientific evidence on evolution - in Biology
textbooks, but the threat of having a textbook rejected by the radical
right element on the State Board of Education (SBOE) seems to have
persuaded Holt, Rinehart & Winston to cave to political pressure.

"CONTACT HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON TODAY to demand that
this change be removed. They must hear from mainstream Texans in force.

"Call, email or write Michael Brawley, [email protected], 800-242-5479 1175
N. Stemmons Fwy., Lewisville, TX 75067.

I"n the textbook ‘Biology’ by Johnson and Raven, the chapter review
question on p. 271 was changed from:

"20. Finding and Communicating Information. Use the media center or
Internet resources to learn about the condition on Earth that scientist
think existed before life formed. Identify which compounds Miller and Urey
formed in their experiment…

to:

20. Finding and Communicating Information. Use the media center or
Internet resources to study hypotheses for the origin of life that are
alternatives to the hypotheses proposed by Oparin and Lerman. Analyze,
review, and critique either Oparin’s or Lerman’s hypothesis as presented
in your textbook along with one alternative hypothesis that you discover
in your research."

What will be next? Medical textbooks that recommend students search the Internet for alternate cures?

A nice thing about the Texas Taliban is that they actually publish their "criteria" for evaluating school textbooks. You can read them (and weep) at the web site of Mel and Norma Gabler, a kindly looking couple who have done more than anyone to try to undermine public education in Texas. They do catch the occasional error in school textbooks, but the errors they want to add (about law, about history, about science, about economics) are just breathtaking.

Remember, this isn't just a Texas issue, since the textbooks selected by the Texas State Board of Education are likely to end up in the classrooms of children from Michigan to Florida to Oregon.

Two Important Recent Books

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has recently published two informative reviews of two important recent works of philosophy; I recommend both books (though I disagree, in the end, quite strongly with one of them). The books are:

(1) John Doris's Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (CUP, 2002), which is informatively reviewed by Lawrence Blum.

(2) Michael Rea's World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism (OUP, 2002), which is skillfully reviewed by Troy Cross. Cross makes, I think, the right criticisms of Rea's argument, but I would just underline that the opening chapters of the book are an especially valuable and scholarly investigation of the contours of philosophical naturalism, from which naturalists will benefit.

Whatever Became of the Heckling Campaign?

I periodically receive correspondence inquiring, in one form or another, “Whatever became of the Heckling campaign?” In the hopes of satisfying the curiosity of other users of the PGR with the same question, and thus saving myself a lot of individual correspondence, let me give an extended answer to this query:

So what became of the Heckling campaign? The simple answer is: it’s been moribund for a long time now. There hasn’t been a new signature on the letter in about six months (and perhaps 2 or 3 per month before that), and the last signature was actually from an English professor, rather than a philosopher! The Heck site counter reports about 700 hits per month, during a time period when the PGR itself has been getting nearly 300,000 hits per month. (Of course, “hits” overstate the number of actual readers, by a factor of at least five to one.) When my RA undertook a random search of sites that link to the PGR, he found that about 1% of those also linked to the Heck site. The Heck letter has topped off with not quite 2% of professional philosophers having signed it, and the signatories consist almost entirely of the Harvard-Berkeley circle of influence, plus the SPEPPies (the “revenge” of the later Wittgensteinians and the Heideggerians?!?).

(Note: 2% understates, to be sure, the amount of opposition to the PGR, since there remain two other clusters of opposition: (1) philosophers who, for various reasons, dislike the PGR, but realize that Harvard would be the primary beneficiary of a successful attack on the PGR; and (2) a lunatic fringe that would like to leave all undergraduates at the mercy of their teachers (more charitably, it’s fair to say that some teachers resent the fact that their students now have an independent source of information, which reduces the teacher’s own influence and importance.). This fringe--to which Professor Heck himself belonged initially [back when the site was called, more honestly, “Anti-PGR”], until he discovered he couldn’t get many people to sign the first version of his “open letter” calling for the PGR to be abolished—presumably would not sign the actual “open letter” which admits, grudgingly, that the PGR is useful.)

The handful of students who even mention the Heck letter anymore in correspondence uniformly refer to it in the context of “how badly it reflects on Harvard” or “how good it makes your Report look” and so on. Interestingly, some students appear to interpret the site and the letter as reflecting fundamental contempt for or indifference to students, an inference which I actually don’t think is warranted—certainly not for all the signatories--though it is easy to see how a student might come away thinking that. (It is not lost on students that a year-and-a-half after launching his smear campaign, Professor Heck has not come up with any constructive alternative for the benefit of prospective students.)

The most curious phenomenon, though, is this. I’ve now had correspondence, sometimes quite extended, with dozens of signatories to the letter, and, with the exception of one or two, none endorse the actual “arguments” in the letter, let alone those elsewhere on the Heck site. (Many signatories even participated in the 2002-04 PGR surveys!) Indeed, if there is one recurring view among signatories it is the view expressed by Professor Lynne Rudder Baker elsewhere on the Heck site: “I think that the Leiter Report disseminates some important information. My objection is that undergraduates seem to hang onto the rankings to the exclusion of other factors that we agree are significant, even other factors that are discussed in the Leiter Report.”

Of course, an open letter that urged students not to “hang onto the rankings to the exclusion of other factors” and to pay attention to the PGR’s many existing admonitions about other important factors is a letter I would have signed. (Though I confess I agree with Brian Weatherson that this worry may be overblown.)