Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Philosophers on the Political Compass

Blogospher philosophers have responded to my plea: here is Weatherson (note his comments esp. on the misleading nature of the results), Bertram, and Holbo (and note esp. Cosma's comments about the possible bias of the survey). (Apologies to others I may have missed.) All the philosophers are in the libertarian/left quadrant, as befits their superior intellectual discipline.

Solum's Top 10 Books in Jurisprudence

I was quite astonished to discover this list of the "Top Ten" books in "Contemporary Jurisprudence" compiled by Larry Solum. Here's the list:

H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law,
Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously
John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights
Richard Posner, Economic Analysis of Law
Randy Barnett, The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law
Lon Fuller, The Morality of Law
Roger Shiner, Norm and Nature: The Movements of Legal Thought
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations
Duncan Kennedy, A Critique of Adjudication

It's fair to say this is an extremely idiosyncratic list, though the main difficulty seems to reside in how the category "jurisprudence" is being conceived--more precisely, the difficulty is that I have no idea how to describe "jurisprudence" so conceived, such that all these books on the list are jurisprudential. Rawls's Theory of Justice is a seminal piece of philosophy, and parts of it are highly relevant to paradigm cases of jurisprudential debate, but I would have thought, conventionally, that it's a work of political philosophy, not jurisprudence. Ackerman's We the People (or, as I learned they call it at Yale, Me the People) is a major contribution to constitutional law and theory, but if that kind of work counts as jurisprudence, then where is Ely or Bobbitt or Perry etc.?

The books on the list that seem to be to be uncontroversially contributions to jurisprudence are: Hart, Dworkin, Finnis, Barnett, Fuller, Shiner, and Kennedy. I'm with Solum on Hart, Dworkin, and Finnis (though, arguably, Dworkin is better-represented with respect to his implausible jurisprudential views by the 1986 Law's Empire than by the 1978 collection of essays). Shiner is interesting, but idiosycnratic, and not in the same league with either Hart, Dworkin, or Finnis--or with some of the startling omissions (about which more in a moment). The same is plainly true of Barnett and Kennedy: philosophically, these works are not substantial contributions (whatever their virtues and importance in law), and Solum's implicit diversity criterion (Barnett's book "is the new locus classicus for libertarian legal thought," while Kennedy represents Critical Legal Studies) just can't suffice for a meaningful "top ten" list of works in jurisprudence. After all, where is the "locus classicus" of Marxist legal thought? of Schmittian legal thought? and so on? There are lots of eccentric categories one might create, for which one work is representative, but surely any such work has to pass muster by relevant philosophical criteria.

Fuller's work is a philosophical muddle, but it's been a stimulating muddle for many other writers, so his book arguably belongs here.

But the omissions are startling. As a remedy, here's the "Leiter Top 10 Books in Jurisprudence" list:

Karl Llewellyn, The Bramble Bush
Hans Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law
Lon Fuller, The Morality of Law
H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law
H.L.A. Hart, Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy
Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law
John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights
Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire
Gerald Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition
Leslie Green, The Authority of the State

UPDATE: More from Larry Solum on these topics here. I have to say I do not share his view that, "Legal theory is at its best when it is normative and entangled with substantive questions of policy and doctrine." Some normative theory (what is usually called normative jurisprudence, and what Solum calls first-order jurisprudence) is quite good, but not simply in virtue of its being normative.

The US Philosophy Hierarchy Over 50 Years

In the 1950s, the top philosophy program in the United States was, by a wide margin, Harvard (W.V.O. Quine, an aging C.I. Lewis, Morton White, Roderick Firth, etc.), followed by some mix of Cornell (Max Black, Norman Malcom, a young John Rawls, etc.), Michigan (William Frankena, Cooper Langford, Charles Stevenson, etc.), Princeton (esp. after Carl Hempel and Gregory Vlastos moved there circa 1955), and Yale (Hempel, until he left for Princeton, but also a young Wilfrid Sellars, Brand Blanshard, Alan Anderson, Arthur Pap, etc.), and then some mix of, depending on who you asked, UCLA, Chicago, Columbia, Brown, maybe Berkeley.

A decade later, say circa 1965, Harvard was till on top (Quine, Rawls, a young Putnam, Owen, etc.), but Princeton was now a powerhouse (Hempel, Vlastos, Hampshire, a young Gil Harman, a young Richard Rorty, a young Joel Feinberg, etc.), Cornell (Black, Malcolm, a young Shoemaker, etc.) and Michigan (Alston, Brandt, Frankena, Stevenson, a young Alvin Goldman, etc.) were still among the top five, with Pittsburgh (Sellars, Rescher, K. Baier, Grunbaum, etc.) closing in. Yale, after the exodus of faculty to Pittsburgh, was fading though perhaps hanging on in the top ten; Columbia and Chicago were hanging on too; while UCLA (Carnap, Montague, a young Kaplan, a young David Lewis [66-70]etc.) and Berkeley (Feyerband, Mates, a young Searle, a young Stroud) and perhaps Stanford (Suppes, Davidson) were now solidly in the top ten. A brand new program, MIT, was also on the move.

Political Compass Mania

I appear to have started something (other than the PGR). My little post on "the Political Compass" test, on 10/29 (picking up on Bainbridge's neglected 10/25 post), and the suggestion that all bloggers should take it, led Professor Bainbridge to reply, which appears to have then led the omnipotent Larry Solum to post the results for me, Bainbridge, Solum himself, and one other (whose name I'm now forgetting)...and which then led to more than a dozen other bloggers posting their Political Compass results, which Solum now records here. I'm sure the numbers will go up.

The results, alas, are depressing, and confirm how utterly right-wing the law parts of the blogosphere are (and these results don't even include the right-wing kooks--I say this only with the greatest affection--at The Right Coast or the Volokh Conspiracy). Needless to say, even though I post almost nothing of a political nature, it turns out I'm further to the Left than any of these folks, and, interestingly, far more libertarian. Of course, this is consistent with the fact that I'm also the most intelligent by all objective measures. (Note to Steve Bainbridge: I'm kidding.)

I'm sure if more of the blogosphere philosophers, like Bertram, Weatherson, Holbo weigh in, things will tilt more to the civilized left.

On a different note: if David Bernstein posts any more frequently at the Volokh Conspiracy, the name will have to be changed.

Libertarian Utopia in New Hampshire

The New York Times reported that libertarians are looking to create their utopia in New Hampshire, by moving there en masse in order to take over state government. I particularly enjoyed the astute comments of libertarian migrator Jackie Casey.

Ms. Casey, who lives with her cat and two 9-millimeter handguns (and wants a machine gun "or at least a rifle" for Xmas), and "sells memberships to a Las Vegas survivalist training institute and models for comic books," is full of vintage libertarian insights:

On the advantages of eliminating entitlements: "you'd only attract immigrants who are hard-working people," like those who sell memberships to survivalist training institutes, for example.

On public education: "I radically oppose public education. It's demeaning and it creates criminals."

On the causes of poverty: "the thing that hurts poor people is they don't know how to think of themselves as rich."

Prediction: I expect Ms. Casey to join the ranks of the Volokh Conspirators before long. She's not as knowledgeable as Eugene, to be sure, but this never before appears to have been the criterion for adding Conspirators. Moreover, they are short of women, plus she's pithy, which is a virtue.

IN MEMORIAM

B.J. Diggs (1916-2003)

A brief profile is here. When memorials are available, they will be posted here and to the Update Service of the PGR.

My Political Compass

Thanks to Steve Bainbridge for pointers to this site, which reports my "political compass" here. I'm delighted to note that, according to the Political Compass site, I'm closer to Gandhi, while Steve is closer to Hitler and Thatcher!

The New York Times on the PGR

Once again, a writer in the NY Times calls the Philosophical Gourmet Report "the bible" of prospective graduate students, which is either unfair to the bible or the PGR, I'm not sure which. But the author raises some interesting issues that will have to await time for a serious post in a couple of days...

Atlantic Monthly "College Rankings"

Sitting for a dozen hours on airplanes yesterday and the day before allowed me to read, with some care, among other things, the November 2003 issue of Atlantic Monthly, their first annual issue on "College Admissions." Overall, the articles on this subject are extremely informative; I can't recall better articles on these subjects by journalists. Anyone with children facing college admissions in the next few years will benefit from this issue.

The most attention, alas, has gone to their "top 50 schools" based on selectivity, calculated on the basis of admit rate (1/3rd), SAT (1/3rd) and percentage of students in the top 10% of their high school class (1/3rd). Although the ranking got a lot of attention, leave it to other journalists to fail to read the "fine print," for as the accompanying article makes clear: "Such a rating seems to provide clarity. But the clarity is an illusion." In other words, the accompanying article debunks the ranking.

IN MEMORIAM

John Hart Ely (1938-2003)

The NY Times obituary is here, which contains a useful discussion of his best-known contribution to constitutional theory, Democracy and Distrust (1980).

Nothing new for a bit...

...I'm on a plane tomorrow, to talk to the folks at George Mason Law on Tuesday about "Why Evolutionary Biology is (so far) Irrelevant to Law." (Evolutionary biology/pscyhology is the hot fad among right-wingers in the legal academy right now, preying on the impressive scientific ignorance of law professors; I'm doing my part to make sure it will go the way of deconstructionism, the fad of the pseudo-left in the legal academy in the 1980s.) There is unlikely to be much new on this site before Wednesday--maybe Tuesday, if I end up with office time on my hands.

"The less they know, the less they know it" post of the week is...

here, where the tediously reactionary Professor Reynolds is handed the rope and then hangs himself with it (i.e., posts it). (The last "paragraph" of the rope [about married men] is irrelevant, by then Professor Reynolds is long gone.) (What a misfortune, and injustice, for the University of Tennessee College of Law that Reynolds should now be their best-known faculty member.)

UPDATE: And for more on the moral depravity of Professor Reynolds, visit here and scroll down to October 24.

Finalists for Berkeley Law (Boalt) Deanship

The four external finalists to be Dean of Boalt are: Christopher Edley from Harvard; Edward Rubin from Penn; Tom Sullivan from Minnesota; and Stephen Yeazell from UCLA. (Yeazell is also the sole external finalist for the Cornell Deanship; there are two insiders in contention there as well.)

This is a surprising list, and for one reason having nothing to do with the quality of these candidates: a law school whose prior Dean resigned over allegations of sexual assault would have been keen, one might have thought, to have some female candidates for the Deanship; and a law school which has a reputation (just or unjust, I do not know) for discriminating against women in hiring and tenure (a law school which even lost a law suit on the latter count) would have been especially keen to have female candidates for Dean.

But for all I know, no credible female candidates were available. Edley, who is African-American, is a prominent administrative law scholar. Rubin, who also works in administrative law, taught at Boalt for many years, before taking early retirement and moving to Penn, when his wife got a job in that area. Sullivan, an antitrust scholar, has become something of a "professional" dean, serving at Arizona, Minnesota, and elsewhere, and earning high marks from all the faculty I've ever heard from at those schools. (Sullivan had the misfortune to serve as Dean at Minnesota when Minnesota's three most prominent faculty--Daniel Farber, Philip Frickey, and Suzanna Sherry--all left, through no fault of Sullivan's; Farber and Frickey are now at Boalt.) Yeazell is a prominent scholar in civil procedure.

Blog Stat

Number of visitors topped 600 for the first time yesterday, more than two-thirds having been here previously. Daily average for visitors has topped 450. I'd throw a party for all you nice folks, but my house isn't big enough.

US Ranks 31st for Press Freedom...

...according to Reporters Without Borders. Seems generous. (And US ranks 135th for Press Freedom in the countries it's invaded and is now managing as client states.)

"The Sushi Memo"

The now infamous Sushi Memo is here. I'm relieved to report that the Paul, Weiss partner who instructed a paralegal to spend time researching local sushi restaurants is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center. Georgetown has a mandatory public interest service requirement for both its students and its faculty. This obviously doesn't stop some of them from becoming ridiculously self-absorbed yuppies. Shocking!

(Note to Austin lawyers: save your paralegals some time, the only place to go for sushi is Momoko, on 24th, about half-way between Lamar and Guadalupe. It's an odd location, but the sushi is so good, you won't believe it.)

Yet more on the Socratic method...

...from a former law student turned philosophy PhD student here; and

...from the Curmudgeonly Clerk here.

Philosophy/Law Faculty Move

Mark Greenberg (philosophy of mind, philosophy of law), currently on tenure-track at Princeton, has accepted a joint law and philosophy offer from UCLA, to start next fall. That will give UCLA one of the strongest clusters of law-and-philosophy faculty in the US (besides Greenberg: Seana Shiffrin, Steven Munzer, and David Dolinko are all doing work at the intersection of law and philosophy, and Shiffrin is also jointly appointed between the two units).

Vouchers

I have largely refrained--and will continue to largely refrain--from entering political debates in the blogosphere, especially with the hopeless folks at the Volokh Conspiracy (apart from Eugene's always knowledgeable and often penetrating analysis of First Amendment questions, the quality of "political" comment and analysis there is not, shall we say, "cosmopolitan"). But I can not resist a brief remark on this recent posting by the admirably prolific (and much cited), but I fear morally hopeless, David Bernstein:

"Matthew Yglesias makes an error that I've heard over and over again from otherwise-intelligent liberals--that vouchers can't do much of anything to solve the problems that exist with public schools, because there are so few slots available in private schools. Call me crazy, but I assume if vouchers gradually became available to more students, especially those trapped in bad public schools, existing private schools would expand, and new private schools would arise, to meet the increased demand for their services. People didn't say sixty years ago, when Las Vegas was a small town in the desert, "guess we can't settle Vegas, there aren't enough grocery stores." It's possible that existing voucher plans don't provide a large enough voucher to give entrepreneurs the incentive to expand or create schools. But that's not an inherent problem with vouchers, that a problem of funding vouchers at far lower levels per student than the funding of public schools."

Extensive funding of vouchers would, indeed, result in a proliferation of private schools. These schools would flourish by not taking the "problem" students, which is what all the "good" private schools do now (as anyone with children knows full well). The "problem" students are overwhelmingly the ones from broken homes, socially and economically unstable communities, and so on. The problem students would all end up in the remaining public schools, which, of course, would be even more poorly funded than they already are, given the huge drain on taxpayer dollars subsidizing private schools. These schools would then be even worse which would, of course, lead clever pundits to advocate more vouchers to provide "competition" with the public schools.

These remaining public schools would be even "worse" because, as anyone--i.e., no one in the law blogosphere--who knows anything about schooling knows the two main problems actually afflicting the public schools are inadequate funding [which affects class size, in particular] and the socio-economic pathologies of American cities whose children populate the so-called "bad" urban public schools.

In lieu of talking about any actual causes of the problems in public schools--like the socio-economic pathologies of American society, the underfunding of public schools, the mindless proliferation of standardized testing, and so on--our clever pundits blame "lack of competition" and "teacher's unions." These little pernicious fantasies then circulate among the clever consumers of the clever pundits, and soon everyone is congratulating each other for their "insights."

Which is why I largely stay out of these intellectually pathetic and morally depraved discussions.

Students Interested in Philosophy of Physics Take Note

Michael Dickson, a quite highly regarded, though still relatively young, philosopher of physics in the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Indiana University at Bloomington has accepted an appointment at the University of South Carolina (his undergraduate alma mater) for next year. Dickson, who has rebuffed offers and entreaties from even stronger departments than Indiana, is really quite a catch for South Carolina, which already has RIG Hughes, another very reputable philosopher of physics. Overall, the South Carolina department has improved markedly over the last decade; students interested in philosophy of physics, in particular, might want to take a look now that Dickson is moving there as well.

More on Socratic Method in Law Schools

Professor Michael Froomkin of the University of Miami Law School writes:

"I sometimes tell my classes that I don't adopt the Socratic method because if I did they might feel obligated at the end of the semester to make me drink hemlock..."

The "Socratic Method": The Scandal of American Legal Education

So everyone who's seen a movie about law school in America knows that law professors use something called "the Socratic method." The professor asks a student a series of questions about some court case (which the students have read), eliciting the facts, the court's decision, and the reasoning behind it. The professor sometimes tries to elicit from the student recognition of the guiding legal principles at work in the decision. Other times the professor tries to lead the student to the realization that equally good arguments would support a different conclusion by the court (in this guise, the method is less Socratic, than Sophistic, since no one answer to the legal questions presented is deemed to be the correct one). The key is that the professor does not supply the "answers," but tries to lead students to recognize or figure out the answers for themselves.

The Socratic method is not as ominpresent as it once was in law schools, but it is still widely used, more or less, in most law schools, by most professors, at least some of the time.

And that's a scandal. For there is no evidence--as in "none"--that the Socratic method is an effective teaching tool. And there is much evidence that it's a recipe for total confusion.

When I started teaching law, I tried employing something like a Socratic method for the first couple of years, at least in my substantive law classes (never in the legal philosophy classes). I did so because I thought I was supposed to do so. Why? Well, because that's what law professors did--even though there is still no pedagogical research supporting the use of this method. (Am I wrong? I'd be grateful for cites to pertinent educational or psychological research.)

I'm now a recovering Socratic method teacher. Actually, I'm fully recovered: I don't use it. In Evidence, I still have students on call, who need to answer some of the problems in the textbook I use, but that's not Socratic method, that's just mandatory class participation.

As I say to my Evidence classes on the first day: "Philosophy is almost never taught via the Socratic method, so why should law be taught that way?" It's plainly not a question of intellectual or dialectical ability; the exceptional philosophical lecturers I've had the pleasure of listening to in one class or another over the years--Paul Boghossian, Philip Kitcher, Peter Railton, David Velleman, Crispin Wright, among others--are, as thinkers and dialecticians, heads-and-shoulders above all but two or three law professors in the country. They could surely have taught the Socratic way, but they didn't. They are, to repeat, the norm among philosophers.

He makes the Texas Taliban look sane...

Guess who said the following:

"The Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today."

"Communism was the brainchild of German-Jewish intellectuals"

"The Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew."

"How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy moneychangers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top?"

Feminism is a "socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

Recently, he declared: "When you get through you say, 'If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom [where the State Department's building is located]. I think that's the answer. We've got to blow that thing up.'" This was his second nuclear terror threat on Washington, DC. "Maybe we need a very small nuke thrown off on Foggy Bottom to shake things up," he said in June.

Was it Osama bin Laden? The Malaysian prime minister? The leader of the Aryan Nation?

Nope. It was Pat Robertson, wealthy televangelist, friend and supporter of the U.S. Attorney General, and founder of the politically influential Christian Coaltion.

[Thanks to Mickey Z. for the references.]

Penn Law's Law Suit Against the Defense Department

Before the Yale Law faculty sued Rummy over the military's discrimination against homosexuals (and, more precisely, the requirement that Law Schools cooperate with military recruitment, notwithstanding their own anti-discrimination policies), the Penn Law faculty filed suit first. Their complaint is here: Download file.

Summary of Philosophy Faculty Moves and Hirings for 2002-03

10/19 UPDATE: I'm moving this to the front, since various corrections/additions have been made in some of the entries (Harvard, Columbia, Pittsburgh, among others).

==============

The following summary of faculty moves and hirings at ranked PhD-granting programs that transpired since the last edition of the Report (from fall 2002) is intended to allow prospective students make effective use of the 2002-04 Report as they choose graduate programs this coming academic year. (The next comprehensive survey will be undertaken in summer 2004, for the 2004-06 edition of the Report.)

Note that in some cases, senior hires were announced prior to the last PGR, even though the actual move did not occur till this year. Thus, where hires are already reflected in the fall 2002 PGR, they are not noted here. In addition, since faculty age is a factor evaluators are invited, but not required, to consider, faculty who are turning 70 soon are noted. Remember, however, that there is no mandatory retirement age, and while many faculty still retire before or around 70, many others continue teaching. Check with individual departments for more information.

It is a reasonable supposition that senior appointments (listed as “hires”) will affect the specialty rankings in most of the cases noted below. (“Junior hires” means a tenure-track assistant professor, or equivalent.) If you are interested in Brian Leiter’s own editorial comments on these developments, please see the next posting.

This information will also be added to the Update Service of the PGR

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Hired Don Garrett (early modern) from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Beatrice Longuenesse (Kant, Continental philosophy) from Princeton University. The Law School at NYU hired Stephen Perry (legal and political philosophy) from the University of Pennsylvania; Perry is an “affiliated faculty” member in philosophy (as are Ronald Dworkin and Liam Murphy from the Law School). The School of Education hired Dale Jamieson (environmental ethics) from Carleton College; Jamieson is an “affiliated faculty” member in philosophy as well. Also one junior hire: Elizabeth Harman [PhD, MIT] (ethics). Jerry Fodor (Rutgers) and Sydney Shoemaker (emeritus, Cornell) are teaching one seminar per year at NYU for the next three years. Lost Gordon Belot (philosophy of physics) to the University of Pittsburgh; Frances Myrna Kamm (ethics) to Harvard University; and Cian Dorr (metaphysics), a junior faculty member, to Pittsburgh as well.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Hired Michael Smith (ethics, metaethics) from the Australian National University (starting in 2004). Lost Beatrice Longuenesse (Kant, Continental philosophy) to New York University.

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, NEW BRUNSWICK

Hired Jefferson McMahan (ethics, applied ethics) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Philosophy Job Placement

Although almost every American PhD-granting department now includes reasonably detailed placement information on its website, there are still some stragglers. One of the oddest is Columbia University, which even recently updated and redid its whole web site, though it still includes this wholly misleading information on job placement:

"Recent graduates of the Ph.D. program have found exmployment in academic and non-academic institutions in the United States and abroad. They have obtained teaching poisitions at such colleges and universities as Carnegie Mellon, University of Chicago, Columbia University, University of Delaware, Franklin and Marshall College, Georgia State, Grinnell College, Harvard, Hofstra, Johns Hopkins, Marist College, University of Maryland, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Miami University, Ohio University, University of Michigan, NYU, Patterson, Queens College, Rutgers, University of Stockholm, University of Waterloo, and Portland State University."

The key word here is "recent." How recent are we talking? Let's take the placement at the University of Chicago. The last Columbia PhD placed at Chicago, I believe, was Josef Stern, and that was about two decades ago. How about Harvard? That would have been Frederick Neuhouser, about a dozen years ago--and now he's back at Columbia as Chair of the department at Barnard! Rutgers? I can't identify any graduate of Columbia placed in a tenure-track job at Rutgers in the last 15 years. Fred Schick and Peter Kivy are Columbia PhDs at Rutgers, but they earned their PhDs three decades ago, or more. And NYU? Who could they be thinking of in the last 15 years? (I suppose Liam Murphy, who was hired in the law school.)

In sum, this "job placement" information is astonishingly misleading and inaccurate. Columbia's job placement hasn't, in fact, been bad, and one would expect that with someone like Philip Kitcher in the department, who has an exceptionally good record of training and placing students, that it will continue to be quite respectable. But it is peculiar, to say the least, to revamp your whole site, and continue to include essentially inaccurate information on job placement. (There are other pecularities, like the continued listing of Crispin Wright as a member of the faculty; I'll have to check on this, though last we talked, Wright was at St. Andrew's and part-time at NYU, period.)

Anti-Semitism, Disney

Thanks to the Malaysian Prime Minister, anti-semitism is the issue de moment (a full "jour" is too long for the blogosphere), which brings us to the irrelevant Gregg Easterbrook--another one of the horde of neocon blatherers--who has now apologized for his anti-semitic remarks. But as far as I'm concerned, that's the least of it. For in his apology, he wrote that he "was indignant that a major company whose work is mainly good, Disney..."

Now that's really obscene. Disney's "work is mainly good"! Has Mr. Easterbrook seen the crap that Disney has produced over the last decade? (Does Mr. Easterbrook have any criteria?) Disney has taken every cultural icon with emotional, existential, and sometimes even moral texture--Hercules, Aladdin, even Tarzan--and turned it in to cartoon sitcom trash. It's very clear that every screenwriter Disney now employs was raised on television, with the result that the dialogues of all their films--films aimed at children, no less--are all written in the style of smart-ass sitcoms, in which no character has depth or seriousness, in which every other figure is a wise-cracking buffoon. Seriously, rent Bambi, and then rent any of the Aladdin films, and you'll see that Disney has become another purvey of "porn." (This is unfair to porn, of course, which is at least clear about what it is.)

I'm sure I speak for all parents of small children when I say that if Disney folded tomorrow, they would not be missed.

"The Jews rule this world by proxy"

So says the Malaysian Prime Minister, anyway (for all the details, and lots of good links, see Drezner).

But if we rule the world, how come I can't:

(1) find the perfect school for my 2nd-grader?

or

(2) find an Italian restaurant in Austin that wouldn't be car-bombed by the Mafia in New York for gastronomic offenses?

It must be because my mother was Catholic. Unfair. I really don't want to rule the whole world, I'd settle for 1 and 2.

The "worldwide" readership for this blog

I found this data courtesy of my site counter service interesting, but perhaps no one else will (but that's what my "navel-gazing" category is for!):

Country of Origin

This page lists the domains from which your traffic originates. Please note that some domains do not have a precise geographical meaning ; Network in particular is a worldwide domain. Also, it is possible for a non-US visitor's request to be re-routed through a US-based server by the visitor's ISP (that sometimes happens with large US-based ISPs such as Compuserve). In that case the visit will appear as coming from the US, even though it originated somewhere else.

Country of origin Visits %

US Educational .edu 6218 32.5

Network [ Hide ] .net 5394 28.2

US Commercial .com 4673 24.4

Canada .ca 476 2.5

United Kingdom .uk 436 2.3

US Government .gov 367 1.9

Japan .jp 246 1.3

Australia .au 237 1.2

Ireland .ie 189 1.0

Singapore .sg 188 1.0

Belgium .be 100 0.5

France .fr 90 0.5

Germany .de 87 0.5

South Africa .za 75 0.4

Finland .fi 51 0.3

Hungary .hu 43 0.2

United States .us 36 0.2

Norway .no 32 0.2

Netherlands .nl 31 0.2

Mexico .mx 28 0.1

Switzerland .ch 24 0.1

Non-Profit Organization .org 18 0.1

Israel .il 16 0.1

Austria .at 13 0.1

All others were less than 10.

Yale Law faculty sue over military policy discriminating against homosexuals

Forty-four members of the Yale Law School faculty have filed a lawsuit in federal district court challenging, on constitutional and statutory grounds, the Department of Defense demand that the Law School permanently rescind its nondiscrimination policy as applied to military recruitment, notwithstanding the military's exclusion based on sexual preference. You can read the complaint here: Download file

Funny

Here's a choice observation by the Curmudgeonly Clerk about "comments" sections in the blogosphere (the remarks might have been generalized I suspect):

"Being a reader of many blogs with comments, I cannot say that I find anything useful about them as a general rule. Those who comment frequently seem to be emotionally and/or intellectually stunted and armed with a poor sense of style, grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Even when comment sections are not so afflicted, they are often littered with detritus. Consider this thoughtful comment to one of Calpundit's posts: 'Mmmmmm . . . . sausage.'"

Wash U jumped the gun

Even though the Law School at Wash U/St. Louis announced in its alumni magazine--which it then sent to every law professor in America--that distinguished political scientist Matthew McCubbins from the University of California at San Diego would be joining the faculty...I now have it on good authority that McCubbins is not moving to Wash U (and I wouldn't be surprised to see him take up a joint appointment with the University of San Diego School of Law, instead). [Note: UC San Diego does not have a law school; the main law school in the San Diego region is affiliated with a private university, University of San Diego, that, apart from its law school, is otherwise undistinguished.]

Teachers abandon "approved" textbooks

Thanks to the Texas Taliban, and their allies nationally, not to mention the PC censors, school teachers are apparently giving up on the official "approved" school textbooks altogether, as discussed here.

Nietzsche Studies in Britain

Having recently accepted an invitation to give a plenary address at the annual meeting of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society of Great Britain next September 10-12 (at the University of Sussex, for UK readers who might be interested), I was reminded of the unusually large number of interesting scholars working on and interested in Nietzsche in Britain (an ironic development, given Nietzsche's famed antipathy for the English)--for example, Ken Gemes and Christopher Janaway at Birkbeck College, University of London; Sebastian Gardner at University College London; Raymond Geuss at Cambridge University; David Owen and Aaron Ridley at the University of Southampton; David Cooper at the University of Durham; Michael Rosen at Oxford University; Peter Poellner at the University of Warwick; and so on. And this isn't counting some of the terrific British philosophers whose work reflects an apprecative interest in Nietzsche, like Simon Blackburn at Cambridge, Galen Strawson at Reading, and, of course, Philippa Foot, now emerita at Oxford. Although Nietzsche studies in the U.S. is finally coming in to its own philosophically, thanks to Richard Schacht and Maudemarie Clark, among others, I think it's fair to say that, per capita, the amount of significant work is higher in Britain. I have no explanation for why things should have developed that way, but it is a striking (and welcome) development nonetheless.

The "No Bullshit" Approach to the Texas Textbook Debate

Excellent essay here, with lots of apt shots at the conmen at the Discovery [sic] Institute and others who are making a career out of lying about the theory of evolution.

Against Civility, Part II

Let's be clear: there are lots of compelling reasons for civility in the context of collegial, social, and pedagogical interactions (indeed, in the latter context, it is absolutely obligatory). None of that is at issue here. There's even a reasonable case for civility in genuine intellectual disputes among intellectuals and scholars. That's not at issue here either. What's at issue is the demand for civility in two contexts: (1) political disputes, and (2) disputes in the blogosphere. Both kinds of disputes have something important in common, namely, they are often devoid of intellectual content, pretense notwithstanding.

Good-looking professors get better student evaluations...

...according to a study by a colleague in economics, reported on here. So that explains it. I thought I was a good teacher, and it turns out it's just my good looks.

Texas Eagle Forum=Texas Taliban on Steroids

Here's a gem of an e-mail from the Texas Eagle Forum, the folks who take the Texas Republican Platform really seriously:

From: Cathie Adams
To: [email protected]
Subject: YOU CONSIDER HOW EVOLUTION SHOULD BE PRESENTED IN TEXAS TEXTBOOKS
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 20:34:10 -0500

Friends,

Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) member Terri Leo wants YOU to be the
best informed PARENT and TAXPAYER concerning the textbooks that will be
used to teach your children and/or grandchildren in Texas classrooms. Did
you evolve from an ape or were you created by God? This is NOT a rhetorical
question. Your child or grandchild WILL be taught according to what you
choose NOW.

Do NOT become weary in well doing. Be informed and influence YOUR SBOE
member with your thoughts.

Cathie Adams, Texas Eagle Forum

And now the Wyoming Taliban...

...strike a blow for ignorance.

The Best Book Publishers in Philosophy

There was considerable interest in the posting on the best philosophy journals, so consider this a sequel. Interest in the best presses for philosophy, at least among students, is more often a matter of trying to gauge faculty quality (via proxies like where they've published), though as with journals, there is interest too among philosophers trying to make publication decisions. With respect to presses, my sense is that an assessment of quality is easier and more clear-cut than in the case with journals (see the comments section of the latter posting for some indication of the ways in which opinions diverge). But in case I'm wrong, I've activated the Comments section here as well, and invite corrections and additions.

For breadth, depth, and quality of publications in philosophy, I would think it is clear that the two leading English-language presses are Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press.

Coming close for depth and quality--but falling far short on breadth--is Harvard University Press's philosophy catalogue.

Also boasting strong, if generally not as high-profile, catalogues are Princeton University Press and Routledge.

Two presses have carved out specialty niches, where their publications are as strong as anyone's: MIT Press (the Bradford Books imprint) for philosophy of mind/metaphysics; and Cornell University Press for philosophy of religion.

Blackwell has largely stopped producing new monographs in philosophy, so it's harder to compare them any longer with the others; certainly for "guides" and "anthologies," Blackwell is as reliable and high quality as any of the others.

Occasionally, significant contributions to philosophy are published by Yale University Press, Westview Press, University of Chicago Press, Rowman & Littlefield, and so on, but none of these other presses is as good in philosophy as the ones noted above.

Some more detailed comments now on the preceding:

The Platform of the Texas Taliban

CalPundit has a pithy and pointed account of the main highlights of the official agenda of the Texas Taliban as expressed in the "platform" of the Texas Republican Party. The only good news is that many of the Texas Republicans who hold elected office ignore it.

Another timely Nietzsche observation

"The practices demanded in polite society: careful avoidance of the ridiculous, the offensive, the presumptuous, the suppression of one's virtues as well as of one's strongest inclinations, self-adaptations, self-deprecation, submission to orders of rank--all this is to be found as social morality in a crude form everywhere, even in the depths of the animal world--and only at this depth do we see the purpose of all these amiable precautions: one wishes to elude one's pursuers and be favored in the pursuit of one's prey. For this reason the animals learn to master themselves and alter their form, so that many, for example, adapt their coloring to the coloring of their surrounding..., pretend to be dead or assume the forms and colors of another animal or of sand, leaves, lichen, fungus....Thus [too] the individual hides himself in the general concept 'man,' or in society, or adapts himself to princes, classes, parties, opinions of his time and place...."

--Dawn, sec. 26.

How Much Money Do Law Professors Make?

This must certainly be the question most-often asked by students thinking about careers in law teaching (well, after the question, "How do I get in to law teaching?" but I've answered that question at length elsewhere). As it happens, there are three public sources of information on the subject, which don't give an exhaustive answer, but certainly are highly informative.

First, a group called the Society of American Law Teachers, collects data each year on median salaries at each professorial rank from schools willing to report it; the most recent data is here. (Keep in mind that most, but not all, law schools promote straight from the untenured ranks to "Professor"; indeed, some law schools don't even have an Assistant Professor rank--untenured faculty are "Associate Professors.") One difficulty with the data is that it appears that some schools are reporting the 12-month salary, while others are reporting the 9-month salary figures. In law schools, "summer money" (which would be reflected in a 12-month figure) is an important part of the compensation package, accounting for anywhere from 5% to 25% of overall compensation. "Summer money" is usually awarded competitively, to support active researchers, but practices vary from school to school, and at some schools the money is basically guaranteed. It's not always clear, however, from the SALT data whether that money is included or excluded in the figures reported for each school.

The Most Important Blog Site in Existence

Can there be any doubt that this is the most informative, timely, insightful and valuable blog site anywhere in Cyberspace? And you thought he was just a mild-mannered conservative Catholic corporate law expert.

The Relevance of Motives, or The Hermeneutics of Suspicion, or Ricoeur meets Gettier

There is some discussion in the blogosphere about Paul Krugman's tendency to make claims about the "motives" of Bush & co. One reasonable defense of the practice comes from Crooked Timber. The discussion, however, brought to mind an issue that arises with respect to what Paul Ricoeuer dubbed "the hermeneutics of suspicion," the practice of critics like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud of attacking certain views by exposing their real motives or origins. In general, I don't find the blogosphere conducive to substantial philosophical argument, but in this case, and since it bears on the Krugman discussion, let me just post part of a forthcoming paper on "The Hermeneutics of Suspicion" (in The Future for Philosophy volume) that constitutes a defense, as it were, of the epistemological foundations of Krugman's practice (not to mention the more sophisticated forms in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud):

Against Civility, Part I

Krugman, as it happens, takes up one aspect of the issue du jour today:

"All this fuss about the rudeness of the Bush administration's critics is an attempt to preclude serious discussion of that administration's policies. For there is no way to be both honest and polite about what has happened in these past three years."

This, however, just scratches the surface of what's wrong with the civility cult. More soon...

Dissing George Will

I'm not sure I agree with all the politics of this piece, but it's delightfully wicked anyway.

Will Academics Start Fleeing California?

Already the "buzz" among philosophers is that the election of the absurd Schwarzenegger, in a state already facing enormous problems, is going to lead philosophers in California, especially at UC system campuses, to start thinking about leaving. We'll see whether Schwarzenegger can pull a "Thatcher."

(Question: which two people did the most for philosophy in the U.S. in the 20th-century? Answer: Adolf Hitler and Margaret Thatcher. Hitler sent Carnap, Hempel, Adorno, Reichenbach etc. fleeing to the United States; Thatcher sent McDowell, McGinn, Peacocke, Blackburn (for awhile), etc. fleeing to the United States.)

Who "Owns" the Pseudo-Nobel Prize in Economics?

It's not entirely clear...read this and then read this.

The best analysis of the California election results is...

here.