Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

the "No Bullshit Approach"

Another reader (something of a "hot shot" on the law teaching market this year) writes: "I confess that one of the joys of your blog is its no bullshit approach." That's gratifying, but the approach is not universally admired. Alas, it would take me too long to link to all the sites that are evidence of that!

More on Conservatives and Law School Hiring

A well-known young law professor at a major law school writes with the following amusing observation:

"Delightful latest post on law school hiring and political bias. As someone who tends to lean right-of-center, I think you're quite right about the seige mentality among conservatives in academia. The way I see it, being a right-of-center academic is a lot like being a single guy who is prematurely balding. You meet a few attractive women who announce that they would *never* date a balding man, and pretty soon you start thinking that all women are biased against balding men. There's a grain of truth to your perception -- balding hurts you overall in the mating game -- but the one or two experiences get blown out of proportion, and you conveniently overlook when it helps you because others happen to like the look. It's similar with right-of-center academics. They have a few bad experiences, and suddenly they fear the entire academic world is against them."

Not All Law Profs Are Right-Wingers...

...though you might get that impression if you only knew about law schools via blogs like Volokh or Reynolds or Bainbridge or the USD blog. Anyway, here's some evidence otherwise, involving my esteemed colleague Tom McGarity, who is truly one of the good guys (and a great scholar).

The Pseudo-Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to...

economists at New York University and the University of California at San Diego. More information is here.

For more on the Pseudo-Nobel in Economics, see the several entries here.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry...

goes to two professors, one at Johns Hopkins University Medical School and one at Rockefeller University in New York. More information is here.

Law School Hiring and Political Bias

I am learning a lot about hiring practices at UCLA, thanks to Steve Bainbridge's informative posts. I am particularly struck by his posting on "the anti-conservative bias [in law school hiring] as institutional phenomenon." I am inclined to agree that law school hiring is more politically driven than hiring elsewhere in the academy, but Professor Bainbridge's post, following up on Professor Reynolds's on the same topic, leads me to think that differences between institutions may matter a lot. In particular, I don't think his explanation of the institutional basis for the bias phenomenon is generally applicable. I've interspersed my observations on the process with Bainbridge's in what follows.

Finnish anyone?

I'd love to know what this blogger said:

Tuomari tulee ja tuomari tuom... eipäs kun bloggaa. Lawrence Lessig, Brian Leiter, Eugene Volokh ja Stephen Bainbridge. No okei, yksikään noista ei ole tuomari vaan lakitieteen professori, mutta halusin olla vitsikäs. Varsinkin Leiter (kas kun ei Felix Leiter) on aika tyly, ja tekee esimerkiksi blogissaan saman huomion NAS:n jäsenten uskonnollisuudesta kuin minäkin taannoin.
posted by Ilkka at 11:05 AM

UPDATE: Thanks to a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Helsinki, for a translation:

"The judge comes and the judge judges ... never so much as when blogging.
Lawrence Lessig, Brian Leiter, Eugene Volokh and Stephen Bainbridge. Well
okay, none of these are judges but law professors, I just wanted to be
funny. Leiter especially is quite brusque, and noticed the same things
about the NAS's religious bias as I did."

One indication that this translation is correct is that I am identified as being "quite brusque" as compared to Professors Lessig, Volokh, and Bainbridge.

UPDATE 10/7: Professor Ilkka Kokkarinen, source of the original quote, writes with further interesting explanation about the quote and the translation:

"First, the line 'The judge comes and the judge judges...' is from an old song by a Finnish pop artist, who incidentally later got himself a law degree.

"Second, the word 'tyly', translated as 'brusque', is of course correctly translated, but it should be noted that like the English word 'bad' which can also mean 'good' in some senses, this word has multiple connotations, and I used it here in a positive and admiring sense. Imagine a chess match where one player makes moves that force a win without giving the other player any chance: such a play could be said to be quite 'tyly', even more so the more inventive and the
forceful the moves are. The word similarly applies to the world of argumentation. (For example, I doubt that very many people in your position would use blunt but correct terms such as 'Texas Taliban'.)"

University of Illinois Picks Up Its 2nd Nobel Prize in as Many Days!

The Physics prize, announced today, is to be shared by a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the prize in Physiology and Medicine, announced yesterday, was also shared by a professor at Illinois.

But as any astute reader of U.S. News knows, the University of Virginia is really a much better university. Really.

Epistemology comes to Law School

A generation ago the primary point of contact between legal theory and philosophy was through moral and political philosophy; now it is more often through epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language, which has much to do with developments like this. (Needless to say, we're excited here in Austin about this development!)

Fame in the Blogosphere: A Blog Devoted to Monitoring Your Blog?

Erin O'Connor, an English professor at Penn, who monitors "politically correct" assaults on academic and political freedom in universities (and, who more recently, was a major contributor to the conservative self-pity fest inspired by the David Brooks column on alleged bias against conservatives in academia), has achieved an unparalelled distinction for an academic blogger: there is now an (anonymous, naturally) blog site devoted to monitoring and critiquing her blog each day.

This doesn't seem like a sound investment of time, does it?

(Word to the wise: these anonymous blog sites aren't as anonymous as one might think. Since the anonymous sites, unsurprisingly, tend to give rise to more-than-their-share of defamation claims that would survive dismissal motions--and how eager are service providers to defend against such claims? (I don't know)--this means the identity of all these anonymous blogs is a discovery request away.)

Two Libertarians on Edward Said

One here, and one here.

Who is the hypocrite?

The culture of "documented facts" in journalism

Good article.

And an excellent complement to the preceding from Asia Times: "The more commercial television news you watch, the more wrong you are likely to be about key elements of the Iraq War and its aftermath, according to a major new study released in Washington on Thursday."

False consciousness, anyone?

2003 MacCarthur Fellows

The MacCarthur Foundation has announced the 2003 winners of what has come to be known as its "genius" grants--5 years worth of money, unrestricted in how it is to be used. My father, who forwarded the NY Times article about the awards, prefaced it with the following:

"The ranks of 'genius' are thinning. Reads more like a balance of social hot buttons and ethnic allocation. Would it be inappropriate to call this award eccentric?"

I think the answer to the last question is: clearly not. Consider which philosophers have been deemed "geniuses" by the MacCarthur Foundation: Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, T.M. Scanlon, Patricia Smith Churchland, Gregory Vlastos, Nancy Cartwright. I think any student of philosophy could reasonably say that this is a completely eccentric list--there are some first-rate philosophers on this list (and some not-so-first-rate ones), but are these truly the geniuses of the profession? The MacCarthur Foundation has been bestowing these windfalls for more than two decades. How could it be they never gave the award to David Lewis, Saul Kripke, Kit Fine, Stephen Yablo, Peter Railton, Allan Gibbard, David Malament, and on and on, in other words, to philosophers who may well be philosophical "geniuses"?

The MacCarthur Fellowships are splendid awards, some of which recognize first-rate scholarship and achievement. But it is long past time to stop referring to them as "genius" awards. They aren't.

Splendid Parody of Leo Strauss

There is a splendid parody of Strauss in the comments section at Crooked Timber on the Strauss thread noted here.

The poster of the parody is responding to one "Robert Schwartz," who, singlehandedly, is a powerful argument for not having a Comments section on any blog (his repeated "the less they know, the less they know it" postings on Crooked Timber have led Timberite Henry Farrell to hurl at him the blogosphere's worst insult: "troll"! Professor Farrell has even singled him out for banishment from the Comments section, which seems unjust given the competition.)

Schwartz objects to Farrell's critique of Strauss (and apparently hasn't gotten over my dissing of the master either) as follows:

Timely (as always) Nietzsche Observation

"Where has the last feeling of decency and self-respect gone when even our statesmen, an otherwise quite unembarrassed type of man, anti-Christians through and through in their deeds, still call themselves Christians today and attend communion?"

--The Antichrist, sec. 38.

Yet More on the Nobel Prize in Economics

Thanks to James DeRossitt for the following additional information:

"I was surprised to learn that, strictly speaking, there really is not a Nobel Prize in Economics. The prize was created by the Bank of Sweden in 1968, long after the other prizes were endowed (in 1901). The official name of the prize is 'The Bank of Sweden Prize for Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel.' Although it is not a Nobel Prize, the Bank of Sweden persuaded the Nobel Foundation to administer the prize along with the 'real' Nobel Prizes, effectively obscuring the distinction between the real Nobel Prizes and the Economics prize.

"This article (published around the time the awards were made in 2002) makes the interesting case that the endowment of this award was a clever gambit to lend legitimacy to the field of economics, 'a move aimed at enforcing the dominant status of economics as a "hard" science not only among the disciplines of the social sciences, but first and foremost in the mind of the public and its elected representatives.'"

Minnesota (!?!) Taliban

...are on the march against science too.

Immortality in Legal Philosophy

Larry Solum's remarks on questions of philosophical immortality also include some reflections on immortality in legal theory and philosophy of law, broadly construed. Solum's list of candidates for immortality: O.W. Holmes, Karl Llewellyn, Hans Kelsen, H.L.A. Hart, N. Luhmann, Ronald Coase, Richard Posner, Joseph Raz, Ronald Dworkin. I agree on Holmes, Kelsen, Hart, and Llewellyn; am uncertain about Posner and Raz; and am skeptical about Coase, Luhmann, and Dworkin.

Holmes has already lasted a century fairly well, so betting on another century seems reasonable. Kelsen and Hart are, uncontroversially, the dominant figures of 20th-century legal philosophy, read and studied internationally, who give deep and often very compelling answers to fundamental philosophical questions about law. Insofar as those questions are asked in the future--let's assume they will be--it's hard to see how Kelsen and Hart won't be read for answers.

Llewellyn's corpus is large, and having spent a chunk of my academic career trying to make philosophical sense of the legal realist movement in which Llewellyn was so important, I think I'm entitled to offer the verdict that a lot of it is crap (or, when not crap, very temporally bounded in its interest and significance). But when Llewellyn is on target, he has a deeper and more subtle sense for the nature of legal reasoning in the common law countries than anyone writing before or since. Insofar as the common law lives on for another hundred years (it's done well for several hundred already!), Llewellyn will remain a live figure in legal theory as well.

More on Economics and Science

Responding to my post asking why a Nobel Prize is awarded in economics, a young philosopher at a top department writes with the following interesting remarks:

"Now, this business about Economics not being a science. The difficulty with philsophers who comment on this sort of thing...is that they tend to suffer from the same myopia as most people in Econ departments do, and so take aim at a rather uninteresting branch of work which attempts to fit observational (and noisy) data to models rather ill-suited to the task, or, what's even more dismal, forecasting. But that hardly exhausts the field. There is plenty of experimental work in economics---both using standard behavioral techniques and using imaging techniques from neuroscience (fMRI, PET, etc.) to gather data, and then using modeling techniques which are an mixture of stuff from traditional game theory and stuff from the cognitive sciences---which is as scientific as anything done in medicine, chemistry, or physics. (That's not meant to just be an intuitive judgment. On any plausible story about the demarcation problem, this research counts as being on the right side.) Most of this interesting work, of course, is seen as radical by people in Econ departments, and until last year went unrewarded by the Nobel committee. But an experimental and behavioral prize was given last year, and I suspect that a prize in neuroeconomics will be given within 20yrs."

"Austin is so not Texas"

So says Sports Illustrated, and I believe they're correct. Secession from the state is out, though, since the legislature meets here...

UPDATE: More on the "myth of Texas" from the Curmudgeonly Clerk.

More Strauss Bashing

Someone else doesn't think too highly of old Leo's misreadings.

Paul Krugman (future Nobel Laureate?) in the Guardian

Interesting short profile--note especially the bit about the death threats he gets, no doubt from really, really smart, could've-been-top-flight-academics-except-for-liberal-bias right-wingers.

J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize in Literature

From the Swedish Academy's statement on Coetzee: "he is a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilisation."

This will no doubt lead to his being derided in the blogosphere.

UPDATE: Coetzee is also a UT-Austin graduate alumnus.

UPDATE 10/05: As predicted, the derision begins.

The motto of the blogosphere?

"A lie can travel around the world while the truth is just putting on its shoes."

--Mark Twain

Why is there a Nobel Prize in Economics?

Next week, the Swedish Academy starts handing out Nobel Prizes, which guarantees for the recipients a wave of international publicity and attention. Since the late 1960s, economics has been included among the fields for which the Prize is given. And without a doubt, the field of economics has gotten a lot of mileage out of the fact that it is the only social science field in which there is a Nobel Prize, which puts economics right alongside real sciences like physics and chemistry.

Economists tend to take the scientific status of their field for granted, while those outside the field are more skeptical. There's a large popular literature, of course, on the preposterously bad track record of predictions by economists (the December 2, 1996 essay by John Cassidy in The New Yorker may be the best-known, though it's not, as far as I can tell, on-line), but philosophers (notably Daniel Hausman at Wisconsin and Alexander Rosenberg at Duke) have developed substantial theoretical accounts of the problems that afflict economics and that account for the poor predictive track record. A good sampling is found in Hausman's contribution to SEP on philosophy of economics. Hausman there writes, for example, regarding Milton Friedman's famous defense of unrealistic assumptions in economic theories:

A Rapprochement Between Philosophy and English Departments?

Philosophers are used to thinking of literature departments as the repositories for all the world's bad philosophy, but there are indications that that is now starting to change. It's not only that Derrida is increasingly out of fashion, but that literary scholars are getting interested in philosophical issues about the mind, mental representation, the nature of cognition, artificial intelligence and so on. A representative bibliography of this kind of work (thanks to Chun the Unavoidable for the reference) is here.

Blog Stats

Number of page views in a single day topped 500 yesterday for the first time, more than two-thirds having visited previously. 9387 page views for September, same percentage repeat visitors. Other breakdowns:

12% of page views were by high IQ libertarians.
2% of page views were by high IQ conservatives.
14% of page views were by low IQ conservatives.
3% of page views were by no IQ Straussians.
4% of page views were by low IQ Thomas Friedman fans.
24% of page views were by run-of-the-mill Democrats (IQ distribution on
a bell curve)
4% of page views were by high IQ social democrats.
5% of page views were by high-IQ-off-the-charts Chomskyites.
4% of page views were by high-IQ-low-intelligence Mensa members.
The remainder were unidentified.

OK, I made some of that up.