Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Hardcastle from Virginia Tech to Cincinnati

Valerie Hardcastle (philosophy of mind and cognitive science), currently Professor of Philosophy and Science & Technology Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, has accepted appointment as Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Cincinnati, where she will also be Professor of Philosophy.  That is likely to be a boon for philosophy at Cincinnati, which already has a strong presence in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and cognate fields.  The Cincinnati press release is here.

Friday Poem: "Theater Death"

Theater Death

I am in the Theater Death
Alone but not feeling alone
If dead not feeling dead
I go about my business playing out my role
It is not a time for taking chances
Everything is very serious
Scenes started cannot be stopped
Actions must be taken to conclusion
I know that if I begin to speak
My sentence will proceed inexorably

But what is my role
It appears to conform to the character
I remember to have been mine in life
My part consists mainly of inaction
A simple exercise in expectation
I am not Everyman I am Readyman

Although I play in isolation
I do not think I am the only player
I am confident of this
I expect others to step
Onto the stage at any moment
And perform some action in line
With what I do or do not do
I reassure myself about this
Saying I am not the only one
Someone has always come along
Death will not be different

I begin to imagine characters
To complement my performance
An old man sweeping the stage
Silently absorbed in his work
He passes close to me shuffling
Along uneasily the broom whisking
The boards but disturbing nothing
He does not greet me
He does not seem to see me
Yet I could make him notice me
For I have imagined him
But I will not do so deliberately
So as not to step out of character
And jeopardize my authenticity

Alone ignored but expectant
I feel almost like an exile
Whose task is to await a summons
To return perhaps in triumph
But to where seems not to matter

The old man continues sweeping
Except for him the stage is empty
How cleverly I have imagined myself

No doubt others would play this differently
In a bucolic setting or as a celebration
Say a gathering of loved ones
Full of warmth and good feelings
Such scenes are not in my nature
But were they to pass upon the stage
Absorbing other players I would understand
Might even applaud were it permitted

I think of those whose lives were unhappy
Tortured foreshortened exploited afflicted
What roles would suit them
In this Theater Death
Would they repeat their troubled days
Or alter them to suit some need
Replacing the grim with the halcyon
For me that is not an option
The Theater Death is the Theater Life as well
I lack the device to make it otherwise
I need to be what I can understand
Death must be the familiar thing

Were I to put all cant aside
All of this would be impossible
One cannot have a Theater Death
The roles fixed the script written
And nothing left to chance
If doubt waits in the wings
For even as we make our preparations
Moving about as if we are alive
We must know the drama's certain in the end

Thus confident we live on in rehearsal
Of Death as life's reversal
Mirroring the little that we comprehend

Think of God as Pirandello

8/15-10/21/95, 6/27/98

Copyright 1995, 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Philosophy = skateboarding - skateboard? (Edmundson)

One of the compliments philosophy is paid is its being invoked to spice up other things that--without a dash of philosophy--might seem rather insipid.

Consider "parkours" (from the Fr., parcours), and "freerunning," practically indistinguishable urban sports invented and perfected in France.  Both are kinds of scrambling around, caroming gracefully off of obstacles, hurdling guardrails, and scaling tall buildings in multiple bounds.  They have been compared to a kind of po' folks' skateboarding, or one-gear biking without the bike or the one gear.

How can print journalism make this stillborn craze seem glamorous enough to want to read about, rather than just check out (or not) on YouTube? 

Answer: Philosophy!  Here's Ethan Todras-Whitehill in the NY Times, on the elusive parkour/freerunning distinction:

Freerunning focuses on the feeling and aesthetic expression of freedom, thinking that can be traced to the transcendentalism of Rousseau and Thoreau. And parkour’s “utility,” of which Mr. Cliff and other traceurs speak, is akin to the Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham in its application of mathematical principles to everyday life.

Got that?  Now you're all set to throw yourself against a wall.  As the French say, but a single step separates the ridiculous and the sublime.

European Science Foundation's Ranking of Philosophy Journals

Philosopher Gualtiero Piccinini (Missouri/St. Louis) has the details, links and a short explanation of the rating scale, as well as some comments on the significance of this list for European philosophers.  The philosophy list is here.  And a longer explanation of the rating scale is here. 

The rankings consist of three gradations:  A being the highest, C the lowest.  The ratings strike me as fairly plausible, though there are some odd results.  (Thom Brooks (Newcastle) also comments on some oddities in the ranking.)  European Journal of Philosophy, for example, should clearly be an A, now that it is the most important forum for historical work on post-Kantian Continental philosophy, as well as publishing important articles in many contemporary areas.  And why is British Journal for the History of Philosophy an A, while History of Philosophy Quarterly gets a B?  All the Kluwer X and Philosophy journals (where X is Biology, Economics etc.) got an A, which may explain how Law and Philosophy got an A, while the journal I co-edit, Legal Theory, got a B, even though we reject many papers that end up being accepted at Law and Philosophy. 

One explanation for the handful of peculiarities may have to do with the committee that oversaw the philosophy journal rankings, which consisted of Francois Recanati, Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, Diego Marconi, Kevin Mulligan, and Barry Smith--a strong group of philosophers, but none of whom work mainly in moral, political, or legal philosophy, or in the history of philososphy.  (Marconi and Mulligan do some work in these areas.)  Overall, though, they deserve credit for coming up with a fairly reasonable listing, which, as Professor Piccinini suggests, may exert a positive influence on professional standards and practices in philosophy in Europe.

What do readers think?  Post only once (comments may take awhile to appear), and non-anonymous comments will, as usual, be strongly preferred.  Since this appears to be an "initial" list, it may be that feedback from philosophers will influence the final listing.

At last..."Experimental Philosophy" T-Shirts!!!

Here.

Brian Leiter Links Page

Your (nearly) complete Brian Leiter links page, which some readers may want to switch out for their current links to this or my other pages.  (I've got another Brian Leiter links page as well, which I may fill out further, though the Naymz site was a bit easier to use I thought.)

The Finkelstein Tenure Case and the Meaning of "Ad Hominem"

On his web site, Professor Finkelstein has posted a very fine letter by a philosopher in the U.K. sent to the President of DePaul University, Dennis Holtschneider (you may e-mail President Holtschneider here regarding the tenure case).  The letter writer notes a point we have touched on in the past, namely, the misuse of the term "ad hominem" to describe certain kinds of criticism.  Our U.K. philosopher wrote, in pertinent part, as follows:

I write to you as a retired teacher of Philosophy, formerly a lecturer in the University of Wales, and a founding member of the Council for Academic Freedom and Academic Standards, to express my dismay at your decision to refuse tenure to Norman Finkelstein and to dismiss him.

In defending your position, you refer more than once in your letter to him to ‘ad hominem attacks’ he has made upon other scholars, thus endorsing the complaint made publicly against him by Alan Dershowitz.

As I’m sure I don’t need to point out to you, ‘ad hominem’ refers to the fallacy of inferring the falsity of a statement from the bad character of the individual making it. But I’m not sure if you and Dershowitz understand the term in its technical sense. The implication of your use of the logician’s term of art is that Finkelstein is guilty of a scholarly offence: but I doubt that you could point to an instance of it in his writings. To the contrary, Finkelstein draws adverse conclusions about an individual’s character from the falsity of what he or she says, a perfectly reasonable procedure (where the falsity can’t be put down to innocent error). In drawing such conclusions Finkelstein is hardly guilty, as you suggest, of not being ‘objective’ in his ‘professional judgement of colleagues’, unless you think that objectivity is the same as neutrality. Nor can you think that he fails to show ‘due respect for the opinions of others’ unless you hold the absurd view that all opinions are worthy of respect.

No one, of course, actually holds "the absurd view that all opinions are worthy of respect."  But many people, unsurprisingly, hold the view that their absurd "opinions are worthy of respect," which is almost always what is at issue when careless accusations of "ad hominem" attacks are bandied about.

UPDATE:  It might be worth noting that the Illinois Chapter of the AAUP has now entered the fray, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education:

On Friday the Illinois Conference of the American Association of University Professors sent a letter to the university’s president, the Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider....In the two-page letter, Leo Welch, the chapter’s president, says the decision to deny tenure to the two assistant professors violated both the association’s standards and those of DePaul’s own Faculty Handbook.

Mr. Finkelstein’s alleged lack of “collegiality” appears to have been the “sole basis” for denying him tenure, Mr. Welch writes. “It is entirely illegitimate for a university to deny tenure to a professor out of fear that his published research … might hurt a college’s reputation,” he says. The association has explicitly rejected collegiality as an appropriate criterion for evaluating faculty members, and has criticized it as “ensuring homogeneity” and undermining the leadership role of colleges and universities, according to the letter.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

Maudlin on Truth, Realism, and Rorty

This is an amusingly blistering review by Tim Maudlin (Rutgers) of a recent collection of papers on Truth and Realism, though it is especially timely given the proliferating pontificating about Richard Rorty by people who don't know anything about philosophy (for example--I'll comment more on Carlin Romano's silliness later).  Herewith Maudlin:

Rorty tells a just-so story about a "pre-pre-Socratic golden age [when] nobody felt metaphysically emasculated, for phallogocentrism had not yet been invented" (p. 241). The snake in this Eden was Parmenides, who "rolled the grass, the snakes, the gods and the stars into a single well-rounded blob, stood back from it, and called it unknowable. Plato's admiration for this imaginative feat led him to coin the term 'really real'" (p. 240). Rorty wants to lead us back to the prelapserian paradise. It might be worthwhile to note that the historical claim here is perfectly wrong: Parmenides' "one" was supposed to be the one thing that is knowable, the thing described completely by the "path of truth". And Plato similarly reserved a higher sort of being for the mathematicals and the Forms because they were knowable, not because they were unknowable. Rorty's claim that "it is definitory of the really real that there is no agreed-upon way to tell which statements about it are true" (p. 241) gets Plato (the supposed originator of the phrase) exactly backward: mathematics concerns the "really real" because we can prove things about, e.g. squares, and hence come to unshakable agreement, while the best we can get for the physical world is a "likely story" (eikos logos). Should a sensible discussion of realism have to devote time correcting this sort of historical nonsense?

William & Mary Philosophy Department Put in Quasi-Receivership Because of Mistreatment of Junior Faculty

Story here.  What is reported is certainly consistent with what I've heard from various faculty.

Is your work being flogged on eBay? (Edmundson)

The PHILOS-L list is buzzing about internet sales of DVDs and downloads of recent philosophical texts.  Probable copyright violations and facilitated plagiarism leap to mind.  Check here, here, and here.  If you are among the aggrieved, you may lodge complaints to eBay here.

Amusing Video Clip of Rorty

MOVING TO FRONT--SEE UPDATE

Reader Rob Sica sent me a charming video clip of Rorty from 2005, noting some of what I had to say about him in The Future for Philosophy volume (he then goes on to talk about Heidegger).  As others have noted, Rorty always took criticism in stride.

UPDATE:  Alas, the earlier link has gone dead.  But Mark Crimmins (Stanford) kindly sent along a video of a lecture in which Rorty talks about "naturalism" and "quietism" (in the context of the introduction to The Future for Philosophy) in the context of the mind-body problem. 

Gillett from Illinois Wesleyan to Northern Illinois

Carl Gillett (philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of science), Associate Professor of Philosophy at Illinois Wesleyan University has accepted a tenured offer from the Department of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University.

Weatherson, Maitra to Rutgers

Brian Weatherson (epistemology, philosophy of language, decision theory, metaphysics), Associate Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University, has accepted a tenured offer from the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.  His partner Ishani Maitra (philosophy of language, feminist philosophy), Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University, has accepted a tenure-track offer from the Departments of Philosophy at Rutgers University at New Brunswick and Newark (she will split 50/50 between the two).  Weatherson himself has further details.  Cornell's own recent lateral hires should keep the department in the top twenty, notwithstanding this latest blow.

Google Scholar Redux (Leiter)

UPDATED WITH CORRECTIONS TO HEGEL LISTING (thanks to Thom Brooks for catching the errors)

Following up on Jason 's post about using Google Scholar to assess the impact of philosophical work--and do note all of Jason's caveats, and those of the commentators, myself included--I thought I'd see what Google Scholar tells us about the impact of books on Kant and major figures in post-Kantian German philosophy.  The results are not silly, it seems to me, even if they are idiosyncratic in some respects (and, in the case of Kant, greatly affected by the extent to which the book intersects with more general concerns in contemporary philosophy).  I list the year of publication after the name of the book, since obviously books around longer have more opportunity to be read and cited.  Where there were other books with almost the same cite total, I list them after the "top ten."

Philosophical Books in English on Kant

1. P.F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (1966) (136 citations)

2.  Henry E. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism:  An Interpretation and Defense (1982) (105 citations).

3.  Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (1992) (81 citations)

4.  Allen Wood, Kant's Ethical Thought (1999) (65 citations)

5.  Henry E. Allison, Kant's Theory of Freedom (1990) (61 citations)

6.  Jonathan Bennett, Kant's Analytic (1966) (49 citations)

7.  Andrew Brook, Kant and the Mind (1994) (47 citations)

8.  Patricia Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology (1990) (45 citations)

9.  Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (1960) (43 citations)

10. Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (1987) (38 citations)

Also:  Rae Langton, Kantian Humility:  Our Ignornace of Things in Themselves (2001) (36 citations); Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (1997) (33 citations); Beatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge (31 citations).  Not a book simply on Kant, though important in both Kant and German Idealism studies, is Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason:  German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (1987) (44 citations).

Philosophical Books in English on Hegel

1.  Charles Taylor, Hegel (1975) (183 citations)

2.  Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (1979) (68 citations)

3.  Shlomo Avineri, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State (1972) (53 citations)

4.  Allen Wood, Hegel's Ethical Thought (1990) (34 citations)

5.  Terry Pinkard, Hegel's Phenomenology:  The Sociality of Reason (1994) (32 citations)

6.  Michael O. Hardimon, Hegel's Social Philosophy:  The Project of Reconciation (1994) (23 citations)

7.  Robert B. Pippin, Hegel's Idealism (1989) (17 citations)

8.  Stephen Houlgate, Freedom, Truth, and History:  An Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy (1991) (16 citations).

9.  Paul Franco, Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom (2002) (12 citations)

10.  J.N. Findlay, Hegel:  A Re-examination (1958) (11 citations)

10.  Michael Rosen, Hegel's Dialectic and Its Criticism (1982) (11 citations)

10.  Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel (1983) (11 citations)

Also:  Michael N. Forster, Hegel and Skepticism (1989) (10 citations) and Michael N. Forster, Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit (1998) (10 citations).

Philosophical Books in English on Marx

1.  Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (1986) (260 citations)

2.  G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History:  A Defence (1978) (219 citations)

3.  Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (1970) (72 citations)

4.  G.A. Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom:  Themes from Marx (1988) (65 citations)

5.  Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (1985) (54 citations)

6.  Michael Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude:  False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology (1996) (25 citations)

7.  Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx (1950) (18 citations)

7.  Allen Wood, Karl Marx (1981) (18 citations)

9.  Richard W. Miller, Analyzing Marx (1984) (13 citations)

10. Alan Gilbert, Democratic Individuality (1990) (12 citations)

Philosophical Books in English on Nietzsche

1.  Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche:  Life as Literature (1985) (108 citations)

2.  Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche:  Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) (98 citations)

3.  Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (1990) (38 citations)

4.  Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (1983) (34 citations)

5.   Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (1965) (33 citations)

6.   Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (2002) (28 citations)

7.  John Richardson, Nietzsche's System (1996) (18 citations)

8.  M.S. Silk & J.P. Stern, Nietzsche on Trategdy (1983) (17 citations)

8.  Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul (1990) (17 citations)

10. Lester Hunt, Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue (1991) (11 citations)

10. Aaron Ridley, Nietzsche's Conscience (1998) (11 citations)

10. J.P. Stern, A Study of Nietzsche (1979) (11 citations)

10. Tracy Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (1975) (11 citations)

Martha Nussbaum and Wikipedia: A Case Study in the Unreliability of Information on the Internet

Some philosophers will recall the curious spectacle awhile back of the philosopher of mind David Chalmers intervening in a Wikipedia discussion to correct misstatements of his views about consciousness, only to be "told off" by an anonymous Wikipedia editor!  (Chalmers himself took a more charitable view of the matter.)

Now we have Wikipedia foolishness redux, this time with the entry on Martha Nussbaum (this is a link to the current version, which may change, hopefully for the better!).  A scholar who actually knows something about Nussbaum's work posted a corrected entry (you can see it here or here: Download martha_nussbaumwiki.rtf ), only to have it promptly undone by an anonymous editor who deemed it "unsourced"!  I invite readers who have some patience for dealing with Wikipedia's hordes of ill-informed (and often biased) anonymous editors to see about getting the current version in line with the accurate version.

Burnyeat Honored by Queen of England

Thom Brooks (Newcastle) has the details.

Friday Poem: "This Special Time"

This Special Time

This special time
Immortal yet
Loud we trumpet
Inconvenience

The clothes are old
The neighbors loud
The grass is brown
The roses bowed

The night too loud
The sun so pale
The food turned cold
The rain now hail

The paint job flaked
The traffic dense
The mail tardy
The news nonsense

The belly flabby
The book too thick
The door still jammed
The salesman slick

And on we rant
And on we gabble
Alive but slack of purpose
And every day
We sputter and flay
Until we dribble life away

9/24-12/30/94, 6/10-6/11/07

Copyright 1994, 2007 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Berkeley Makes Bid for Harvard's Shelby

The Department of Philosophy and the Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program (JSP) in the Law School at the University of California, Berkeley have made a joint, tenured offer to Tommie Shelby (African American Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy), who is presently Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University (though his PhD is in philosophy from Pittsburgh).  (In addition, the JSP Program at Berkeley has hired, jointly with Political Science, Kinch Hoekstra [history of political and moral philosophy, Hobbes], who has been a Tutor and Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford University for a number of years.  This is a tenure-track appointment.)

Wisconsin faces "faculty exodus"

Rather unusual for a story like this to make CNN.  So far, the Department of Philosophy at Wisconsin has not been affected; indeed, just a couple of years ago the distinguished philosopher of biology Elliott Sober returned to Wisconsin after moving briefly to a tenured post at Stanford.

DePaul University's Attack on Academic Freedom: The Tenure Case of Norman Finkelstein

It would be nice to think there is a more charitable explanation than political persecution for the decision to deny tenure to Norman Finkelstein, the fierce critic of Israel who teaches political science at DePaul University in Chicago, but on the record that is public, I can't see one, and especially not after this contemporaneous tenure decision has come to light.  (Professor Finkelstein's website has additional information about his tenure case.)

As this observer remarks:

Because few assistant professors with books published by at least three major publishers (in this case the University of California, W.W. Norton, and Verso) are denied tenure, and because even fewer with such books, a vote of support from their department, and glowing student evaluations, are denied tenure, it is difficult to imagine that anything other than outside interference, almost all of it from [Alan] Dershowitz, led to the denial of Finkelstein’s tenure at DePaul.

But since Professor Dershowitz's criticisms have been shown to be wholly lacking in merit, any adverse decision against Professor Finkelstein growing out of these criticisms would be inconsistent with a fair tenure process.   (Interestingly, a committee in the Political Science Department at DePaul also evaluated Dershowitz's charges of academic misconduct, and found them wholly without merit.)

There is a website in support of Professor Finkelstein with an excellent and well-crafted open letter to the DePaul President and Provost raising questions about the grounds for the tenure denial, which I would urge readers concerned with academic freedom to sign.  The letter reads in relevant part:

We have seen a memo, dated March 22, 2007, from Charles Suchar, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, to the University Board on Tenure and Promotion, recommending against tenure for Dr. Finkelstein, despite favorable votes at two levels of faculty review. Dean Suchar justifies his recommendation on the ground that Dr. Finkelstein’s scholarly work, though sound in its content, is often uncivil, disrespectful, mean-spirited, inflammatory, and so on, in its tone. We object to this weighting of criteria, especially when a scholar’s polemical style is cited as evidence that he lacks “values of collegiality.” The American Association of University Professors has explicitly challenged the use of criteria such as “collegiality” in tenure and promotion evaluations, precisely because these terms are subject to a wide range of interpretations. The AAUP rightly notes that criteria of this sort are often used to mask retribution as well as disciplinary or other biases. We note that they often stand in for political disagreement. The likelihood increases, in our view, when the criteria are couched as vague institutional principles, such as “personalism” and “Vincentian values.”

The "comments" section on the website contains the names of signatories to the letter, many of whom have added interesting comments.  The European historian Tony Judt (NYU) writes:

Norman Finkelstein and I have not always seen eye to eye and he has been very critical of me in print. And yes, he isn’t always polite or ‘respectful’. But that is a scholar’s privilege and has been for a thousand years. Precisely because of the controversial and highly politicised field in which he works, it is vital that Finkelstein’s tenure process be fair, free of all outside pressure and concerned exclusively with his qualities as scholar and teacher. Anything else will bring your university in serious public disrepute.

The political theorist Bertell Ollman (NYU) comments:

How should one deal with people who deserve strong criticism in a scholarly work?  By being clear and above board and supplying a lot of good evidence for the charges made. I would have thought that this answer was self-evident and that Norman Finkelstein has provided us all with a model of how that should be done. To claim, as his Dean has, that Finkelstein’s well documented criticisms of a few people who have shown they deserve such treatment, crosses some imaginary line of academic civility is both unbelievable and unheard of.

I was also pleased to see that some philosophers had contributed comments.  Philosopher Joseph Levine (U Mass/Amherst) writes:

I have read several of Prof. Finkelstein’s books, and listened to his commentary on current events in the Mideast on several occasions, and I have never seen or heard an “uncivil” comment. On the contrary, what I’ve seen and heard are sober, intelligent, and extremely well-informed analysis of both historical and current events. The idea that such an important scholar should be denied tenure is unthinkable. The fact that this is even a question sadly indicates the power of those forces in both academia and the media who just cannot tolerate any criticism of Israeli policy or an honest look at the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Philosopher Tomis Kapitan (Northern Illinois) concurs: 

I have been studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for over 30 years, and have frequently lectured and written about this important topic. During the past 15 years, I have found Mr. Finkelstein’s research to be immensely useful in shedding valuable light on relationships between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, and on the American role in shaping and perpetuating this conflict. Given the consistently high calibre of his research, it is beyond belief that the scholarly credentials of Mr. Finkelstein should be in doubt. Those who oppose Mr. Finkelstein’s ideas are anxious to silence him. it would be shameful if DePaul University acquiesces in this assault upon freedom of speech.

I hope other philosophers will join me, and Professors Levine and Kapitan, in signing this letter.

UPDATE:  John Gardner, the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University, has added an apt comment in signing the letter:  "To my mind this business reveals only one person who should clearly not be enjoying the privileges and immunities of tenure, and that one person is not Norman Finkelstein."

Gemes to Split Between Birkbeck and Southampton

Ken Gemes, who works in philosophy of science and on Nietzsche, will now split his appointment between the philosophy departments at Birkbeck College, University of London (where he presently teaches) and the University of Southampton (where his former Birkbeck colleague Christopher Janaway [Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, aesthetics, ancient philosophy] is now Professor of Philosophy); Gemes will be half-time as Reader in Philosophy in both Departments.  That move will certainly solidify Southampton's position as one of the world's leading centers for Nietzsche studies, with not only Gemes and Janaway, but Aaron Ridley in Philosophy and David Owen in Politics.  (The AHRC has also recently funded a multi-year project at Southampton, directed by Janaway, on "Nietzsche and Modern Moral Philosophy.")

Antioch College to close (Edmundson)

Antioch College is to close in July 2008 due to money woes and dwindling enrollments.  Antioch, founded in 1852 by Horace Mann, graduated Stephen Jay Gould, Clifford Geertz, Coretta Scott King, and Rod Serling. The Trustees hope to reopen in 2012.

Philosophers, guard your research (J. Stanley)

It's getting dangerous out there.

Philanthropy vs. "the Perpetuation of Privilege"

This is an unusually forthright piece:

On April 11, the president of Columbia University announced that it had received a $400 million pledge from alumnus John W. Kluge, who in 2006 was 52nd on the Forbes list of the wealthiest people, earning his fortune through the buying and selling of television and radio stations. This gift, payable upon the 92-year-old’s death, will be the fourth largest ever given to a single institution of higher education.

With such a massive transfer of wealth, the accolades poured in, justifying such a gift to an Ivy League university. Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, said: “The essence of America’s greatness lies, in no small measure, in our collective commitment to giving all people the opportunity to improve their lives… [Kluge] has chosen to direct his amazing generosity to ensuring that young people will have the chance to benefit from a Columbia education regardless of their wealth or family income.” Mayor Michael Bloomberg indicated that investing in education produces returns that can’t be matched. Rep. Charles Rangel said the gift would ensure greater numbers of students can afford a first-class education.

Oh please!

I am becoming less and less tolerant of people who pass wealth on to the privileged and masquerade it as philanthropy. Philanthropy is the voluntary act of donating money, goods or services to a charitable cause, intended to promote good or improve human well being. When a billionaire gives money that will benefit people who are more than likely already well off or who already have access to huge sums of money, attending the ninth richest university by endowment, this is not philanthropy. This simply extends the gross inequities that exist in our country — inequities that one day will come home to roost.

Almost 40 percent of all college students nationally earned a Pell Grant, which in general represents students from families earning less than $35,000 a year. Yes, almost 40 percent of students in college today are from low income families. At Columbia, where tuition and fees alone tops $31,000, only 16 percent of students are Pell Grant eligible. In fact, over 60 percent of Columbia students don’t even bother to apply for federal financial aid. They can pay the bill — no problem (see the Economic Diversity of Colleges Web site). Columbia is not alone. A recent New York Times article, which provided a great story on a recent Amherst College graduate, indicated that 75 percent of students attending elite colleges come from the top socioeconomic quartile, while only 10 percent come from the bottom half, and just 3 percent from the bottom quartile.

Schliesser from Syracuse to Leiden

Eric Schliesser (early modern philosophy, philosophy of economics), Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University, has accepted a permanent post as Universitair Docent in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Leiden.

Missouri Votes Offer to Robbins

UPDATE:  Moving to front from March 24--see Update.

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Missouri, Columbia has voted out a tenured offer to Phillip Robbins (philosophy of mind, psychology, and language), who is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Washington University, St. Louis.

UPDATE:  Professor Robbins has accepted the tenured offer from Missouri.

In Memoriam: Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

At the time of his death, he was Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University.  He had taught previously at the University of Virginia, Princeton University, and Wellesley College.

This appears to be the first memorial notice.  I will post links to some others as they appear.

A good deal will no doubt be written about his contributions to philosophy in the coming weeks, months, and years.  Let me note here that he was also a quite gifted undergraduate lecturer.  I was fortunate to have him his last term teaching at Princeton, in the Spring of 1982.  It was a course on "Kant to 1900,"  that covered Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and William James!  The course had a distinct theme:  bad and misguided reactions to Kant (Fichte and Hegel) and good, i.e., proto-pragmatist reactions to Kant (Marx, Nietzsche, and, of course, James).  When Raymond Geuss joined the Princeton faculty a year later, he had that course stricken from the books, on the grounds (I still recall him saying this) that "such a course can not be taught."  There was some truth to that, though, in fact, Rorty taught it engagingly and well, but it was crucial that he had a story to tell and a moral to convey.  Even though I have come to think Rorty's view of Nietzsche, among others, was quite wrong-headed, there is no doubt it was one of the most valuable undergraduate courses I had precisely because of its ambitious scope, Rorty's synoptic and pedagogical skill, and the distinctiveness of his take on what was important in each of these authors.

UPDATE:  The philosopher Farhang Erfani at American University has put together an informative set of links about Rorty and his work.

UPDATE (JUNE 11):  The Stanford press release is here.  (On the blackboard in the photo [from 2005] appears to be the title of my edited collection The Future for Philosophy which I know Rorty had been lecturing about around that time.)

ANOTHER:  The New York Times obituary is here.  It contains fewer howlers than is the norm when it comes to journalistic writing about philosophers.  The big exception is the quote from Russell Berman, Chair of the Comparative Literature Department at Stanford, who says that Rorty "rescued philosophy from its analytic constraints" and returned it "to core concerns of how we as a people, a country and humanity live in a political community."  This is silly and ignorant on many levels.  First, there is no evidence that Rorty had any such effect on philosophy (perhaps Rawls had such an effect, but certainly not Rorty), and his own writings about political questions always struck me as fairly conventional and uninteresting.  Second, philosophy has had as its "core concerns" going back to the PreSocratics precisely the questions about knowledge and reality which Rorty argued we ought to abandon:  it was precisely Rorty's project to turn philosophy away from what had been its "core concerns" for millenia.

May I suggest that those who want to understand why philosophers often found Rorty a bit puzzling ought to read the old essay by Jaegwon Kim, "Rorty on the possibility of Philosophy," available on JSTOR, and which originally appeared in Journal  of Philosophy in 1980.  Professor Kim gives the best short overview of the main themes of Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and indicates some of the central ways in which Rorty's critique might not seem compelling to philosophers. 

ONE MORE:  Several readers sent along Habermas's memorial notice for Rorty.  In my opinion, it overstates his philosophical originality.  Rorty's great skill was always a synoptic one--thus, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he brought together critical themes from Sellars and Quine, among others, and suggested a new way of understanding their import.  I think it very unlikely that any knowledgeable historians of philosophy in our period will recall Rorty's work, as Habermas does, as "a constant source of the subtlest, most sophisticated arguments."

Fun with Derrida

Thanks to my law school colleague Mark Gergen for a pointer to this amusing item on Derrida from several years ago.

Bays Declines Minnesota, To Remain at Notre Dame

Timothy Bays (logic, philosophy of mathematics) at the University of Notre Dame has declined the tenured offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Listen to Interviews with Philosophers

Nigel Warburton, of the Open University in Britain, has started PhilosophyBites, where you can listen to interviews with philosophers on a variety of topics.  So far, there are interviews with Mary Warnock and Simon Blackburn.

The Facts about a Call by British Academics to "Boycott" Israeli Academics

Chris Bertram (Bristol) reports what is actually going on.  For my prior comments on these proposed boycotts, see here, here and here.

Aydede from Florida to British Columbia

Murat Aydede (philosophy of mind and cognitive science), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Florida at Gainesville, has accepted the senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia.  This appointment is likely to push UBC back squarely into the top 3 Canadian PhD programs.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

Friday Poem: "Lesson Two"

Lesson Two

               I
A false word makes
A doomed poem
Throws no shadow
Won't show on film

              II
Easy virtue
May cozen you
Seeking comfort
You lie with it

             III
But writing
A voice will say
Wrong wrong
The poem will die

             IV
And choiceless
In the hard dark
Heart stumbles
At soul's flaw

             V
Which it must rout
Like alien spawn
And for art's sake
Forsake the poem


8/15/96-4/23/97, 1/27/98, 2/9/98, 4/6/98                                                   

Copyright 1997, 1998 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.