Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Friday Poem: "The End of Mythology"

The End of Mythology

A sudden glow; the crowd struck dumb recoils.
Another sun more proximate alights
Upon the curled and breathless mass.  Frail hands
That cannot fend the fluoroscope are pressed
Upon the eyes, heads bow as if in prayer.

And then the blow that ravishes our myth
Impales the earth and ricochets full force
Upon the throng, a sound of many million wings,
The graveled shriek of vulture flocks upon
The corpse, and rising like a blossom from
The pit, a diadem of smoke and mist.

Transubstantial in its subtlety
The flower flows upon the wind until
The lurid form dissolves while essence lurks.
With time, the consummation of the innocent
Is done, extinguishing all scent of life:
Desire and the mother laid to rest
Amid the tranquil objects of decay.

ca 1955, rev. 1995, 7/9/07
Copyright 1995, 2007 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.

Nietzsche on YouTube!

More information here.

Over in Legal Philosophy Land...

...an epistemological puzzle about legal positivism?

UPDATE:  For the benefit of new readers, I should note, again, the purpose of the new blog and its commenting policy.

A Good Statement on the Finkelstein Tenure Case...

...by DePaul philosopher Bill Martin.  He is absolutely correct that DePaul's embarrassing conduct in this matter, culminating now with the inexplicable exclusion of Professor Finkelstein from the classroom, risks making the university a "laughing stock."  DePaul will, and should, pay a heavy price in terms of academic standing and its ability to hire and retain faculty for this attack on freedom of intellectual inquiry.
 

The New Strategy of the Creationist Conmen

Pharyngula has the scoop.  Sigh.

Leo Strauss, the non-philosopher, in the News Again

This time in the Chicago Reader.  An interesting piece, though the reporter, Ms. Englander, who was a pleasant woman, seems to have misunderstood my main points, and also misquoted me in a rather significant way.  I submitted the following comment:

I am misquoted in this article, as I have alerted Ms. Englander. I most certainly did not describe Straussianism as "a pathology of American philosophy departments," since it does not exist in any leading American philosophy department. Strauss was not, contrary to the article's heading, a "professor of philosophy," but a professor of political science, and the Straussian pathology and its attendant cult, which I discussed with Ms. Englander, operates exclusively in some American political science departments. Actual philosophers view Strauss exactly as I and Burnyeat describe.

Strauss may indeed have "many critics who persist in connecting him to all that’s wrong with American policy," but I am not one of them, as I made clear to Ms. Englander. It strikes me as rather silly to attribute the venal criminality of the Bush Administration to a not very good scholar of the history of philosophy. Unfortunately, this article, while informative and interesting, tends to contribute to the misapprehension that Leo Strauss and his acolytes know anything about philosophy or the "philosophical life." The more interesting question is the sociological one of how this particular pseudo-scholarly cult has enjoyed such staying power in U.S. political science departments.

Ironically, Straussianism is largely a dead issue in Hyde Park (Professor Tarcov being its last representative), having migrated instead to UT Austin's political science department!

DePaul University: Serial Violator of the Academic Freedom and Contractual Rights of Faculty

Already widely criticized by the AAUP and others for the politically motivated tenure denials of two faculty last Spring, DePaul University has now taken the extraordinary step of "terminating the terminal year" of one of those faculty members, Norman Finkelstein, by denying him the right to teach his scheduled (and apparently fully subscribed) classes.  Students at DePaul continue to be at the forefront in protesting this disgraceful institutional behavior.

The Future of Naturalism?

Everything you wanted to know here.  I'll be talking about some themes from my recent book.

Normore from UCLA to McGill

Calvin Normore, one of the world's leading scholars of medieval philosophy (who also works in political philosophy and logic) at UCLA, has accepted the Macdonald Chair in Moral Philosophy at McGill University, where he will join the faculty in fall 2008. (He will officially be on leave from UCLA, so there is still some possibility he might return.)  That's a major hire for McGill, which will solidify its position as a leading center for history of philosophy.  (Normore will continue as an Honorary Research Professor in the American summers/Australian winters at the University of Queensland.)

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

"New" Legal Realism?

From another Brian Leiter.

Where to go for PhD Work in Continental Philosophy?

MOVING TO THE FRONT with an update.

The transformation of the Northwestern Department has led a few different correspondents in recent months to inquire about where students with a philosophical interest in post-Kantian Continental philosophy of the 19th- and 20th-centuries should go to study for a PhD these days.  The specialty rankings from the most recent PGR give a reasonable picture of the choices.  In my own judgment, the top choice is pretty plainly the University of Chicago (Brudney, Davidson, Forster, Haugeland, and Pippin, plus a number of other faculty [e.g., Lear and Nussbaum] with sympathetic interests in particular figures or movements), but any serious student should also be looking at Columbia University (Carman and Neuhouser), Stanford University (Anderson, Follesdal [part-time], Friedman, Hills, Hussain, and Wood are all working primarily or partially on figures or movements in post-Kantian German philosophy), Syracuse University (Baynes and Beiser, among others), the University of California at Riverside (Keller, Warnke, and Wrathall, among others), and the University of Notre Dame (Ameriks, Gutting, and Rush, among others).  Northwestern (Habermas [part-time], LaFont, Taylor [part-time], and Zuckert, among others) is also still worth considering, as are Brown University (Larmore and Reginster) and Georgetown University (Blattner and Pinkard, among others). 

New York University has two very good senior scholars (Longuenesse and Richardson), but students will want to consider whether the overall philosophical environment is hospitable for their interests in Continental philosophy.  Prospective students should talk to current students to find out.  The situation at Texas is, I'm afraid, a bit up in the air; certainly Kathleen Higgins and I would continue to welcome students interested in 19th-century German philosophy.  The tragic death of Bob Solomon makes Texas quite a bit less viable for those with 20th-century Continental interests.  Whether we replace Solomon this year and whether I remain will obviously affect the viability of UT Austin for students interested in post-Kantian Continental traditions.

In Britain, the best bets are probably the Universities of Essex, Southampton (at least for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche), and Warwick--perhaps also Sussex.  Unfortunately, with the exception of Warwick, these tend not to be very strong philosophy departments overall, though they have cultivated niches of excellence in the Continental traditions.  Among the very top U.K. departments, one would be well-advised to look at Cambridge University (though Raymond Geuss will be running up against the mandatory U.K. retirement age in a few years), University College London (Sebastian Gardner and Sarah Richmond--plus Jonathan Wolff works on Marx), and perhaps still Oxford University (Michael Inwood and Stephen Mulhall are still active, though G.A. Cohen is about to hit mandatory retirement [and Inwood is only a few years away], and Michael Rosen has left).

In Canada, University of Toronto is the best choice (Paul Franks being the primary attraction), and in Australasia, the University of Auckland (Wicks and Young, among others) clearly dominates. 

I should reiterate that students ought to consult the specialty rankings, especially if they have well-focused interests already.  And all these recommendations are for philosophically-minded students.  There are obviously many other kinds of students interested in post-Kantian figures who may be less likely to find these departments congenial.

UPDATE:  A couple of readers pointed out, correctly, that the University of Sheffield should really be on the list of strong UK departments that might be viable for students interested in Continental philosophy.  Robert Stern has done very good work on Kant and Hegel, and Robert Hopkins, best-known for important work in aesthetics, also has interests in Nietzsche.  One reader familiar with the British philosophical scene also offered the following pertinent observation about Cambridge:

Raymond Geuss is certainly a wonderful supervisor with an excellent record of developing Ph.D. students but, now that Edward Craig has retired, he appears to be the only person in the Cambridge Department with interests in Continental Philosophy and any student would be well advised to enquire how sympathetic the atmosphere there would be for someone working in that area.

APA Book Prize Announced...

...here.  The winner is famed blogger Jason Stanley (Rutgers) for his book Knowledge and Practical Interests.  "Honorable Mention" also went to Alva Noe (Berkeley) for Action in Perception and to Mi-Kyoung (Mitzi) Lee (Colorado) for Epistemology after Protagoras.

Congratulations to all three!

Van Fraassen from Princeton to San Francisco State Univ.

Bas van Fraassen (philosophy of science and physics) will finish his phased retirement at Princeton University at the end of the 2007-08 academic year and then take up a tenured post in the Department of Philosophy at San Francisco State University.  SFSU has also appointed, to a tenure-stream position, Isabelle Peschard, a philosopher of science at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.  These appointments will certainly make SFSU an appealing choice for terminal MA students interested in philosophy of science.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

Peacocke to take up Part-Time Post at UCL

Christopher Peacocke (philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, epistemology), currently at Columbia University, will take up the newly named Richard Wollheim Chair in Philosophy at University College London, where he will be in residence each May-July (starting in 2008) supervising graduate students and putting on research seminars.  (This Established Chair was formerly unnamed, and held previously by Paul Horwich [now at NYU] and Quassim Cassam [now at Cambridge].)  Peacocke will continue to be full-time at Columbia University the rest of the American academic year.

In Memoriam: Susan Hurley (1954-2007)

From the Philos-L list comes news of the death of Susan Hurley.  Prof. Alexander Bird writes:

I am very sorry to inform you of the death last night of Professor Susan Hurley.  Susan had been suffering from cancer for some time and  faced her illness with remarkable dignity.  She continued to work until very recently, hosting an international conference at Bristol only five weeks ago.  Colleagues here in Bristol and throughout the world will know what an inspiration she was to work with and that although her contribution to several and diverse fields of philosophy was already invaluable, she had much more to offer yet.

More here, from the Bristol website.  An appreciation by Chris Bertram here, at Crooked Timber.

Updates (Sept. 16): The Guardian has an obituary here; (Dec. 27) The Times here.

Friday Poem: "No Hope"

No Hope

I am a long way
From making good poems
As I draw a bit closer
I feel further away
As I become more certain
I experience great doubt
As I grasp what I must do
My hands lose their strength
As I learn I grow foolish
As I succeed I wallow in defeat

There is no question
That I am making progress
For I am convinced
That there is no hope

9/29/94,  7/5/96,  6/25/07
(adapted from an aphorism)
Copyright 1996, 2007 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "Love's Dying"

Love's Dying

I miss love's blindness
reckless with impiety

I miss love's unity
selflessness variety

I miss love's courtesy
grace beyond mortality

I do not miss love's dying
Still lingering…not quietly

3/17-7/12/97, 6/25/07
Copyright 1997, 2007 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.

A New On-Line Repository of Papers by Philosophers

Brie Gertler (Virginia) asked me to share this, and while I usually don't do these kinds of announcements, this one really is a public service to the profession, about which philosophers should know.  I've inserted a couple of comments in brackets:

There is now a cost-free, centralized place to post work in progress, called the Philosophy Research Network. The Philosophy Research Network (PRN) is part of the Social Science Research Network, a massive website started 10 years ago or so by scholars in law, economics, business and so forth. There are hundreds of thousands of papers and abstracts now posted on the SSRN, and in the last 12 months there have been over 3,700,000 downloads of papers through the site. In short, this service is a big success in the social sciences.  It is a one-stop place for people to post working papers so that those dealing with related topics can have access to them (free of charge). It thus consolidates and organizes the sort of electronic exchanges that already occur via e-mail, or through private websites. And it improves on such exchanges by allowing users to access new work through keyword, abstract, or author searches.

The PRN will be formally launched later this summer, and you will see an announcement about it from the APA. But we are happy to say that the network is now accessible in a preliminary way, and we invite you to try it out by posting some of your work.  You’ll need a PDF version of the papers you want to post, and an abstract of each that you can cut and paste into a text box during the posting process. (For those without the ability to create pdfs, the process will direct you to a site that allows you to transform your document into a pdf without cost.) [BL:  note that the PDF file must have a document name that has no spaces in it, otherwise the system will not accept it!]

The PRN will eventually have its own web address, but you can get to it now by going here.   You will see a full list of the sub-networks. If you expand the Humanities Research Network list (by clicking on the + sign to the left), you will see the one for philosophy. And if you expand that, and then expand the list of “subject matter journals” in philosophy, you will see what we’re up to. We recently put up papers of our own just to test-drive the system. Signing on and getting this done the first time is a little bit of a hassle, but after that it’s very easy. And your papers can be found on your own personal page (created automatically when you sign up) and by perusing the subject matter areas in which you want them listed.

SSRN is based at the University of Texas, but supports its staff and infrastructure through university sponsorships and institutional subscriptions. The network does very light screening to exclude material of a non-scholarly sort, and to refine the classification of papers – for example by increasing the number of cross listings. [BL:  a big problem in academic law is that papers get listed in far too many subject categories, where they don't really belong--I expect this will be less of a problem in philosophy.] Otherwise there is no peer review, and this posting does not amount to a publication. It is solely for facilitating communication among philosophers who are working on similar things – and thus it is in the same line of work as conferences, and circulating papers among friends.

The PRN Advisory Board is:  Julia Annas, David Chalmers, Maudemarie Clark, Christine Korsgaard, A. John Simmons, Elliott Sober, Ernest Sosa, and Brian Weatherson.

A final note: most of the papers that are now on PRN were originally posted on other parts of the SSRN site, and cross-listed by the SSRN staff.  [BL:  the SSRN staff, not surprisingly, missed quite a lot of philosophical papers that are already on SSRN; and many of those they have included don't really belong there.  I hope the real philosophy editors will correct this!]  For this reason, they tend to be on topics that are only marginally philosophical. Once the network is fully launched, such pieces will be a small minority of the available papers.

Please don't hesitate to write to either of us with any questions about using the PRN.

Lawrence C. Becker

Fellow, Hollins University

Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, College of William & Mary

[email protected]

Brie Gertler       

Department of Philosophy

University of Virginia

[email protected]

Longtime readers of this blog will be familiar with SSRN, since I've posted many of my papers there the last couple of years--indeed, I listed my most recent jurisprudential paper on the new PRN network, as well as SSRN.  Quite some time ago now, I had offered my colleague Bernie Black, who is one of the co-owners of SSRN, advice about how to set up the philosophy section (though, being stretched thin, I declined to take on a more formal role).  I am delighted to see so many excellent philosophers on board for the enterprise.  SSRN has been a huge success in academic law (not in all fields, but in some of them), and I hope it will be similarly successful for philosophers.

Deja Vu All Over Again: Return of the Creationists to the Texas Textbook Battles

Almost four years ago, Texas scored a great victory against the creationist conmen at the Discovery [sic] Institute and their local shills when the State Board of Education voted by a decisive majority to reject attempts to force biology textbooks used in Texas schools to misrepresent the state of knowledge about evolution by natural selection.   

I'm sad to report, alas, that the pathetic Texas Governor Rick Perry has appointed one of the dissenters of four years ago, Don McLeroy, a dentist, as Chair of the State Board of Education.  Dr. McLeroy's record on matters of science education is not a good one.  Moreover, there is now a real chance, given the changed composition of the Board since 2003, that Texas may humiliate itself as Kansas did.  (It does not help that Governor Perry's spokeswoman defended the appointment--I heard this on local public radio--by saying, "The Governor has long believed that if evolution is taught in the schools, creationism should be taught as well."  The conmen at the Discovery [sic] Institute at least understand that that approach won't fly constitutionally any longer.)

I hope Dr. McLeroy will remember something I said to him in my office in the fall of 2003 during our very pleasant conversation after the last battle.  I said, "Wouldn't you find it odd if an organized group of non-dentists got together to promulgate standards for how you should practice dentistry?"  This seemed to give him real pause, and he acknowledged that essentially all scientists are on the other side of the issue about Intelligent Design. 

I hope the moral of our exchange is not lost on him in his new role as head of the State Board of Education.

More Thoughts on the Churchill Case

Here.

Friday Poem: "UT Library"

UT Library

Striding through
the reading room
his eyes a dog
a blind man is
pulled around the corner
padding out of sight

As if plain seeing
were all of life
I go on reading
glad of light

3/11-3/16/96, 5/5/96, 6/25/07
Copyright 1997 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission

New URL for my Legal Philosophy Blog--Plus a New Paper on "Explaining Theoretical Disagreement"

My legal philosophy blog has moved to its new (and this time permanent) location, where I have also posted the abstract for a new paper on the problem Dworkin dubbed "theoretical disagreement" about law.

Graham from Aberdeen to Princeton Theological Seminary

This news is also a bit belated:  Gordon Graham (philosophy of religion, ethics), formerly Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, has taken up a Chair at the Princeton Theological Seminary (the Seminary is an independent institution in Princeton, New Jersey, not formally connected to Princeton University).

Indiana Makes Four Senior Offers to Freeman, Mann, and the Woods

The Department of Philosophy at Indiana University, Bloomington has senior offers outstanding to:  Samuel Freeman (political philosophy), who is currently Goldstone Term Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania (with a secondary appointment in the Law School there); Wolfgang Mann (ancient philosophy), who is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University; Allen Wood (Kant, 19th-century German philosophy), who is Woods Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University; and Rega Wood (medieval philosophy), who is Research Professor of Philosophy at Stanford.  Obviously, prospective students will want to keep an eye on what happens here, since if Indiana were to successfully recruit all four, it would have a dramatic and transformative effect on the Indiana Department.

Nietzsche Blog

Folks occasionally ask about this blog.  I do plan to get it going (finally) in September, though probably more on the model of the legal philosophy blog, i.e., as a place for "thinking out loud" about what I'm reading related to Nietzsche at any given time.

Darwall from Michigan to Yale

Stephen Darwall (ethics, history of ethics), who has taught at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor since 1984, has accepted the senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Yale University, where he will start in fall 2008.  Along with this year's addition of Kenneth Winkler (early modern philosophy) from Wellesley, this appointment should push the rejuvenated Yale Department to the cusp of the U.S. top ten (depending, of course, on what happens elsewhere).  Michigan will continue, however, to have a quite strong presence in ethics (with Elizabeth Anderson, Sarah Buss, Allan Gibbard, Peter Railton, and Donald Regan).