Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

UC Riverside's New Class of PhD Students

A snapshot of one program's admissions season here.  One thing not reported is the areas of interest of applicants and admitted applicants.  Because there is always a large pool of applicants interested in Continental philosophy, and UC Riverside is one of the dominant programs in this area, my guess would be that their total volume of applications and their results have something to do with this fact. 

New Biography of Rorty by a Sociologist

I have been meaning to mention Neil Gross's new book on Richard Rorty, which I read much of in manuscript quite some time ago.  (There is an interview with Professor Gross here).  The book is partly a contribution to the sociology of ideas and intellectuals (what is called "the new sociology of ideas"), and partly a straight biography of Rorty.  The biographical part will certainly be of interest to philosophers, even those not much enamored of Rorty's work.  It sheds an interesting light on what the profession was like, what it was like to pursue a career in academic philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s, and also has lots of interesting anecdotes about various departments, especially Princeton and Chicago.   Gross is a clear writer.  The sociological "explanation" (Gross's theory of "intellectual self-concept") struck me as a bit thin qua explanation, but even that bit of the book is instructive for philosophers as to what it is the sociologists are debating when they try to understand intellectual figures and movements. 

Philosopher Interested in Studying Law for a Year Seeks Advice

A philosopher at a state university writes:

I’m hoping to impose upon your good will and perhaps that of your blog(s) readers.  I'm a soon-to-be tenured philosopher doing ethical theory and history of ethics who regularly teaches philosophy of law. I'm up for sabbatical year after next and I'm contemplating pursuing a Masters in Legal Studies.  It would certainly deepen my teaching and hopefully open some scholarly vistas — and it seems like it would just be intellectually worthwhile in its own right.  I wonder if you or your readers have any thoughts on or experience with these degrees and if you're / they're aware of any fellowship /funding opportunities to help with the cost, as I'm sure my cash-strapped state institution won't be able to pony up much in addition to sabbatical support.  Everything I’ve seen so far appears to be support for people pursuing JDs who plan to become law professors.  The law schools offering the MSL (e.g., Yale, Stanford, Pitt, Arizona State, Nebraska, Ohio State, and Toledo) vary greatly in quality and reputation.  Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Qua law schools, Yale and Stanford are obviously the best, but for philosophers, Yale is likely to be more congenial; Arizona State would also be a congenial law school for a philosopher.   I do not know how funding works.  Readers with information/experience, please post in the comments.  I will also solicit input from readers of my law school blog.

The Subprime Mortgage Crisis "for Dummies"

Here.  Very clear, and amusing.

Nottingham Graduate Student and Employee Arrested and Threatened with Deportation...

...for downloading Al Qaeda materials from a U.S. government website related to his research!   There is a news report here.

Sreenivasan from Toronto to Duke

Gopal Sreenivasan (moral and political philosophy) at the University of Toronto has accepted the Crown Chair in Ethics at Duke University, where he will have a joint appointment in the Department of Philosophy and the Medical School. 

UPDATE:  Duke Philosophy sends a minor correction:  Professor Sreenivasan has not yet resigned from Toronto; he will, instead, be on leave from there to start.

A Useful Set of Links to the Job Placement Pages...

...for the top thirty doctoral programs in philosophy in the English-speaking world.

Waldron on the Prohibition of Hate Speech

Some comments on an interesting recent essay here.

Brown Student Expelled (!!!) For Throwing a Pie at Thomas "No Ideas and the Ability to Express Them" Friedman

There is a petition protesting the de facto expulsion here.  Friedman himself did not press charges.  Expulsion seems a tad disproportionate to the offense.

UPDATE:  For those new to the blog, and unfamiliar with my view of Friedman, this post from several years ago may help.

ONE MORE:  Here's a video of the incident.  (Link fixed now, I hope!)

ANOTHER:  Here's an hysterically funny evisceration of Friedman's book The World is Flat (thanks to Barry Lam for the pointer); an excerpt:

Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.

AND ANOTHER:  Friedman, "blithering idiot" and "moral monster."  (Thanks to John Protevi for the pointer.)

Information about MA and PhD Programs in Chinese Philosophy?

Manyul Im (Fairfield) is compiling the information.  Help him out!

Braun from Rochester to Buffalo

David Braun (philosophy of language and mind) has accepted the offer of the Romanell Chair in the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo.  That's a significant hire for Buffalo!

A Good Year for Philosophy with the Newcombe Fellowships!

Eight Ph.D. students in philosophy have won Newcombe Fellowships this year; they are:  Andrew Blom (University of Illinois, Chicago); David Dick (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor); Lauren Fleming (Georgetown University); Daniel Groll (University of Chicago); James Hebbeler (University of Notre Dame); Jacob Klein (Cornell University); Daniel Koltonski (Cornell University); Kelby Mason (Rutgers University, New Brunswick).  For more on prior philosophy winners of the Newcombe, see here.

Leave it to a law professor to come to the defense of the honorary degree for Schlafly

The sordid details are here.  Hills is an able scholar in his chosen fields, I've no idea what explains this sorry display.

UPDATE:  A reader asks:  "why leave it to law profs?"  Answer:  because they're more conservative, on average, than philosophy professors. 

Something Reasonably Sensible on Iran

In a U.S. newspaper no less.  Maybe Senator Obama will restore some sanity to these discussions after all.

A Favor, Once Again

I'd ask readers with blogs to please consider adding these blogs to their blogrolls (if they maintain one):

Brian Leiter's Legal Philosophy Blog

Brian Leiter's Nietzsche Blog

Thanks.

List to Split Between Government and Philosophy at LSE

Christian List (social choice theory, formal epistemology, political philosophy) in the Government Department at the London School of Economics will now split his time between Government and Philosophy at LSE.

Centenary of Quine's Birth is Coming on June 25...

...and many events are planned--the philosopher's son, Douglas, has a page with all the information about the events, as well as lots of information about Quine.

NYU's Nagel Wins Rolf Schock Prize...

...in the category "Logic and Philosophy."  (A more detailed announcement is here.)  Past winners are W.V.O. Quine (late of Harvard) (1993), Michael Dummett (emeritus, Oxford) (1995), Dana Scott (emeritus, Carnegie-Mellon) (1997), John Rawls (late of Harvard) (1999), Saul Kripke (CUNY) (2001), Solomon Feferman (Stanford) (2003), and Jaakko Hintikka (BU) (2005).

The History of Philosophy in 90 Seconds

Courtesy of New York-based comedian Jennifer Dziura, who was a philosophy major at Dartmouth.  A few good laughs!

Alan Wolfe Is Clueless About Philosophy

Patricia Marino (Waterloo) calls my attention to this startling display of ignorance about the state of academic philosophy by Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe.  Wolfe writes:

Contemporary academic philosophy is riven by a great divide: Either you adhere to a Continental perspective identified with Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger that addresses big speculative subjects like the Essence of Being, or you identify with the British and American analytic school that puts a priority on rigorous logic, language, and meaning. What, then, are we to make of John Stuart Mill, who belongs to neither?

This, alas, doesn't even qualify as a caricature of the contemporary philosophical scene, though it has, I fear, a simple explanation:  namely, the idiosyncratic Boston College Philosophy Department (which is fairly squarely on the Heidegger side of this make-believe divide) probably encourages its colleagues elsewhere in the university to think that this "great divide" exists.  (And poor Nietzsche gets sucked into the Heideggerian camp of "big speculative subjects like the Essence of Being"!) 

'Tis a shame that Professor Wolfe didn't do any research at all into "contemporary academic philosophy"--or Mill for that matter--before writing about it.  If he had done so, he would have quickly learned that Mill made contributions to epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind, and moral and political philosophy, all of which remain of profound interest to Anglophone philosophers, from the heyday of "analytic" philosophy in the mid-20th-century through that movement's demise and continuing to the present.  Even a bit of lazy google research would have turned up this quite representative overview of Mill's contributions across all the main areas of philosophy, precisely the areas with which Anglophone philosophers have been occupied for the last one hundred years.  A bit more ambitious research (but he still could have done it from his armchair!) using this helpful site would have revealed that (by my quick estimate) half of the top 20 PhD programs in philosophy in the U.S. include at least one faculty member who has published scholarly work on Mill!  Needless to say, in every single one of these programs, Mill is taught regularly at the undergraduate level, and fairly regularly at the graduate level as well.

Mill, in short, "belongs to" Anglophone philosophy of the last hundred years more than any other 19th-century philosopher except Frege (who, of course, worked well into the 20th-century).

Professor Wolfe appears to be dimly aware that his presentation may not be entirely accurate, since he writes: 

Mill, as eminent a Victorian as one can find, foreshadows almost none of the analytical approaches that would dominate his country's philosophy a century after his death in 1873. True, he did write A System of Logic (1843), which addressed questions of reasoning and causality, but Mill was not interested in logic for logic's sake; his purpose was to demolish the so-called intuitionist school, whose views on human nature he found too conservative.

Does Professor Wolfe really mean to imply that Mill's radical empiricism--manifest across a range of issues in epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mathematics--was a pose adopted for political reasons, and that Mill didn't really believe it?  Presumably not.  But what then is the force of saying he "was not interested in logic for logic's sake"?   And who, apart from second-rate philosophers with formalism fetishes, is interested in "logic for logic's sake" rather than for the sake of truth, knowledge, and understanding?   It is, of course, precisely because Mill's concerns are so continuous with Anglophone philosophy over the past century that he looms so large in the canon.

Wolfe, to be sure, is not nearly as ignorant as Carlin Romano, but two pieces peddling misrepresentations about academic philosophy in the usually high quality Chronicle of Higher Education in less than a year is not a happy sign.

UPDATE:  A philosopher in Pennsylvania writes:  "Aside from the fact that I'm pretty sure that Mill's 'Utilitarianism' is taught in the majority of intro to ethics classes, his philosophy of math is broached when doing a class on Frege's 'Foundations of Arithmetic,' and 'On Liberty' is taught in many intro level political philosophy classes, apparently that whole (ongoing) 30 year+ debate about Millian theories of names was about some OTHER John Stuart Mill fellow.  Perhaps we should all aspire to be as ignored as Mill has been. ..."

"Logic for Politics"

That's a new blog by my colleague (now emeritus) in Government and Philosophy here at UT Austin, the political philosopher David Braybrooke.   I wish him success in this worthy endeavor!

UPDATE:  Two other philosophers--John Casey at Northeastern Illinois University and Colin Anderson at Hiram College (plus periodic guests)--have been undertaking the same project for awhile now.

Reading Janaway Reading Nietzsche

Details and links here.

In Memoriam: Arthur W. Burks (1915-2008)

Professor Burks taught philosophy of science and logic, among other subjects, at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor for nearly forty years (where he also earned his Ph.D. in philosophy), but may be best known for his pioneering work in computer science.   The NY Times obituary is here.  (Thanks to Michael Bishop for the pointer.)  A memorial notice from the Electrial Engineering Department at Michigan is here.   His profile from the Michigan Philosophy Department page is here.

Egan from Michigan to Rutgers

Andy Egan (metaphysics, philosophy of language and mind, metaethics), Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has accepted a tenured appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, to start in fall 2009.

Recent Texas Philosophy PhD Making History as Female Candidate for Parliament in Kuwait

In my thirteen years at UT Austin, I've had the privilege of working with many wonderful students, but Aseel al-Awadi (whose dissertation was directed by my colleague A.P. Martinich) is the only one making political history in her native country!  Aseel is the first woman in Kuwait to be supported by a political group in an election.  She is running with the National Democratic Alliance, which represents liberals in Kuwait, on a slate of eight candidates.  Although Aseel reports that she expects the Islamists to prevail in the election (the election is today), one Kuwaiti journalist has already described her as "the phenomenon of election 2008."  For those who read Arabic, the NDA webpage is here and her blog is here.  You can also see a video clip in English about her candidacy here.

UPDATE:  It appears the religious conservatives have won.

ANOTHER:  More details on election results here.

Friday Poem: "Memphis to Austin Talking"

Memphis to Austin Talking
      (for Courtney)

Now here is the wonder of it
A rightness to the talk
Something planted sensing springtime
And the warming of the earth
Discovery unfurrowed as if newly made
The past recaptured at the future's birth

And vaguely in the background
A passage through the dark
Rising out of Memphis dizzy in its pride
Westerly to Shreveport aglow with self-delight
And a guilty glance toward Waco
As it burns into the night

Then to Austin and dispersion
To our almost separate lives

3/11-3/16, 4/9-4/17/96

Copyright 1996 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Doris Turns Down UCSD, to Remain at Wash U/St. Louis

John Doris, a leading contributor to work at the intersection of moral and empirical psychology at Washington University, St. Louis, has turned down the senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of California at San Diego.  That's a lucky break for Wash U, whose department has been on a steady upward trajectory over the last half-dozen years.

Strong Statement by a Wash U Law Professor on the Schafly Honorary Degree Scandal

Here.

What sorts of people should there be?

That's the subject of a new blog run out of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Alberta.  Rob Wilson (Alberta) explains that the blog is,

associated with a large-scale research project with more of less the same name that pulls together about 60 researchers--a number of them philosophers of science, bioethicists, folks working on disability, the history of eugenics, enhancement technologies--mostly from Canada and the US, but also with a wider reach.

UK Philosophers Tackle the "Business Model" Being Forced on British Universities

Their blog is here.  It deserves a wide readership; the issues it raises are not peculiar to the UK, though, ironically, because there is no meaningful private sector in higher education in Britain it is proving far easier for the government there to enforce the 'business model' on all universities.  In the U.S., at least, the elite private universities can actually exploit their market position (in the market for prestige and certification) to uphold non-business models of learning, and by doing so they create some pressures for the elite public sector of higher education to do the same.

The Appalling Buffoon Oliver Kamm...

...has surfaced again--a "vicious little merchant banker" Chris Bertram (Bristol) calls him--apparently because some people in the U.K. actually read his blog.  I had assumed he dropped off the face of the earth after the last time we encountered him several years ago.  The nerve of some people!

UPDATE:  More fun with the buffoon.  (Thanks to Chris Bertram for the pointer.)

More on the Schafly Honorary Degree Scandal

Here.

A Temporary Reprieve for the PhD Program at Florida?

Professor Jamil at Miami Dade, who started the petition in support of the philosophy PhD program at the University of Florida, calls to my attention this article from a Florida newspaper which reports that:

The UF board of trustees, in a conference call Tuesday, unanimously approved a budget largely identical to what UF President Bernie Machen announced last week. But Machen made a few changes to cuts to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, which had taken the lion's share of faculty layoffs.

The revised budget spares five of the 16 college faculty members slated for layoffs and another of those faculty members is retiring. While doctoral programs in German, philosophy and romance languages and literature with a concentration in French were proposed for elimination, the new budget instead freezes admissions to the programs until at least 2012.

The resolution approved by trustees kept open a window for 60 days for Machen to make additional changes to proposed mergers and eliminations of academic programs.

Freezing PhD admissions for three years may, of course, just be an attempt to permit existing students to get through the program, before closing it down, it's hard to know.  Equally worrisome is this story passed on to me by a philosopher at another university:

[A] friend in the german/slavic lang & lit department at Florida just received a letter from the dean firing him. This letter comes a couple of months after the same dean wrote a letter supporting my friend's tenure and promotion. So, it seems that those unfortunate to have come up for tenure this year (in certain departments), and got it (except for the president's signature), are being laid off. i wonder if junior faculty in the 'eliminated programs' are being laid off as well?

Absent a very clear signal from the University President and Dean that tenure decisions are and will be made on the academic merits, not based on cost-cutting considerations, it's hard to see how the affected programs will be able to hire or retain tenure-track faculty.

Comments are open for those with additional information; non-anonymous comments are very strongly preferred.

Prinz from North Carolina to CUNY Grad Center

Jesse Prinz (philosophy of mind, cognitive science, moral psychology), one of the leading figures working at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science, who is currently at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has accepted appointment as Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he will start in January 2009.  With Prinz and David Rosenthal, among others, CUNY will be a major center for philosophy and cognitive science.

In addition, Jeffrey Blustein (bioethics) at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine has accepted a senior position at City College, and will also be appointed at the Graduate Center, where he will teach a seminar once every year or so.

It is probably worth pointing out, for the benefit of prospective students, that CUNY has in the last few years seen a dramatic improvement in its financial aid packages for PhD students, such that they are now highly competitive with the best private universities.  For a long time, relatively weak financial aid was an obstacle for many students in considering CUNY, but that has now changed.  With the recent success in faculty recruitment--besides Prinz, also Noel Carroll and Graham Priest just recently, as well as Alan Berger, Saul Kripke, Stephen Neale, and Catherine Wilson in the last few years--on top of longtime faculty strengths (in areas like logic, philosophy of language and mind, and applied ethics), CUNY is poised to be competitive at the top ranks of U.S. philosophy programs.  (The program will surely rank in the top 20 in the fall PGR surveys, and perhaps higher.)

Geuss on Rorty (and on Geuss)

Raymond Geuss (Cambridge University) and the late Richard Rorty were colleagues in the Princeton Department in the late 1970s.  Geuss has some characteristically interesting, amusing and iconoclastic remarks about Rorty here, which illuminate both Rorty and Geuss.  (Thanks to Rob Sica for the pointer.)  An excerpt:

[One day] Dick happened to mention that he had just finished reading Gadamer's Truth and Method.  My heart sank at this news because the way he reported it seemed to me to indicate, correctly as it turned out, that he had been positively impressed by this book. I had a premonition, which also turned out to be correct, that it would not be possible for me to disabuse him of his admiration for the work of a man, whom I knew rather well as a former colleague at Heidelberg and whom I held to be a reactionary, distended wind-bag. Over the years, I did my best to set Dick right about Gadamer, even resorting to the rather low blow of describing to him the talk Gadamer had given at the German Embassy in occupied Paris in 1942, in which Gadamer discussed the positive role Herder could play in sweeping away the remnants of such corrupt and degenerate phenomena as individualism, liberalism, and democracy from the New Europe arising under National Socialism.  All this had no effect on Dick. His response to this story was that Gadamer had probably wanted to finance a trip to Paris—a perfectly understandable, indeed self-evidently laudable aspiration—and, under the circumstances, getting himself invited to the German Embassy was the only way to do this. As I persisted in pointing out that this in itself might “under the circumstances” not exactly constitute an exculpation, I came up against that familiar shrug of the shoulders which could look as if it meant that Dick had turned his receiving apparatus off. In this case, the shrug also made me feel that I was being hysterically aggressive in pursuing a harmless old gent for what was, after all, no more than a youthful indiscretion. In retrospect, I am not sure but that I don't now think Dick was right about this last point, but that was not my reaction at the time....

On another [occasion]...Dick described to me a new undergraduate course he wanted to give. It was to be called “An Alternative History of Modern Philosophy” and would sketch a continuous conversation from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century without once naming any of the standard canonical figures. This would be a history of philosophy without any reference to Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, or J. S. Mill. I don't recall in all detail how the alternative story was to run, but I do remember very vividly that it was to start from Petrus Ramus. Dick had an extremely low opinion of Descartes as a philosopher, thinking of him as no more than a minor disciple of Petrus Ramus. I also remember that some of the high points were to be Paracelsus, the Cambridge Platonists, Thomas Reid, Fichte, and Hegel. I think the course was to end with Dewey, although I may be making that up.... [BL comment:  Rorty, in fact, taught a course, which I had with him in the Spring of 1982, called "From Kant to 1900," which covered Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and William James; when Geuss re-joined the Princeton faculty, he had the course eliminated from the books saying [I still recall this], "This course can not be taught."  Of course, Rorty had a message to convey, which is why he could get away with it--it was an excellent course for undergraduates, but I can see why Geuss, who did not share Rorty's agenda, would not think it teachable.]

Dick had two different worries about his planned new course. The first was that, if the Committee on Instruction knew what he was up to, “They” would never permit it. Dick spoke of the Committee on Instruction as if it was a kind of academic Thought Police. One must, as it were, he said, consider the University as a complex machine with two interlocking parts, a Generator that was devoted to producing excellence in relatively abstract areas of research, primarily scientific research, and then a Transformer which turned the prestige acquired through this excellence into a force of repression, directed at legitimizing the deepest possible cultural and political conservatism. The combination of excellence and a strictly-enforced, backward-looking cultural ethos made the University an almost irresistible magnet for the extensive funding from the alumni, large corporations, and the government that fuelled the Generator. The Committee on Instruction was the transmission belt between the two parts of the machine. “That is the way a great university protects itself from change,” Dick would say to me, as a kind of refrain during the late 1970s, meaning by “change,” I presume, in the first instance, cultural change. I naïvely objected that Dick's description couldn't possibly be correct because such a structure couldn't possibly maintain itself: it was like a confidence trick or a perpetual motion machine; reality would eventually break through at some point. Dick, however, was, at that time, significantly more disillusioned, or perhaps more realistic, than I was....

Dick's second worry about this planned course was that he did not quite see how he could tell his story without mentioning Kant at all, and even to mention Kant would be to violate the rationale of the enterprise. Since I had at least as negative an opinion of Kant as Dick had of Descartes, I encouraged him to move directly from Jacobi to Fichte, bypassing Kant altogether. He didn't seem very taken with this idea, although it was not clear to me why not. I suppose anyone who knew Dick knew his sometimes uncanny capacity simply to allow a train of thought that was moving in a direction he found uncongenial to peter out without it ever being completely clear why no further step in the conversation was made. This was not merely a gift or skill he had, but a personality trait that was integral to an aspect of Dick's philosophical make-up which I have already mentioned: his deeply rooted anti-Cartesianism.  Once one has set the origin of a system of Cartesian coordinates, and specified the axes, one can continue to count off in any direction ad libitum....

Dick was deeply tolerant and amazingly generous both in action and in spirit. When I was appointed at Princeton, he had, I think, some hopes of acquiring a colleague with whom he could discuss the more metaphysical parts of the German philosophical tradition that were near the center of his attention at that time. It must have been at least a mild disappointment to him that I had little interest in any kind of metaphysics and spent my time studying philosophers like Adorno who were of no interest to him and thinking about “social theory”—at that time a purported academic discipline that has now disappeared as completely as Davidson's [a now defunct market in Princeton, mentioned earlier in a part of the essay not excerpted here]. Characteristically, Dick used to say to people that my first book, The Idea of a Critical Theory, showed the uselessness of the concept of “ideology,” whereas I thought it showed the reverse. We could also find no common ground in aesthetics because of my own obsession with the philosophy of music. Dick seemed not only, as I have mentioned, to be deeply unmusical, like Freud, but he sometimes seemed even slightly irritated by the very existence of music and certainly by the thought that someone could take it sufficiently seriously to try to think about it in a sustained and systematic way. Finally, I think it puzzled him that I cleverly avoided ever giving any instruction in the university on Heidegger. None of this in the least diminished the unstinting intellectual and academic support he gave me in the most diverse contexts over decades, which went far beyond anything I can have been thought to deserve.

As the years went by, and we both left Princeton, I am afraid the incipient intellectual and emotional gulf between us got wider, especially after what I saw as Dick's turn toward ultra-nationalism with the publication of Achieving Our Country. Dick had always been and remained to the end of his life a “liberal” (in the American sense, i.e., a “Social-Democrat”): a defender of civil liberties and of the extension of a full set of civic rights to all, a vocal supporter of the labor unions and of programs to improve the conditions of the poor, an enemy of racism, arbitrary authority, and social exclusion. On the other hand, I found that he also enjoyed a spot of jokey leftist-baiting when he thought I was adopting knee-jerk positions which he held to be ill-founded. That was all fair enough. I tried not to rise to the bait, and usually succeeded, but this did not contribute to making our relations easier or more comfortable for me. The high (or low, depending on one's perspective) point of this sort of thing occurred some time in the 1980s when Dick sent me a postcard from Israel telling me he had just been talking with the Israeli official responsible for organizing assassinations of Arab mayors on the West Bank. He closed by saying he thought this was just what the situation required....

Achieving Our Country, though, represented a step too far for me. The very idea that the United States was “special” has always seemed to me patently absurd, and the idea that in its present, any of its past, or any of its likely future configurations it was in any way exemplary, a form of gross narcissistic self-deception which was not transformed into something laudable by virtue of being embedded in a highly sophisticated theory which purported to show that ethnocentrism was in a philosophically deep sense unavoidable. I remain very grateful to my Catholic upbringing and education for giving me relative immunity to nationalism. In the 1950s, the nuns who taught me from age five to twelve were virtually all Irish or Irish-American with sentimental attachment to certain elements of Celtic folklore, but they made sure to inculcate into us that the only serious human society was the Church which was an explicitly international organization. The mass, in the international language, Latin, was the same everywhere; the religious orders were international. This absence of national limitation was something very much to be cherished. “Catholica” in the phrase “[credo in] unam, sanctam, catholicam, et apostolicam ecclesiam” should, we were told, be written with a lower-case, not an upper-case, initial because it was not in the first instance part of the proper name of the church, but an adjective meaning “universal,” and this universality was one of the most important “marks of the true Church.” The Head of the Church, to be sure, and Vicar of Christ on earth, was in fact (at that time) always an Italian, but that was for contingent and insignificant reasons. The reason most commonly cited by these nuns was that, as Bishop of Rome, the Pope had to live in the “Eternal City,” but only an Italian could stand to live in Rome: it was hot, noisy, and overcrowded, and the people there ate spaghetti for dinner everyday rather than proper food, i.e., potatoes, so it would be too great a sacrifice to expect someone who had not grown up in Italy to tolerate life there. I clearly remember being unconvinced by this argument, thinking it set inappropriately low standards of self-sacrifice for the higher clergy; a genuinely saintly character should be able to put up even with pasta for lunch and dinner every day. I have since myself adopted this diet for long periods of time without thinking it gave me any claim on the Papacy. In any case, it was obvious even to a child of six or seven that none of these sisters had ever been within a thousand kilometers of Rome....

Hegel says at some point that a great man causes others to write commentaries about him and his work. I have probably spent more time thinking about Dick than about anyone else outside my narrow circle of intimates. His philosophical position contains much of great interest and importance, along with, as one would expect, some things I cannot bring myself to agree with, but that position is clearly and plausibly put. His writings have a human richness and substance which are not present in most contemporary philosophy. As a person, however, he remained a complete mystery to me. I rarely had the sense I understood why he did anything he did. I don't usually find most people that unfathomable. Perhaps it is simply that I cared enough to want genuinely to understand him, because I admired him, more than I cared about understanding other people, and so was not satisfied in his case with the superficial “explanations” of people's behavior which we normally accept.

As a person, Dick was thoroughly lovable, and as a philosopher both extraordinarily perceptive, and, at times, intensely irritating. The one thing he was not—not ever—was predictable or boring. I won't see his like again in my lifetime. I hope he would have been pleased to know that he would be remembered as this kind of person and this kind of philosopher.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

A Philosopher Confronts a Terminal Diagnosis

Story here (and a sample of her writing on the subject here).  Another philosopher who received a similarly grim prognosis nearly twenty years ago, only to "beat the odds," is Julian Young (Auckland), whose book The Death of God and the Meaning of Life is both a very fine introduction to themes in post-Kantian German and French philosophy of the 19th- and 20th-centuries and a very personal engagement with its subject-matter.

Life in a Small Philosophy Department

Andrew Mills, a philosopher at Otterbein College in Ohio, is collecting information on the experiences of philosophers working in small departments.  He writes:

As a member of a small philosophy department, I am interested in what other philosophers in similar departments think about the concerns and advantages of life in a small department. I plan on leading a discussion on this topic in August at the 2008 AAPT International Workshop-Conference on Teaching Philosophy at the University of Guelph, and, in order to prepare for that discussion I would like to know what other philosophers think about being in a small philosophy department.

For the purposes of this project, I've defined "small philosophy department" as a department (either free-standing, or linked with another discipline) that contains 3 or fewer full-time philosophy faculty. If you are a member of such a department, I would very much appreciate you filling out this survey. Moreover, if you have colleagues who teach in small philosophy departments, I would appreciate it if you could forward this survey to them. Finally, if you used to work in a small philosophy department, feel free to take this survey, answering as if you still worked at that department. 

You can access the survey by clicking here.

Professor Mills says he will make the results of the survey available on-line after the August conference.

"Continental Philosophy" Blog Under Attack from a Hacker!

Please help Professor Erfani solve the problem.

Hillary Clinton's Downfall

As played by Adolf Hitler.  Very funny (lots of naughty language, though, be forewarned!).  (Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Reader Erich Matthes points out that this is actually a rip-off of an earlier parody about the "downfall of the Cowboys," the Texas football team, here.

An Honorary Degree for Phyllis Schafly???

From a serious university no less!?!?  Wow.  (Philosopher Gillian Russell at Wash U also comments.  And here's a very good letter on the subject by law faculty at Wash U.)

UPDATE:  Katha Pollitt on the Schlafly honorary degree scandal.

Friday Poem: "What game is this"

What game is this

Oh we are clever
alive
with escapade and risk
inventing and becoming
rich

The game is gelt
or gold or gilt
whatever gilds our trade

And trade it is
that makes us tick
move quick
move quicker
move quickest
to the goal

what is the goal

what game is this

8/5-10/11/95, 4/7/96

Copyright 1996 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Ludlow from Toronto to Northwestern

Peter Ludlow (philosophy of language), who just last year moved from Michigan to the University of Toronto, has now accepted a senior offer from Northwestern University.  Northwestern, which ranked 53rd in the fall 2006 PGR surveys, has, since that time, lost Tad Brennan to Cornell University and Habermas is no longer a regular visiting professor, but has also added, in addition to Ludlow, several tenured faculty, including Sanford Goldberg from Kentucky, Jennifer Lackey from Northern Illinois, and Charles Mills from Illinois/Chicago, as well as making junior appointments.  I would expect Northwestern to be squarely back in the top 50, probably the top 40, in the next round of PGR surveys.

(Query:  does this mean Urzinus Sklar is moving too?)

Foreign Policy's "Top 100 Public Intellectuals": Several Philosophers Make the List

Foreign Policy's annual game of identifying what they deem the world's top "public intellectuals" is here.  Noam Chomsky has won in the past, and correctly so given the criteria:  "Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country."  (Of course, being an "intellectual" is obviously not a criterion for being a "public intellectual" in this exercise, given the presence of poseurs like Christopher Hitchens and Francis Fukuyama on the list of 100!)

Several philosophers make the finalist list of 100:  Anthony Appiah (Princeton), Daniel Dennett (Tufts), Jurgen Habermas (Frankfurt), Martha Nussbaum (Chicago), Peter Singer (Princeton/Monash), and Charles Taylor (McGill/Northwestern).  (Some others are listed as being, among other things, "philosophers," though I doubt some of them would be so classified by most philosophers.)  There are also several candidates who work in cognate fields and whose work is well-known to philosophers, such as Daniel Kahneman (Princeton), Steven Pinker (Harvard), Amartya Sen (Harvard), and Michael Walzer (Institute for Advanced Study)--as well as, of course, Chomsky.

Are there other philosophers who should be on the list given the criteria?  If so, why? Anonymous comments are unlikely to appear.  Note that you may submit write-in candidates in the poll.

A Third, and Final Call, to Sign the Petition in Support of the Florida PhD Program

In the second 24 hours, the petition calling on the University of Florida President to reconsider the decision to close the PhD program in philosophy at the University of Florida garnered just under 400 new signatures, bringing the total to well over 1,000 in just two days!  I know this is a busy time for most philosophers and students, with exams and essays to grade and/or write, but please take a moment to sign if you have not done so already.  The outpouring of support from those inside and outside the academy for the discipline of philosophy should encourage everyone who cares about the subject, and so please add your voice to theirs.

The Florida Department has also been reposting some of the comments from the petition, including some that appeared since my posting yesterday.

Nietzsche: Channelling McDowell on Consciousness?

Perhaps.

Memorial for Michael Frede

There is a memorial event in honour of Michael Frede, organised by and on behalf of his Oxford pupils, on Saturday 14 June at 2 p.m., in the Philosophy Faculty Building at 10 Merton Street, Oxford.

Hendrik Lorenz (Princeton) will give a lecture entitled 'Aristotle on the Unity of the Perceiving Subject', which will be followed by a full discussion and a reception.

If you wish to attend, it would be helpful if you could reply to Ben Morison or Tobias Reinhardt to let us know.

NB This event takes place on the same day as J L Ackrill's memorial service; the timing is such that people wishing to attend both events will be able to do so.

A Second Call to Sign the Petition in Support of the Graduate Program in Philosophy at the University of Florida

In just the first 24 hours, there have been more than 650 signatures to the petition calling on the University of Florida President to reconsider the decision to close the PhD program in philosophy at the University of Florida.  It would be wonderful if there were 650 more in the next 24 hours!  Please take a moment to sign (and include some identifying info as you do so, e.g., Prof of Philosophy at .... or undergraduate at....).  (I hope some of the journalists who cover higher education and read this blog will run a story about the effort to save the PhD program at Florida.  650 signatures in support of the Florida program in just one day is, I hope, newsworthy!)

Many signatories have posted excellent comments as well.  Here are a few samples. 

From John Protevi, Associate Professor of French Studies at Lousiana State University:

Philosophy is the oldest and most rigorous of all the humanities disciplines, stretching back to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Philosophy has been taught in European universities since at least the 13th century in the schools at Paris and Oxford. It is today a lively and important discipline in its own right, and also as a pivot, linking many of the sciences. Because of its positive effects on the intellectual growth of students, it is increasingly popular as an undergraduate major. The University of Florida can only damage its reputation if it follows through on this shortsighted proposal.

From Stephen Darwall, John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (who is moving next year to Yale University):

Dear President Machen, Years ago (I like to think not so many), you and I worked on some projects together when you were Provost at Michigan. Since you left Michigan, you have devoted your life to the effort to make good universities great. Do you really think a university can be great without a good philosophy department? And do you think a philosophy department at a research university can be good without a Ph.D. program? Florida faces great exigency and must cut its budget. While you were at Michigan, the University also faced great exigency, as it has again recently. Was cutting the Philosophy Ph.D. program something you would have long contemplated as Provost of Michigan? I doubt it. I like to think that the proposed cut to Florida's Philosophy Ph.D. program has yet to come before your attention with sufficient vividness, since the document with the proposed cuts is large and complex. And I like to think that when it does you will see the wisdom of retaining the program.

From C. Kenneth Waters, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities:

Great universities across the world have first rate philosophy departments, and that is no accident. I am sorry to see that the flagship public university of one of America's most prominent states does not recognize the value of philosophy.

From Daniel Garber, Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at Princeton University:

This is a short-sighted move, one that sets back the cause of liberal education in one of the country's important state universities.

From Otavio Bueno, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami:

UF has an excellent philosophy department. Keeping the department's Ph.D program will be an asset for the university -- and for the profession.

From David McNaughton, Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University:

Even though I am on the faculty at FSU, and thus likely to benefit from this extraordinary decision, as a Past President of the Florida Philosophical Association, and as someone who cares about the profession, I am appalled.

From Peter Carruthers, Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at the University of Maryland, College Park

The University of Florida cannot possibly aspire to be a serious research university without a PhD Program in Philosophy.

From Craig Duncan, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ithaca College:

Others have spoken of the importance of philosophy to the humanities. Let me emphasize its practical importance too. In today's dynamic economy, career changes are the norm. Given this fact, it is important that students be trained in highly portable skills such as critical thinking, lucid writing, and accurate reading. Philosophy is a first-rate opportunity to hone these skills. Harming the quality of your philosophy department harms your undergraduates' education.

From Janice Dowell, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln:

I have taught philosophy at state universities for over ten years. I have served as an undergraduate advisor for five of those years. I urge you to reconsider the termination of Florida's graduate program in philosphy. Good philosphy departments, such as Florida's, make a contribution to undergraduate education that far exceeds their size. Philosophy departments tend to be small and their faculty relatively low-paid. In short, good philosophy departements are relatively cheap. Yet philosophy majors consistently far out-perform just about any other major--in engineering, the sciences, or the humanities--on standardized tests for graduate programs, an excellent neutral measure of undergraduate learning. (Just check any source of information for the comparative scores of undergraduate majors on the GREs or LSATs. Year after year, philosophy majors dominate these lists.) The emphasis here, though, is GOOD philosophy departments. A university's ability to attract strong philosophers depends in part on the strength of their graduate program. Florida currently has a strong program and a strong department. It would be a real blow to undergraduate education at Florida to decimate the philosophy department by terminating its philosophy program. If this action is taken, I predict that the best faculty leave for better positions within a few years. It would be very difficult for a department to recover from this. And the reinstatement of the graduate program will be a necessary condition on recovery.

From Radu Bogdan, a philosophy professor at Tulane University and Bilkent University in Turkey:

Some time ago, I was considering applying for a job at UF, given the strength of the philosophy graduate program and its prestige. Philosophers make a great difference to a university, being the most interdisciplinary and connecting various fields. Both at Tulane and now visiting in Turkey, I set up and run cognitive science programs -- one of the most exciting developments in recent education -- and it is my experience that philosophers are the best link across disciplines in cognitive science. In eliminating the PhD at your university, you would weaken not only philosophy but also future developments in cognitive science, also various areas of applied ethics (business, ecology, medical, etc.) where philosophers are also essential. I hope you would reconsider.

From Alistair Norcross, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder:

Eliminating the Ph.D program in Philosophy at the University of Florida would be a terrible move. If that happens, the "flag" would have to be transferred to FSU

From Barry Loewer, Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick:

It is a grave error for the University of Florida to close its PhD program in pilosophy. Over the years it has been an excellent program. A vibrant philosophy PhD program is needed for vibrant undergraduate programs in philosophy and the humanities and sciences in general. Closing the program will make the university much less appealing to undergraduates. It will lead to many of the faculty leaving. It will be embarrassing to Florida that its flagship university doesn't have a doctoral program in Philosophy and re-instituting the program will be enormously more expensive than maintaining the current program.

From Joel Anderson, Research Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands:

This strikes me as very poor judgment. Sometimes, sacrifices have to be made to make certain savings. But in this case, the savings are likely to be small, and the cost in loss of prestige and academic standing will be extremely high. For, what talented person is going to want to be hired or pursue an advanced degree at UF -- in any field of the humanities -- with this as the track record of the University? As a faculty member at one of the UF's international partner universities, I would add that this is the sort of move that will likely raise questions about whether to continue that partnership.

From Kevin Fink in Ohio:

This decision comes just weeks after I was admitted to the PhD program in philosophy. I am extremely disappointed. This is something I never would have expected from such a highly respected research institution. Further, I can hardly imagine that the cost to the reputation of the university is worth what little money can be saved by this cut.

From Elizabeth Palmer:

I completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy at the Univeristy of Florida and am now attending Indiana University's PhD program in philosophy. I cannot express how disgusted and disappointed I am with your decision to end the PhD program in philosophy at UF. The UF department is quite strong - they are ranked in the top 50 of all graduate philosophy programs. Although I understand the budget constraints Florida is facing, it is ludicrous to eliminate a program clearly performing so well. At this moment, I'm ashamed to be a UF alumna. I hope you reconsider your decision.

From Jennifer Arellano, an undergraduate majoring in philosophy at Florida:

As a philosophy undergrad at UF, I am outraged that [President] Bernie Machen would cut such a vital discipline from UF's PhD. curriculum. I have firsthand witnessed the proficiency of UF's philosophy department, the growing student interest, and the passion and drive of its philosophy students and professors. I came specifically to UF with one goal in mind - to earn my undergraduate degree in philosophy. If this department suffers any more setbacks due to Machen's insensitivity, inconsideration, and general insolence towards a first-class undergraduate education, I will hold him personally responsible for disrupting the quality of my education. The department is already small in size, and with some professors already leaving, how can we afford to lose any more faculty? At the expense of increasing student interest in the major? At the expense of the respectability of Florida's supposed flagship institution? I'm pretty sure Berkeley still offers PhD's in philosophy.

From Jason Braswell in Illinois:

As a former philosophy major at the University of Florida, I strongly disagree with the decision to cut the PhD program. Studying philosophy was one of the best decisions I've ever made, and it's sad that such an important subject is being marginalized.

From Charles Wolvertron in Virginia:

As someone who "discovered" philosophy late in life after a career in engineering, I think a claim of being relatively unbiased is justifiable. It is now my opinion that a course in philosophy should be a graduation requirement for every student. Eliminating a key part of your philosophy program is a step in the wrong direction and sends a message opposite to the one that needs sending.

From David Holt in Florida:

As a tax paying resident of Florida, who understands the skills in critical thinking that the study of philosophy provides, I urge you not to eliminate the Ph.D program at the University of Florida. I studied philosophy as an undergraduate and graduate student some 30 years ago and know the sound foundation it provided for earning a living in business.

From Alice Allen in Florida:

Dear Dr. Machen, From a fellow Vanderbilt alumnus... Please reconsider and keep the PhD program in Philosophy. I know several of their students and have known others over the years. These young scholars are EXCEPTIONAL. I know times are tight and understand your need to cut somewhere. But a top Liberal Arts university needs a Philosophy Ph.D. program. Respectfully submitted, Alice Allen B.A., Vanderbilt, 1965 M.A, M.S., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1967, 1969 Mother of a 2006 Summa Cum Laude graduate of the University of Florida with double major in English and Philosophy.

Here, finally, is an article from a Gainesville paper about the initial response to the proposed cuts.

Show Your Support for the Philosophy PhD Program at Florida, and for the Importance of Philosophy in the Curriculum

A professor at Miami Dade College has created an on-line petition protesting the decision to eliminate the PhD program at the University of Florida.  I hope other philosophers will join me in signing.

UPDATE:  May I suggest that when signing you use the comments to indicate who you are:  e.g., "undergraduate philosophy student at University of Missouri," or "graduate student in philosophy at University of Notre Dame" or "Assistant Professor of Law at University of Kentucky," or "Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida," etc.  You should, of course, add whatever other comments you think relevant, as many signatories have already done (lots of good comments too!).

ANOTHER:  50 new signatures in the hour since this post went up.  Nice work, readers!  But there were over 500 'hits' on the blog in the last hour (of course not all of those were real visitors, some land here by accident).  Don't be shy, please!  Sign!!!  It is important for the profession to stand up for the centrality of the discipline to the mission of a major research university.

Cindy Sheehan Running for Congress...

...against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has, of course, done nothing to stop or atone for the criminal war of aggression against Iraq.  Back in the good 'ole (time-consuming) days of the blog, I'd suggested Ms. Sheehan for President.  I'd be happy if she made it to Congress.