Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Philosophers Writing on Wittgenstein: Sympathetic but Critical?

John Hyman (Oxford), in a quite positive review of Michael Forster's book Wittgenstein on the Arbitrariness of Grammar (Princeton University Press, 2004), makes an observation that is striking for those of us who are not Wittgenstein scholars but occasionally read the literature in that area:  after noting that Forster's book is "lucid, subtle, and intellectual scrupulous," Hyman also observes that it "is unusual in being both sympathetic to Wittgenstein's ideas and critical of them."  (This is, by the way, true of all of Forster's work that I have read, for example, on Hegel and on Herder.  Forster, of course, is best-known for his seminal work on German philosophy from the late 18th- through the 19th-century [e.g., here, here, here, and here], where he is clearly one of the three or four leading scholars working on figures in this period in the Anglophone world.) 

I would be curious to hear from readers whether there is other work that fits this bill, i.e., that is "both sympathetic to Wittgenstein's ideas and critical of them."  I'm particularly interested to hear about books or articles in this vein that have been recommended, with success, to graduate students.  Thanks.

Open Access Philosophy?

You can discuss the issue here.

Something Sensible on Iran

Here; an excerpt:

Nothing in the modern affairs of nations has been more exhaustively analyzed and debated than the utility and dangers of nuclear weapons, and yet the dangers posed by Iran with a bomb have been barely discussed. They are treated as a given. The core idea is that Iran cannot be trusted because the country is run by religious fanatics crazy enough to use a bomb if they had one. This is not the first time such arguments have been made. Some Americans, including Air Force generals, believed in the late 1940s that a preemptive war against the Soviet Union was justified by the peril of Moscow with a bomb. Twenty years later the Russians, in their turn, were so alarmed by the prospect of Beijing with a bomb that they quietly proposed to the Americans a joint effort to destroy the Chinese nuclear development effort with a preemptive attack.

The world's experience with nuclear weapons to date has shown that nuclear powers do not use them, and they seriously threaten to use them only to deter attack. Britain, France, Russia, China, Israel, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all acquired nuclear weapons in spite of international opposition. None has behaved recklessly with its new power. What changes is that nuclear powers have to be treated differently; in particular they cannot be casually threatened....

Official reluctance to spell out why Tehran more than other nations cannot be trusted with a bomb has been matched by reluctance to consider why Tehran might want one in the first place.....

What US officials say, when they say anything at all, is that Tehran wants a bomb in order to dominate the Persian Gulf region and to threaten its neighbors, especially Israel. This is a misreading of how other nuclear powers have made use of their weapons. As tools of coercive diplomacy nuclear weapons are almost entirely useless, but they are extremely effective in blocking large-scale or regime-threatening attack. There is no evidence that Iran has a different motive, and plenty of reason for Iran to fear that attack is a real possibility.

Indeed, the Bush administration, far from trying to quiet Iran's fears, makes a point of confirming them every few months. These threats are not limited to words, but are supported with practical steps—the presence of large American armies just across Iran's borders in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the dispatch of the world's largest fleet of warships to cruise along Iran's Persian Gulf coastline. The Bush administration further accuses Iran of "meddling" in the affairs of its neighbors, of supplying weapons and training to Iraqis who kill Americans, and of being the world's principal state sponsor of terrorism. Fear that Saddam Hussein might provide nuclear weapons to terrorist groups was the leading American justification for the invasion of Iraq, and the same concern is often cited about Iran.

The seriousness of American threats is confirmed by the fact that no significant national leader in the United States has ever disowned or objected to them in clear, vigorous, principled language. It is as if the whole country listens to the administration's threats with breath held, wondering if Bush and Cheney really mean to do as they say, and in effect leaving the decision entirely to them. Americans may count on the President to think twice, but why would leaders in Tehran, responsible for the lives of 70 million citizens, want to depend on President Bush's restraint for their survival and safety? Bush has a history. On his own authority, without the sanction of any international body, he attacked Iraq five years ago and precipitated a bloody chain of events that shows no sign of ending. It would be natural, indeed inevitable, for any government in Tehran, seeing what has happened next door, to ask what could save Iran from a similar fate. An answer is not far to seek: nuclear weapons with a reliable delivery system could do that.

UPDATE:  I hope this analysis is correct.

Friday Poem: "My Age While I Read Rimbaud"

My Age While I Read Rimbaud

I notice I am seventy-five
Today this evening I am reminded of this
Even while thinking I am twenty
Twenty and in love verging on passion
Why now do I remember
Why now remember which
Who I am now
Who I was then
I am twenty
And I remember
When I was seventy-five

6/16/08

Copyright 2008 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

A Puzzle About Heller (the US Supreme Court Case Invalidating the DC Gun Ordinance)

Here.

Discussing John Yoo and Academic Freedom on the Radio

I'll be on KFPA in Berkeley this morning (9:10 am Central Time, 7:10 am California time, 10:10 am New York time) discussing the John Yoo case (my views here) with Sharon Adams from the National Lawyers Guild.  The NLG, for reasons given here, thinks Berkeley should investigate Yoo.  I am disappointed the NLG has taken this position, for reasons we'll discuss on the air.  There are some pleasant ironies here:  I have been the faculty advisor for the student chapter of the NLG at the University of Texas School of Law for the past decade, and the student chapter was started by two students, one of whom, Carlos Villareal, is now Executive Director of the San Francisco NLG and author of the letter linked above!  I admire both the NLG and Carlos, even though I think they are on the wrong side of this particular issue.

UPDATE:  One can listen to the discussion here, it starts about ten minutes in.

Philosophers with Style...

...in their writing, that is.  A reader comments:

As a TA, I always emphasize the importance of writing clearly. This isn't a matter of who I think is right, or even who I enjoy reading because I find their ideas fruitful or interesting; it's a matter of who writes well. Who would others suggest as good philosophers I should tell students to emulate? (Perhaps "hold up as an ideal" is better than "emulate". I'm not sure anyone should be trying to write like (say) Lewis, but I think it's good to read him with an eye on his style.) I have my own favourites, but it would be interesting to know who others would pick.

Interesting question.  It's easy to say whom students should not emulate:  John McDowell, Christopher Peacocke, Martin Heidegger, the charlatan Jacques Derrida, among others.  Some engaging stylists, like Quine or (very differently) Nietzsche, are not philosophers one would encourage students to emulate either, because they are unlikely to do it well needless to say.  My own picks for philosophers students should strive to emulate:  Jaegwon Kim, Philip Kitcher, Thomas Nagel, H.L.A. Hart, Michael Forster, G.A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, among others.  Comments are open; non-anonymous comments strongly preferred, as usual.

 

Stephen Stich (Rutgers) Wins First Gittler Prize from the APA...

...for contributions to the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences.  Professor Stich is certainly a quite appropriate first honoree, who will set the standard for this award, no doubt, in future years.

Tenure Letters: Some Questions

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY, in hopes of generating some more comments!

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

A philosopher writes:

If your blog has not done so recently, I wonder if you would be willing to start up a discussion about the ethics of writing tenure letters. I would very much like to hear other people's opinions about this. I have heard that it can be held against a candidate if people decline to consider their tenure case. Is this true? Do people think it to be encouraged? I don't see why it should. How much pressure do people feel to not decline to consider a tenure case? Also, has anyone found a good solution to the question of how to be able to say that one has done this hard work without outing oneself a letter writer for a particular person?

Good questions, probably of interest to many.  Here are my own impressions:  (1)  many schools want a reason if you decline to do a tenure review, usually because their Administration wants one--this is, I assume, because declining to do a tenure review is often (mis)interpreted as having a negative view of the candidate; (2)  my own practice, which may well be idiosyncratic, is to only do tenure reviews in cases where I am interested to study the candidate's work more carefully--sometimes this has led to favorable reviews, sometimes not; (3)  I simply list on the CV the names of schools that have asked me to do formal reviews for promotion; I don't list dates, though I suppose one could draw inferences about the candidates given the likely AOS for which I get asked to review candidates.  But since in most cases there are multiple reviewers, I'm not sure this is especially revealing information.

No anonymous postings, and please post only once--comments may take awhile to appear.

Thomas Nagel's Honorary Degree from Oxford...

...or how to say "what is it like to be a bat?" in Latin.

"Rising Stars" Redux

Another udpate has been made to the original post--a posting which I've also learned (upon my return to Austin) has called forth a torrent of personal abuse on some philosophy blogs from anonymous, and largely self-deluded, individuals.  A few observations about the list of young philosophers who garnered the most job offers:

1.  I posted this information because readers asked for it, indeed, had been asking for it since last year, when Sam Cumming (PhD, Rutgers; AOS:  Philosophy of Language; now at UCLA) got more offers from top departments than anyone I can recall since Gideon Rosen.  Moreover, various folks posting in the comments on the hiring thread had already been noting multiple offers, and the information presented is well-known to many folks participating in the hiring process at top schools.  I have always operated on the premise that more information, widely disseminated, is a good thing, especially for students.  The list of the most successful job seekers does indeed track both the overall and especially the specialty rankings from prior years in the PGR, and the spectacular success of graduates of some programs is surely pertinent professional information for prospective students to be aware of.  (Remember:  job placement is a backward-looking measure of program quality, tracking past faculty quality, not present.) If large numbers of faculty at NYU, MIT, Michigan, and Pittsburgh know about these young philosophers, I am, in any case, hard-pressed to see why others already in or entering the profession should not know about them as well.

2.  My criterion for listing was at least two tenure-track offers from top ten departments plus other tenure-track offers from top twenty departments.  There were, of course, other excellent candidates who garnered multiple offers, but this benchmark seemed to do reasonably well.

3.  I was simply amazed to discover that some anonymous individuals in Cyberspace did not think that multiple offers from top departments were a good indicator of philosophical talent.  How do these folks think hiring decisions are made?  The work of these young philosophers was scrutinized in excruciating detail by dozens and dozens of established philosophers, who appraised it favorably.   Philosophical excellence is not a natural kind; to the extent it exists, it emerges from the consensus of philosophers.  In the case of these young philosophers, the consensus is clear.

I realize that information about the successful can provoke resentment and envy among some, but those in the grips of such emotions ought to be a bit more self-conscious about how transparent their motivations are when they "shoot the messenger"! 

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.  (Sorry for the delay in posting this one, I've been on the road.)

Remembering George Carlin, Moral Philosopher

Here.  (Thanks to Jerry Dworkin for the link.)

UPDATE:  And political philosopher.  (Thanks to Jeffrey Roland for the pointer.)

Charles Taylor Wins Kyoto Prize in "Arts & Philosophy"

The press release is here.  This award is better known, I suspect, in the sciences than in the humanities, but it is both lucrative and well-regarded.

Glanzberg Declines Cornell, To Remain at UC Davis

Michael Glanzberg (philosophical logic, philosophy of language) at the University of California at Davis has turned down a tenured offer from the Department of Philosophy at Cornell University.  That´s a significant retention coup for the Davis department!

Some of Richard Kearney's "Best Friends" Are Famous Philosophers...

and movie stars!  Of the many weird things on homepages, this is among the more peculiar and revealing.  (Oddly, mixed in with photos of Professor Kearney with Borges and Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Marion is also a picture of him with Simon Critchley!)

UPDATE:  Stefano Predelli (Nottingham) has the right idea!

ANOTHER:  Two different readers pointed out that the original title for this post was too provocative, and beside the point, hence the revision.  Alas, the dangers of posting stuff from Internet cafes "on the run"....

Albert v. Carroll on the Philosophy of Time

Philosopher David Albert and Physicist Sean Carroll discuss issues in philosophy of physics (esp. with respect to time).

In Memoriam: Mark Sacks (1953-2008)

Professor Sacks was, of course, well-known to scholars of Kant and German Idealism, and is known to even more philosophers for his role as the founding editor of the excellent European Journal of Philosophy.  The Department of Philosophy at the University of Essex has posted a memorial notice here.  I will add links to additional memorials as they appear.  (Because I am travelling right now, they may not be posted in as timely a fashion as would be ideal.)

UPDATE:  An obituary is here.

ANOTHER memorial notice here.

Proops from Michigan to Texas

Ian Proops (history of analytic philosophy, Kant), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has accepted a tenured offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.   Already strong in history of analytic philosophy (Hochberg, Sainsbury, and Sarkar, among others), this appointment should push Texas into the very top ranks in this specialty.

Keller to Victoria U, Wellington

Simon Keller, one of the most creative and interesting political philosophers of his generation, has accepted a tenured appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy at Victoria University, Wellington in New Zealand.  He is presently a CAPPE Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and before that taught philosophy at Boston University.

How Many Libraries Have Your Books?

This site purports to give you the answer, though I've no idea how accurate it is.  For example, it reports that for "Brian Leiter," there are "16 works in 25 publications in 2 languages and 2,403 library holdings; though they seem to have missed the Chinese translation of one book, and the library holdings they report for some books seem lower than what sales figures would lead one to believe.   (They report that 278 libraries hold copies of my Nietzsche on Morality [2002], which has sold about 5,000 copies, which would suggest that the overwhelming majority of the sales were to individuals, rather than institutions, which I guess is possible, but seems to me not likely.)   By contrast, my colleague Martha Nussbaum is recorded as having "171 works in 254 publications in 12 languages and 25,584 library holdings," which, relative to my results, sounds like it could be right!

UPDATE:  Dean Rowan, a librarian at Berkeley, writes:

You are correct to wonder why few occurrences of your Routledge Nietzsche book appear in WorldCat when you know it has sold several thousand copies. Oddly, the 278 figure becomes 320 if you view the full record. I can't explain that discrepancy, but I can explain at least in part why the number of holding libraries is fewer than what you expect. Although OCLC (WorldCat) aggregates the holdings of some 10,000 or so libraries, it is not an exhaustive "union catalog." For quite some time, academic libraries tended not to include their holdings in OCLC, opting instead for alternative services. Recently, one of those major services, RLIN, was purchased by OCLC. I'm not sure whether that means that holdings of academic libraries on RLIN would automatically be transferred to OCLC. Our library at Boalt has indeed migrated, but lots of libraries keep their distance from OCLC. This must certainly account for some of the discrepancy, although I would not have expected it to remain so large. That is, I would have imagined that many more academic libraries on RLIN had elected to migrate. But if OCLC can't square 278 with 320, there must be other hiccups at work.

"Rising Stars" (Amended)

The Chronicle of Higher Ed used to run a feature each fall on "rising stars" focusing on newly hired junior faculty who were deemed the most promising, as evidenced in large part by the offers they accrued from leading departments.  I used to suggest to them junior philosophy faculty on whom to focus, some of whom they ran stories on (such as Joshua Knobe at North Carolina, and Carolina Sartorio at Wisconsin), but now that the Chronicle is out of the business as it were, I'll just note briefly the five young philosophers whose talent and promise resulted in the most offers from leading departments this past year; they are:

David Baker (PhD, Princeton), AOS:  Philosophy of Physics.  He will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Agnes Callard (PhD, Berkeley), AOS:  Ethics, Philosophy of Action, Ancient Philosophy.  She will be the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Matthew Kotzen (PhD, NYU), AOS:  Epistemology, Philosophy of Science.  He will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Japa Pallikkathayil (PhD, Harvard), AOS:  Moral and Political Philosophy.  She will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy at New York University.

Seth Yalcin (PhD, MIT), AOS:  Philosophy of Language and Mind, Metaphysics.  He will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy at New York University.

Hegel Meets Pittsburgh

I found this to be an interesting review, especially for those with interests in both German and Anglophone philosophy.  (The reviewer, alas, refers to 'analytic' philosophy, which, of course, does not exist!)

Four Philosophers Answer Questions about Philosophy: Its Purposes, Nature, History

Jonathan Barnes (Paris), Myles Burnyeat (emeritus, Oxford), Raymond Geuss (Cambridge), and Barry Stroud (Berkeley) answer the questions here.  The questions and answers vary quite a bit in their interest and depth (Geuss is appropriately short and dismissive of some of the questions).  A few excerpts.

Geuss, in response to a question about whether it is a loss that few philosophers now write in the form of dialogues, poems, aphorisms or the like any longer:

Academic philosophers should not give themselves too much importance. People are not going to stop expressing philosophical views in letters, or dialogues, or aphorisms just because this will not get them employment in a department of philosophy.

Stroud on whether only those with training can do philosophy:

I think of philosophy as a difficult intellectual endeavour. You have to learn how to do it, and it takes a lot of practice. Only those who know how to do it are really engaged in philosophy. It is possible to do serious philosophy outside an academic institution (many of the great philosophers of the past did it). But nowadays it is virtually impossible to earn a living and support oneself outside an academic institution while doing philosophy.

Barnes embarrasses himself mightily with this bizarre proclamation:

[M]ost philosophers who belong to the so-called analytical tradition are pretty poor philosophers. (Most academics who do anything are pretty poor at doing it; and philosophy, or so it seems to me, is a subject in which it is peculiarly difficult to do decent stuff. A modestly competent historian may produce a modestly good history book; a modestly competent philosopher has no reason to publish his modest thoughts.)   But there's a big difference between the analyticals and the continentals: what distinguishes the continental tradition is that all its members are pretty hopeless at philosophy. Myself, I've read scarcely a hundred continental pages. I can't see how any rational being could bear to read more; and the only question which the continental tradition raises is sociological or psychological: How are so many apparently intelligent young people charmed into taking the twaddle seriously?

Having read "a hundred continental pages" (whatever exactly that means), Barnes dismisses as worthless two hundred years of philosophy since Kant on the European Continent, including multiple traditions (Idealism, Marxism, existentialism, phenomenology, etc.) encompassing tens of thousands of pages of canonical texts!   Barnes, at least, claims elsewhere in the interview not to be a philosopher, but an historian of philosophy, which means that this disgraceful display of parochial ignorance can not be attributed to "analytic philosophy."   

With regard to the question that provokes Barnes's outburst--regarding the "analytic/Continental divide," Geuss has a better and more apt answer:

Whether "analytic"/"continental" is an illuminating or well-formed dichotomy is less important than the general recognition that for as long as there have been philosophers, they have always disagreed with one another radically on a wide variety of important issues. In this they differ from scientists or mathematicians.  Lack of consensus, if not active intellectual hostility, is the natural state for any body of philosophers. This seems to be a fact of life about the way humans respond to certain basic features of the human condition, and it seems more reasonable to accept this and try to understand why it is the case and what its implications might be than to try to fit philosophy into a mould derived from religion (the universal consensus of all orthodox believers) or from a certain conception of "strict science" (all biologists agree that the whale is a mammal, not a fish).

Which is to say that the best way to approach embarrassing displays of ignorance like Jonathan Barnes's would be through psychology, not philosophy!

Charles Taylor Co-Authors Government Report on the Integration of Immigrants in Quebec

Story here.  (Thanks to J. Brendan Ritchie for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  I'm told the prior link is behind a firewall; Jacob Levy kindly sent a link to another article about the report.

Friday Poem: "A Vow Forsaken"

A Vow Forsaken

Struggling home at dawn
I briefly view an unexpected birth
Seeing the night I squandered turn to light

I vow to change my life
Rise early and write till noon
Feast only on salad and yogurt no wine

Never again be cross or self-absorbed
But self-absorption was all it was
Aflame in the fever of dissipation

As the sun rose up I tumbled into sleep
Awash in dreams of relevance
Of promises and starry nights to come

5/30-6/1/08

Copyright 2008 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Kronz from Texas to NSF

Frederick Kronz (philosophy of physics), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, has accepted appointment as a Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program (which includes History and Philosophy of Science as a component element) of the National Science Foundation.

Paul from Arizona to North Carolina

Laurie (L.A.) Paul (metaphysics) at the University of Arizona has accepted the tenured offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

Specialty Areas in the PGR

There are curretly 31 specialty areas evaluated in the PGR, plus two others (Indian Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) evaluated in informal consultation with the Board and scholars in the field.  (We simply did not get enough respondents to the surveys in those areas.)

Here is the basic question:  should there be fewer specialty areas, on the theory that undergraduates have less well-defined interests, or should we leave the list as it is, since it allows students to identify programs, especially programs less highly ranked overall, that would meet their interests?

The 31 areas currently covered are:  Philosophy of Language; Philosophy of Mind; Metaphysics; Epistemology; Philosophical Logic; Philosophy of Action (incl. free will); Philosophy of religion; Normative Ethics & Moral Psychology; Metaethics; Political Philosophy; Philosophy of Law; Applied Ethics; Philosophy of Art; Philosophy of Science; Philosophy of Biology; Philosophy of Physics; Philosophy of Cognitive Science; Philosophy of Social Science; Decision, Rational Choice and Game Theory; Philosophy of Mathematics; Mathematical Logic; Ancient Philosophy; Medieval Philosophy; Early Modern Philosophy:  17th Century; Early Modern Philosophy:  18th Century (excluding Kant); Kant and German Ideailsm; 19th Century Continental Philosophy after Hegel; American Pragmatism; History of Analytic Philosophy (incl. Wittgenstein); 20th-Century Continental Philosophy; Feminist Philosophy.

These 31 areas are grouped into four broad categories:  Metaphysics & Epistemology; Theory of Value; Philosophy of the Sciences and Mathematics; and History of Philosophy.  It seems obvious that those categories are far too broad to admit of meaningful evaluation. But a possible restructuring might look like this:

In the M&E family:  Phil of Language & Logic; Metaphysics & Epistemology; Philosophy of Mind and Action; Philosophy of Religion.

In the Value Theory family:  Ethics; Applied Ethics; Political & Legal Philosophy; Philosophy of Art.

In the Phil of the Sciences:  Philosophy of Science (incl. physics, biology, economics, etc.); Philosophy of Mathematics; Decision, Rational Choice & Game Theory.

In History:  Ancient Philosophy; Medieval Philosophy; Early Modern Philosophy; Kant; Continental Philosophy; History of Analytic Philosophy.

I myself think this too dramatic a truncation, but I am curious what readers think, or what alternative suggestions they have.  Please post only once; comments may take awhile to appear.