Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

10 Notable Philosophy Blogs

Blogs.com, run by Typepad, runs "top ten blog" lists, and they asked me to do one for philosophy (and to include this blog).  Here it is.  Obviously there are more than ten philosophy blogs worth recommending, but ten was my limit.  (Dave Chalmers maintains a huge list of philosophy-related blogs.)  If some readers don't know any of these ten, maybe they'll find the list helpful.

The Texas Taliban Never Rest: Done Trying to Wreck Science Education, They Move on to History

The mindless nonsense continues; how sad for the children.

(Thanks to David Warrington for the pointer on this.)

"Naturalizing Jurisprudence"

Now everyone will surely want their own copy!

Mind Editor Tom Baldwin Reponds to Worries about Editorial Delays

Here.

Texas Tech's Walter Schaller Spearheads Petition Protesting Appointment of Disgraced Former AG Alberto Gonzales

Kudos to philosopher Walter Schaller at Texas Tech University for organizing a petition to protest the appointment of disgraced former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to the faculty.  (More information and supporting documents here.)  The petition correctly challenges both the "procedure" by which he was appointed (there wasn't one!) and the merits of the appointment.  So far more than 70 Texas Tech faculty have signed.  As I understand it, Mr. Gonzales's former firm, Houston-based Vinson & Elkins, would not take him back, and the private sector generally has balked.  How strange and ironic for a public university to step in; so much for faith in markets!

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

New Blog: Law and Neuroscience

Here--notwithstanding the title, there are several philosophers in the mix as well.

My one and only comment on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

A few readers have asked whether I might have a comment on the arrest of Professor Gates of Harvard for "disorderly conduct" after someone phoned the police after seeing him and his car service driver forcing open the front door of the house, which was jammed.   President Obama, who described the arrest of Professor Gates as "stupid," has now been backtracking, since one is not supposed to criticize the police, apparently, in America.  "Stupid" is, I think, a very nice way to put it:  I do not see any evidence that the officer was stupid, just arrogant and irritated at being bawled out.  Even if one accepts verbatim everything in the police report--and more on that in a moment--it's pretty clear the arrest was unlawful.   Why would an intelligent officer make an unlawful arrest?  Because he was pissed off at being shouted down and thought he could get away with it, as the police usually do.

In any case, the police simply aren't very credible in circumstances like this, so it would be bizarre to credit the police report in all details:  police lie, all the time.  I recall a Queens (N.Y.) prosecutor telling me years ago that the police he would have to call as witnesses would openly joke about testifying in court as "testilying."  The culture of dishonesty in the service of both commendable (e.g., getting genuine criminals and preserving public safety) and self-serving (e.g., concealing misconduct and allowing the police to trample on those who offend them) ends is, from all the evidence I have seen, absolutely pervasive in American policing, at least in the major urban areas, where the pressures on the police are probably the greatest.  (On testilying, see the first few paragraphs here [and citations therein] or this L.A. Time article.)  Anyone familiar with police practice in major urban centers knows that "disorderly conduct" is the charge the police always fall back on when they don't have an actual charge to support an arrest.  (See the comments of Northwestern law profesor Steven Lubet in this regard.)  Some minority of "disorderly conduct" charges are probably legitimate, most are not.  Professor Gates acted imprudently, without a doubt, but he was right to be angry, and all the evidence now available strongly suggests the arresting officer acted illegally.

What role did race play in all this?  Less, I suspect, than the initial news coverage has suggested (or than this would suggest).  The woman who called the police was probably influenced by racial considerations:  why are two dark-skinned men forcing their way through the front door of a nice house near Harvard Square?  But would she have called the police if two white men were doing the same thing?  One hopes so, but who knows?   The arresting officer's annoyance at being bawled out may have been exacerbated by the fact that it was an African-American man shouting at him:  it's hard to know, we'd have to know a lot more about the officer in question.   Police do not like to be berated or challenged, period, and an incident like this should call more attention to police abuse of the charge of "disorderly conduct" as a way of trampling on the First Amendment rights of citizens to challenge police conduct. 

Signed comments from readers are welcome:  full name, valid e-mail.

Reaction Formation Watch: State Senator Paul Stanley, Republican of Tennessee

Haven't done one of these in awhile, but this is too charming to let pass in silence.  God Bless America!

The Australian Philosophy Exodus to America

Story here.  (Thanks to Michael Weisberg for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Huw Price (Sydney) writes:

The Australian piece on the "exodus" of Australian philosophers seemed a little one-sided, to me. A quick count reveals that about 40% of my colleagues here at Sydney are imports, who first came to Australia after graduate school. The list includes both senior and junior people. There are several others who (like me) have returned to Australia in recent years, after working elsewhere. And the mix is broadly similar elsewhere in Australia (and NZ), I think.

So without denying that there are and have been difficulties in some departments, I wanted to counter the impression that the Australian discipline as a whole is a sinking ship. Just as for many years, well-qualified philosophical rats are moving in both directions; and much of the real story is about the attractions of the local philosophical environment, as well as the commendable openness of its borders.

That strike me as a fair assessment, and useful supplement to the linked article.

Notre Dame's Plantinga to Retire in 2010

Browsing the philosophy blogs, I came across this impressive conference line-up for a "retirement celebration" in May 2010 in honor of Alvin Plantinga (b. 1932), a mainstay of the Notre Dame Department for more than a quarter-century, and a leading contributor to epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion during that time and before.  One can get some sense of his many contributions to graduate education at Notre Dame from the many now well-known former students who are among the participants. 

What Hitler Learned from the US Advertising Industry (and the Industry was proud!)

Curious story.

Atlas Shrugged, the Movie: It's on the Way!

Helpful analysis here; choice paragraph:

Weep no more, bruised and battered libertarians: After 37 years of being shot down by rational people who see the book as a stilted and masturbatory work suitable only for college freshmen who haven’t figured out that, if everyone did exactly what they wanted all the time, civilization would collapse on itself—and by the way, dudes, most ladies don’t enjoy being raped into submission, even by rugged industrialists—your sticky dreams of turning Rand’s rambling screed about the values of selfishness and laissez-fare capitalism into a brutally dull, unwatchable movie are about to become a reality!

Young from Auckland to Wake Forest

Julian Young, a leading scholar of 19th- and 20th-century German philosophy at the University of Auckland, will become Kenan Professor of the Humanities at Wake Forest University in January 2010.  That's an exciting appointment for Wake Forest.  A propos our earlier discussion of 'enduring questions,' I heartily recommend Young's The Death of God and the Meaning of Life, which is an instructive introduction to its title themes in major Continental European philosophers of the last two centuries.

Time to Boycott "Journal of Philosophy"?

More authors are reporting horror stories with J.Phil. here.  Add to this the fact that it's an in-house operation, and the fact that there are now lots of high-profile and high-quality alternatives, that are also generally efficient (like Nous, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Philosophers' Imprint etc.), and one wonders whether a boycott isn't the right response.  (See also the comment from Barry Lam [Vassar] regarding on-line sources for collecting information about journal practices.) 

Thoughts from readers?

More on "Enduring Questions" and the NEH--and Why Philosophers Should Be "Worried"

Philosopher Mark Couch calls to my attention an interesting comment posted on IHE, which I here reprint in its entirety:

I am an assistant professor of philosophy in a PhD-granting department and was a reviewer for the NEH Enduring Questions grant this past year. I hope you will excuse this message's anonymity -- and its length. I reviewed about 20 or so of the applications, and recently received a list of the 20 award recipients, so I might be able to make some informative remarks about this program. I think the program gives philosophers two reasons to be worried.

These reasons have been mentioned here and there throughout the preceding comments but it may be helpful to draw them out explicitly. The first reason concerns philosophers' views about what constitutes legitimate inquiry into these "enduring questions." The second concerns how the NEH and other humanities fields view philosophy. I'll elaborate on these. When I first heard of this program, I, like many of the above commenters, had what I'll dub the "proprietary response." The proprietary response is that the enduring questions (such as "What is a good life?") are distinctly philosophical questions and that it is absurd and insulting to set up a grant program to induce non-philosophers to teach philosophy courses. However, many of the grant proposals from non-philosophers impressed me as speaking to these questions in valuable and pedagogically effective ways. Some of the proposals centered around the ethical dimensions of literary or historical figures.

Studying these lives is a way of gaining experience by proxy, such that students have a range of experiences to draw upon once they start doing philosophy more seriously. So one defense of non-philosophical courses on the enduring questions can be put in terms of remedying one of Aristotle's reasons for not doing moral philosophy with the young: they lack experience. If the question is "what is the good life?" one way to start answering that question, even if it isn't Socrates' preferred way, is with a list. Now of course one could include the study of historical and literary figures in a philosophical ethics course, but that is not very common. One applicant (unfortunately not a winner) proposed having her students spend the semester studying a single play (along with other texts) and then learning more about the characters and their motivations and interactions by having the class culminate with their own performance of the play. Maybe this sounds gimmicky to some of you, but plenty of serious moral philosophers are worried about the dominance of abstraction and general moral theories in philosophical ethics, and counsel engagement with the particulars.

This is one interesting way to grapple with the particulars. In any event, I don't remember hearing much about this kind of activity in the typical philosophy course. And if this doesn't appeal to you, there were other good ideas, such as in the truly excellent (yet, alas, non-winning) proposal for a course team-taught by an English professor and a biology professor on the question of what is human nature. Some of the proposals whose content fit the more traditional introductory ethics or philosophy course seemed detached and sterile by comparison. To sum up this first point, many of the enduring questions concern how to make sense of some aspect of life. One way to start this inquiry is to become familiar with said aspect. This stage of the inquiry need not be philosophically sophisticated to be valuable. To the extent that philosophers hold fast to the view that only they are qualified to teach courses centered around good lives, wisdom, human nature, war, religion, freedom, happiness, etc., I am concerned that we do not understand how ignorance about life and its varieties can render philosophical inquiry empty or baffling to the typical undergraduate, nor how other disciplines might contribute to philosophical learning.

That said--and this takes us to the second point--there is a limit to how much progress one can make on these questions without some kind of philosophical expertise. And while I reviewed some excellent proposals by philosophers who were grant winners (such as Mike Austin's, mentioned upthread), some good philosophical applications were overlooked. Even worse, there are signs that people at the NEH are indeed ignorant of what philosophers do, and dismissive of the idea of philosophical expertise. One application listed several of the classic questions of moral philosophy and then proceeded to complain that too few philosophers address these questions. The applicant is obviously highly ignorant of contemporary moral philosophy, his application flaunted this, and yet he is one of the award winners. Seeing something like that is infuriating. Even more worrisome than the NEH's carelessness about philosophy is the ignorance displayed by some of our colleagues in other departments. Many of the proposals by non-philosophers took up the more philosophical questions.

Yet in aspects of their applications, from the stating of the course's core questions and assumptions to the listing of the bibliographies, often I found myself frustrated at the absence of basic and helpful philosophical distinctions and the absence of classic and directly relevant philosophical texts. I only had a small sample size to work with, but the impression I got was that the view that "anyone can do philosophy well" is common in academia. This worries me. If our colleagues in other departments do not understand professional philosophy as requiring some kind of valuable expertise, that does not bode well for philosophy as a discipline. Both of the reasons for worry that I discussed in this message have to do with philosophy's isolation from other disciplines. The proprietary response is a sign that we don't appreciate what they do, and their lack of humility in regard to their philosophical ignorance is a sign that they do not appreciate what we do. In recent years in the profession there has been a fair amount of attention paid to philosophy's "public relations." As far as I know, this has been directed at getting those outside of academia interested in philosophy. But what might be even more important is a public relations campaign directed at our fellow academics.

Thoughts from readers?  As usual, signed comments preferred, but you must at least include a valid e-mail address.

Iran Protests Again

A dramatic account by a philosophy student in Tehran of protests this past Friday.  (Thanks to Parsa Pezeshki for the pointer.)

In Memoriam: Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009)

The Polish historian of philosophy and ideas died today in Oxford.  A short obituary is here.  He is probably best-known for the three-volume Main Currents of Marxism, which remains an extremely useful reference work for students of the history of Marxist thought.   His view that Stalinist terror was (as the obituary puts it) the "logical" outcome of Marx's philosophy probably had most to do with his fame in the U.S., quite apart from the interpretive or philosophical soudness of the view or his arguments for it.

UPDATE 7/21:  David Luban (Georgetown) writes with the following charming story about meeting Kolakowski when he taught at Yale many years ago:

Leszek Kolakowski died last Friday at age 81.  I’d like to contribute a brief recollection from my graduate student days in the early 1970s, when Kolakowski taught at Yale.  Students keenly anticipated his arrival.  We knew him through the English translation of his essays, Toward a Humanist Marxism.  To those who saw ourselves as part of the New Left, Kolakowski was intensely interesting:  a courageous, authentic East European dissident who criticized communism on humanist grounds but still belonged to the left!  We were immersed in the New Left Review, the early Marx, Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Marcuse, and the first English translations of Habermas; the Grundrisse had just appeared in English; and the philosophical action seemed to be the debate between various versions of Marxism-with-a-human-face--that's where we put Kolakowski--and Althusser’s “death of man” austerities. 

By then Kolakowski had left that world behind.  Rather than a younger version of Herbert Marcuse (who at the time used to raise his fist and intone “Power to the people!” when he lectured), Kolakowski was an urbane ironist of immense cultivation.  He was already immersed in writing his skeptical history of Marxism, and when I had lunch with him he described it as a theological history of heresies and persecutions.  “The biggest difficulty in writing it,” he told me, “is making these thinkers sound different from each other.”  He smiled.  “Really, it’s almost impossible.  Not only are they indistinguishable from the Christian sects, they’re nearly indistinguishable among themselves.”

The lunch was personally memorable because (a child of my times) I showed up in typical ‘70s counter-culture costume:  bib overalls from Sears, hiking boots, a U.S. Navy hardhat that I had bought for a nickel at a surplus store, and a trenchcoat.  Kolakowski stared—his good manners did not permit him to laugh at me—and in embarrassment I began to murmur a few words about how really, the hardhat was very practical…but he cut me off.  “No, no, no.  You must never apologize for your extravagances.”

ANOTHER:   A longer obituary here.

Shields on Aristotle

Christopher Shields's book on Aristotle in the Routledge Philosophers series gets a justly laudatory review in the current Philosophical Review:

This delightful and fully engaging book, written in a sparkling style and abounding in entertaining examples, is designed for those who are new to Aristotle and want to approach him from a contemporary philosophical standpoint. It presupposes no familiarity with ancient philosophy and just a little bit of general philosophical knowledge. The main objectives Shields sets for himself are to reconstruct and explain the philosophical motivations that uphold Aristotle’s central tenets, and to provide his readers with the key concepts and a general interpretative strategy that they can put to work in studying Aristotle’s texts and assessing his views on their own. The book fulfills these goals very well and thereby offers a prime alternative to standard introductions to Aristotle.

California Budget Crisis and the Cal State System

Story here; additional comments from those knowledgeable about the specific issues facing philosophy departments in the Cal State system welcome.

The Bush Presidential Library at SMU: From Joke to Farce

Here.

Medieval Philosophy Scholar John Marenbon (Cambridge) Elected to the British Academy

The full list of new Fellows is here.

UPDATE:  Jo Wolff (UCL) points out to me that the logician Wilfrid Hodges, who taught mainly on mathematics faculties, was elected to the Philosophy section of the Academy, and so really should be singled out here as well.

Ned Block on the NRC "Methodology"

This is worth reading, and pretty damning.

OUP to Publish 1st Volume of Kripke's Collected Papers...

...including five previously unpublished papers.   I imagine this will generate a lot of interest, given Kripke's huge influence upon Anglophone philosophy of the past forty years.

Jerry Springer Meets Philosophy

Barry Lam (Vassar) sends along this funny video clip, which he thinks is from an Australian comedy show.  As Professor Lam notes:  "If this is funny to Australians, then they must be far more educated than Americans."

UPDATE:  My colleague Michael Kremer passes along this "viciously funny" segment from the same Australian comedy show, this one about dumb Americans (and I mean really dumb).  It's a bit long, but it is funny (even funnier, I imagine, if you don't live here!).

University of Wisconsin Faculty Also to Face Furloughs

A colleague in the University of Wisconsin system calls to my attention the now official "furlough" policy for faculty.  His summary and comments:

All UW faculty will be furloughed over the next 2 years, taking 6 days/year for faculty 9-month appointments, effectively a 5% cut (3% + rescinded 2% raise).  Since furloughs cannot interfere with instruction, and research-minded folks like me cannot seem to find their curiosity time-clock, it’s just a pay-cut without permanently reducing base salary—which will return to Fall, 2008 levels in the Fall of 2011.  We have obtained the right to unionize, however. 

"Enduring Questions" and the NEH, Again

This time in IHE, though it's a pretty thin piece.

University of California Budget Crisis Update

The University of California has announced its response to the budget crisis.  The plan includes this information of particular relevance to job seekers:  “UC Berkeley, for example, anticipates reducing faculty recruitment from a typical 100 positions a year to 10. …Moreover, most campuses are deferring at least 50 percent of planned faculty hires.…”

This newspaper account adds additional details:      

The $813 million state funding cut represents about 20 percent of all general state revenue for UC, [UC President] Yudof said.

Yudof's plan for furlough days would be progressive, meaning lower-paid employees would experience a lower percentage of furlough days and lower percent of lost income compared to high wage earners. Here's Yudof's proposal:

$40,000 and under -- 11 furlough days -- 4 percent of income
$40,001-$46,000 -- 13 furlough days -- 5 percent of income
$46,001-60,000 -- 16 furlough days -- 6 percent of income
$60,001-$90,000 -- 18 furlough days -- 7 percent of income
$90,001-$180,000 -- 21 furlough days -- 8 percent of income
$180,001-$240,000 -- 24 furlough days -- 9 percent of income
$240,000 and above -- 26 furlough days -- 10 percent of income

The one 'advantage' of a furlough as opposed to a salary cut in this context is that, absent further action, salaries remain officially at their current level, and so after one year return to normal--unless, of course, there is another round of 'furloughs.'

Comments from UC faculty about effects of the budget cut on their departments are welcome--also comments from Cal State faculty.  Additional informational links are also welcome.

UPDATE:  A related IHE story here.

The NRC Releases Its "Methodology" for Ranking Graduate Programs (Ranking to Follow...)

IHE has a useful story and summary of the 200-page (!) document.  What made the earlier NRC reports (1982, 1995) useful was they included systematic surveys of experts in different disciplines evaluating program faculty and training of students.  That is no more.   According to the IHE article, the worry about expert evaluation was that, "Many people assume departments at outstanding universities must be outstanding as a result, even if that's not the case, or people who associate certain stellar researchers with a department may not know that they have retired."  Dare I observe that there is a pretty simple solution to these problems:  ask experts to evaluate faculty lists, not university names, and make sure the faculty lists are current and exclude those who are retired, dead, not really teaching etc.

Instead of the peer evaluations that made the prior NRC reports so important, programs will now be evaluated using 21 different variables--many different in kind from each other (see below)--and all weighted differently.  Here are the variables being utilized (I wish I were making this up, but, really, I'm not!):

The 21 Program Characteristics Listed in the Faculty Questionnaire.

Faculty characteristics

i. Number of publications per faculty member

ii. Number of citations per publication (for non-humanities fields)

iii. Percent of faculty holding grants

iv. Involvement in interdisciplinary work

v. Racial/ethnic diversity of program faculty (only non-Asian minorities count)

vi. Gender diversity of program faculty

vii. Reception by peers of a faculty member’s work as measured by honors and awards

 

Student characteristics

i. Median GRE scores of entering students

ii. Percentage of students receiving full financial support

iii. Percentage of students with portable fellowships

iv. Number of student publications and presentations (not used)

v. Racial/ethnic diversity of the student population (only non-Asian minorities count)

vi. Gender diversity of the student population

vii. A high percentage of international students

 

Program characteristics

i. Average number of Ph.D.’s granted in last five years

ii. Percentage of entering students who complete a doctoral degree in a given time (6

years for non-humanities, 8 years for humanities).

iii. Time to degree

iv. Placement of students after graduation (percent in either positions or postdoctoral

fellowships in academia)

v. Percentage of students with individual work space

vi. Percentage of health insurance premiums covered by institution or program

vii. Number of student support activities provided by the institution or program

The weightings to be used in the case of philosophy programs are not yet public--the weightings were determined in each case by a survey of people in the field.   No doubt many of these individual measures will be illuminating, but the idea of aggregating them in order to say that "Ivy University is in the 5-15 cluster" will produce a meaningless, 'nonsense' number:  what does it mean to say Ivy University is somewhere between 5th and 15th based on some aggregation of the number of publications per faculty member, the number of international students, the number of non-Asian minority faculty, and the number of student support activities?   Who would care about such an aggregation?   What is most distressing is that the NRC has eliminated any meaningful measure of faculty quality, relying on factors that have no qualitative dimension (e.g.,  publications per faculty member) and proxies for quality like grants and honors, some of which are certainly probative (e.g., Guggenheim or NEH Fellowships), others of which will just reinforce traditional hierarchies because of their insular and self-reinforcing nature (e.g., American Academy of Arts & Sciences membership)).

And then, of course, there is the delay issue.  Most of the data collection on faculty took place over three years ago.  Among those who would have been included for philosophy at UT Austin, for example, are Robert Kane [now retired], me, and Robert C. Solomon [now deceased].  Chicago's evaluation will presumably include William Wimsatt (now retired), John Haugeland (retiring next year), and Charles Larmore (left for Brown).  One Ohio State department reports that more than 20% of the faculty is new since the time they submitted the faculty questionnaires to the NRC, while nearly 20% of the faculty at OSU then have either left or retired.  There will obviously be substantial variation in how much these changes in faculty rosters over the last 3-4 years matter, but in some cases, they will be very significant.     

In any case, I would be most interested to hear what philosophers think of the variables the NRC is using and also what they think of the idea of an aggregation of such variables.  Non-anonymous comments preferred, though you must at least submit a valid e-mail address; submit comments only once, they may take awhile to appear.

"Enduring Questions" and the NEH, Again

A propos this, Robert Stainton (Western Ontario) wrote to the NEH as follows:

I had one question about the application process. Is it acceptable simply to submit course outlines from the philosophy courses that I and thousands of my colleagues have been offering for, I don’t know, one hundred years or so?

 This elicited the following reply from a no-doubt well-intentioned NEH program officer:

 

Dear Professor Stainton:

 

Your inquiry about our Enduring Questions grant competition was passed along to me for a response.   I'll do my best to answer your question.

 

These are grants for a brand new course, developed around some "enduring question" in the humanities.  Obviously, many of the "questions" proposed will be ones very familiar to philosophers.   But the better applications are likely to frame a familiar "question" in a fashion that is novel and thought-provoking.  Readings could include both historical/canonical works and more recent efforts to address the question.   

 

I don't see, therefore, how the inclusion of one of your past course outlines would bolster your case, unless you wanted to compare what you've been doing for many years with what you're proposing for the new course.  

 

I've pasted below the content requirements for the Enduring Questions grant applications.  You can find the complete Enduring Questions guidelines at the NEH website:  www.neh.gov.

 

By the way,  my understanding is that these grants are only available to scholars at institutions in the United States.   That means, unfortunately, that the University of Western Ontario would not be eligible to apply.   But you should double check the Guidelines cited above. 

 

Well, I hope that answers your immediate questions.  Thanks for the inquiry and please let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Attention State University Faculty in Colorado: You Have Almost No Remedy if the Regents Violate your First Amendment Rights!

Seriously.  Maybe this shocking decision will be overturned on appeal.

NEH and "Enduring Questions" Redux

Here, and, last year, here.

Marx, Greenspan, Mandeville, and the Current Crisis of Capitalism

Thoughts from Jo Wolff (UCL).

Moeller from Brock to Univ College Cork

This is a bit belated, but still worth noting:  Hans-Georg Moeller (Chinese philosophy, comparative philosophy), previously of Brock University in Canada, accepted appointment as Senior Lecturer at University College Cork, Ireland this past January 1.  Last year, UCC added Graham Parkes, who also works in Asian and comparative philosophy (among other areas), frmo the University of Hawaii.

NYU Law School Hires Anti-Gay Bigot to Teach Human Rights Law!

Details here.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

Meetings of Department Chairs at the APA

A propos an earlier subject, Sandy Goldberg (Northwestern) writes:

The 2009 Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association meeting will be reinstituting a “Chair’s Caucus” meeting. The aim is to have an institutionalized venue for chairs from across the country to discuss issues of mutual interest and to share best practices. To ensure that this year’s sessions are productive, I will be assembling a list of questions that Philosophy Chairs would like to see addressed. Please send suggestions to me.

 

This year there will be two sessions of the Chair’s Caucus. The first will be an open-agenda meeting, where we will discuss challenges and opportunities facing Philosophy Departments in these difficult economic times. The second will be a session with experienced chairs and administrators who will be asked to share insights and give advice to first-time chairs. These sessions will be as follows:

 

Chairs’ Caucus: Open Agenda

 

Monday December 28, Group Session Meetings, 5:15-7:15 p.m.

 

Participants: Amy Allen (Chair, Dartmouth College); Sandy Goldberg (Chair, Northwestern University); Norah Martin (Chair, University of Portland); Andrew Mills (Chair, Otterbein College); David Schrader (Executive Director, APA); Anita Silvers (Chair, San Francisco State

University)

 

Chairs’ Caucus: Advice for New Chairs

 

Tuesday Dec. 29, Group Session Meeting, 7-9 pm

 

Participants: John Bickle (recently named Head of Philosophy, Mississippi State University); Saul Fisher (Associate Provost, Hunter College, CUNY); Valerie Hardcastle (Dean, McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, University of Cincinnati); Brian McLaughlin (Chair of the Rutgers Philosophy Department from 1999-2005 and 2006-07); David Schrader (Executive Director, APA)

Nietzsche's Philosophy of Action

This is the penultimate draft of an essay for The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Action being edited by Timothy O'Connor and Constantine Sandis, that should be out in 2010. I am still working on the issues here (and have worked on them previously, as some readers will recognize), and welcome comments (here)--especially since there were significant space constraints in this piece, which will be less of a factor in the work-in-progress on these themes.  But this short piece may be useful for those with a passing interest in Nietzsche, who want to locate his views in philosophical space.

Choosing a Dissertation Supervisor

A grad student writes:

How should one choose a supervisor? I'm a graduate student at a PGR rank 15 - 20 school, and starting to think seriously about dissertation topics. One consequence of our relative status is a very mixed placement record: some of our students get amazing jobs, but others struggle to get any interviews. I get the sense that choice of supervisor is a crucial factor in this.

I suppose one shouldn't have as chair someone who is just starting (less than 5 years post-PhD) in the profession. But what about the other end of the scale: would it be a bad call to have someone who is well known and produces great work, but who hasn't produced much in the past few years? What about a very famous philosopher who has become more of a 'public intellectual'? And how should one balance considerations of who would be a good adviser, pedagogically speaking, against who is more well-known in the profession?

I know that, in the end, one should go for the most interesting topic, and try to produce the best work one can - but I suppose that it can't hurt to stack the deck a little by taking such things into account.  Thanks very much for any thoughts!

Comments are open; submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.

Things are bad enough with the swine flu pandemic without the UK Minister of Health...

...revealing that he's not qualified for his job.

The barely literate Cynthia Davis is also opposed to contraception...

...as she eloquently explains.  Stupidity is often a package deal in cases like this, so we've just touched the tip of the iceberg of her ignorance.   Sadly, there were more than a dozen state legislators just like her in Texas.   In a civilized country, people this intellectually and ethically incapacitated would not be let out of their homes without adult supervision.

In Memoriam: David Pears (1921-2009)

The distinguished English philosopher wrote in many areas, both historical and contemporary, but may have been best-known for his work on Wittgenstein.  An evocative obituary is here.

UPDATE:  Another here.

Cynthia Davis: One of Missouri's "Best and Brightest"

This is no doubt what the drafters of the Declaration of Independence had hoped for:  that 200 years of our democratic experiment would produce brainless and callous neanderthals like Representative Cynthia Davis, a Republican from Missouri, whose web site (link courtesy of Jeff Glick) includes the following "analysis" of a state proposal to expand a school-based meal program in light of the current crisis of capitalism:

Top Research Universities Based on US News Data on PhD Programs

I haven't run one of these meta-analyses of US News reputation data on PhD programs in a number of years, but now that US News has conducted new surveys of natural science, humanities, and social science PhD programs over the last couple of years, I thought it might be amusing.  The scoring system is the one used previously, though I've limited the survey to the Natural Sciences (Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Earth Sciences, Mathematics, and Physics), Social Sciences (Economics, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology), and Humanities (English, History and Philosophy [from the PGR, of course]), excluding the professional schools and engineering, which not all schools offer.

The rank below is based on total score, followed by a breakdown of the total number of points due to natural science programs (NS), the total number of points due to social science & humanities programs (SSH), the number of fields in which the school ranked at least in the top 25, and the number of fields in which the school had a top five program.

1.  Stanford University (51 total; 24 in NS, 27 in SSH, ranked in all 13 fields, 12 top five programs)

2.  University of California, Berkeley (49 total; 24 in NS, 25 in SSH, ranked in all 13 fields, 10 top five programs)

3.  Harvard University (47 total; 20 in NS, 27 in SSH, ranked in all 13 fields, 10 top five programs)

4.  Princeton University (42 total; 16 in NS, 26 in SSH, ranked in all 13 fields, 7 top five programs)

5.  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (37 total; 14 in NS, 23 in SSH, ranked in all 13 fields, 5 top five programs)

6.  Massachussetts Institute of Technology (36 total; 24 in NS, 12 in SSH, ranked in 10 of 13 fields, 7 top five programs)

6.  Yale University (36 total; 13 in NS, 23 in SSH, ranked in all 13 fields, 4 top five programs)

8.  Columbia University (32 total; 14 in NS, 18 in SSH, ranked in all 13 fields, 2 top five programs)

9.  University of California, Los Angeles (30 total; 10 in NS, 20 in SSH, ranked in all 13 fields, 1 top five program)

9.  University of Chicago (30 total; 11 in NS, 19 in SSH, ranked in 12 of 13 fields, 3 top five programs)

11.  Cornell University (25 total; 15 in NS, 10 in SSH, ranked in all 13 fields, 0 top five programs)

11.  University of Wisconsin, Madison (25 total; 10 in NS, 15 in SSH, ranked in 12 of 13 fields, 1 top five program)

13.  California Institute of Technology (24 total; 21 in NS, 3 in SSH, ranked in 7 of 13 fields, 4 top five programs)

14.  University of Texas, Austin (21 total; 12 in NS, 9 in SSH, ranked in all 13 fields, 0 top five programs)

15.  University of Pennsylvania (20 total; 6 in NS, 14 in SSH, ranked in 10 of 13 fields, 1 top five program)

16.  University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (17 total; 11 in NS, 6 in SSH, ranked in 8 of 13 fields, 1 top five program)

17.  Duke University (16 total; 4 in NS, 12 in SSH, ranked in 9 of 13 fields, 0 top five programs)

17.  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (16 total; 2 in NS, 14 in SSH, ranked in 8 of 13 fields, 1 top five program)

19.  Johns Hopkins University (14 total; 6 in NS, 8 in SSH, ranked in 9 of 13 fields, 0 top five programs)

19.  New York University (14 total; 3 in NS, 11 in SSH, ranked in 7 of 13 fields, 1 top five program)

19.  Northwestern University (14 total; 3 in NS, 11 in SSH, ranked in 7 of 13 fields, 0 top five programs)

Runners-Up:

University of California, San Diego (13 total; 6 in NS, 7 in SSH, ranked in 9 of 13 fields, 0 top five programs)

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (13 total; 4 in NS, 9 in SSH, ranked in 9 of 13 fields, 0 top five programs) 

University of Washington, Seattle (11 total; 8 in NS, 3 in SSH, ranked in 7 of 13 fields, 0 top five programs)

Brown University (10 total; 4 in NS, 6 in SSH, ranked in 8 of 13 fields, 0 top five programs)

Draconian Budget Cuts at UCLA

Student newspaper story here.  In 2008-09, UCLA searched to fill 74 faculty lines; in 2009-10, UCLA will search to fill just 20 faculty positions.

Fleischacker Wins 2009 Gittler Award from APA

Samuel Fleischacker (Illinois/Chicago) has won the 2009 Gittler Award from the APA for work in philosophy of the social sciences for his 2005 book On Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations:  A Philosophical Companion (Princeton University Press).

"The Guardian" Series of Blog Postings on Great Works of Philosophy

It's here, though I can't, I'm afraid, recommend it based on what I've seen so far.  The series of items on Nietzsche's Genealogy by Giles Fraser is largely incompetent, at a level I would find unacceptable for work submitted by an undergraduate.   Simon Critchley on Heidegger is about what one would expect from Critchley.  A reader told me Baggini on Hume was pretty good, though, but I haven't had a chance to look at that or the others.  So perhaps there is some good stuff there, for readers inclined to take a look.

Great moments in misspellings

Here.  Some are quite funny.