Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Richard from Tufts to Harvard

Mark Richard (philosophy of language, philosophical logic, metaphysics, epistemology), a longtime faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at Tufts University, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University.  (Jason Stanley [Rutgers] wrote about the earlier effort a few years ago of Princeton to recruit him here.)

Fascist America, Redux

This is a sober and mostly careful analysis, though its conclusion seems to overreach the author's own concession:

It's so easy right now to look at the melee on the right and discount it as pure political theater of the most absurdly ridiculous kind. It's a freaking puppet show. These people can't be serious. Sure, they're angry -- but they're also a minority, out of power and reduced to throwing tantrums. Grown-ups need to worry about them about as much as you'd worry about a furious five-year-old threatening to hold her breath until she turned blue.

Still, there is obviously evidence (an example) to support the general outlines of this author's worries.  As she writes:

Posner on Keynes, and the Krugman-Cochrane Debate Continued

Richard Posner, repentant free-market utopian, has writte a nice overview of the main ideas of John Maynard Keynes, which also confirms a number of Krugman's charges against the "Chicago School" of macroeconomics:

Until last September, when the banking industry came crashing down and depression loomed for the first time in my lifetime, I had never thought to read The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, despite my interest in economics. I knew that John Maynard Keynes was widely considered the greatest economist of the twentieth century, and I knew of his book's extraordinary reputation. But it was a work of macroeconomics--the study of economy-wide phenomena such as inflation, the business cycle, and economic growth. Law, and hence the economics of law--my academic field--did not figure largely in the regulation of those phenomena. And I had heard that it was a very difficult book, which I assumed meant it was heavily mathematical; and that Keynes was an old-fashioned liberal, who believed in controlling business ups and downs through heavy-handed fiscal policy (taxing, borrowing, spending); and that the book had been refuted by Milton Friedman, though he admired Keynes's earlier work on monetarism. I would not have been surprised by, or inclined to challenge, the claim made in 1992 by Gregory Mankiw, a prominent macroeconomist at Harvard, that "after fifty years of additional progress in economic science, The General Theory is an outdated book....We are in a much better position than Keynes was to figure out how the economy works."

We have learned since September that the present generation of economists has not figured out how the economy works. The vast majority of them were blindsided by the housing bubble and the ensuing banking crisis; and misjudged the gravity of the economic downturn that resulted; and were perplexed by the inability of orthodox monetary policy administered by the Federal Reserve to prevent such a steep downturn; and could not agree on what, if anything, the government should do to halt it and put the economy on the road to recovery. By now a majority of economists are in general agreement with the Obama administration's exceedingly Keynesian strategy for digging the economy out of its deep hole. Some say the government is not doing enough and is too cozy with the bankers, and others say that it is doing too much, heedless of long-term consequences. There is no professional consensus on the details of what should be done to arrest the downturn, speed recovery, and prevent (so far as possible) a recurrence. Not having believed that what has happened could happen, the profession had not thought carefully about what should be done if it did happen.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

Listings of Philosophy Conferences and Calls for Papers

As readers know, I don't post these as a matter of course, but this great resource, created by Buffalo grad students, will post them.  Another useful item to remember as a new academic year begins (at least here in the Northern Hemisphere!).

UPDATE:   And don't forget the Google e-mail group, Philosophy Updates, a mailing list for calls for papers/abstracts, conferences, and jobs run by Fritz Allhoff and graduate students at Western Michigan University (with over 3,000 subscribers).  More information about the group can be found here, and you can drop an email with your request to be added.

 

"Advice for Wannabe Philosophers"

I have not linked to Aidan McGlynn's useful page of links in awhile, so I thought early fall is a good time to flag it again.

"Myths about Nietzsche"

I discuss them with Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds on Philosophy Bites.  I can imagine that some of those who write on Nietzsche won't view some of these as myths, however!  Nietzsche studies is comprised, alas, of a somewhat, shall we say, eclectic cast of characters.

Zombie Karl Popper Attacks!

A quick take on our recent discussions about economics.  (Thanks to Ben Burgis for the pointer.)

Swine Flu on Campus--an Update

This is an illuminating chart from the American College Health Association.  Swine flu continues to increase nationwide, but there are still big differences between parts of the country, most connected to how long school has been in session.  At the high end, we see 'attack' rates of swine flu of over 100 per 10,000 students for a lot of schools in the American South, which started in mid-August--though, for reasons unknown, Washington has a rate of over 360 per 10,000 students (so over 3% of college students already affected there, and this, like the other figures, probably understates how widespread it is).  By contrast, where schools have only been open a couple of weeks, rates are as low as 10-20 per 10,000, but will presumably increase in the coming weeks.

The right-hand column in this chart shows the percentage change in total new cases from the prior week, which indicates, e.g., that in parts of the South, the flu may have already peaked, while in other areas, like New England, there are huge jumps in new cases, even though the overall total is low.

The RAE's Successor: the REF!

A quick gloss here.  Any U.K. philosophers have any idea what it really means?

Either Buckingham University or Its Vice-Chancellor is Finished

One hopes.   He explains himself here, though this looks to me like post-hoc rationalization of humor that revealed a bit too much about the humorist.  But perhaps not.

Does Having Publications Hurt a Candidate for Jobs at Schools Whose Primary Mission is Teaching?

Reader Matt Barker writes:

John Basl has an interesting post on his Normal Science blog about whether publications do or should count against those applying to teaching-focused jobs. It would be nice to have this noted on the Leiter blog, and to ask faculty in teaching-focused departments whether they (even sometimes) count publications against a job applicant, and why they do so if they do. John, in his post, and I and others, in comments below the post, raise worries about counting publications against those applying to teaching-focused jobs.

Comments are open; signed comments preferred, but you must at least use a valid e-mail address (which will not appear).  Submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.

Trolley Problem Solved At Last!

Here.

Linnebo from Bristol to Birkbeck

Øystein Linnebo (philosophy of logic and mathematics, metaphysics, philosophy of language), Reader in Philosophy at the University of Bristol, has accepted a permanent post in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Alex Rosenberg on Cochrane and Economics

Alexander Rosenberg (Duke), as most readers will know, is a leading philosopher of science, especially of biology and economics, and author of a devastating critique of economics, Economics:  Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminshing Returns? (University of Chicago Press), which won the 1993 Lakatos Prize in Philosophy of Science from the London School of Economics.  I asked Professor Rosenberg for his reaction to John Cochrane's reply to Krugman, and he kindly gave me permission to post his thoughts:

I can imagine how a Chicago-school free-market economist like John Cochrane feels when he reads an article in the New York Times Magazine like Paul Krugman’s “How did Economists get it so Wrong?” How would analytical philosophers have felt if Quine had published an accessible version of “Two dogmas of empiricism” in the Times, along with cartoons making fun of Kant and Carnap?

The fact that Cochrane can't do any better than the response on his blog is about as significant for economics as the fact that the best opponents could do to Quine was Grice and Strawson’s question-begging article, “In defense of a dogma.”

Cochrane thinks that neither Krugman nor the last years of the Bush stock market can impugn the “efficient markets hypothesis” and so everything in conventional economic theory is untouched.

The efficient markets thesis is that the market makes complete use of all relevant information, and the “proof” is roughly that in a perfectly competitive market among perfectly rational agents prices invariably and instantaneously reflects all agents’ real beliefs and real desires. Any one who knows anything that can make him or her money acts on it—buys or sells—and that signal is picked up by every one else, who also acts on it, thus preventing any one from making excess profits—rents--long-term.

The first thing a philosopher notes about this notion is that since most people have false beliefs, especially about the future, an efficient market doesn’t internalize knowledge, but only beliefs. If they are mostly false, then the market isn’t efficient at internalizing (correct) information, it’s efficient at internalizing mostly false beliefs. If false beliefs are normally distributed around the truth, then they’ll cancel out and the proof of a probabilistic version of the efficient markets theorem will go through—market prices reflect the truth most of the time. Too bad false beliefs don’t always take on this tractable distribution. Even worse, when enough people notice the skewed distribution of false beliefs, they can make rents, as the markets crash. This is what Cochrane seems to think can't happen. How many times will it have to happen for the Chicago School to give up the efficient markets hypothesis?

There are so many way the assumptions of the efficient markets theorem can go wrong—different ones at different times, often even cancelling one another out, that it's easy for a complacent economist to see in the long term trend a vindication of the efficient markets theorem. And all Chicago economists have been taught to be complacent with their mother’s milk—Milton Friedman’s famous insistence that the falsity of assumptions doesn’t matter.

But Friedman’s children, like Milton himself, forgot his caveat that false assumptions are harmless so long as predictive power is improved, or at least preserved. Now the real point of Krugman’s essay is the obvious one. The economic theory the Chicago School prizes lacks the predictive resources even to have retrodicted the last two years of the world’s economic trajectory. The catastrophe of international finance is only the head-line grabbing symptom of this failure. And Chicago economists don’t have the slightest idea of where to start to explain (to retrodict) it. They don’t know which of their assumptions to give up, and how much of each of those to give up. Add in their ideological attachment to the nonsensical ideas that the marginal productivity of labor or capital measures its causal role, and therefore its moral right to a proportional slice of the profits, and you easily slip from Laissez-faire “science” to “trickle down” political philosophy.

Cochrane talks earnestly about how the Chicago School’s scientific economists are forever comparing their theories to quantitative data.  Since most of what they will accept as data is unreliable, and mostly it shows no short-term trends, the Chicago School satisfies itself that its theory is consistent with the long run (the logarithmic long run at that). Here the expected quote from Keynes can’t be resisted. In the long run, we are all dead. What we want from economics—if it purports to be a science—is at least medium term predictions. What Krugman seeks, and Keynes before him sought, is a theory that has some medium term consequences, something that would make it relevant to governmental policy that will ameliorate peoples’ lives while they wait for the hidden hand’s benevolent long run outcome. The Chicago school has scientifically self-protective and normative objections to the very possibility of medium-term prediction. It will put a theory that can make none out of business, and it will put a theory that does at the disposal of a government that might use it to redistribute if that is what it takes to increase the total size of the pie.

Keynes, not Kahnemann, was of course the first of the behavioral economists—think about propensities to consume, liquidity traps, and most of all “animal spirits.” It was easy for Chicago School proselytes to explain away ‘70’s stagflation by showing that perfectly rational economic agents couldn’t be fooled into spending their way out of a recession by inflationary government policies Keynes inspired. But the fact is that people are not like that. They are satsificers exploiting fast and frugal heuristics with kinky indifference curves.

Keynes’ repudiation of rational choice theory’s description of the economic agent was the first straw, and the last for the Chicago school.  Without even allowing for the work of the last 40 years, it was enough to put paid to Keynesianism among the free market elect. For the same reason—their retrospective rationalization of the stagflation they hadn’t predicted—they felt themselves able to ignore work that won many of the subsequent ersatz Nobel Prizes in their subject—especially those awarded for work in behavioral and other branches of economics that don’t take general equilibrium solutions seriously. The same after-the-fact account of why Keynesian pump priming stopped working in the ‘70s also licensed their repudiation of the Obama administration’s stimulus spending this year. We wont hear of its successes from them.  Too much of an embarrassment.

All the reasons the failure of financial markets gives us to question the scientific status of Chicago-school economic theory are mutates mutandis reasons to ignore their “rational expectations” claims (the wish being the father of the thought) that the stimulus wont work—or at least that the non-tax-cut portions of it wont.

Since I am not an insider, I’ll refrain from commenting on Cochrane’s hurt feelings about the insults. But if this is the best a Freshwater economist can do by way of reply to Krugman, there is not much chance he will have to take anything back.

Signed and substantive comments welcome.  Submit your comment only once; it may take awhile to appear.

UPDATE:  For the reading impaired, a signed comment is one with your full name in the signature line.  Postings that aren't signed, or are being posted with pseudonyms, are being summarily deleted:  they won't appear, so you're wasting your time.  And a substantive comment is one which engages the substance of the arguments.  Ex cathedra pronouncements by random nobodies are not substantive, and won't appear.

AND ANOTHER:   The comments of Brad DeLong, an economist at Berkeley, are also relevant to our topic du jour.  This is also pertinent:

Alex Tabarrok has a great post today clarifying the complaint that "economists failed to predict this crisis." Some big guns have come out and said that not only should they be excused for failing to predict the crisis, but they should be congratulated for predicting that they would fail to predict this and all future crises. (If you think I'm exaggerating to make a joke, read it yourself.) So Tabarrok calls this move for the obvious foul that it is. (Incidentally, Tabarrok is responding to this defense of macro by David Levine. But when I get more time, I have to write a full-blown article on it, it's so bad.)

Three Mid-Career Philosophers Win Australian Future Fellowships

The Australian Research Council has announced the first 200 "Future Fellowships," five-year fellowships for mid-career researchers.  Three philosophers are among the winners:  Jacquie Broad (Monash) for a project on Mary Astell; Jonathan Schaffer (ANU) for a project in epistemology; and Jeremy Moss (Melbourne) for a project on climate justice.

Friday Poem: "Things"

      Things

 

Lately I’m struggling

To recollect

Things

 

And when I do

They’re things from long ago

Not the near things that slip away

 

Unexpectedly I remembered

Running to my father up an incline

I was six “Daddy,” I yelled

 

That was odd

For I never saw him again

Recalled fresh as if just now

 

Meanwhile ‘just now’

Continues to elude me

The past apparently more memorable

 

Time and again snatches of it

Intrude on my elusive mundane present

And I am transported…I remember

 

Sandburg after a flamenco performance

White mane dancing among the dancers

My friend among them as I waited

 

My second son five floors up

At a NY Hospital window held high

While I below introduce the infant to his brother

 

Pinpricks and triggers

Animate my present with my past

And I in the haze of now enjoy the clarity of then

 

9/13-9/16/09

Copyright 2009 by Maurice Leiter.

Posted with permission.

Volcker on Economics

A propos our topic du jour, here is former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker:

I recently commented to some of my economist friends that I’m not aware of any large contribution that economic science has made to central banking in the last 50 years or so.

Our ability to forecast is still very limited. The old issues of the relative role of fiscal and monetary policies are still debated. Markets are certainly more complex, and some of the old approaches toward monetary control seem less relevant. Recent events have certainly illustrated limitations in our understanding of the economy.

Cochrane v. Krugman...or the Pseudo-Science of Macroeconomics Implodes

We noted Krugman's attack (which didn't go far enough) on the "pseudo-science" (with apologies to Larry Laudan) of macroeconomics, but now one of his targets, John Cochrane, an economist in the Finance Department at the Business School here has responded, and in terms that are not wholly, shall we say, edifying.   There is a useful overview of the debate here, which notes that, "Cochrane makes the same mistake he accuses Krugman of, by caricaturing and oversimplifying Krugman's argument, and, even worse, complaining that Krugman is only interested in making personal attacks on an ever-growing 'enemies list,' while engaging in his own litany of vicious slander."  The only "personal" criticism I can find in Krugman's original piece is the suggestion that some free-market utopians are motivated by the financial rewards of touting the party line.  Cochrane is far worse, but readers can decide for themselves.  But from a philosophical point of view, the really remarkable aspect of the Cochrane reply is the start.  As this observer notes:

I am trying to read John Cochrane's comments on Paul Krugman's article on why economists got it so wrong. I tend to get upset while reading. I have managed to get through the first paragraph in which Cochrane compares Krugman to someone who denies that HIV causes AIDS and compares developments in economics to progress in the natural sciences. Now in the natural sciences, there are counter intuitive models which are consistent with all available data and have withstood many tests. Also there are once mysterious facts which are explained by theories to the satisfaction of all people familiar with the theories.

Professor Cochrane even mentions the fake Nobel Prize in Economics as a way of legitimating the epistemic credentials of the field--which, of course, was precisely the objective of those who created it.  Yet this works only if you think of that Prize as on a par with the prizes in Physics and Chemistry, rather than, say, Literature or Peace, the latter two being quite explicitly ideologically motivated more often than not.

I am curious to hear how the Krugman-Cochrane dispute looks to philosophers engaged with economics.  (I am not inviting a free-for-all discussion of Krugman's or Cochrane's views, there are plenty of places on the Internet to rant and rave about that.)

UPDATE:  Here's a more substantive, and calmer, response to Krugman by a Minnesota economist, which suggests that Krugman has misdescribed the state of macroeconomics among its leading young practitioners.

Massive Fee Increases in the Offing for University of California Students

Story here; an excerpt:

The proposed mid-year increase to take effect in Spring 2010 would see tuition rise to $585 for resident undergraduates, and between $579 and $654 for resident graduate students (for the remainder of the year) and for 2010-11 tuition would rise to $1,344 for resident undergraduates, and between $1,332 and $1,506 for resident graduate students (for the full year).

These are fee increases, not tuition increases, contrary to the story's presentation.  But one imagines significant tuition increases are not far behind.

UPDATE:  John Fischer points out to me that there is no "tuition" in the UC system, only fees!

ANOTHER:  A couple of readers point out that the linked article misdescribes what are increases in the existing fees as the fee amounts.  If you follow the article's link to the UC press release, you can get a more accurate picture.

In Memoriam: Myles Brand (1942-2009)

The New York Times obituary is here, and it emphasizes, unsurprisingly, his work with the N.C.A.A. and in academic administration.  But prior to his move into administration of one kind or another, Professor Brand did some well-known work in metaphysics and epistemology, especially action theory, as a professor at places like Pittsburgh, Arizona, and Illinois/Chicago.

"Foundations of Religious Liberty: Toleration or Respect?"

This draft paper may perhaps be of interest to some readers; the abstract:

Should we think of what I will refer to generically as “the law of religious liberty” as grounded in the moral attitude of respect for religion or in the moral attitude of tolerance of religion? I begin by explicating the relevant moral attitudes of “respect” and “toleration.” With regard to the former, I start with a well-known treatment of the idea of “respect” in the Anglophone literature by the moral philosopher Stephen Darwall. With respect to the latter concept, toleration, I shall draw on my own earlier discussion, though now emphasizing the features of toleration that set it apart from one kind of respect. In deciding whether “respect” or “toleration” can plausibly serve as the moral foundation for the law of religious liberty we will need to say something about the nature of religion. I shall propose a fairly precise analysis of what makes a belief and a concomitant set of practices “religious” (again drawing on earlier work). That will then bring us to the central question: should our laws reflect “respect” for religion” or only “toleration”? Martha Nussbaum has recently argued for “respect” as the moral foundation of religious liberty, though, as I will suggest, her account is ambiguous between the two senses of respect that emerge from Darwall’s work. In particular, I shall claim that in one “thin” sense of respect, it is compatible with nothing more than toleration of religion; and that in a “thicker” sense (which Nussbaum appears to want to invoke), it could not form the moral basis of a legal regime since religion is not the kind of belief system that could warrant that attitude. To make the latter case, I examine critically a recent attack on the idea of "respect" for religious belief by Simon Blackburn.

Comments are welcome.

Creating a List of Philosophers Visiting from Abroad

MOVING TO FRONT FROM AUGUST 27

Yujin Nagasawa, a philosopher at the University of Birmingham, writes:

I wonder if you might be interested in discussing on your blog the possibility of making a list of philosophers visiting foreign countries. The website of the British Philosophical Association used to have a list of philosophers visiting UK each year but it would be nice to have such a list for other countries as well. It would benefit organisers of departmental seminars and conferences because they can invite international speakers with minimum cost. It would also benefit speakers because it allows them to give as many talks as possible while they are overseas.

This does seem a very useful idea.  I will open comments here for philosophers, or host departments, to post information about philosophers from other countries visiting during 2009-10.  But if someone wants to set up a website for this purpose, send me a link, and I will post it.    Signed comments only will be approved, to help insure the accuracy of this list.

 

Become a "Friend" of SEP!

As long as we're on worthy philosophy causes this week:  we all know what a great resource the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has become, but to keep it going and keep it free, it needs support:  so if you use SEP, become a "friend" of SEP.  It even comes with some perks!  Check it out.  And note that students can join for just $5.

Do Job Interviews for Philosophy Posts Serve a Purpose?

Richard Holton (MIT) writes:

There's now quite a widespread perception amongst philosophers that interviews don't do any good, and may do some harm, in hiring the best faculty. Much of this is based on the belief that there is a body of psychological research that has established that this is the case. I had subscribed to this myself, though with something of a bad conscience. Whilst I was familiar with plenty of general research that might make one sceptical of interviews (work on salience effects and the like), and I knew the much cited discussion in Robyn Dawes' book House of Cards of how interviews hadn't helped find better students for Houston Medical School, I didn't know of any studies that had specifically investigated the effectiveness of interviews of different types in selecting the best people for jobs.

 

So over the summer I did a little research, and was surprised at what I found. There is virtually nothing on academic interviewing (there isn't enough of it, and it's hard to get independent criteria for good outcomes), but there is a lot of research on interviewing for other jobs. The data turn out to be fairly complex. It does seem that free-wheeling interviews, with no agenda and no prior expectations of what the candidate should say, are not very helpful.  But there is a fair bit of evidence that a well structured interview, especially one that probes the skills that are needed for the job, yields good information. Such interviews typically involve either questions about how the candidate has handled certain things in the past (so-called 'behavioural description interviews'); or about how they would handle certain hypothetical happenings (so-called 'situational interviews'). To overcome salience biases, it is important to have fairly objective criteria of success, and to record the candidates' performance at the time (reliance on memory is not good). With that in place, the evidence is that both kinds of interview provide useful information. 

 

I had a brief correspondence with Allen Huffcutt, one of the leading interview researchers, about the relevance of these findings to philosophy positions. Here are his comments:

Some may argue that academic positions are unique so the results of research do not apply to them.  I would argue against that.  The process of the interview is to identify key characteristics needed for a position, and then ask questions to assess those characteristics.  The research out there has been applied to a vast range of job types, a number of which have very similar key characteristics to faculty positions.

What I might suggest is a carefully thought out approach to hiring philosophy faculty.  In the job talk, looks for key elements related to presentation.  E.g., are they well organized?  Do they find ways to make the material interesting and relevant to the students?  Do they deliberately bring people into the presentation (e.g., ask them questions) or just stand there and lecture the whole time?  Do they handle questions well?

During the interview, look for key elements pertaining to social interactions.  For instance, using the behavior description format, you could ask them to describe a time when they had to handle a difficult student, a time when they went out of their way to help a student, etc.  Same for their interaction with other faculty.

None of this is conclusive, but it has changed my mind. I remain convinced that the kinds of unfocused interviews I often had to conduct in the UK, typically with a majority of non-philosophers on the panel, are, at best, unhelpful. In contrast, discussing someone's paper, which is what many APA interviews and on-campus talks consist in, is rather like a mix of a behavioral descriptive interview and a situational interview; you spend much of it finding out how the candidate responded to various philosophical problems (BDI), and then you find out how they would respond if someone said something like what you then say (SI). Of course there remain worries: you need to work hard to make sure that the knowledge from the interview doesn't crowd out the knowledge you have from other sources (and typically interviews don't provide much information about teaching abilities); there is a real question about whether interviews tend to increase the effects of sexual and racial bias (I don't know what the findings are on this); and there is a question of whether it is worth the cost of both interviewing at the APA and bringing candidates onto campus (I think that for us it's not). But I do now think that well conducted interviews or on-campus talks can have a useful role. At any rate, there's no knock-down evidence that they don't.

Comments are open; submit comments only once, they may take awhile to appear.  As usual, signed comments will be strongly preferred, and all submitted comments must include a valid e-mail address.

Support Philosophy Bites!

I've linked on various occasions to the nice interviews that Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds, the proprietors of "Philosophy Bites," do with a diverse array of philosophers on an equally diverse array of topics.   In Oxford this past weekend, I met with them and was surprised to learn that they pay for "Philosophy Bites" out of their own pockets!   So please, if you have enjoyed "Philosophy Bites," please visit and hit the tip jar!

In Memoriam: William P. Alston (1921-2009)

Professor Alston, a leading contributor to epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of religion over the last fifty years, passed away earlier today.  He was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Syracuse University.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

UPDATE:   An informative and detailed intellectual biography by Daniel Howard-Snyder.

PROFESSOR ALSTON REMEMBERED by former students here and here.

Dennett's Autobiography (Part 1)

From Philosophy Now.  (Thanks to Varol Akman for the pointer.)

Czech Republic to Stop Funding All Research?

Via Brains, I learn of this website with information and a petition regarding draconian cuts to all basic research in the Czech Republic.  Our academic colleagues, including those in philosophy, would benefit from our support.

Pedigree and Hiring, Once Again

The pedigree-sensitivity of the City College search committee chair has stimulated a lot of blogospheric chatter again about whether a candidate's pedigree ought to be relevant to hiring decisions.   We have addressed the topic previously, in which our central conclusion was this:  "Where pedigree has substantial evidential value about the quality and character of philosophical training, and where pedigree also informs the interpretation of letters of recommendation, it would be foolish to eliminate pedigree as an important point of information in the evaluation of job candidates." 

Krugman on the Failures of Macroeconomics

For those who don't read The New York Times, this piece might be worth your time, though being an economist he can't quite draw the real conclusion about the epistemically feeble state of his discipline.

Memorials for Jerry Cohen in June 2010

Mike Otsuka (UCL) informs me there will be a commemoration of Jerry Cohen in the Codrington Library at All Souls College, Oxford, on the afternoon of Saturday the 19th of June 2010, and in the Department of Philosophy at University College London on Thursday the 17th of June.    More details will be forthcoming closer to the time.

Philosophy in Turkey

Varol Akman (Bilkent) comments.

"Change we can believe in"

What a betrayal.

UPDATE:  People are so desperate to believe in Obama, that even smart people resort to brazen non-sequiturs.  Wow!  The U.S. is certainly long overdue for a civilized healthcare system, but that has nothing to do with the points made in the original link (from several days ago no less!), does it now?

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

Philosopher's Annual Announces "Ten Best" Papers of 2008

This year's winners (soon to be on-line here) are as follows:

Fabrizio Cariani (Northwestern), Marc Pauly (Groningen) & Josh Snyder, “Decision Framing in Judgment Aggregation” from Synthese

Thomas Forster (East Anglia), “The Iterative Conception of Set” from the Review of Symbolic Logic

Tamar Szabó Gendler (Yale), “Alief and Belief” from the Journal of Philosophy

Daniel Jacobson (Michigan), “Utilitarianism without Consequentialism: The Case of John Stuart Mill” from the Philosophical Review

Penelope Maddy (UC Irvine), “How Applied Mathematics Became Pure” from the Review of Symbolic Logic

Cheryl Misak (Toronto), “Experience, Narrative and Ethical Deliberation”  from Ethics

Agustin Rayo (MIT), “Vague Representation” from Mind

Mark Schroeder (USC), “How Expressivists Can and Should Solve their Problems with Negation” from Noûs

Michael G. Titelbaum (Wisconsin), “The Relevance of Self-Locating Beliefs” from the Philosophical Review

Kai von Fintel (MIT) & Anthony S. Gillies (Rutgers), “CIA Leaks” from the Philosophical Review

I was pleased to see that 2 of the 3 papers I nominated were chosen (last year, though, I was 3 for 3! The 2007 winners are here).  I do think that formal papers tend to be over-represented in PA lately, and papers in history of philosophy are underrepresented, but even so, this is a fine group of papers, and their authors deserve recognition for their excellent work.

Steven Weinberg Has Been Tone Deaf to Philosophy Since He Was an Undergrad!

Anyone who has read the popular work by physicist and Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg (Texas) knows he is tone-deaf to philosophical issues and problems; here he confesses when the problem started!

Australian Radio Program about Philosophy (imagine that!) Covers the Troubles at Melbourne

Audio here.

Podcast Interviews with Chicago Philosophers

Two PhD students here, Matt Teichman and Mark Hopwood, have been doing substantive and skillful interviews with philosophers at the University of Chicago about their work; you can find the interviews on-line here.  So far, there are interviews with Agnes Callard about desires and satisfaction, Gabriel Richardson Lear about Plato's philosophy of poetry, and me about Nietzsche's critique of morality.

Faculty Walkout at University of California Planned for September 24

Aldo Antonelli (UC Davis) calls my attention to the planned faculty walkout to protest the way the University is handling the budget crisis and the faculty furloughs.  Professor Antonelli explains: 

Given your interest in issues concerning the academic profession, I wanted to call your attention to events developing at the University of California, where faculty across the ten campuses are planning a response to the implementation of furloughs and salary reductions put through by the UC Office of the President (UCOP, in UC-speak).

 

You will recall that following a 20% cut in the State's general fund appropriation for the University, UCOP adopted a plan for faculty and staff "furloughs" designed to be the equivalent of a 4-10% salary reduction over the next 12 months (the lower percentage applying to those earning less than $40K and the higher one to salaries above $240K). The plan was advertised as achieving savings of about $200M, or one-quarter the amount of the general fund cut. Unions representing professional and technical employees (UPTE), and lecturers and librarians (UC-AFT) had to sign off on the plan, but the furloughs were implemented by fiat for faculty, who are not represented at UC.

 

There were some doubts about the accuracy of the numbers being passed around. The advertised $200M savings represents only 1% of the University's $20B budget -- and in widely circulated letter to the UC Regents Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff asked if "salary was the best place to cut  that 1%". It also later turned out that the furlough program would result in savings of about $515M, with no explanation of where the excess $315M was going to go. Nonetheless, people by and large recognized the unprecedented threat to what was designed to be the greatest public system of higher education in the world.

 

At the same time, though, a majority of the faculty advocated that at least a few of the furlough days be taken on instructional days in order to convey to the Governor, the Legislature, and the general public that such draconian measures have consequences for the quality and viability of the University. The system-wide academic senate formalized such a request in a letter to UCOP.

 

It was quite a surprise when UCOP decreed that furloughs were to be taken on "non-instructional" days, i.e., days when faculty were not scheduled to teach or otherwise meet with students. This was widely viewed as the most egregious breach of shared governance at UC since WWII, and prompted a broad discussion on the campuses and on faculty-run blogs about the proper response, including a faculty walk-out proposed for Sept. 24 (first day of classes for all campuses except Berkeley).   Needless to say, this is unprecedented. UC faculty have never been inclined to labor action.

 

In retrospect, this should have been a no-brainer for UCOP: receive the senate request, pay lip service to shared governance, and everything would have been smooth until the next round of cuts. By denying the senate request, UCOP set on a collision course with the faculty that will lead, I believe, to an exacerbation of a more fundamental difference between those who support the ideal of a public university and those who are working for the "privatization" of UC.

CORRECTED--Big Drop in Advertised Jobs in "Religious Studies"--CORRECTED

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY, SINCE THE ORIGINAL POST OVERSTATED THE DROP

Reader Stephen Bush writes:

There has been a big drop in offerings in religious studies this year from last, but the statistic you give in your recent post is not quite accurate, assuming the statistic came from the online AAR Job Postings site.

The 235 jobs is not the jobs that were posted on Sept 1, 2008, but throughout the whole month of September 2008. That is, any job that was posted on at least one day between Sept 1-30 counts in the 235.

There is no way to search the AAR's database for the number of jobs on any particular day (besides the current day, of course), so you can't compare Sept 1, 2008 to Sept. 1, 2009.

The 48 jobs is the number that was posted as of Sept 1, 2009, but new jobs are being posted everyday and this will continue throughout the month. As of right now, 51 jobs are posted, that's 3 added since yesterday.

To compare this year to last year accurately, you would have to wait until Oct 1, 2009, then search on September 2008 vs. September 2009.

If we do this for August 2008 vs. August 2009, in August 2009, a total of 41 advertisements were posted (that is, appeared at least one day in August 2009). For August 2008, there were 105 advertisements.  That's a drastic drop, but not quite 80%. September and October are far heavier months for job advertisements than August, so we'll have to wait to find out just how bad things really are.

=====================ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS==========================

Reader Carl Seaquist points out that September 1 marks the analogue of the October JFP in the field of Religious Studies; last year, Religious Studies had 235 jobs advertised on September 1, this year it is 48.   What I do not know is whether this fluctuation is at all typical (please e-mail me if you have more history/context about this field--there are smaller fields in which significant fluctuation is not uncommon).   I do believe this year's philosophy job market will be worse than last year's, but the anecdotal evidence does not suggest that Philosophy will see a drop of 80% or anything close to that in the total number of jobs.   With that in mind, though, I flag again some advice from last year about the timing of your dissertation defense.

UPDATE:  Here's a pertinent bit of info that might explain why the drop-off in advertised positions in Religious Studies is so steep from last year, from a reader at the University of Calgary:

One additional factor in comparing this year's jobs in Religious Studies to last year's is that the annual AAR meeting - the equivalent of our Eastern APA, where most first-round interviews are conducted - was about two weeks earlier last year than this year, and almost a month earlier last year than in years past. It might be that departments hurried to get their ads out last year, but are less hurried this year. It will be worth comparing the number of jobs on Sept. 10 or 12 this year to last year's Sept. 1. Both dates will be about two months from the annual meeting.

Swine Flu Comes to Campus

It's been circulating all summer in the Northern Hemisphere, which influenza viruses usually don't do, and now that college is resuming across the U.S., outbreaks are already being reported.  The 'good news,' as it were, is that it now is clear that 30-50% of swine flu infections do not involve fever, and really are fairly mild (Dr. Niman, Pittsburgh's prophet of doom, is good on this subject).   The odds are pretty good that a majority of readers of this blog (since most are either academics or students) are either going to get swine flu or have already had it (perhaps without knowing it).   If, in fact, the incidence of infection is much higher than realized (because those with mild symptoms do not usually seek medical care), than the mortality associated with this strain of flu is really very low.  And if there has already been widespread infection with it, then, if we're lucky, there won't be as much transmission this fall as feared.  Still, it's a good bet that there will be a lot of absent students and faculty in September and October.  Meanwhile, The Accidental Blogger, who grew up in an environment with far deadlier viruses in circulation, has some sensible advice about how to avoid getting sick.

UPDATE:  Another example of what schools will be up against this fall.

Time to Vote for the Best Philosophy Blog Posting of the Last Year

Here.  Although there's a good deal of sophomoric silliness nominated, there are also, happily, many promising items in the mix.  As long as a few good ones make it, one can count on Daniel Dennett, I expect, to weed out the nonsense.   I haven't look at all of these, but with that caveat in mind, let me put in a plug for #6, 9, 38, 40, and 52.  I'm sure there are other worthy ones, but if at least these make it, there will be some good choices in the final mix.  If I get to review more, I may post some additional comments.

A Journal Nightmare Story--but Not in Philosophy

Reader Eric Saidel called this horror story to my attention.

Chair of a Philosophy Search Committee Describes the Process

Here.