Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

More Ayn Rand Humor

Here.

(Thanks to Don Hubin for the pointer.)

In Memoriam: Steven K. Strange (1950-2009)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOVEMBER 2--SEE UPDATE

Best-known for his work on Plotinus and Neo-Platonism, Professor Strange passed away on October 28.  At the time of his death, he was Associate Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, having taught previously at Ohio State University, University of Pittsburgh, Princeton University, and Harvard University.  I will post links to memorial notices as they appear.

Professor Strange, I should note, was also one of the earliest graduates of the distinguished program in classical philosophy established by my esteemed former colleague, Alexander P.D. Mourelatos, at the University of Texas at Austin.

UPDATE:  Tim O'Keefe (Georgia State) has compiled a page of recollections and tributes from friends.

Why it is not fruitful to discuss Nietzsche interpretation with postmodernists

Here and also here.

(Thanks to Ryan Lake for the pointer.)

Do the "Folk" Really Believe in Objective Standards of Moral Right and Wrong...

...or are they cultural relativists?

Real Moral Education

Here.

(Thanks to Adrian Bardon for the pointer.)

Kierkegaard in the NY Times

Here.

The Neoliberal Paradigm in Higher Education...

...has been preparing the demise of "public" research universities for 25 years now.   Those that become de facto privates like Michigan will survive as major research universities, and those that don't will see their former excellence gradually erode--unless, of course, there is some dramatic transformation in the economic and political culture.

In Memoriam: Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)

The NY Times obituary is here.  Although his most influential work was in anthropology, it raised interesting philosophical issues and, of course, played a major role in the development of structuralism in French philosophy in the post-War period.

Are You the Chair of a Search Committee? Check Your Junk E-Mail Folder!

Sergio Tennenbaum (Toronto) writes with a useful reminder:

Some departments seem to be sending job candidates' letters of recommendation by email to the head of the search committee. I don't know if these are supposed to duplicate hard copies of the letters or not. But at any rate, I have already been sent some of those, and in two cases the files ended up in my junk mail folder. Since not everyone is judicious about searching through their junk folder, I suspect that, if this is a common phenomenon, many of these dossiers will be lost. For all I know, I am the only one whose junk filter has behaved in this manner, but I imagine that a job candidate dossier has many of the phrases that triggers junk filtering. Not knowing how widespread the problem is,  I don't know whether it makes sense posting about it, but I thought it might be worth mentioning it to you.

I suspect this is happening a lot.  The U of Chicago certainly has an over-active spam filter, and at least once a day one or two genuine messages (usually with big attachments or that are very long or that contain embedded links) end up in my junk mail folder (which I always check prior to emptying).  I can see how large attachments, like dossiers or letters of recommendation, would also get wrongly picked up.  

Simon Blackburn on the "Impact" of Philosophy

Very funny.

Interested in Legal Philosophy: Just a PhD in Philosophy, or a JD as Well?

A student writes with a variation on a question I have gotten from others over the years:

I'm coming to the end of my undergraduate career and am, naturally, thinking about my next destination. Being a philosophy major, I've developed a strong interest in legal philosophy. I've also always had one eye set on law school. My question is simple: what special advantage does a legal education give to someone who is interested in a career in legal philosophy? If the options are graduate work in legal philosophy in a philosophy department or law school (with the intention of either doing a combined degree or a philosophy degree afterwards), other things being equal, is the latter more advisable? I ask this especially in light of the heavy debt that one must incur should she choose to attend law school.

 

I realize that most of the heavyweights in legal philosophy are law school-educated, so I don't doubt that there is significant merit in receiving a legal education. But I would nevertheless appreciate it if the (important?) role legal education plays (in terms of specific skills or knowledge) in being able to do legal philosophy is clearly spelled out.

Certainly one can get a very good education in legal philosophy in a handful of PhD programs (or via the DPhil in Law at Oxford, for example), and without going to law school.  Many substantial contributors to legal philosophy in the past fifty years had only the PhD in philosophy (Joel Feinberg and Gerald Postema are obvious examples).  Some who work in legal philosophy earned the PhD and also spent a year studying in a law school for an M.S.L. degree (examples are Jules Coleman and Arthur Ripstein).  So given the time and the cost, why get a JD in addition to a PhD?

 

I can think of two main considerations that favor getting both degrees, one practical/professional, one intellectual.

 

First, with the JD, as well as the PhD, one is also eligible for teaching positions in law schools.  There are pure PhDs teaching in law schools, but in all cases (e.g., Nagel at NYU, Nussbaum at Chicago), they were appointed to the law faculties well into their careers and after having established substantial reputations.  While a small handful of law schools (e.g., Penn and Northwestern) have begun hiring junior faculty with only the PhD in certain social science fields, this seems to be driven mainly by the demand for scholars who do emipirical work on the legal system.  Given that law schools will hire legal philosophers, but only if they have the JD, someone who wants that option should also earn the law degree.

 

But why want that option?  (I wrote a bit about this a few years ago--see esp. the last couple of paragraphs here.)  There are the obvious practical/professional benefits:  higher salaries, more research support, better teaching loads, shorter tenure tracks.  There is also an intellectual benefit, or so it seems to me:  one can do more with the subject if one is teaching it to students who know the law (consider an analogous case:  how much philosophy of physics can one meaningful teach to students who don't know any physics?).  That was not a benefit I fully appreciated until I began teaching the subject to law students.  It is certainly true that the majority of JD/PhDs during the time I've been teaching have chosen to enter law teaching (with some notable exceptions, of course, like Stefan Sciaraffa at McMaster and Hanoch Sheinman at Rice).

 

Second, there is one important, but not overriding, intellectual reason to get the JD as well as the PhD:  namely, understanding how lawyers really think, and how the legal system really operates, is not something one can pick up from PhD study only.  (One really ought to practice law for the same reason, since there's a limit to how much of this one learns in law school.)  My own philosophical work on American Legal Realism would not have been possible without the background of a legal education and some law practice.  But anyone working on the philosophy of particular substantive areas of law--for example, criminal law or torts--will be greatly helped by formal legal education.   It is probably not an accident that most of the leading writers in philosophy of criminal law and torts (for example, Stephen Perry, Michael S. Moore, Mitchell Berman, George Fletcher, among others) are trained as lawyers.

 

On the subject of cost, it is worth noting that there are also JD/PhD programs that offer funding for both parts of the degree.  To be sure, admission tends to be highly competitive, and, unfortunately for aspiring philosophers, some of the schools that offer such funding (like Harvard and Stanford) are pretty thin on the philosophy of law.  But there are schools, like NYU and Penn and UCLA, which do provide funding for the joint degree that might be quite attractive for an aspiring legal philosopher (though bear in mind that NYU and Penn have better track records on their alums getting law teaching jobs than UCLA).  Finally, of course, there is the option of doing the degrees at different institutions.  Law schools offer a lot of merit aid to highly qualified candidates, and someone with the PhD, or having done significant graduate work, may well be in a competitive position for such aid on the JD side.  Finally, since starting salaries in law schools range from 80-160K these days (depending on the caliber of the school and the region of the country--and with the bulk of the jobs in the 110-120K range), even someone in debt from the JD side of a JD/PhD should be in a position to service student loans.

 

UPDATE:  A reader points out, correctly, that most top law schools have "loan forgiveness" for those who go into less renumerative careers, which might well include a JD/PhD who went into philosophy teaching--but one would need to investigate the terms of the loan forgiveness program at a law school carefully.

How Judith Butler Writes Her Books and Articles

The secret revealed at last!

Job Placement Information: Which Departments Have Good Sites, Which Not So Good?

As longtime readers will know, in the early part of this decade ago I undertook, via the Update service of the PGR, to get all PhD programs to post detailed placement information.  At the time, relatively few departments had such information (Michigan, Arizona, and Harvard were notable exceptions), but now almost all departments have complied, though with varying degrees of precision and detail (as we have noted previously).  Like our earlier post on this subject, and in the interest of encouraging more and better quality information, I would invite readers to post links to what they consider especially good and especially poor sites--good or bad in terms of the informational content and its presentation, obviously, not in terms of the job placement success.  Submit your comments only once, they may take awhile to appear.