Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

2009: Philosophers Who Died

Here are the philosophers whose passing in 2009 was noted on the blog:  William Alston, Brian Barry, Myles Brand, G.A. Cohen, Marjorie Grene, Leszek Kolakowski, Neil MacCormick, Edward Mahoney, Benson Mates, Julius Moravcsik, Arne Naess, David Pears, John L. Pollock, John E. Smith, Steven Strange, Stephen Toulmin.  Please scroll through the "Philosophy Updates" category for more details and links to memorial notices.

I will try to run such annual summaries of the memorial notices in future years.  For those who are interested, a list of those philosophers whose passing was noted for the prior three years is below the fold.

Handout for my APA Talk on Wednesday

For any readers who may be attending, here's a handout (Download FOUNDATIONS OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY APA Handout) and here's the paper.  Because I'm travelling, I'm not sure whether I'll be able to print out copies of the handout.

Some Blog Highlights from 2009

These were posts that attracted unusual amounts of attention and discussion during the past year:

Thomas Nagel Jumps the Shark, Part II (December)

Does Academia, Including Philosophy, Exclude People Based on Class? (December)

"Party-Line Continentalists" versus Philosophical Scholars of the Continental Traditions (November)

Philosophy Referee Hand Signals (November)

Nietzsche and Ayn Rand:  A Brief Comment (November)

Carlin Romano Does It Again (October)

Why aren't there more women in academic philosophy?  (October)

Alex Rosenberg on Cochrane and Economics (September)

Best of the Summer Blog (links to posts June-August)

The 20 "Most Important" Philosophers of All Time (May)

Francis Beckwith:  Intelligent Design Apologist or Not? (May)

Acquiring Substantial Debt While in Grad School:  How Much?  How Common?  (April)

Inside the Mind of Religiously-Inspired Bigots (March)

The Highest Quality "General" Philosophy Journals in English (March)

Which Person Do You Most Wish the Media Would Stop Referring to as a 'Philosopher'? (March)

Gourmet Reports for Other Disciplines? (February)

The APA and Discrimination Against Homosexuals...Again (February)

Do Young Philosophers Have a "Sense of Entitlement" or Are They Just Internalizing the Expectations of Their Teachers? (January)

Where to Eat While at the APA in New York...

...and without necessarily spending a fortune.  If you want to spend a bit more,Lattanzi, is a good Italian restaurant on restaurant row just about two blocks from the Marriott.  There's more information on restaurant row restaurants (which, again, are fairly close to the conference hotel) here.

UPDATE:  Wesley Buckwalter, a grad student at CUNY, writes with another recommendation:  "There is this place BXL Belgian Cafe, with great food, beer, and prices on 43rd right off 6th.  I'm not sure at all how a spot this nice exists so close to times square, but it does."

What *not* to do at the APA Smoker

Here.

Best Philosophy Books/Articles of the Last Decade (2000-present), Part II

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM DECEMBER 24

The last thread grew quite long, so I thought it might be useful to start a second thread on the same topic.  Other blogs are doing similar things for particular specialties, featuring work in political philosophy and philosophy of action, for example; readers are certainly welcome to mention that work here as well.

The posting rules are the same:  full name, valid e-mail address, and give some reasons why the work in question is important and worth reading.  The latter will make the thread of particular value to those outside your sub-specialty trying to figure out what is worth reading.

A Fair-Minded Survey of a Particularly Ugly Decade in the History of the American Plutocracy

Here; an excerpt:

We have always had robber barons in American politics, but the Neoliberal moment created a new social class. At about 1.3 million adults, it is not too large to have some cohesive interests, and its corporations, lobbyists, and other institutions allow it to intervene systematically in politics. It owns 45 percent of the privately held wealth and is heading toward 50, i.e. toward a Banana Republic....They established 'think tanks' like the American Enterprise Institute, which hires only staff that are useful agents of the interests of the very wealthy, and which produce studies denying global climate change or lying about the situation in Iraq. Bush-Cheney were not simply purveyors of wrong-headed ideas. They were the agents of the one percent, and their policies make perfect sense if seen as attempts to advance the interests of this narrow class of persons. It is the class that owns our mass media, that pays for the political campaigns of 'our' (their) representatives, that gives us the Bushes and Cheneys and Palins because they are useful to them, and that blocks progressive reform and legislation with the vast war chest funneled to them by deep tax cuts that allow them to use essential public resources, infrastructure and facilities gratis while making the middle class pay for them.

Here are my picks for the top ten worst things about the wretched period, which, however, will continue to follow us until the economy is re-regulated, anti-trust concerns again pursued, a new, tweaked fairness doctrine is implemented, and we return to a more normal distribution of wealth....

10. Stagnating worker wages and the emergence of a new monied aristocracy. Of all the income growth of the entire country of the United States in the Bush years, the richest 1 percent of the working population, about 1.3 million persons, grabbed up over two-thirds of it. The Reagan and Bush cuts in tax rates on the wealthy have created a dangerous little alien inside our supposedly democratic society, of the super-rich, with their legions of camp followers (sometimes referred to as 'analysts' or 'economists' or 'journalists'). The new lords and ladies are the Dick and Liz Cheneys and the people for whom they shill. They are the Rupert Murdochs and the Richard Mellon Scaifes, and they are guaranteed to own more and more of the country as long as more progressive taxation (i.e. pre-Reagan, not pre-Bush) is not restored. They are the ones who didn't want a public universal health option, did not want the wars abroad to end abruptly, did not want the Copenhagen Climate convention to succeed. They are driven by pure greed and narrow profit-seeking for themselves. They always get their way, and they always will as long as you poor stupid bastards buy the line that when the government raises their taxes, it is taking something away from you. It is the alliance of the Neoliberal super-rich with the new lower middle class populists led by W. and now by Sarah Palin that produces clown politics in the US unmatched in most advanced industrial countries with the possible exception of Italy.

9. Health and food insecurity increased for ordinary Americans. Health care costs skyrocketed. Most Americans in the work force who have health care are covered via their employers. 'From 1999 to 2009 health insurance premiums increased 132%" for the companies paying most of the costs of coverage to their employees. Euromonitor adds, "Average private health insurance premiums for a family of four in 1999 were US$5,485 per annum or 7.2% of household disposable income. 2008 premiums were estimated at US$12,973 per annum or 14.8% of average household disposable income." By Bush's last year in office, food insecurity among American families was at a 14-year high. About 49 million Americans, one in six of us, worried about having enough food to eat at some points in that year, and resorted to soup lines, food stamps, or dietary shortcuts. Some 16 million, according to the NYT, suffered from '“very low food security,” meaning lack of money forced members to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise forgo food at some point in the year.' Hundreds of thousands of children are going hungry in the richest country in the world. From being a proud, wealthy people, our social superiors reduced us to the estate of third-world peasants, so as to make sure their bonuses were bigger....

4. The Iraq War, which the US illegally launched a war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, displaced 4 million (over as million abroad), destroyed entire cities such as Fallujah, set off a Sunni-Shiite civil war, allowed Baghdad to be ethnically cleansed of its Sunnis, practiced systematic and widespread torture before the eyes of the Muslim Middle East and the world, and immeasurably strengthened Iran's hand in the Middle East. All this on false pretexts such as 'weapons of mass destruction' or 'democratization,' for the sake of opening the Iraqi oil markets to US hydrocarbon firms-- a significant faction of the oligarchic class. Cost to the US in American military life: 4,373 dead as of Dec 15 and 31,603 wounded in combat. The true totals of war-related dead and injured are higher, since 30,000 troops who were only diagnosed with brain injuries on their return to the US are not counted in the statistics, according to Michael Munk. The cost of the Iraq War when everything is taken into account will likely be $3 trillion....

There's more of course.  While the somewhat prudent wing of the plutocrat party is now in power, so far they haven't done much to undo the ravages.

Happy New Year indeed.

Eastern APA Marriott Hotel Apparently Has Rooms Available at Conference Rate

Chirs Surprenant (Tulane) writes earlier today:

I just called the Marriott about the APA block and they have quite a few rooms that are now available for the entire conference period (or just selected days)--lots of cancellations in the past few days.  I got this information by calling the group reservation number: 800-843-4898.  I've posted this information on some of the blogs and am sending it to you in the event that you can publicize it.  Hopefully, the word can get out soon enough to quell the panic and save some people some money.

On the Idea of "Objectivity" in Journalism

This essay makes a number of good points, using The New York Times as its example.

The Phenomenology of Inner Experience...

...makes The New York Times, discussing work by, among others, philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside).

(Thanks to Matt Lister for the pointer.)

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

The Health Care Bill--Probably is Better than Nothing

Here's the case, cleanly stated.  (Thanks to Craig Duncan for the pointer.)  Hope it's right!  Although only mentioned in passing in the linked article, the need for the Democrats to have some legislative achievements, such as they are, may be important to preventing a Republican resurgence.  Since the Republican Party is now fully the party of sociopaths, villains, religious zealots, and crazies, any return to power would be frightening.  (I am still wondering when the libertarians will notice?)

There are no "Darwinists," and "Darwinism" is not a theory in biology

It is a shame when otherwise intelligent people fall prey to one of the favorite rhetorical ploys of the ID conmen, namely, referring to one of the best-established theories in the natural sciences--the theory of evolution by natural selection--as "Darwinism" and referring to those (essentially all biologists, and almost all educated people) who accept the theory as "Darwinists."  The phraseology is no accident on the part of the ID shills:  it is meant to suggest that a discovery about regularities in the natural world made originally by a man named Charles Darwin, and since confirmed and elaborated by thousands of other scientists, is something like the 'ideology' of an individual, so that "Darwinism" and "Darwinist" should have the vaguely pejorative connotation that, at least in American public culture, "Marxism" and "Marxist" have.  Thomas Nagel's recent embarrassment, at least, did not make this mistake, though several of his "defenders"--none of whom actually defended what he had done on the merits, of course--did. 

UPDATE:  More on this rhetorical trick from the always excellent and well-informed Eugenie Scott and Glenn Branch.

ANOTHER:  Christopher Hitchcock (Cal Tech) writes:

One comment on your post on the use of "Darwinism" by ID theorists.  There is actually another reason for this. "Darwinism" is sometimes used by Gould and defenders of punctuated equilibrium theory to describe the view that evolution is a gradual, uniform process. Thus there are lots of juicy quotes from Gould et al explaining why "Darwinism" is false. To the unsuspecting reader, it sounds as if Gould (of all people) is rejecting evolution. Creationists and ID types love to use those quotes.

On Choosing Referees

This concerns a mathematics journal, but several of the points will resonate with philosophers.

The Plutocracy is Alive and Well, Thank You

No surprise there.

Given the Job Market, Should PhD Programs Systematically Limit the Number of New Students They Enroll?

A young philosopher at a PhD-granting department writes:

Given the decline in new tenure-track jobs available, shouldn't PhD granting departments cut the number of slots for PhD students?  It is perverse for us to collectively continue to produce the same number of PhDs as the number of available jobs declines.  I am not talking about temporary halts to PhD admissions - I am suggesting something more along the lines of collectively, as a discipline, recommending a cap on the number of overall PhD slots available.  Or, at the very least, the APA should issue a statement *discouraging* people from pursuing PhDs in philosophy if their ultimate aim is a tenure-track job (much less a tenured position!).   One reason I say this is that admission to a grad program implicitly signals to the admitted student that the department is confident that the student has a chance to get a tenure-track job.  But, except for the very, very best departments, there is, as far as I know, no basis for this confidence and everyone knows this, so the signal is deceitful.

 

For those who focus exclusively on their own pocketbooks: the more out-of-work PhDs we produce, the larger the reserve army of "teaching labor," which in turn will put downward pressure on wages for adjunct and temporary faculty positions.  For some schools - especially state schools that do not throw down large sums for star faculty - this downward pressure on wages at the bottom will in turn threaten wages of regular (non-star) tenure-track/tenure faculty.

Comments are open; signed comments preferred (and expected from faculty), though students may post without a full name, as long as there is a valid e-mail address.

What were the best/most important philosophy books and articles of the past decade (since 2000)?

This seems like a fun and suitable end of the decade question to ask.   With respect to your choices, please say a few words about why--that will be helpful especially to those outside a particular specialty trying to figure out whether or not they should read that particular book or article.  I'll weigh in in the comments with my own choices at some point.

Only signed comments will appear:  full name in the 'name' line and valid e-mail address.  Submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.

MLA on the Decline in Jobs in English and other Language Specialties

Here:

The Modern Language Association's annual forecast on job listings, being released today, predicts that positions in English language and literature will drop 35 percent from last year, while positions in languages other than English are expected to fall 39 percent this year. Given that both categories saw decreases last year, the two-year decline in available positions is 51 percent in English and 55 percent in foreign languages.

The declines in each of the last two years are the largest ever recorded by the MLA, since it started tracking the trends in the association's Job Information List 35 years ago. The list has also never had fewer notices of openings. The MLA's job list does not include all jobs in English and the humanities, but over time, the ups and downs in openings on the MLA list have been an excellent proxy for judging the overall state of the job market.

"This is a historic low," said Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA. "We've never seen a recession like this."

There is more detail in the article.  Sadly, but predictably I suppose, the APA couldn't come up with jobs data when asked.  There is, alas, no reason to think the situation is any better in philosophy. 

 

NYU's Waldron to Take Up Chichele Chair at Oxford on Half-Time Basis

Jeremy Waldron (political and legal philosophy) at New York University School of Law will take up the Chichele Professorship in Social and Political Theory at Oxford University on a half-time basis beginning in the 2010-11 academic year.  He will teach in the fall at NYU and in the spring at Oxford for the first two or three years.  There remains the possibility going forward that he may make a full-time commitment to Oxford.

Waldron will be the 6th holder of the Chichele Professorship in Social and Political Theory; the first five were G.D.H. Cole, Isaiah Berlin, John Plamenatz, Charles Taylor, and G.A. Cohen.

An Opportunity to Discuss Journal Issues with Editors...

...at the Eastern APA.  This grew, in part, out of discussions here, so those who participated in or followed those threads may want to participate in this session if they will be in New York.

Correlation is Causation After All

Here...which reminds me of Frank Jackson's remark:

I am sometimes asked--in a tone that suggests that the question is a major objection--why, if conceptual analysis is concerned to elucidate what governs our classificatory practice, don't I advocate doing serious opinion polls on people's responses to various cases?  My answer is that I do--when it is necessary.  (From Metaphysics to Ethics, pp. 36-37)

(Thanks to Marcus Rossberg for the link.)

"There is no general metaphysical picture that our best science supports"

The quote is from Jack Ritchie's Understanding Naturalism, which I learned about from this informative review.  A bit more context:

Ritchie's brand of naturalism takes a stand against analytic metaphysicians such as Armstrong, Jackson and Lewis, who appeal to science as a basis for their constructive metaphysical programs. His main claim is that if we are honest in our appeal to actual scientific practices rather than merely paying lip-service to such an aspiration, or misguidedly employing mythical or ideological conceptions of science then we will find there is, on balance, no scientific support for substantial metaphysical conclusions embodied in such prominent '-isms' as physicalism, scientific realism, modal realism and mathematical Platonism....

Ritchie's discussion does...suggest a more useful distinction, that between metaphysically inflationary and metaphysically deflationary naturalisms. Ritchie takes seriously that for the consistent naturalist there is no first philosophy. In so far as metaphysics is extraneous to actual science then the "good naturalist should . . . be suspicious of such metaphysics" (153). Ritchie's general criticism of allegedly naturalistic analytic metaphysics is that it gains an unearned cachet from presuming to follow the results and methods of the successful sciences. Regarding metaphysically inflationary naturalists, the commitment to naturalism is really just window dressing since "there is no general metaphysical picture that our best science supports" (158). The attitude Ritchie recommends for the genuine or serious naturalist is metaphysical agnosticism (cf. 104, 143, 148, 158). Like Fine's Natural Ontological Attitude, the naturalist should not take sides in the metaphysical debates between physicalists and nonphysicalists, or between "realists" and "antirealists" about theoretical posits, universals, possible worlds, numbers, and the like. Metaphysics wants to tell us how things must be, or can be, once and for all, but "science forces us to revise our conceptions of what is and is not possible, of where a concept can be meaningfully deployed and where it can't" (147). Further, it is idle speculation to try to foresee how our future science might develop. Philosophy should purge itself of scientific soothsaying. In light of these considerations Ritchie interestingly suggests a reconception of metaphysics as metaphor: "Thinking of metaphysical theories as inspirational pictures or metaphors strikes me as . . . perhaps the best way to understand how science and metaphysics relate to one another from a deflationary naturalist perspective" (158).

Ritchie's deflationary methodological naturalism takes the sciences "at face value" (109). From this perspective the "strong disanalogy" between the standards of ontological commitment of the sciences and those of metaphysically inflationary naturalists (e.g. Quine, Armstrong and Lewis) is disastrous for these metaphysical programs (109). A naturalist is enjoined to stick as closely as possible to the results and methods of the sciences. When pondering the existence of some entity scientists themselves do not rest content with considerations of indispensability and explanatory worth. They also demand the right kind of empirical confirmation. We are asked, for example, to consider the experiments of Jean Baptiste Perrin in the aftermath of Einstein's work on Brownian motion, which allowed us for the first time to "see" atoms and thereby settle widespread skepticism about their existence. Ritchie suggests that science itself is more empirically minded than many naturalists suppose. [Aside: how would this appeal to empirical support help when it comes to the existence of abstract entities such as numbers or concepts?] In general, for the deflationary naturalist there is no unified story to tell about what exists: all he can do is to endorse "the many different things that our many empirically well-supported sciences say about the world" (158)....

In Ritchie's eyes, metaphysically inflationary naturalists are not naturalistic enough by their own lights. Although they claim to be naturalists opting for a properly scientific philosophy, they actually subscribe to false or outdated or mythic views of science. To make matters worse, they have a too loose sense of what it is to follow the results and methods of the sciences. A consistent naturalism must hold more closely to the sciences -- their variety and the multiplicity of their results and methods. This is not something that can be done from the armchair. It requires adopting an empirical attitude to the sciences themselves and learning from actual scientific case histories and examples (cf. 71, 90). However, "taking science on its own terms is not something philosophers have had much practice at" (5). Studies of "the history of science refute . . . the most popular methodologies of science", namely, inductivisim and hypothetico-deductivism (81). They also undermine constructive metaphysical programs, including philosophical speculations about the relation between mind and matter, at least within a naturalistic setting.

Discuss.

On the Moral Responsibilities of Intellectuals

The conclusion of my last posting on the scandal of Thomas Nagel's endorsement of an incompetent book by a Discovery [sic] Institute shill appears to have introduced a misunderstanding of the position I was articulating.  The political philosopher Chris Bertram (Bristol), after discussing the topic with some colleagues, kindly called the matter to my attention:

You have taken Thomas Nagel to task, first for recommending a book on evolution that lends some respectability to ``intelligent design'' and then for writing a somewhat unsatisfactory letter in his own defence.

 

My initial sympathies were entirely with you, but I've come to entertain doubts and I've picked up that they are shared by some other philosophers. The doubts don't concern the validity of ID, whether ID ought to be considered ``science'', whether the book Nagel recommended is any good (I'm assuming not and I'm never going read it to find out), or whether your characterization of Nagel's letter is accurate (it is). Rather, they are about the disciplinary stance of your remarks and the suggestion that we should be careful what we say ``in front of the children.''

 

We live in a highly politicized world and a highly mediatized one, and one where almost any remark is liable to be reproduced and circulated for bad purposes on the internet. Philosophers often discuss topics in terms, and using examples, that could sound really bad if turned into a sound bite. Should we therefore cease debating cannibalism, the morality of torture, the fundamental equality (or not) of human beings, whether old people should be left to suffer and die because younger and fitter people would use the resources better, euthanasia and abortion? The latter two examples are expecially pertinent because there is a well-known philosopher, of similar rank to Nagel, whose remarks have been seized upon by "culture wars"" lobbyists. Back in 2004, I posted at CT , deploring a review published in PPA that attacked ``left libertarians'' on the grounds that, by endorsing the idea of self-ownership, '' they may well give up more than they bargain for in the public relations battle for the hearts and minds of those in the murky center of American politics.''

 

Considerations of how things play in that murky zone just ought not to count as any kind of a reason in philosophy. But maybe your thoughts about what Nagel should and shouldn't do only concern his conduct as a ``public intellectual'' and not as a philosopher - though that's not the clear sense I get from your latest. I, for one, would welcome a clarificatory post from you.

Since I agree with Professor Bertram's remarks, I am grateful for the invitation to clarify my point (and it raises some issues I touched on long ago, back when I lived in Texas and was in the thick of the battle over wrecking the biology curriculum in the public schools).   I can sum up my actual position in two propositions:

(1) It was extremely irresponsible--a product of some mix of ignorance, arrogance, and laziness--to endorse and thus give crediblity to an incompetent and misleading book, something no one informed about the issues would have done (that was the point of most of the links in my original posting).

 

(2) Nagel's irresponsibility on this score is especially reprehensible in a context in which his fame, and the credibility he has tried to confer on a snakeoil salesmen, will obviously be used for pernicious ends, in this case, undermining the biology curriculum in the public schools, which is the raison d'etre of the Discovery [sic] Institute and its conmen.

The much harder cases, on which I took no position, would be those in which something like (1) doesn't hold, that is, where philosophers are staking out and arguing for defensible positions on the merits, but doing so might have deleterious consequences for others.  (The issue arises more often in science, and what the right answer is is tricky--see, e.g., Philip Kitcher's paper on "The Ends of the Sciences" in The Future for Philosophy volume I edited [OUP, 2004] for a useful discussion.)  In general, considerations pertaining to the values of academic and intellectual freedom should counsel in favor of a wide latitude for subjects and methods of scholarly investigation.  As I noted in the earlier item, commenting on Nagel's letter:

No one objects to challenging the explanatory completeness of physics, or to asking whether physicalists can explain consciousness, or whether naturalism is the correct meta-philosophy (lots of philosophers, as we recently learned, reject it, yet you can count on one hand the 'target' faculty who would pal around with the ID conmen at the Discovery [sic] Institute).  What people are objecting to is lending credibility to individuals and groups whose goal it is to undermine the integrity of biology education for children.

But the latter is all Nagel has accomplished by irresponsibly endorsing bad work by an intellectually dishonest person.  A cleaner case for Professor Bertram's question would be the recent work by Jerry Fodor arguing that the notion of "selection for" in Darwin's theory of natural selection doesn't make sense (more here).  There's obviously a chance that Fodor's work will be put to bad use by bad people, but that is not a reason for him not to think about these issues.  Fodor (and his co-author) have developed an actual argument and raised philosophical questions about causation in the theory of natural selection that warrant (and have received, and will receive) answers.  If Fodor turns around and starts endorsing work riddled with scientific and technical mistakes by Discovery [sic] Institute shills, he will deserve (and no doubt receive) the same kinds of criticism directed at Nagel.   (Unsurprisingly, by the way, I've heard from only one philosopher, a lifelong friend of Nagel's, willing to even suggest his position was defensible on the merits.  Friendship is a virtue, of course!)

 

UPDATE:   This is aptly put:  "Of course there can be serious academic discussion of thorny problems. And serious scholars should be able to defend unconventional and even unpopular positions with no more harm to their reputations than what they garner from the quality, or lack thereof, of their arguments. But if you want to, say, dispute common wisdom on the roots of the Holocaust, you don't do that by taking to the popular press to issue an endorsement of a deceptive book by some Holocaust denier."

The whore of the insurance industry...

...lives up to expectations.  (Maybe we will thank him?  Hard to know.)

What a pathetic, reactionary country this is.

Why Isn't There a Centralized Service for Grad School Applications?

A student applying to PhD programs writes:

As a prospective graduate student, I'm forced to send multiple transcripts from every college I've attended, as well as GRE scores at $20 each, to every school to which I'm applying. Altogether these add around $50 per school to the cost of applying, as well as a great deal of additional paperwork, for me, ETS, and the schools to which I am applying. Like many prospective students, I'm applying to several programs. Without considering application fees (which also add up to quite a bit), these transcript and score-reporting fees add close to a thousand dollars to my total application costs. This amount isn't insignificant, especially given the poor job prospects of graduate students in many disciplines and the low salaries accompanying most of the jobs we can look forward to.

Would it not be vastly simpler and cheaper to have a repository for transcripts and test scores like LSAC [the Law School Admissions Council]? While we're at it, why not couple it with a common application form? Most applications, in any given discipline, ask for mostly identical information. For the programs that ask for some additional information, or don't require some commonly requested information, it could be modifiable. As a result of this, the great majority of repetitious filling-in of forms could be eliminated, and the application and supporting documents (transcripts and scores) could all be integrated into one document, easily printed for review by admitting institutions.  In fact, the simplicity of this system could lower the cost of reviewing applications--less filing; easier digital collaboration with digitized documents; algorithm-driven culling of students whose applications are incomplete, or whose GPAs or GRE scores fall below some minimum, or who have low GPAs and GRE scores and lack a positive recommendation from a well-known professor; etc--producing savings for cash-strapped schools and possibly permitting them to slightly lower application fees, which would be helpful for students.

Everyone I've spoken to (students and admissions officers) agrees that these reforms are obviously overdue. So why isn't this happening? I imagine score-reporting earns ETS millions (tens of millions?) of dollars every year. If they need the revenue, can't they earn it some way that doesn't add unnecessary make-work for them, students, and admitting institutions?

It does seem like it would be far better for applicants if there were a centralized service, and, frankly, ETS seems like the obvious candidate, though they have some financial incentives, of course, not to reduce the costs too much.  Is there any service out there that tries to do this?  Could the APA undertake coordinating such a process?  Other ideas?

In Memoriam: John E. Smith (1921-2009)

There is a compact, but informative, obituary of the longtime Yale philosophy professor at The New Haven Register site

Philosophers for White Supremacy?

One wonders when reading this:

In 2003 [Donald W. Livingston, a Hume scholar at Emory] started the Abbeville Institute, named after the South Carolina birthplace of John C. Calhoun, seventh vice president of the United States and a forceful advocate of slavery and states' rights. The institute now has 64 associated scholars from various colleges and disciplines. They gather to discuss topics about the South that they feel are misrepresented in today's classrooms. Feeling a chilly reception to its ideas—officials of the Southern Poverty Law Center say its work borders on white supremacy—the group has kept a low profile. Mr. Livingston's own department chair, as well as a number of Emory history professors, say they have never heard of it....

On his own campus, Abbe­ville's founder is anything but a pariah. "Mr. Livingston has a great reputation as a professor among his students," says John J. Stuhr, chair of the philosophy department at Emory. "His connection with this institute has not impacted his teaching, research, or campus service by any standard professional measure."

The other Abbeville scholars teach history, philosophy, economics, and literature at institutions including Emory, the University of South Carolina, the University of Georgia, and the University of Virginia. They write books with titles like Defending Dixie: Essays in Southern History and Culture (published by the Foundation for American Education, a nonprofit group "dedicated to the preservation of American culture and learning") and The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, his Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Prima). They say the institute's work, although academic in nature, is ­really about values. Its members study the South in search of a history of piety, humility, and manners. The scholars acknowledge a history of bigotry and slavery, but they focus primarily on what they say are the positive aspects of Southern history and culture....

[T]he outsiders who have heard of Abbeville tend not to like what they hear. One historian, whose research includes the cultural history of racism and white supremacy in the United States, and who asked for anonymity to avoid becoming a target of "Southern identity groups," says the lectures he has listened to on the Abbeville Web site (http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org) are dominated by racialism and are "ideological, through and through." There is the condemnation from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights group. In 2005, Time magazine pegged Abbeville as a group of "Lincoln loathers...."

One of Abbeville's most important purposes, according to Mr. Livingston, is to arm the next generation of Southern intellectuals with an education they cannot expect to get from their high-school or college curricula.

"The Southern tradition as taught in the academy today, if taught at all, is studied mainly as a function of the ideological needs of others," Mr. Livingston says. "It is not examined in terms of its own inner light. It is as if you had programs of Jewish studies explored from the point of view of Catholics, or worse, of Nazis."

I do hope Professor Livingston was misquoted at the end there.

So what *do* philosophers believe?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 10 TO ENCOURAGE MORE COMMENTS FROM READERS

The results of the survey organized by Chalmers & Bourget are now available.  Chalmers comments on them here.  The results can be searched in a variety of ways--by the "target faculty" (i.e., faculty at 99 leading PhD-granting programs), by graduate student responses, even undergraduate students.  I'm just going to canvass a few results that caught my attention.  Following the "coarse" results (as they call them), I will lump together those who "accept" a certain view and those who "lean" towards it.

To start, it's not a surprise that with 931 responses from target faculty, 72.8% are atheists, and only 14.6% theists.  (That correlates nicely, one suspects, with the 13.7% who are libertarians about free will!)   On the other hand, when the survey includes another 900 or so philosophers who weren't among the target faculty, the percentage of atheists drops slightly to 69.7% and the number of theists increases to 16.3%.   With 829 graduate students responding, a full 20.8% are theists, while 63.5% are atheists.  (And, perhaps unsurprisingly, among graduate students, 19.3% are libertarians about free will!)

Perhaps more notable given journalistic portrayals of the humanities as hotbeds of moral relativism and skepticism is that 56.3% of target faculty are moral realists, while only 27.7% are anti-realists--and among those who work in normative ethics, nearly two-thirds (62.5%) are moral realists!  (The rest hold some mix of opinions, which you can see by choosing the fine-grained results on the survey page.)  Journalists take note:  more than half of philosophers at PhD-granting programs believe there are objective moral truths!  (An odd sidenote:  nearly two-thirds of philosophers are cognitivists, which means, I suppose, that there are more error theorists about moral judgment out there than one might have supposed.  Also striking is that there are many more moral anti-realists--35.1%--among graduate students!)

In the meta-philosophy category, not quite half (49.8%) consider themselves naturalists, while a quarter (25.8%) self-identify as non-naturalists (among those with an AOS of meta-ethics, only 44.1% are naturalists!).  I think this is rather compelling evidence that, contrary to a lot of philosophical rhetoric, we aren't all naturalists now!  (How depressing!)  But I begin to wonder what kinds of naturalists these folks are when it turns out that 71.1% of respondents think there is a priori knowledge, and nearly two-thirds (64.8%) accept the analytic-synthetic distinction (maybe just in the thin sense Putnam identified years ago?). 

Anyway, that's just a taste.  Readers are invited to post their thoughts on the results or additional interesting results in the comments section.  Please submit your comment only once, they may take awhile to appear.

More Funny Quips and Anecdotes...

...courtesy of Jerry Dworkin (UC Davis).

Nagel's Revealing Non-Reply to a Critic

Paul Raymont (Ryerson) calls to my attention a letter from Thomas Nagel in the TLS purportedly replying to the letter from the chemist Stephen Fletcher (quoted in relevant part in the first "update" here) criticizing Nagel's endorsement of the incompetent book by the "intelligent design" apologist Stephen Meyer.  The letter is striking for not responding to any of the substantive points (no surprise, I guess), but this portion is really the most revealing:

The tone of Fletcher’s letter exemplifies the widespread intolerance of any challenge to the dogma that everything in the world must be ultimately explainable by chemistry and physics. There are reasons to doubt this that have nothing to do with theism, beginning with the apparent physical irreducibility of consciousness. Doubts about reductive explanations of the origin of life also do not depend on theism. Since I am not tempted to believe in God, I do not draw Meyer’s conclusions, but the problems he poses lend support to the view that physics is not the theory of everything, and that more attention should be given to the possibility of an expanded conception of the natural order.

As Nagel well knows, there is also widespread "intolerance" for quackery, falsehood, and dissembling, especially, one hopes, among philosophers.  That Professor Fletcher (and not only he!) is aggrieved about Nagel's "shameless stunt" really does not support Nagel's explanation for the tone. 

Nagel's explanation is, in any case, obviously silly and meant to distract attention from the stupid thing he has done.  For who exactly is committed to thinking physics and chemistry explain everything?  Maybe Alex Rosenberg (not really!), certainly not Jerry Fodor and the legions of token-identity physicalists, and certainly not biologists, rather obviously!  The method of looking for natural explanations of natural phenomena has worked well; it is no "dogma", but an induction over past success, that keeps scientists working in that vein.  (We've touched on this topic before.)  But this is all a distraction:  for the snake oil salesman that Nagel is promoting (Meyer of the Discovery [sic] Insitutte) isn't interested in figuring out whether physics is complete, since he already knows the answer, and it demands supernatural interventions into natural processes.  That mode of explanation has an even longer history than the naturalistic kind, and it is one of massive failure (did Nagel really not notice?).  Every theory in the natural sciences has gaps, and the question is whether we are to try to fill them with posits whose track record of disappointment is well-established, or not.  (As one of Nagel's teachers might have taught him, methodological conservatism is considered a virtue among scientists.)  No one objects to challenging the explanatory completeness of physics, or to asking whether physicalists can explain consciousness, or whether naturalism is the correct meta-philosophy (lots of philosophers, as we recently learned, reject it, yet you can count on one hand the 'target' faculty who would pal around with the ID conmen at the Discovery [sic] Institute).  What people are objecting to is lending credibility to individuals and groups whose goal it is to undermine the integrity of biology education for children.

For once we get outside our comfy Washington Square apartment, and look at the real world, here's what is going on:  the Discovery [sic] Institute and its conmen, with hefty financial support from religious extremists, travel the country badgering school boards made up of laypeople to tinker with public school biology curricula.  The Discovery [sic] Institute conmen learned in the 1980s that certain strategies for injecting religious viewpoints into the public school curricula won't pass constitutional muster, so they have shifted their strategy:  the goal is not "equal time" for creationism, but rather to inject material into the standard curriculum that would leave high school students--high school students (!) in their first real encounter with biology--with the false impression that there is not a scientific consensus about Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.  The laypeople on school boards can as little assess the biology as Thomas Nagel; but unlike Nagel, they do rely on epistemic authorities, but even here they are at a disadvantage in figuring out who those are.  The specialty of the Discovery [sic] Institute is to try to create the impression with laypersons on school boards that there is significant dissent among those with the requisite epistemic authority to evaluate the theory of evolution.  (Fortunately, they are sometimes inept at this, a bit of 'moral luck' that may save Nagel from long-lasting notoriety.)

Thus, it is a certainty that the new addition to the ID lobbying arsenal, that will be repeated again and again in the years ahead, will be the fact that "a famous atheist philosopher" endorsed Meyer's book, so earnest school board members really ought to take it seriously, perhaps require that portions of it be assigned, or at least make sure that they only approve textbooks that suggest (falsely) that there is significant skepticism about Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection among biologists.  That Meyer is not a biologist; that Nagel is not a biologist; that Nagel is (or was) a good philosopher won't matter.   None of that matters for the Discovery [sic] Institute:  the only goal is--to quote a different philosopher who wasn't thinking of this mischief--"to put limits on knowledge to make room for faith."

And if Nagel's latest letter is to be believed, the reason he has given ammunition to ignoramuses and know-nothings in their efforts to mislead schoolchildren, is because he thinks Stephen Meyer's book lends support to a paper that Nagel wrote in 1974! 

Wow.

Wouldn't it have been less destructive to just write another paper?

There is a case study in this to be written about the moral responsibilities of intellectuals.

UPDATE:  More on the topic here.

Why Legal Positivism?

Scott Shapiro (Yale) has put together a splendid panel on the topic "Legal Positivism:  For and Against" for the AALS annual meeting in New Orleans.

A draft of my remarks are now available; here's the abstract:

This short paper will be presented at a panel on "Legal Positivism: For and Against?" at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools in New Orleans, January 9, 2010. It attempts to identify the theoretical considerations that explain why legal positivism is the dominant view among legal philosophers. Three are identified: (1) positivism gives the best account of the ordinary understanding of law; (2) its account of law is the one deployed fruitfully in all empirical social science; and (3) it does not involve incredible or controversial metaphysical commitments. The paper concludes by noting that the competitors to legal positivism have narrowed considerably in recent years. American Legal Realism (as I have argued elsewhere) depends on a positivist theory of law, rather than being in competition with it. The most sophisticiated version of natural law theory, that of John Finnis, has conceded the main points in dispute to the legal positivists, and simply proposes changing the subject. And Dworkin's theory fails along the three dimensions of theoretical adequacy noted.

The paper concludes that the appeal of Dworkin's theory to constitutional lawyers in the Anglophone world and elsewhere is due entirely to the (correct) perception that his theory makes moral considerations relevant to the resolution of momentous constitutional questions. Unfortunately, so do the positivist theories of Hart and Raz. Only atrocious public relations for legal positivism--aided and abetted by decades of misrepresentations by Dworkin--has led so many casual consumers of the jurisprudential literature to think otherwise. Thinking morality relevant to constitutional adjudication is no reason not to be a legal positivist.

The point in the second paragraph bears emphasizing:  none of the leading positivist theories of law make morality irrelevant to the adjudication of difficult constitutional questions.  It is an interesting sociological, but not philosophical, question why so many believe otherwise.

"Explaining Theoretical Disagreement"

First the video, now the article.

The comments policy here

I do have one, and it's worked quite well, so much so that I am able to approve 90% or more of submitted comments (spam excluded!).  But for those newer to the blog, you might take a look at it.  Thanks.

Eagles-Broncos Tickets for December 27?

Now here's a request you weren't expecting on this blog, I know:  but does anyone have 3 tickets for the Eagles-Broncos game on December 27 in Philly?   4 tickets is fine too.  Please e-mail me if you have them and are willing to sell.  Many thanks.

Philosopher of Biology Wimsatt to Take Up Winton Chair at Minnesota

My esteemed colleague William Wimsatt, the distinguished philosopher of biology who (sadly) took emeritus status last year here at Chicago, will now take up the Winton Chair at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul, where he will teach full-time each fall term for the next three years, and also participate in other activities the rest of the academic year.  He will join two other philosophers of biology at Minnesota, C. Kenneth Waters and Alan Love.

Rosenberg on Naturalism Redux: The Reply to Critics

Here.  (Although the link is supposed to be to his reply, which is in the comments section, you may also need to scroll down to get to it.)

In Memoriam: Stephen Toulmin (1922-2009)

The USC memorial notice is here.

(Thanks to Matt Kramer for the pointer.)

Should Philosophers Referee Papers for Free for For-Profit Journal Publishers?

Warren Goldfarb (Harvard) raises an interesting issue:

I was wondering whether you'd like to muse about a topic on your blog, namely, that of refereeing for for-profit journals.  I was just asked to referee something for Erkenntnis, which is a Springer journal.   I began to think, why should I donate my time for no compensation to a for-profit enterprise?  It's one thing when a not-for-profit journal asks (for me, it's usually the Jnl. Symb. Logic, or Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, or Mind), but why should I give my time gratis to help Springer or Elsevier make money?

The culture of journal refereeing as a duty of the professoriate in a subject, without compensation, developed when journals did not make any profit.  It continues only because we are not interrogating the changes that academic publishing has undergone.  (Book refereeing has always been compensated, even from university presses, because the publication was supposed to make some kind of money, even if for a non-profit entity.)  Yet, of course, I don't want to damage the younger people in the subject, who need to be published, even in for-profit journals.

But I am tempted to write back to the editor who asked me to referee, "Please be advised that I do not do any refereeing work for journals published by for-profit entities without compensation.  Are you prepared to offer compensation for this refereeing job?"

I'd be interested in your reaction, and those of your readers if you think this is an issue of general enough interest to discuss on the blog.

I am inclined to think Professor Goldfarb has a good point.  What do readers think?  As always, signed comments will be strongly preferred.  Submit your comment only once, they may take awhile to appear.

Survey on Publishing in Philosophy

MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOVEMBER 17:  The survey closes on December 15 (one week!).  Nearly 900 philosophers have responded so far, but with 10,000+ philosophers in the Anglophone world alone, it would be good if even more took the time to complete it.  It's an interesting exercise; get your CV in hand, and give it a try!

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

Sally Haslanger (MIT) writes:

All professional philosophers are invited to participate in a survey on publishing in philosophy.  It should take about 10 minutes.  It will be useful to have your CV handy as you fill it out.  Please go here to find it.

If all goes well, Professor Haslanger will report on the results at the December APA in the symposium on philosophy publishing (Wednesday December 30th, 11:15-1:15).  Let me add that if you've been in academia for more than a few years, you will definitely need a CV in hand to complete the survey.

Gnome Chomsky

Really.

Should One Publish While in Graduate School?

Gualtiero Piccinini (Missouri/St. Louis) discusses the issue.  My own judgment is that for the vast majority of positions, having a publication in a reputable journal (either in your specialty, or a more generalist journal) is a plus, as long as it is a good piece.  Professor Piccinini moderates comments at his blog, for those who want to discuss the issue.

A New Petition Protesting the Proposed "Impact" Criteria for Assessing Research in Britain

Charlie Pelling (Birkbeck) kindly called this new petition to my attention, which specifically addresses the concerns of younger scholars in the humanities and social sciences.  For earlier items on this lunatic proposal, see  here and here and here.

California Budget Crisis and the Community Colleges

Here.

What happens when a blog does not moderate comments?

You end up with lists like this.

Thanks to the many intelligent readers who guarantee that every comments thread here will be instructive, intelligent, and actually worth reading.

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the link.)

14 Volumes of Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science Now On-Line and Free

Here, encompassing volumes published from 1956 through 1990.  Many of these are "classics" in the literature, and together they contain dozens of extremely important articles in philosophy of science, physics, mathematics, mind, and language, as well as in epistemology, decision theory, and the history of analytic philosophy.  Such seminal papers as Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" and Putnam's "The Meaning of 'Meaning,'" among many others, appeared originally in these volumes.  It's a wonderful gift to students of philosophy to make all this work available on-line.

Philosophy in Primary Schools in Australia

Story here.

(Thanks to Max Taylor for the pointer.)

On Afghanistan

George W. Obama neglected to mention any of this while explaining his escalation of the war.

More Comments from Philosophers on Thomas Nagel's "Shameful Stunt"

In the wake of the item about Thomas Nagel's high-profile endorsement of an incompetent book on "Intelligent Design" by Stephen Meyer, a leading shill for the Discovery [sic] Institute, I've heard from many philosopers, especially philosophers of science, who are livid about this.   A leading philosopher of biology, for example, gives expression to sentiments I have heard from several correpondents:

Thank you very much for your vigorous examination of Tom Nagel's shameful stunt involving evolutionary biology.  The fact that he doesn't know what he's talking about regarding science has been apparent ever since The View from Nowhere, and here it shows again.  It reflects on all of us working in philosophy of science, though, when a "famous" philosopher acts so stupidly.  Arrogance is the keyword here, I'm sure.  Nagel has done irreparable harm, which we'll be paying and paying for, for years to come, insofar as this endorsement will be used in school board battles across the nation.  Thanks very much for your coverage of this farce.

Meanwhile, Branden Fitelson (Berkeley, moving to Rutgers), a leading expert on probability and decision theory who has done well-known critical analysis of the work of ID apologist William Dembski, writes:

Thanks for your recent posts on the Nagel/Meyer fiasco.  I've been looking at Meyer's book, and one thing (among many) that really bothers me is that Meyer spends a lot of time engaging in "Dembski worship", but he doesn't even cite (much less discuss) the only comprehensive and serious review of Dembski's first book (which forms much of Meyer's "basis" for his "Dembski worship"), which was written by Elliott Sober, Chris Stephens, and myself (and published in Philosophy of Science in 1999).  This strikes me as rather irresponsible of Meyer (and, indirectly, of course, of Nagel too).

Since Meyer's book obviously is not a scholarly investigation of its subject, but a partisan tract whose technical pretensions are meant to dazzle and confuse the ignorant, it is hardly surprising that it lets pass in silence any critical scholarship that might interfere with the con job.  But one would hope that Thomas Nagel has heard of the journal Philosophy of Science, and perhaps even of Elliott Sober.  One might even have thought that, being well aware what all philosophers of biology think about this issue, he might have spent some time studying the scholarly literature before going out on a limb.  But perhaps, as the other correspondent noted, "arrogance is the keyword here."

Questions *Not* to Ask at Your APA Interview

Here.

The Narcissist Reviewed

This is quite funny--read it through to the end.  One imagines Larry Summers feels vindicated.

UPDATE:  A philosopher in the Boston area writes:

As a generally appreciative reader of your blog, I write to offer clarification that might be helpful. The Summers/West controversy was not mainly about the judgment of West's scholarly work and activities. Rather, it was about the tone of "street" familiarity and subsequent condescension that Summers adopted in his infamous meeting with West.

This was the view of many academics sympathetic to West, particularly those who had nearby experience with Summers or knew others who had.   West himself made clear that the issue was mainly about manner of address. Had the issue been mainly about West's scholarly output and its quality, and whether this ever merited appointment as a University Professor at Harvard, I am fairly confident that many of these sympathetic academics, at least those with some knowledge of areas closely related to his work, would not have been nearly as sympathetic.   Indeed, some of these academics might question McLemee's highly
favorable judgment of West's earlier work.

In short, if Summers were to now feel vindicated regarding the controversy, this largely suggests that he would feel vindicated about his manner of address to West. I doubt that this is what you meant to suggest.

Indeed, that was not at all what I meant, and I am grateful for the additional context surrounding that dispute, about which I was unaware.