Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Congratulations to Brooklyn College...

...for doing the right thing.  Those who supported this outcome will now need to support Brooklyn College in the media, the blogs, and elsewhere, as it will no doubt face renewed political threats from those who believe in neither academic freedom nor the First Amendment.

(Thanks to Jonathan Adler for the heads up.)

G.A. Cohen Videos

Just in case you can't get them yet on Netflix.  Includes some comedy and impersonations!

New Books in January

Authors and/or publishers were kind enough to send me the following books this month:

A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation by Colleen Murphy (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

What Should I Do?  Philosophers on the Good, the Bad, and the Puzzling edited by Alexander George (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Essays and Aphorisms on the Higher Man by Emile Benoit (Eudaimon Press, 2010).

On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy by G.A. Cohen, edited by Michael Otsuka (Princeton University Press, 2011).

La dignidad humana:  Sus origenes en el pensamiento clasico by Antonio Pele (Dykinson, 2010). 

Legality by Scott J. Shapiro (Harvard University Press, 2011).

Perpetual Euphoria:  On the Duty to be Happy by Pascal Bruckner (Princeton University Press, 2010).

Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite:  Evolution and the Modular Mind by Robert Kurzban (Princeton University Press, 2010).  (Kurzban is a fairly dogmatic evolutionary psychologist, not a philosopher, but I have not read this book, so can not comment on its particular merits or demerits.)

Analytic versus Continental:  Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy by James Chase & Jack Reynolds (Durham:  Acumen, 2011).

Knowing Full Well by Ernest Sosa (Princeton University Press, 2011).

All Things Shining:  Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly (Free Press, 2011).

Philosopher Sean Kelly to be on Colbert Report February 2

Details here.

"Science Hall of Fame"

Science magazine's list, based on frequency of mention in books over the last two hundred years, includes a number of philosophers, including Alfred North Whitehead, Gottlob Frege, Michael Dummett and, at #1, Bertrand Russell!

(Thanks to Mihnea Capraru for the pointer.)

Ayn Rand, Welfare Queen

Several readers sent this amusing item, but perhaps even more remarkable are the examples of Rand's "reasoning" about government support (thanks to Ruchira Paul for that link).   (Can you imagine getting any of her arguments in a student paper?)  It's really doubtful there has ever been a more simple-minded "philosopher" with a public following than Rand, though the fact that she is so simple-minded obviously has much to do with her popularity in the United States (that, and of course the fact that she is an apologist for all the interests of the ruling class).

UPDATE:  Chris Hitchcock (Cal Tech) writes:

Actually, your two links on Ayn Rand display a frightening logical consistency. 

The first says:

"Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn "despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently... She didn't feel that an individual should take help."

But actually, that's not quite right. As the second one quotes:

"The recipient of a public scholarship is morally justified only so long as he regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism. Those who advocate public scholarships, have no right to them; those who oppose them, have." 

So it would be more accurate to say that she didn't think people who disagreed with her should take help. Those who agreed with her were entitled to all they could get.

A great philosopher's mind at work, clearly.

Bernard-Henri Levy Indicted for "Crimes Against the Intellect"

About time!

Anyone involved in higher education should be aware of...

...this disturbing trend.  Last year, the University Counselling Center here gave an informative workshop for the faculty, pointing out, among many other things, that the widespread use of relatively effective psycho-pharmaceutical medications means that there are now many students in higher education today whose lives would have been crippled or destroyed by mental health issues a generation ago, and so would never have even made it to college or gradutae school.  So we now have both more vulnerable students in the population, but the additional stresses associated with the current crisis of capitalism. 

Will Egyptians Topple the Dictator Mubarak?

Al Jazeera coverage in English.  Of course, since Mubarak does U.S. bidding, the "free" media in this country do not refer to him as a dictator.

UPDATE:  A propos the non-dictator Mubarak, thanks to Vice President Biden.  Amusing that he couldn't even muster the nicer words we reserve for "our" dictators, like authoritarian.

Brooklyn College Caves in to Political Pressure, and Fires Instructor for Having the "Wrong" Views

You can read accounts here and here.  The University's explanation is transparently nonsensical, absent a showing that the Provost regularly overrides hiring decisions about adjuncts by departments even when rabidly Zionist politicans don't send in letters of complaint about the views of the instructor.  What an embarrassment for a College with a distinguished academic history to cave in to craven political censorship this way.  You may sign a petition in support of academic freedom at Brooklyn College here. 

UPDATE:   More information here.  Philosophers, please sign the petition too!

Why philosophers find the Strauss cult mystifying

This well-crafted and entertaining review illustrates the weirdness of the cult nicely.

UPDATE:  An alert reader points out that some lines in the review that I had not taken literally may imply a rather different agenda on the part of the reviewer.  Be that as it may, it is an entertaining review (though I disagree with Professor Schliesser that there's anything other than "vulgar" Straussianism).

Update on the Situation at the University of Puerto Rico

Philosopher Guillermo Rosado Haddock wrote to me last week:

The situation at the University of Puerto Rico continues in the New Year as bad as before. The Río Piedras campus looks more like a military camp. I had not entered the campus since the beginning of the strike, but had to enter last Wednesday for the evaluation of an MA thesis proposal. There are policemen everywhere, both normal policemen and specialized ones of all sorts, as if the university were a sort of prison. In the last week, the students began to use the method of pacific resistance inspired by Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. Some 100 students were arrested by the military police called "fuerza de choque" between Wednesday and Thursday.

Especially in the case of female students, the arrests were not very gracious. For more information, you can look in You Tube under Universidad de Puerto Rico-Río Piedras-Huelga, or look at <endi.com>, the site of the journal El Nuevo Día, or at <prds@prdailysun>, the site of the Puerto Rico Daily Sun, a newspaper in English. Especially in the edition of this last journal of Friday, January 21, there are photos on pp.1,3 and 7 that speak for themselves.

    In the meantime, the administration has already taken the first step to dismantle the department that has given the University of Puerto Rico the most international prestige, the Department of Hispanic Studies, as well as the Linguistics Program, arguing that the admissions in the last years to those programs have been low. But on the other hand, the administration has announced that it will reduce the general number of admissions to the university, a measure that will produce similar effects on other programs.

Thus, they are simply beginning to dismantle the state university.

Professor Rosado Haddock has also invited me to share a much longer analysis of the political situation and the situation of the universities that he has now written:  Download Crisis at the University as a Mirror of the Social

Feel free to submit links to more news sources and updates in the comment section.

Pissy academic squabbles

Literally.

The Big Dose of Philosophy in Last Weekend's New York Times--and the Continuing Misrepresentation of the Subject and Its History

Many readers pointed out that the New York Times gave an unusually large amount of coverage to philosophical work last weekend.  There was James Ryerson's piece on philosophical novels, and then two reviews of two philosophy-related books, only one actually written by philosophers.  It also included this introductory comment from the editors:

These days, the question of how to live a meaningful life seems to have been banished from philosophy departments. But as it happens, the cover of this week’s issue features two new books — by academics, no less — arguing that philosophy still has much to say about real life, and vice versa.

Looking over the issue, Colin McGinn (Miami) wrote me on Monday with this reaction:

Have you had much correspondence about the NY Times book review yesterday? It was nice to see philosophy figuring so prominently, but the pieces were amateurish and often silly--including the editors comments at the beginning. I doubt that anyone writing had even an undergraduate degree in philosophy....The general message was that philosophy used to be about the meaning of life (good) but now it's about the meaning of language (bad)--so we have abnegated our responsibilities. False on all counts.

I had commented on this common but false claim in the introduction to The Future for Philosophy (OUP, 2004):

“[P]hilosophy” has a currency in everyday parlance and ordinary self-reflection that “linguistics” or “sociology” or “anthropology” do not. One doesn’t need an advanced degree to have a “philosophy of life,” and this has bred an expectation, even among those with advanced degrees, that the discipline of philosophy ought to be continuous with ordinary attempts to forge a philosophy of life.

Most of philosophy, both contemporary and--importantly--historical, does not, alas, live up to this expectation. Earlier and contemporary philosophers worry, to be sure, about truth, knowledge, the just society, and morally right action, as well as the nature of science, beauty, death, law, goodness, rationality, and consciousness. From reflections on these worries one might even extract a “philosophy of life,” though it would hardly be obvious, on an initial reading of Aristotle, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Hegel, or Husserl that this is what they were after.

Thoughts from readers about the coverage of philosophy this past weekend in the Times?  All comments must include a full name in the signature line and a valid e-mail address (the e-mail address will not appear).

The distinguished economist Janos Kornai on the authoritarian turn in Hungary

It's against this backdrop that the persecution of certain philosophers and other academics is taking place.

(Thanks to Barry Loewer for the pointer to the Kornai essay.)

UPDATE:  More useful background and context here.

"The Law of Religious Liberty in a Tolerant Society"

This (relatively early) draft essay is available on SSRN for readers who might be interested; the abstract:

This is a draft of the final chapter of my forthcoming book WHY TOLERATE RELIGION? Earlier versions of material in the first part of the book appear on SSRN as "Why Tolerate Religion?" (Constitutional Commentary, 2008) and "Foundations of Religious Liberty: Toleration or Respect?" (San Diego Law Review, 2010) (the account of religion has changed somewhat since these two papers). The two main conclusions from earlier in the book that are presupposed in this draft chapter are that: (1) the moral value of liberty of conscience is not specific to claims of "religious" conscience; and (2) there are claims of conscience that are not "religious" in character (however precisely religion is understood). "Principled toleration" requires that a dominant group, with the means to stamp out or repress disfavored beliefs of others, nonetheless recognize that there are good moral reasons to permit such beliefs to be held and expressed (subject to the limits imposed by the Harm Principle). The draft chapter explores the question: what should become of the law of religious liberty in light of these conclusions? Should we opt for a scheme of universal exemptions for claims of conscience, or are there reasons to think that no exemptions for claims of conscience, religious or otherwise, are justified? The relation between toleration and religious establishment is also discussed.

This version benefitted from extremely helpful feedback from colleagues at a Work-in-Progress workshop here last week, as well as from written comments by our Law & Philosophy Fellow Ben Laurence.   Additional feedback would be welcome.  Thanks.

"The last liberal President was Richard Nixon"...

...and other unpleasant truths about the demise of liberalism in the U.S., and the rise of the crypto-fascist right, from Chris Hedges.  (Thanks to Les Green for the pointer.)  ADDENDUM:  Link now fixed!

These comments by Robert Paul Wolff concern a related issue.

A perhaps useful resource for students currently applying to graduate programs

Mathew Snow sends along a link to this discussion site for students applying to PhD programs, which he moderates in an effort to insure both accuracy and civil and constructive discussion.  Prospective students may find it useful, though they will need to register with livejournal to participate.

Reminder: the current Republican Party in the U.S. is either...

...criminal or insane, or both.  And guess who Representative Ryan's favorite hack philosopher is?

Philosophy Under Attack in Hungary

Details about disgraceful recent events here and here.  Please sign the petition in support of the Hungarian philosophers here.  (After your name and e-mail, the first line asks for your "occupation" the second for your place of work.)

A letter from scholars associated with the New School for Social Research (where Agnes Heller, a primary target of the attacks in Hungary, is Professor Emerita) is here.

(Thanks to Matthias Katzer and Raphael Neves for the pointers.)

A March memorial conference at Oxford in honor of Philippa Foot

More details here.

A new journal

The Journal of Universal Rejection--and they don't require exclusive submission!

(Thanks to Ryan Perkins for the pointer.)

Hegel's (or at least Bradley's) Revenge?

Perhaps.

The American Right Owns the Rhetoric of Violence, Part II

A useful compilation.

Educational Testing Service--a Comment from a Prospective PhD Student

A student applying to PhD programs writes:

I am a keen follower of your blog and thought you might like to know a bit about the way ETS is currently treating applying graduate students. ETS now charges $160 each time a student takes the test, and $23 per score report sent to a school. Given the poor economic situation right now, many of us are applying to 15+ schools to give us a good chance of getting in. This means each of us is giving about $415 to ETS (or more, depending on whether one needs to retake the test) in order to get a good shot at a PhD program.  Needless to say, this is quite burdensome for a group of people who are not particularly economically advantaged. I have spent about $2000 on application fees and ETS charges in order to give myself a good chance of getting into a PhD program. My yearly salary is $10,500.

 

All of this would be bad enough, but ETS has one other serious failing: their poor record-keeping means that some students receive a score report with only their most recent GRE score, while others receive their scores for the past five years. Out of my cohort of applying graduate students, only one of us was given his/her scores for the past five years. The rest of us received only the most recent (and higher!) scores. This means that admissions committees will only see my most recent score, giving me a notable (though small) leg-up in applying. While I doubt this would highly influence any admissions committee, ETS is still introducing some bias into the process.

 

Even aside from the questions about using GRE scores as a determinant of student success, ETS is overcharging us and doing a poor job at rendering the services for which we depend on them.

I admit I was in the dark about how high the fees were, but there is not, I fear, much leverage students or schools have with ETS.  Have others had similar problems with ETS services?

Glen Beck Mobilizes His Fascist Thugs Against Professor Piven

Another triumph of the  Right.

Revenge of the Ruling Class: The Coordinated Attack on Public Sector Workers

Richard Trumka is pleasingly direct about the actual class warfare going on:

November's election has unleashed a coordinated effort to block the path to the middle class with an attack on workers' rights.  When I say an attack on workers' rights, I am not talking about demands for concessions in tough times by employers.  Wise or not, such demands are a normal part of collective bargaining.  I am talking about the campaigns in state after state, funded by shadowy committees created in the wake of Citizens United, aimed at depriving all workers—public and private sector—of the basic human right to form strong unions and bargain collectively to lift their lives. 

This attack is fueled by the enthusiasm – and the financial support -- of people like Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, and Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire publisher behind Fox News.  Both participate in a committee formed to raise business funds to attack public employees, based on the proposition that firefighters and nurses and medical orderlies are overpaid.

It's a funny thing, when the firefighters arrived at the World Trade Center on September 11th and started that long climb up the stairs to rescue the bond traders trapped on the upper floors, it didn't occur to any of them to call up and ask, "What's it worth to you for us to come and get you?"  So how did we come to the point where our country's ruling class thinks that firefighters...and teachers and nurses are the problem, and people like Lloyd Blankfein and Rupert Murdoch are the solution?          

And in some state capitals we see not just an attack on the middle class, but an attack on economic rationality itself.  What else can explain governors like Mitch Daniels in Indiana and Scott Walker in Wisconsin rejecting high-speed rail through their states?  Turning their backs on jobs, turning their backs on their own state's future.  Betting on misery and anger, rather than hope and progress – and common sense.

George Orwell once said it was fashionable among the really rich to bemoan the materialism of workers.  I can't fathom what spiritual values drive billionaire Pete Peterson to make more millions by doing a leveraged buyout of Hilton Hotels and then trying to take health care away from the people who clean the rooms for $12 an hour.  But I know from my own experience in the coal mines that when Hilton workers stand up for their health care it's not about money—it's about their families' lives—the difference between lives dogged by fear and lives of dignity and security. 

And I don't know what deep moral force drives Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase to fund attacks on firefighters' pensions, but I know why firefighters and construction workers have always needed early retirement—because you can't run into burning buildings in your sixties carrying a hundred pounds on your back.  Too old to work and too young to die has real meaning when you don't have a Goldman Sachs partnership to live off.

If it is really true that we cannot afford to make the investments we need to sustain a middle class society, then we will end up a winner-take-all society, a faded casino that pays a big jackpot now and then, but is headed inexorably downhill. 

For the privileged few on the winning end of America's explosion of inequality, inaction may be a tolerable state of affairs.  But working people, our members and the vast majority of people here in America and all around the world who cannot live off their investments, face an intolerable future unless we act—a future of protracted unemployment, stagnant wages, an insecure old age, rising energy prices and environmental deterioration—a kind of 21st century peonage to the lords of finance and energy and global supply chains.   

These developments are, of course, directly relevant to recent efforts by university faculty to organize, for example, in Wisconsin and elsewhere.  (Thanks to Alan White for the last two links.)

2010 Lakatos Prize in Philosophy of Science Goes to...

....Peter Godfrey-Smith (Harvard, moving to CUNY Grad Center) for his book Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford University Press, 2009).  There is more about the award and past winners here.

More weird use of the phrase "blood libel"...

...though the comparison of the Republican strategy on healthcare to Goebbels is certainly apt.

University of Texas at Austin 24-hour TV!

This is an interesting initiative, and of particular interest to the philosophical community is that one million dollars in revenue from the new venture will be used to endow a new Chair in the Department of Philosophy.

ADDENDUM:  Alas, Texas is still ruled by what may be the dumbest and most venal Republicans in America, and so even with $10 billion dollars in the 'rainy day' fund and no personal income tax, they are proposing to slash spending on public education, including higher education.  How precisely this will affect UT Austin, the flagship, remains to be seen.

Paired Comparisons of Philosophy Journals

Thom Brooks (NewCastle) has put together a second paired comparisons survey with just 50 major philosophy journals (his first one had almost three times as many, which would require 100,000 votes or more to get any meaningful results).  So if every reader casts 25 votes, in no time we should have some reasonable outputs.

"Obama has won the War on Terror debate--for the American Right."

More change we can't believe in.

The BBC's Documentary on Nietzsche: Not Recommended

This one leaves a great deal to be desired.   As a guide to his philosophical work, it is worse than useless, and full of bromides that make Nietzsche out to be a proto-existentialist or self-help pop psychologist, and it even resurrects various myths about Nietzsche.  The problem results primarily from the fact that the film-makers appear to have relied almost entirely on non-philosophers, and even on non-scholars (the writer Leslie Chamberlain is pleasantly trite and uncomprehending, and the novelist Will Self, who is featured quite a bit, is criminally stupid [really, there should be a law against him ever speaking about Nietzsche in public again!]).  There is some nice footage of important places in Nietzsche's life, so this film is perhaps best watched with the sound off.

Guess who finally has a personal homepage?

Brian Leiter, that's who--everything you didn't want to know, and a Steve Pyke photo!   Another Brian Leiter (really, some guy in Maryland) got the .com, so I got the .net.  (It appears the .com has been colonized by advertising connected to the .net Leiter, however!)

Philosophical Poseur Bernard-Henri Levy on Stephen Colbert Show

Reader Blake Taylor flagged this episode for me, in which Levy suggests that he and Colbert are both "public intellectuals," which is probably about right.  As I wrote to Taylor:  "Levy has the distinction of being a bigger charlatan than Derrida," to which Taylor aptly replied:  "At least Derrida wrote about other philosophers who are of great importance.  BHL writes predominately on BHL while performing his duties as a barely concealed neocon apologist."

APA Will *Not* Refund Registration Fees for Those Who Could Not Attend Due to the Blizzard

Philosopher Dustin Locke (Claremont-McKenna) writes:

I just found out that the APA has adopted a "no refund" policy for people who pre-registered for the Eastern APA but could not make it due to the weather.  This seems wrong to me.  Maybe there could be a discussion on your blog?

The Future of "Public" Higher Education: the Oregon Model

It's worth watching this one.  (The University Preident, Richard Lariviere, was Dean of Liberal Arts for a time at UT Austin, and was one of the few Deans I've ever encountered with a backbone, who couldn't be steamrolled by corrupt departments selling him a 'bill of goods.')

Remember to check out the "open" thread on philosophy news...

...it contains links to some pieces readers have recently sent me (scroll towards the end), including Slate's pretty good piece on Nietzsche and the obituary for Matthew Lipman, a leader in introducing philosophy into the lower school curricula.

Why the Right is beside itself about being called out about the Arizona shootings

MOVING TO FRONT FROM 1/13--A FEW UPDATES OF INTEREST

The Arizona shooter was clearly in the grips of anti-government paranoia of a kind not uncommon on the right in America, though he may simply have been in the grips of paranoia simpliciter.  But given the former, it was natural and obvious to point out the role that mainstream figures on the American right--figures like Beck, Limbaugh, and Coulter who speak to millions on radio and televion, and Republican candidates for United States Senate like Sharron Angle and Joe Miller--have played in encouraging and practicing political violence as a solution to political disagreements.  The issue, alas, got mixed up with one about civility in political discourse, which wasn't, or shouldn't have been, the issue:  the issue is the advocacy, explicit or implicit, of violence against one's political enemies.  The American Right owns that rhetoric overwhelmingly, and, of course, they know it.

The American Right, however, is also the political master of "the best defense is a good offense," and so they've gone beserk at anyone's drawing the connection.  They can't, of course, deny that the mainstream Right is full of fans of thuggery and violence, so all they can do is try to claim "parity" of violent rhetoric between the Right and the Democrats (there is no mainstream Left in America, so we can put that to one side).  But there is no such parity, and the American Right must surely know that too.  The far right pseudo-journalist Michelle Malkin--most notorious as an apologist for race-based internment--responded by collecting purported evidence of violent talk and images from the 'left,' and her little collection was widely cited and linked, with satisfaction, by all the little right-wing robots in cyberspace.  But what was obvious and striking about her collection was that she had to mostly mine blogs, blog comments and videos of comedians and unnamed street activists; she could find no real liberal parallels to Sharron Angle, Glenn Beck, or Ann Coulter, that is, no one as crazy and rhetorically violent as these folks who are regularly featured as pundits in the mass media and even run as Republican candidates for Senate.

The fact that the mainstream Right is "guilty as charged" probably explains the hysteria of the reaction, for example in the crypto-fascist entertainer Sarah Palin screaming "blood libel" , even though the actual victims of "blood libels"--like Jews in the middle ages, or at the hands of the Nazis--suffered a tad more than the poor former Governor who likes to put rifle cross-hairs on politicans she dislikes.  (Matt Yglesias has a funny comment on point.)  Glenn Reynolds, the benighted Tennessee law professor, also used the "blood libel" phrase in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece without any awareness of its inappropriateness in this context:  but that's the modern right, even those who are allegedly educated are culturally and historically illiterate.

UPDATE:  Ben Hale (Colorado) has more pertinent commentary.

ANOTHER:  Reader John Gotti sends this apt photo, from a billboard in Arizona.

AND ONE MORE:  A nice piece from Esquire about Oklahoma City and Tucson and the morally and intellectually depraved state of public discourse in America (thanks again to Aaron Baker for the pointer):

Why wasn't Oklahoma City enough? Why have there been sixteen years of lucrative invective since then? And you'll forgive us if we are a little dubious about Sarah Palin's contrition, and the maundering of Peggy Noonan, and the generally sanctimonious flummery that passes for comment on this latest outbreak of American political violence.

Oklahoma City happened. The carnival rolled on. It got wilder. It got nuttier. Ideas so long abandoned and destructive that they seemed like primal superstitions from a barbarian age now were shined up for the cameras and presented as legitimate alternatives to the accumulated reason and intellectual progress of two centuries.

BBC Documentary on Heidegger

This is actually quite interesting, and tells a plausible story about the connection between his work of a philosophical nature and his Nazism.  This isn't, to be sure, the Americanized Heidegger of Hubert Dreyfus (who defends a cogent, if not correct, anti-skeptical position about the relationship between theory and practice), but arguably closer to the spirit of the entirety of Being and Time.  But it also confirms, in an odd way, Walter Kaufmann's old (and largely neglected) hypothesis that Heidegger, at bottom, never got beyond his conservative Catholic upbringing, carrying forward, in non-sectarian terms, its anti-cosmopolitan, anti-modern and anti-semitic aspects.  It is unfortunate, though, that the documentary gives the impression that everyone agrees Heidegger was a "great" philosopher, and that the only doubts about him pertain to his disgusting political and personal behavior.  In fact, there are extensive doubts among philosophers, both European and Anglophone, about Heidegger's originality and philosophical depth.

The story of Heidegger's post-war revival, thanks to Arendt and Sarte, was also quite interesting, I thought.

"The Civility Diversion"

This seems to me exactly right.

(Thanks to Aaron Baker for the pointer.)

Hitler and Wittgenstein (Maybe) as Schoolchildren

Via Peter Ludlow, I learn of this extraordinary photograph.   Is it for real?  Does anyone know if their teacher ever recorded recollections of his/her pupils?  And as Peter asked, "I wonder what they talked about during recess?"  Of course, the photo also brings to mind Szymborska's brilliant poem "Hitler's First Photograph."

Paired Comparisons of Philosophy Departments: The Results After More than 100,000 Comparisons...

...and with apologies to Kenneth Arrow and with the caveats noted earlier, here's the top 25 in the U.S. (a slightly eccentric, but remarkably plausible ordering given the problems with the method--perhaps a useful reminder not to take small ordinal differences in the PGR or here too seriously!):

1.  New York University (90)

2.  Rutgers University, New Brunswick (88)

3.  Princeton University (87)

3.  University of Pittsburgh (87)

5.  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (85)

6.  Harvard University (84)

6.  Massachussetts Institute of Technology (84)

6.  Stanford University (84)

9.  University of California, Berkeley (83)

9.  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (83)

11. Yale University (81)

12. Columbia University (80)

12. University of California, Los Angeles (80)

14. City University of New York Graduate Center (79)

14. Cornell University (79)

16. University of Arizona (78)

17. Brown University (77)

18. University of Texas, Austin (74)

19. University of Wisconsin, Madison (73)

20. University of Notre Dame (71)

21. University of California, San Diego (70)

21. University of Chicago (70)

21. University of Southern California (70)

24. University of Colorado, Boulder (67)

25. University of Massachussetts, Amherst (65)

26. University of California, Irvine (64)

27. University of Pennsylvania (62)

27. Washington University, St. Louis (62)

29. Ohio State University (61)

30. Duke University (60)

31. University of California, Riverside (59)

31. University of Maryland, College Park (59)

33. Indiana University, Bloomington (58)

33. Syracuse University (58)

35. Northwestern University (57)

36. Georgetown University (56)

36. University of California, Davis (56)

38. Johns Hopkins University (53)

38. University of Virginia (53)

40. Carnegie-Mellon University (52)

New Intellectual Biography of Habermas Reviewed...

...by intellectual historian Peter Gordon (Harvard), who overstates, as is common, Habermas's philosophical importance, but tries to tell a narrative connecting the philosophical work and Habermas's admirable role as a genuine public intellectual.   A key bit:

The project [of refashioning modern social theory] would demand that Habermas reconsider the major philosophers of world-rationalization—Kant, Hegel, Weber—to wrest from their theories all that might enrich a new model of truly human freedom while dispensing with their impoverished conception of reason as a mere instrument for the mastery of nature. Unlike his teachers Horkheimer and Adorno, the returned émigrés who presided over the new generation from their posts at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Habermas was unwilling to concede that the Enlightenment itself was caught in a bad dialectic that sabotaged the human bid for emancipation. But to demonstrate what was mistaken in that grim narrative would demand that the entire edifice of Enlightenment rationality be rebuilt from the ground up. The very armature of the Enlightenment tradition had to be excavated and reset, like a bone that had once broken and never properly healed.

Seen in this light, one can perhaps understand how the two roles that Habermas has played throughout his life are parts of a single calling. The public intellectual who advocated for greater democracy and transparency in contemporary Germany could only succeed if he also plunged deep into the philosophical tradition, in which he could discover the conceptual resources for grounding his own practice of public criticism.

It is a tad curious that an intellectual historian, apparently interested in the history of European philosophy, would characterize Kant and Hegel as committed to a merely instrumental conception of reason.  But putting that to one side, what do readers make of the review?  Signed comments will be very strongly preferred.

Why is there no philosophy news?

Please post in the comments all the important stuff I'm missing.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

More on the terrorist incident in Arizona

Krugman (who notes that the issue isn't about civility--of which there is far too much in our political discourse) and Cole (who is quite good on America's most popular crypto-fascist politician, Sarah Palin).

UPDATE:   Recollections from the shooter's philosophy teachers!  (Thanks to David Estlund for the pointer.)

Anscombe in the NY Times...

...albeit in a piece by their religion writer.  It is clearly true that there's more interest in Anscombe than, say, 20 years ago--some of it is driven by renewed interest in Intention, and some of it by conservative Catholics looking for intellectually weighty authorities.  My colleague Candace Vogler (who is part of the former movement) is quoted as saying that Anscombe "is the next big thing" in philosophy. 
What do readers think?  And if not Anscombe, then what is the "next big thing" in philosophy?

A History of Political Violence Over the Last 2 1/2 Years

An informative timeline, taking us to the horrible present.

A New Way to Rank: Pairwise Comparisons of Philosophy Departments

Two sociologists have set up an interesting ranking device for sociology departments, and have now, kindly, made one for philosophy departments.  Give it a try!

UPDATE (1/9/11):  So with votes cast on more than 50,000 paired comparisons, here are some results--not utterly nutty, which is remarkable considering the strategic voting (you know who you are!), the fact that only school names were presented (thus producing obvious 'halo' effects), and the fact that anyone at all could vote, meaning students, faculty, and the totally ignorant.  Here's the world top 25:

1.  New York University (89)

2.  Oxford University (88)

3.  University of Pittsburgh (86)

4.  Princeton University (85)

4.  Rutgers University, New Brunswick (85)

6.  Massachussetts Institute of Technology (84)

6.  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (84)

8.  Harvard University (83)

8.  Stanford University (83)

10. University of California, Berkeley (82)

11. University of California, Los Angeles (81)

11. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (81)

11. Yale University (81)

14. Columbia University (78)

15. Australian National University (77)

15. Cornell University (77)

17. Cambridge University (76)

17. City University of New York Graduate Center (76)

17. University of Toronto (76)

20. Brown University (75)

20. University of Arizona (75)

22. University of St. Andrews/University of Stirling Joint Program (74)

22. University of Texas, Austin (74)

24. University of Chicago (71)

24. University of Notre Dame (71)

And here's the US top 25: