Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

New Books in November

Authors and/or publishers kindly sent me the following new books this month:

Reflections on The Concept of Law, by A.W.B. Simpson (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Commonsense Consequentialism:  Wherein Morality Meets Rationality by Douglas W. Portmore (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Nietzsche's Enlightenment:  The Free-Spirit Triology of the Middle Period by Paul Franco (University of Chicago Press, 2011).

The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology edited by Sebastian Luft and Soren Overgaard (Routledge, 2012).

The Future of the Philosophy of Time edited by Adrian Bardon (Routledge, 2012).

The Opacity of Mind:  An Integrative Theory of Self-Knowledge by Peter Carruthers (Oxford University Press, 2011).

More Embarrassment from the NY Times "Philosophy" Blog

Political philosopher Chris Bertram (Bristol) writes:

Many smart philosophers are thinking and writing about migration and borders at the moment, and yet this drivel is what the NYT gives us in their The Stone section.  Unbelievable!

I wish it were unbelievable, but it isn't.  I confess to having largely given up on it, though occasionally someone competent contributes, but most of the time that readers flag it it's for "drivel" like that Professor Bertram noticed.  The whole thing seems to me even more clearly an unmitigated disaster than it did originally, and I would urge philosophers to steer clear of contributing, in the hopes the whole thing will just go away.

Schwitzgebel on "The Empirical Use of the History of Philosophy"

Here.

Robert Paul Wolff Read Newt Gingrich's Doctoral Dissertation (Really!)...

...so you don't have to.  If you don't read Wolff's blog regularly, there's lots of other good stuff, including, just recently, on "Occupy Wall Street."

Dennett on the Radio...

...in Australia.

(Thanks to Dirk Felleman for the pointer.)

"Working like a dog"

I owe this amusing observation to a friend on Facebook:  "The next time anybody says they were working like a dog i am going to assume that they auto-fellated for an hour and then ate a mitten."

In Memoriam: Sara Ruddick (1935-2011)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM MARCH 23--SEE UPDATE

The well-known feminist philosopher, who taught for many years at the New School, has passed away.  There is an informative New York Times obituary here.

UPDATE:  There is now a memorial webpage here.

Philosophy Compass essays on "The Future of Philosophy"

Here.  I found the piece by Matti Eklund (Cornell) especially interesting.

Der Spiegel's Hatchet Job on Habermas

Several readers sent this two-part article, which struck me as a bit snide and insubstantial--the kind of coverage of intellectuals one expects in the American media.  A bad sign that this kind of "condescension from below" is migrating into German journalism!

Spiros's Advice to the Spouse of an Unemployed Philosopher

Here.

In Memoriam: Frederick Stoutland (1933-2011)

Professor Emeritus at St. Olaf College, where he taught for 35 years (until 1999), Profesor Stoutland was at the time of his death also Permanent Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Uppsala University in Sweden.  He died in Helsinki.  He wrote extensively in philosophy of mind and action, and we had occasion earlier this summer to discuss his introduction to a new set of essays on Anscombe; Professor Stoutland himself generously contributed to the discussion.  I will post links to memorial notices as they appear.

UPDATE:  A brief obituary here.  (Thanks to Tom Carson for the pointer.)

Senate to Vote on Bill that Would Empower Military to Indefinitely Detain U.S. Citizens, Even in the U.S.

Our elected representatives hard at work building the fascist state of tomorrow.

Inflated Letters of Recommendation

We've commented before on letters of recommendation, and the special code they're written in, which is related to the more general probelm of "recommendation inflation" which has become rampant in recent years.  But this report, from a philosopher at a top department, is very worrisome indeed:

I am concerned about a recent trend in departments attempting to place job candidates. After the job candidate assembles his or her dossier, the placement director looks over the letters of the candidate to get a sense of how the candidate will look on the market. Sometimes, after this review, the placement director will contact a letter-writer to ask him or her to consider revising the letter. Officially, this sort of request  is supposed to target unintended infelicities in the letters ("you'll be lucky if you can get him to work for you" or "this research fills a needed gap in the literature," etc.) But it seems to be more common lately for placement directors to ask for changes that alter the letter in order to improve the evaluation of the candidate, usually by asking letter writers to remove salient information such as explicit rankings or comparisons when the candidate is ranked below others.

 Given that we found previously that those who have to read these letters value such comparisons, this seems a very unfortunate trend, if that is what it is.  What do readers think?   Anonymous posts are acceptable on this thread, though please include a valid e-mail address, which will not appear.

Podcast: Ken Gemes (Birkbeck) on Nietzsche

Here.

Support the Right of Grad Students at Private Universities to Organize and Bargain Collectively

Petition here.  Please sign!

We are the 1% and we're fed up!

This is funny; an excerpt:

We’re angry. We’re angry at something we’re calling “imagined frustration.” By this we mean that, except for Congress, the White House, banks, major lobbyists, and the editorial boards of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, no one is listening to us. And we’re tired of it.

Podcast: Matt Evans (Michigan) on Plato on Ethics and Religion

Here.

Some students ain't writing so good...

...really.

FOX News Makes You Even Dumber, Part 192

The latest.  Of course, a proper test would take the FOX news viewers and expose them to actual news sources, and then see if they get the right answers!

Greek Austerity Measures Present Opening for Fascists and Anti-Semites

Two remarkable items about what "technocrat" government really means in Greece.

(Thanks to Sören Häggqvist for the pointer.)

Penn State's Culture of Secrecy

This from a piece on the child molestation scandal that brought down the University President:

In his 16 years as president, Spanier and his administration had a history of circling the wagons in the face of criticism or scrutiny, fitting into what many say was an insular Penn State culture that preceded his tenure. It occurred when high-profile Penn State employees came under fire, when student actions threatened to embarrass the university, and when people sought to obtain information that almost any other public institution would be required to release.

Alas, that seems to fit the pattern of behavior we noted previously when an outside Chair of the Philosophy Department came in and tried to do something about sexual harassment in the department, only to be fired.

Hot topics in philosophy of mind?

We did a few of these "hot topics" items several years ago (here's the one on epistemology, for example), and readers periodically ask for more.  So here we go:  philosophy of mind.  What are the 'hot' issues/debates right now?  Signed comments will be strongly preferred.

In light of recent incidents of police violence on campus...

...an open letter to university leaders.  I plan to sign, and I hope readers will consider doing so as well.

Murphy from Texas A&M to Illinois/Urbana

Colleen Murphy (political philosophy, applied ethics), Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University, will become Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, effective January 2012.

A New Philosophy Web Resource: PhilEvents

David Chalmers has the details.

Police Misconduct at UC Davis

The video is here, and a letter to the Chancellor from a UC Davis faculty member is here.  (The first paragraph of the letter is dispensable, but the rest is quite sound.)   I only hope that the parents of some of the students terrorized needlessly by the police are lawyers or have access to lawyers.

(Thanks to the many different readers who sent me these links.)

UPDATE:  UC Davis philosophers have sent the following apt letter to the Chancellor:

Dear Chancellor Katehi,

We are saddened and disappointed by the way that the University decided to handle the removal of the students' encampment on the Quad on Friday afternoon.

Until now we used to take pride in the way UC Davis was able to handle the students' protesting against the tuition hikes in what seemed to us an enlightened and non-confrontational manner, especially compared to other occurrences at Berkeley and elsewhere.

We do not question the University's right to remove the students' encampment (although there are reasons to question the wisdom of such a move). But we do object to the way UCPD decided to resort to what are unquestionably violent methods in order to deal with a peaceful, non-violent protest. Pepper-spraying students who were sitting on the ground and posed no direct or indirect threat to the police officers strikes us as a vastly overblown reaction.

Surely skilled and highly trained police officers could have come up with a better way to remove the students' encampment in the face of non-violent, passive student opposition?

It seems to us that the general principle the University should abide by is that violence is never an appropriate response to peaceful, non-violent civil disobedience. We hope you will agree with this assessment, and call on you as the highest officer of the University to see to it that such principle informs the actions of University officials at all times.

Respectfully,

Aldo Antonelli, Lesley Byrns, David Copp, Gerald Dworkin, Joel Friedman, Cody Gilmore, James Griesemer, Elaine Landry, Robert May, Roberta Millstein, Bernard Molyneux, Marina Oshana, Adam Sennet, Jan Szaif, Paul Teller, Michael Wedin

A Petition to the White House to Reinstate the Tax-Exemept Status of Grad Student Stipends

Reader Jeffrey Lee McMahan calls my attention to this petition, which readers should consider signing.

APA Will Commence a Search Soon for a New Executive Director

Philosopher Kate Norlock (Trent) writes:

I like to believe that philosophers could publicly discuss the nature of the APA executive director position, what we'd like in such a figure, and even, dare I say it, whom one would consider a good nominee.  That last may not be popular and usually people are loathe to name particular individuals in public conversations in the blogosphere, but I would hope that on a well-moderated blog, we could manage to calmly discuss possibilities. 

Please discuss.  Signed comments (full name in signature line and valid e-mail address) will be strongly preferred, though students may simply supply a valid e-mail address.

Plutocracy Watch: Occupy Wall Street Edition

Here.

"Pluralism" in Philosophy...

...once again.

Why does the legal academic blogosphere tilt so far to the right?

I get asked this often enough by philosophers and philosophy readers that I might as well address it on the blog.   Anyone who couldn't care less about academic law blogs should move right along!

The first thing to observe is that the legal academic blogosphere is actually politcally diverse, and includes a rather good, generally liberal law blog and a feminist law professors blog, among others.   But the traffic these blogs generate is dwarfed, to be sure, by the crazed right-wing blogs, namely "Instapundit" (or "Insta-Ignorance" as we aptly dubbed it years ago), Althouse, the Volokh blog, and, more recently, "Legal Insurrection," a blog by a clinical law professor at Cornell.

Podcast: Peter Kail (Oxford) on Hume

Here.

PGR Preview: Top Five Programs in Philosophy of Cognitive Science

Each had a rounded mean score of 4.0; they are (with median and mode in parentheses):

City University of New York Graduate Center (4.5, 4)

New York University (4, 4)

Rutgers University, New Brunswick (4.5, 5)

University of Arizona (4, 4.25)

Washington University, St. Louis (4, 4.5)

Evaluators:  Murat Aydede, Jose Bermudez, Ned Block, David Braddon-Mitchell, Peter Carruthers, David Chalmers, Jonathan Cohen, Tim Crane, John Doris, Owen Flanagan, Tamar Gendler, Alvin Goldman, Paul Griffiths, David Hilbert, Anne Jacobson, Patricia Kitcher, Stephen Laurence, Peter Ludlow, Edouard Machery, Ronald Mallon, Jennifer Nagel, David Papineau, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Stephen Stich, Michael Strevens, Michael Tye, Robert Wilson.

Curricular Reform Controversy at CUNY...

...continues.

Synthese EIC Symons Resigns

Though all the evidence suggests to me that he was least responsible for the editorial misconduct that has sullied the reputation of the journal.

November JFP

Not good.

PGR Preview: Top Five Programs for 20th-Century Continental Philosophy

There were more differences of opinion in this category, so the highest group had only a rounded mean score of 4.0, though the list certainly makes good sense.   Here are the top five in this area, with the median and mode scores listed in parentheses:

Columbia University (4, 4)

Georgetown University (4, 4.5)

University of California, Riverside (4, 4)

University of Chicago (4, 4.5)

University of Notre Dame (4, 4)

Evaluators:  James Bohman, Steven Crowell, Maudemarie Clark, David Dudrick, Gordon Finlayson, Max de Gaynesford, Charles Guignon, Gary Gutting, Beatrice Han-Pile, Scott Jenkins, Pierre Keller, Michelle Kosch, Brian Leiter, Dean Moyar, Stephen Mulhall, Brian O’Connor, Peter Poellner, Bernard Reginster, Michael Rosen, Joseph Schear, Iain Thomson, Georgia Warnke, Mark Wrathall, Julian Young.

Alcoff and the "Climate for Women" Scandal

Jason Brennan (Georgetown) comments.

(Thanks to Rebecca Kukla for the pointer.)

Time away from philosophy and the job market

A graduate student writes:

I have a question about the impact on one's job prospects from taking a year out from philosophy, for example to work on charitable projects.  I understand that years out from philosophy don't have an effect if they are taken before one starts postgraduate study.  But what's the effect if one takes a year (or more) out:

a) during one's phd?

b) after one's phd?

In each of these cases, would the time away be interpreted as a lack of commitment to philosophy, and therefore harm one's job prospects?  If so, how much harm would be done?

Thoughts from readers?  My sense is that doing so after the PhD can be very damaging, and will be interpreted as failure to get a job and/or lack of serious commitment to philosophy.  During the PhD is a different matter, I imagine.  But I'm honestly not sure.   Please submit your comment just once, they may take awhile to appear.

The Misleading "Climate for Women" Guide, Redux

It turns out that yet another "strongly recommended" department according to the now notoriously unreliable "Climate for Women" part of the SPEP/SAAP Guide to philosophy programs has a special history when it comes to sexual harassment.  As reported here,

A former Penn State department head filed a federal lawsuit against the university and two university officials, alleging that he was removed as philosophy department head for reporting discrimination and harassment within his department.

Mitchell Aboulafia, who was the philosophy department head from July 2003 to March 2004, filed a lawsuit against the university, College of the Liberal Arts Dean Susan Welch and former Associate Dean Ron Filippelli for a breach of contract, violation of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act and violation of First and 14th amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

According to a 23-page brief Aboulafia's attorney filed last August, current and former senior faculty members in the department discriminated against and severely harassed students and graduate teaching assistants on the basis of sex, ethnicity and religion. When he tried to report the alleged discrimination, Aboulafia said he was removed as head of the department and demoted to faculty status, according to the court documents.

Professor Aboulafia's complaint alleged:

15. During Dr. Aboulafia’s tenure as Head of the Department, he received numerous, troubling reports involving the conduct of certain Department faculty members.

16. These reports concerned incidents of discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex, ethnicity and religion by current and former faculty members in the Department directed towards students, graduate teaching assistants, and junior faculty members; discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and ethnicity by current and former faculty members in the Department against prospective faculty members and graduate students; and the severe harassment and humiliation of students and graduate teaching assistants by faculty members.

17. While these reports involved several senior faculty members, many of the most serious reports involved one particular senior professor, who oversaw the academic work of graduate students in his role as a teacher and dissertation director and oversaw the students’ work as graduate teaching assistants in his role as Director of Graduate Studies.

The University eventually settled with Professor Aboulafia.  (Alas, this seems to be part of a university-wide pattern of gender discrimination issues at Penn State (see also this).)  The Aboulafia lawsuit may have been connected with a subsequent exodus of faculty from the Penn State program.  That the Penn State program partly imploded over retaliation against a Department Head who wanted to deal with sexual harassment problems in the Philosophy Department some six-seven years ago doesn't mean, of course, that the problem remains today.  On the other hand, based on the allegations in the complaint, I believe at least one of the faculty members accused of harassment is still there.

Of course, there is no reason the surveyed "leaders in the field" of "Climates for Women" should know anything about a retaliatory firing for reporting sexual harassment, just because it resulted in multiple news stories and a lawsuit, which the university settled for allegedly a substantial sum.

PGR Preview: Kant (UPDATED AND CORRECTED)

Here are the top Anglophone programs for Kant based on the new PGR surveys.  Schools are grouped by the rounded mean score they received, with the median and mode then listed in parentheses.  (Note:  this reflects Guyer being at Penn)

Group 1 (1-2):  rounded mean of 4.5 (median, mode)

University of Notre Dame (4.5, 4.5)

University of Pennsylvania (5, 5)

Group 2 (3-9):  rounded mean of 4.0 (median, mode)

Cornell University (4, 3.5)

Indiana University, Bloomington (4.5, 4.5)

Johns Hopkins University (4, 4)

New York University (4, 4)

Stanford University (4.5, 4.5)

University of California, San Diego (4, 4)

University of Pittsburgh (4, 4.5)

The evaluators for this category (who were not permitted to vote either for their own departments or the school from which they received their PhD) were:  Marcia Baron, Andrew Chignell, Maudemarie Clark, Paul Guyer, Stephen Houlgate, Scott Jenkins, Pierre Keller, Patricia Kitcher, Michelle Kosch, James Kreines, Dean Moyar, Derk Pereboom, Peter Poellner, Ian Proops, Michael Rosen, Robert Stern, Eric Watkins, Allen Wood.

The New GRE General Test, and a New Scoring Scale

This purports to be an explanation, though one has to be patient.  Thoughts from readers?

In case you forgot why the fake "Pluralist" Guide is really the SPEP/SAAP Guide to Philosophy Programs...

...here's a simple explanation.

The Penn State Pedophilia Scandal

Ruchira Paul sent an appropriately pointed commentary.  'Tis a shame so many of the undergraduates there embarrassed themselves and their university by 'rioting' because the football coach who turned a blind eye to criminal sexual misconduct was fired.

"Continental-Analytic Split" on BBC Radio (UPDATED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY

Thursday, with a good line-up of discussants.  If it is available on-line afterwards, please send me a link.  I'm especially interested to hear Han-Pile's and Glock's perspectives on this.  (The introduction to the program, alas, lumps Nietzsche together with Heidegger...sigh.)

UPDATE:  Several readers kindly sent the link (I haven't had a chance to listen yet, but may write something up when I do).

PGR Preview: Top Five Programs "Overall" in Australasia

They are (with mean score in parentheses):

1.  Australian National University (3.7)

2.  University of Sydney (2.8)

3.  University of Auckland (2.4)

4.  Monash University (2.3)

4.  University of Melbourne (2.3)

"Occupy the Plutocracy"

Here.  And related:  the war on the poor.

Guyer from Penn to Brown

Paul Guyer, longtime member of the University of Pennsylvania faculty and one of the leading Kant scholars in the world, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Brown University. Invariably, some moves transpire after the PGR surveys are complete, but this one is particularly significant, since it will affect not only the recently-posted Kant ratings (Gary Hatfield at Penn has also done important work on Kant, but without Guyer, Penn could not possibly have been one of the top two departments in the Anglophone world), and this move would surely have affected the overall results as well: Penn, which came in 29th overall, would drop out of the top 30 without Guyer; and Brown, which came in 19th overall, would surely rank somewhat higher with Guyer. So in many regards, this is a very major lateral move, that students and their faculty advisors should take note of.

Cohen on Rawls and the "Occupy" Movement

Listen here.

(Thanks to David Estlund for the pointer.)

PGR Preview: The Top 20 in Political Philosophy

This follows a pattern in the specialty rankings, namely, that the highest-ranked programs have two or more tenured faculty in the area.  The top-ranked program, Arizona, has a remarkable line-up of prominent political philosophers, including Thomas Christiano, Jerry Gaus, David Schmidtz, and Steven Wall.

Group 1 (1):  rounded mean of 4.5 (median, mode)

University of Arizona (4.5, 4.5)

Group 2 (2-9):  rounded mean of 4.0 (median, mode)

Brown University (4, 4)

Duke University (4, 4)

Harvard University (4.25, 5)

New York University (4.5, 4.5)

Oxford University (4, 5)

Princeton University (4, 4)

Stanford University (4, 4)

Yale University (4, 4)

Group 3 (10-20):  rounded mean of 3.5 (median, mode)

Australian National University (3.5, 4)

Queen’s University (Canada) (3.5, 4)

Rutgers University, New Brunswick (3.5, 3.75)

University College London (3.5, 3.5)

University of California, San Diego (4, 4)

University of Chicago (3.5, 3.5)

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (4, 4)

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (4, 4)

University of Pennsylvania (3.5, 3.5)

University of Toronto (3.5, 4)

University of Virginia (4, 4)

Evaluators:  Marcia Baron, Christopher Bertram, Cristina Bicchieri, Brian Bix, Chris Bobonich, James Bohman, Samantha Brennan, David Brink, Allen Buchanan, Roger Crisp, John Deigh, Julia Driver, Gerald Dworkin, William Edmundson, David Enoch, David Estlund, Gordon Finlayson, Marilyn Friedman, John, Gardner, Gerald Gaus, Michael Giudice, Leslie J. Green, Brad Hooker, Shelly Kagan, Matthew Kramer, Jefferson McMahan, Lionel McPherson, Christopher Morris, Alastair Norcross, Calvin Normore, Brian O'Connor, Mathias Risse, Michael Rosen, G. Sayre-McCord, David Schmidtz, Stefan Sciaraffa, Tommie Shelby, John Simmons, Wayne Sumner, Robert Talisse, John Tasioulas, Larry Temkin, Peter Vallentyne, Wil Waluchow, Georgia Warnke, Paul Weithman, Jonathan Wolff