Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

New Books in July

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

The Soul of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, by Maudemarie Clark & David Dudrick (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

The Making of Modern Liberalism by Alan Ryan (Princeton University Press, 2012).

Freedom of expression under threat at the University of Wyoming

Philosopher Jeffrey Lockwood writes about what's been going on there.

The Humanities are for Everyone

A nice reminder.

(Thanks to David Liakos for the pointer.)

Blog Ad Space Availability-Update

All six spots are now sold out through the end of November; 2 spots remain in December, and 2 or more spots every month thereafter.  Please contact me at bleiter-at-uchicago-dot-edu with any questions. 

The QS Subject Rankings are Complete Garbage...

...at least for anyone interested in the  quality of the faculty in philosophy.  They are based on a hard-to-decipher methodology, though as Jo Wolff (UCL) pointed out previously, it seems to give decisive weight to "employer" opinions.  The law rankings are also very bad, though not as bad, partly because elite research universities do tend to have the best law faculties, and about the only thing that seems to explain these otherwise inexplicable rankings is that they largely track the halo effect of university name--as one would expect employes would do.  (As we noted previously, that would also explain why they rank schools in fields where they don't actually have programs!)  

Three Philosophy PhD Students Win Newcombe Fellowships

They are:  Daniela Dover (NYU); Kelly Heuer (Georgetown); and Camisha Russell (Penn State).    You can see a list of prior winners (and where they are now) here.  (If anyone has the 2007 list of winners, please send it to me.)

(Thankts to Peter DeAngelis for the pointer.)

Fisk on Syria

This is a good read.

Mindless Social-Parasite Celebrity Kim Karsdashian Meets Kierkegaard

Amusing.

(Thanks to the many different readers who sent this.)

UPDATE:  Rob Tempio points out that Justin Bieber (talentless teen hearthrob) has merged with Martin Buber (somewhat more talented, but not as popular as he once was, existential philosopher) to tweet as Justin Buber.

Otago's Alan Musgrave Honored with "Distinguished Research Medal"

Details about the award, and Professor Musgrave's work and career are here.

(Thanks to Gregory McCormick for the pointer.)

Three Philosophers Win Australian Future Fellowships

The winners are Peter Anstey (Sydney), Catherine Mills (Monash), and Alison Ross (Monash).  The Fellowship relieves the winners of teaching and administration for four years (rather nice!)  There is more information here.

(Thanks to Dirk Baltzly for the pointer.)

"The U.K. Graduate Student's Guide to Interpreting Feedback from American Faculty"

Courtesy of sociologist Kieran Healy (Duke).

An introduction to philosophical method(s)?

An undergraduate at Rutgers writes:

I was wondering whether there were any recent books that you would say stand out as works on philosophical methodology these days. I've found a few books on philosophical method dating to the early formation of ordinary language analysis, but might there be more current treatments of the topic that are taken as generally reliable among academic philosophers these days? I often find that introductory books on philosophy seem to cover general philosophical topics and serve as repositories of knowledge in various areas, much like introductory books in Biology or Chemistry, but I was curious whether there was something more like a modern day "how to do a science experiment" book in philosophy, perhaps a "how to make a philosophical argument" or "how to do conceptual analysis", etc. 

My guess is doing philosophy in some area is more useful for understanding the methods than reading about the methods, but I wonder what books readers might recommend in response to the student's query? Maybe there's some good stuff out there.

Anderson Podcast on "Tom Paine and the Ironies of Social Democracy"

So we had an interesting interview with Elizabeth Anderson at 3AM recently, and my Law School just posted the podcast of her wonderful Dewey Lecturer in Law & Philosophy from last year.  It's both entertaining and informative (and also timely).

In Memoriam: William R. Jones (1933-2012)

The founder and director of the African-American Studies Program at Florida State University, Professor Jones was a pioneer in the development of African-American philosophy.  There is a page with links to memorials and much information about his work, as well as remembrances.

(Thanks to Chike Jeffers for the pointer.)

The Culture of Secrecy at Penn State that Made the Child Sex Abuse Scandal Possible...

...permeates the whole university according to a former graduate student in philosophy; an excerpt:

When I first arrived on campus in fall 2007, I was required, along with all new instructors, to take what I thought was a routine training seminar on sexual harassment. Looking back, I clearly should have seen what transpired as a red flag. At this particular seminar, we were taught that it’s perfectly fine for instructors to have sex with their own students. It was considered “unwise” to engage in these sexual relationships during the course of the semester, but it wasn’t exactly prohibited. We’d simply need to alert the proper administrative authorities, and make certain the sex didn’t affect our grading.

It didn’t end there. About half an hour of this training was spent fielding one participant’s complaint that provocatively dressed women were in fact sexually harassing him. This was treated by the seminar facilitator as a legitimate concern. Never did the facilitator mention that the “problem” of revealing dress is frequently (and erroneously) used as a justification for sexual assault and rape.

In retrospect, I should have been prepared for the kind of abuses this type of “training” enabled. Some graduate students whispered about colleagues in my department having sex with their 18-year-old students. Several acquaintances saw one colleague escort two drunken 18-year-old female students back to his apartment one night. Another colleague spoke of finding a graduate student in a compromising position with an undergraduate in our student lounge.

It isn’t clear whether or not any of these young women, particularly those seen at the bar, were intoxicated past the point of meaningful consent. In other words, I can’t be sure whether or not either of my colleagues committed a criminal offense or was just culpable of a despicable misuse of power. I’m not terribly comforted either way....  

On the off chance someone forget America is the most backwards "developed" nation on the face of the earth...

...you can read some of the reactions to the mass shooting in Colorado.

Wide-ranging and interesting interview with Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan)...

...at 3AM Magazine, of course.

Memorial for Bernard Gert

Philosopher Joshua Gert (William & Mary) writes that "there will be a memorial service for my father, Bernard Gert, on Sunday morning, August 12th, at the Rollins Chapel in Hanover, NH, with a reception to follow.  Anyone who wants additional information can contact me."  You can reach Professor Gert with questions at jngert-at-wm-dot-edu.

A few changes to the sidebars

Some readers have noticed a few changes to the sidebars, but it's just reorganizing some material, and adding a photo, which folks have told me for years I should do in order to reveal my true, friendly nature (I'm told I sometimes come across as a bit harsh on the blog [who knew?] but, truly, I'm really a nice guy--devoted to my students and my colleagues, and kind to small animals to boot!--but, alas,  I am a straight-talking, "spare me the bullshit" New Yorker at heart).   But there are no major substantive changes, just some re-organizing.

"The Sad Saga of Jeremy Stangroom"

This is funny.  Since Mr. Stangroom dabbles around the edges of philosophical topics in cyberspace, some readers may have encountered him. 

If there's any justice, when the ice melts...

...it will take out the Repugs first.  As the leading climate change deniers, surely they earned it!

UPDATE:  More cheery news.

Personality Type Predicts Philosophical Beliefs

Geoff Holtzman writes:

A couple years ago, you were nice enough to post a link to a study I was running, which explored the relationship professional philosophers’ beliefs and their personalities. The first article from this study, “Do Personality Effects Mean Philosophy Is Intrinsically Subjective?” is forthcoming in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2013, and I wanted to share a bit about the paper, and the overall results, with your readers. A brief post, including a table of correlations, is now available on the Experimental Philosophy page.

Nietzsche would not have been surprised!

In Memoriam: Alexander Cockburn (1941-2012)

The Nation has collected a nice set of recollections.  I didn't read him regularly, but I almost always enjoyed his contributions to The Nation and Counterpunch when I did happen upon them.  The recollections paint an attractive picture of the man behind the often delightful polemics. 

Podcast with David Albert (Columbia) on philosophy of physics...

...the dispute with Krauss, and other topics.

Grad Student Representatives at Faculty Meetings?

A philosopher elsewhere writes:

Do you have some sense of how widespread the practice of having graduate representatives at department meetings is? It seems to me that my department should have a graduate liaison at meetings, setting aside personnel matters naturally. 

I have anecdotal evidence only--I know some departments where grad students attend the faculty meetings, including some personnel meetings, and others where they attend only when invited because graduate student issues are on the table, but are otherwise excluded.  Readers, what are the practices at your departments?  Comments are open; valid e-mail addresses required.

Why Romney Won't Win

A sensible analysis from Robert Paul Wolff.  It even leaves out one of Romney's major liabilities, namely, that he's not at all likable, while Obama is.  And for the brain-dead "independents" who decide elections, "likability" often counts!

Your police at work...

...shooting women and children with rubber bulletts and unleashing a police dog on them, because they protested an earlier police shooting.  Wow.

(Thanks to Aaron Baker for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  The victim of the police shooting was captured in this video:  after the victim was shot in the head, but still alive, the police stood around for several minutes doing nothing, not even summoning medical assistance.  (This is pretty shocking, be forewarned.)  (Thanks to Michael Sechman for the pointer)

Stone on the NRA

These comments by my colleague Geoffrey Stone are apt.

Rewriting a Job Market Letter for a Philosophy PhD for Purposes of Law School Admissions

A young philosopher on tenure-track writes:

Do you have advice for professors on how to convert philosophy job market letters into law school letters of recommendation for their advisees who decide they want to pursue a law degree?  I’m guessing this would require a substantial amount of different material.

I’m currently a professor, but my interests have been substantially changing.  My PhD advisor is happy to rewrite my letter; but, neither her nor I have any idea on how to do this (and the advice on how to write law school letters of recommendation I have found online seems very focused on undergraduates applying to law school).  Any advice you have would be greatly appreciated.

I'll open this for signed comments from philosophers with experience, but I also have experience in this, from both sides, in particular, having read many letters of recommendation for philosophy PhDs applying to Law School.

The primary audience for a Law School admissions letter is an admissions dean.  At some law schools (including my own) faculty also often read files, but at most law schools faculty do not, or do not systematically.  What that means, first and foremost, is that the kind of letter you'd write to a philosophy colleague about the candidate's work and teaching ability is not what is needed.   You do not need to describe the dissertation in detail or explain why it makes a contribution to the literature and so on.

Law school admissions (sadly) is very heavily driven by the numbers:  by undergraduate GPA and by LSAT score.  But at the better law schools, letters of recommendation are taken seriously.  And what will really help a law school admissions dean is (1) an explanation of your familarity with the candidate and the quality of the candidate's oral, written and analytical skills; (2) some information about the quality of the PhD program, what it's gradutaes usually end up doing, whether some go to law school, and how the candidate compares (this will be more important for students from first-rate PhD programs that law schools may not necessarily know about, like NYU, Rutgers, Arizona, Pittsburgh etc.); and (3) why the candidate is now looking to go to law school.  Here the candidate should help out the letter writer by supplying a narrative about the reasons for the move, or sharing the personal statement the candidate will submit to law schools.  Ideally, it's nice to explain how the prior work in philosophy makes law study an attractive next step.  Sometimes, of course, the reasons for the change are wholly personal/professional, and unrelated to intellectual interests, in which case one shouldn't try to concoct an intellectual reason for the change.

Carlin Romano: "probably the worst example of bullshittery I've seeen from an adult"

One of my philosopher friends on Facebook gave me permission to repost this funny item he wrote on his FB page:

Saw Carlin Romano talk about his book, America the Philosophical, with Simon Critchley tonight in a bookstore downtown.  Critchley was surprisingly down to earth, informed, and engaging.  Romano was probably the worst example of bullshittery I've seen from an adult.  Half the time was spent name-checking semi-important people he's met.  The other half was spent bad-mouthing the interesting and important work of people at prestigious institutions, despite the fact that he clearly understood none of it.

Speaking of the "climate for women" in philosophy...

...the Department of Philosophy at Rice University did something constructive.

Attack on Tenure at Wayne State University Brewing

Details here.

UPDATE:  IHE has more.

"Holy Hegeliana, Batman!"

It's Robert Stern (Sheffield) at 3AM.

Yale's Singapore Campus Won't Include Free Political Speech

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 16--SEE UPDATE (AND COMMENTS NOW OPEN FOR FURTHER PERSPECTIVES)

Shame on Yale for participating in this--surely they could have leveraged their reputation to get the authoritarian capitalists who run Singapore to lighten up on this--but I guess they didn't make a credible threat not to participate at all if political speech were not permitted on campus.  Perhaps this says something about Yale's priorities.  What an embarrassment.

(Thanks to Matt Shafer for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Axel Gelfert, a philosopher at the National University of Singapore, writes:

I noticed your link to the WSJ article on Yale-NUS's 'ban' on political speech, and just for balance I thought I'd point out that this does not reflect the experience of politically active Singaporean students here.  See for example this interview with student activist Bernard Chen: http://kentridgecommon.com/?p=10461 

It is true that foreigners are not allowed to participate in party-political activities -- which, to be sure, is a more extreme restriction than, say, the United States's ban on party-political campaign donations from foreigners. But there is a robust amount of political speech at NUS -- not least thanks to the NUS Political Association ( http://www.nuspa.org/ ), the NUS Democratic Socialist Club (another University-recognized society), and the various Departments and Colleges. I've attended events on such topics as immigration, abortion, the Middle East, and freedom of speech, during which the debate lacked none of the vigour found at European or American university campuses.

While I have my own misgivings about how certain things are run in Singapore, I am somewhat taken aback by the amount of vitriol coming from a small number of people at Yale; clearly, they are more upset about how the Yale Corporation did not consult with the Yale College when railroading through the decision to start a joint campus in Singapore -- but this is hardly the fault of NUS (or even the Singapore government). Much of the criticism was not well-informed at all (e.g., specific political books were said to be 'banned' that are freely available in NUS's University Library -- don't Yale staff know how to do an online search of a library catalogue?) and quite self-serving -- I'm pretty sure NUS has contributed more to liberalization and social mobility in the last 20 years than Yale during the same period...

Note Dame Faculty, Students, Staff, and Alumni Protest...

...the university's decision to challenge the legal requirement of providing contraceptive services as part of medical insurance.  They are still accepting signatures to the letter.  A number of philosophers have signed.

Leiter on Waldron on Hate Speech...

...is now on-line at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Haakonssen, Price Elected Fellows of the British Academy

The full list of new Fellows is here.  Knud Haakonssen is currently Emeritus Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex; Huw Price recently took up the Bertrand Russell Chair at Cambridge.

Perry on "Political Authority and Political Obligation"

This is the penultimate draft of what will be the lead paper in volume 2 of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law, due out later this year.  (Volume 1 is here.)  Perry's paper is a major contribution to the literature on authority, and so I hope it will whet the appetite of legal philosophers and those interested in the subject for Volume 2.  Other contributors to volume 2 will include Bruno Celano, R.A. Duff, Matthew Kramer, Barbara Levenbook, and C.L. Ten, among others.

"Philosophers on Film"

Interviews with Boghossian, Rumfitt, Williamson, Borg and more, courtesy of the Northern Institute of Philosophy.

Which sub-fields of "philosophy" could migrate out and into another department?

Interesting set of reflections from Brian Weatherson (Michigan).

NYU Makes Senior Offer to Sheffield's Hopkins

Robert Hopkins, a leading writer in aesthetics and philosophy of mind at the University of Sheffield (who also has a serious side interest in Nietzsche), has a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at New York University, where he will visit next year (2012-13).  Students interested in aesthetics, in particular, will want to keep an eye on this.

Italian Town Appoints "Municipal Philosopher"

Story here.

(Thanks to John Dupre and Samuel Guttenplan for the pointer.)

Some time in the last couple of months, the fake "Pluralist" Guide to Philosophy Programs...

...pulled the defamatory and misleading "climate for women" section of their report.  No apologies, no formal retraction, but at least that nonsense is gone.  For those who missed the controversy that started last summer, you can get caught up with these posts from last year:  first, second, third, fourth.  

UPDATE:  Spiros weighs in.

And speaking of new addresses...

...the Oxford Philosophy faculty has the same URL but a new real address!

An official statement from the International Committee for the Defense of...

...Analytic Metaphysics.

"Certain Doubts," the epistemology blog...

...has moved.

UK Government to Make Publicly-Funded Research "Open Access"

Story here.  How will this affect monographs produced with public funds? 

(Thanks to J. Brendan Ritchie for the pointer.)

Propaganda, American-Style

Culture industry edition.  How refreshing to see the products of the culture industry correctly described (e.g., Paris Hilton referred to as a "narcissistic parasite").  You can see the full movie here (I haven't watched the whole thing, so can't vouch that it's as apt as the excerpt on the culture industry.)

What areas are most important for a strong PhD program?

With well over 1,000 votes, here are the results from our poll last week:

1. Epistemology  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

2. Moral philosophy (including normative ethics, meta-ethics, and moral psychology)  loses to Epistemology by 381–366

3. Metaphysics  loses to Epistemology by 387–298, loses to Moral philosophy (including normative ethics, meta-ethics, and moral psychology) by 413–364

4. Philosophy of Mind  loses to Epistemology by 602–215, loses to Metaphysics by 560–266

5. History of early modern philosophy through Kant  loses to Epistemology by 639–261, loses to Philosophy of Mind by 471–430

6. Philosophy of Language  loses to Epistemology by 650–183, loses to History of early modern philosophy through Kant by 495–409

7. History of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy  loses to Epistemology by 661–252, loses to Philosophy of Language by 461–450

8. Philosophy of Science  loses to Epistemology by 744–166, loses to History of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy by 523–384

9. Political Philosophy  loses to Epistemology by 742–169, loses to Philosophy of Science by 459–381

10. History of analytic philosophy (incl. Wittgenstein)  loses to Epistemology by 783–154, loses to Political Philosophy by 507–383

The top ten isn't surprising to anyone familiar with the landscape of philosophy in the Anglophone world, though the particular ordinal listing is.  I am guessing "Epistemology" came out on top because, like metaphysics, everyone recognizes it as a core part of the discipline for millenia, but, unlike metaphysics, it is not an object of scorn or ire from the standpoint of certain approaches to philosophy.  That philosophy of language, which surely would have topped the list in, say, the 1970s, came in at a "mere" 6th is notable.  I suspect that by including Kant with history of early modern philosophy, that area got a slight boost, but what isn't surprising is the strong consensus that history of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and history of modern through Kant are the two areas of history deemed most important.  ("History of analytic" is, it seems to me, more a complement to language/mind/M&E then an historical area, but no doubt others will disagree.)  After Ancient and Early Modern/Kant, the next most important historical area was deemed to be 19th-century Continental, which made the top 20, but not the top 15.  There wasn't a lot of love for philosophy of law (sigh), but at least we folks can find a friendly home in law schools!

Thoughts from readers?  Signed comments only:  full name in signature line, and valid e-mail address.

Condescension from Below Watch: Hack Right-Wing Journalist Smears Princeton Prof

This is America:  ignorant fool with a soapbox, and a full plate of prejudices, insults person who thinks and can give reasons for her views.

ADDENDUM:  Although this piece appears on the website of the hack right-wing journalist, the author is some other right-wing hack, of unknown 'profession.'