Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Who is your favorite philosopher?

(LINK NOW FIXED)

PhilosophyBites asked lots of philosophers (and some others), and collected all the answers here.  Participants inlude Frank Jackson, Tim Crane, Kit Fine, Martha Nussbaum, Raymond Geuss, Cynthia Freeland, Helen Beebee, Joshua Knobe, Sean Kelly, Gideon Rosen, Noel Carroll, and me, among many others; in the "others" category there's Nicola Lacey, Catharine MacKinnon (a disappointing answer, I thought, more political than intellectually revealing), and Alison Gopnik, among others.

Guest-Blogger: Amy Ferrer, Executive Director of the APA

I'm very pleased, indeed, that Ms. Ferrer, the APA's recently appointed Executive Director, has accepted an invitation to be a guest blogger here next week (Monday, December 3 through Friday, December 7).  I will put up a few items next week as well, but Ms. Ferrer will be the main attraction, and I'm sure readers will appreciate her contributions.

New Books in November

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

Corrective Justice by Ernest Weinrib (Oxford University Press, 2012).

The Idea of Privae Law by Ernest Weinrib (revised edition, Oxford University Press, 2012).

Love:  A History by Simon May (Yale University Press, 2011; paperback edition, 2012).

Reading Putnam edited by Maria Baghramian (Routledge, 2013).

Donald Davidson:  Life and Words edited by Maria Baghramian (Routledge, 2013).

The Concept of Law by H.L.A. Hart, 3rd Edition, with a new Introduction and Notes by Leslie Green (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Conscience and Conviction:  The Case for Civil Disobedience by Kimberley Brownlee (Oxford University Press, 2012).

 

Apparently it pays to be a disgraced university President

Wow.  The real story, of course, is the extent to which university presidents are being paid like CEOs.  Another triumph of the market.

Assholes

The blog, courtesy of philosopher Aaron James (UC Irvine).

Nordic Wittgenstein Review

The inaugural issue is free on-line.

Florida's Campaign Against the Humanities

These developments bear watching, since venal "ideas" like these usually spread to other states with large numbers of right-wing crazies (the Florida Governor is a "Tea Party" favorite).

Cambridge's Huw Price says...

...watch out for your computer!

(Thanks to Brad Wray for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  David Chalmers (NYU/ANU) discusses related issues here.  (Thanks to Varol Akman for the pointer.)

Plutocracy Watch: The "Bipartisan" Consensus to Destroy Public Education

Here.

Foreign Policy's Curious List of 100 "Global Thinkers"...

...is out once again, and it includes, as usual, some non-thinkers (Paul Ryan, Dick & Liz Cheney [!]), as well as a few philosophers, or folks in the vicinity of philosophy:   Jurgen Habermas, Michael Sandel, Martha Nussbaum, and Slavoj Zizek.

Another Interfolio issue

An employed philosopher who is also a job seeker writes:

Interfolio’s privacy policy and terms of use authorize the sharing of job seekers’ full dossiers and application histories with anyone working for their university. This means that if you are employed at a university, your colleagues may be allowed to see your dossier. This is what Interfolio says in its privacy policy:

"If you are affiliated with a University, you hereby authorize us, and we may disclose your Dossier, related Personal Information and your Dossier's delivery history to your University and its University Users, unless you opt-out of such disclosure in your account settings."

They define “University User” as follows:

"'University User', which means you are an employee, contractor or agent of a University operating in such capacity. A 'University' is a college or university with whom Interfolio has a contractual relationship, generally with the career services department or a specific academic department, to provide services to students, employees and faculty members... "

Their privacy policy is here.

In practice, it appears that Interfolio only shares your dossier with select individuals at your institution (so called “University Users”). At my department, I know that this includes our placement officer and the department chair. This is alarming. Job applicants who are currently employed at a university may not want their chair or placement officer to know that they are seeking alternative employment or the details of their job search.

Interfolio has a page with what appear to be screenshots of what placement services etc. can see:  https://secure.interfolio.com/demo/screenshottour/administrators.cfm

This policy deserves attention for two main reasons. First, Interfolio considers you to be affiliated with a university if you declare it as your affiliation when you sign up. Interfolio does not ask you about the nature of your affiliation.  People who are employed at a university are liable to enter their employer as their affiliation. If you declare your current employer as affiliation, your colleagues may have access to your dossier. The placement officer at my institution has told me that they have access to the dossiers of many faculty members at my university, so this is a real concern.

Second, Interfolio does not limit access to individuals in your department. Anyone from your university is equally eligible for access to your dossier. Even for graduate students who don’t have the seeking-other-employment concern, this seems like a serious breach of privacy. For example, I imagine graduate students in ancient philosophy might not want their dossier shared with placement officers in classics departments, whose students might be competing for the same jobs.

As Interfolio’s privacy policy implies, you are opted-in to this "feature" by default. Interfolio users can opt out by logging in and following the “Account Settings” link at the top-right of the screen.

This is especially alarming given the sudden widespread usage of Interfolio following the APA’s recent endorsement. For example, my graduate institution is now requiring all job seekers to use Interfolio. People have to know what’s involved in handing over such responsibilities to a private company that, it seems, doesn’t really understand academia.

It’s not clear to me how a “University User” gets to have access to dossiers from their university. But it looks like their university needs to set up a special “University Partner” account with Interfolio. Interfolio has listed a sample of their “University Partners”:
http://www.interfolio.com/about/clients/partners/

Neurofeminism

Houston's Anne Jacobson at 3AM.

Academic freedom crisis at University of San Diego

Not good!

"Analytic" Philosophers vs. SPEPPies

Spiros doesn't make this exlicit, but this anecdote concerns a university with a department with a large SPEP contingent.

Plutocracy Watch: Bill O'Reilly/Ronald Reagan Edition

Reagan sent America off the rails, and this cartoon makes the point powerfully.

UPDATE:  Krugman on so-called "New Republicans" is also relevant.

U.S. Philosophy Faculties by British Academy Membership

Unsurprisingly, the numbers are smaller:

1.  New York University (R. Dworkin [cognate, part-time], K. Fine, T. Nagel, D. Parfit [part-time], J. Waldron [cognate, part-time], C. Wright)

2.  Columbia University (J. Elster [cognate], C. Peacocke, J. Raz [cognate, part-time])

3.  Harvard University (T. Scanlon, A. Sen)

3.  University of California, Los Angeles (T. Burge, D. Kaplan)

3.  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (R. Adams, S. Blackburn [part-time])

3.  University of Texas, Austin (H. Kamp [part-time], M. Sainsbury)

Other U.S.-based (or partly based) philosophers elected to the British Academy include Nancy Cartwright (UC San Diego [part-time]), R.A. Duff (University of Minnesota [part-time]), John Finnis (Notre Dame [part-time]), Frank Jackson (Princeton [part-time]), Saul Kripke (CUNY Grad Center), John McDowell (Pittsburgh), Martha Nussbaum (Chicago), and Barry Stroud (Berkeley).

Georgia State's Jessica Berry...

...at 3AM.

"Live like a Stoic" week

Next week at Exeter.

(Thanks to P.S. Horky for the pointer.)

Steve Fuller Makes Things Up

A few readers pointed out that the putative "review" of Nagel's Mind and Cosmos by Steve Fuller is full of bizarre howlers on top of everything else.  Anyone familiar with Fuller's actual "scholarly" work knows that he makes up his history of science to suit the polemics of the moment:

Fuller's grasp of history of science, and of the sciences themselves, turns out to be equally interesting. A few examples will be worthwhile. Newton is supposed to have "presented his mathematical physics as the divine plan that was implicitly written into the Bible [emphasis added]" (p. 54). Fuller must have access to an otherwise unknown veridical edition of the Principia. In the early nineteenth century, Cuvier and Agassiz were supposed to have been thinking of climate change (p. 59). Around the same time, Lamarck is supposed to have held that "lower organisms literally strove to become higher organisms, specifically humans, who at some point in the future would be Earth's sole denizens" (p. 146), a view to be found nowhere in the Lamarckian corpus.

The "Darwinian doctrine" is supposed to consist of the belief that "chance mutations are the driving force of evolution" (p. 31). One wonders what happened to natural selection. Fuller has an answer: "compounded historical accidents" are also known as "natural selection" (p. 48). This issue is particularly troubling because what separates the neutral model of evolution from the selectionist or "Darwinian" model of evolution is the question whether chance mutations drive evolution: the neutralists claim they do whereas the selectionists argue for the primacy of natural selection. For some mysterious reason, Fuller has reversed the selectionists' position.

Returning to Fuller's book, Mendel is supposed to have had his work rejected by scientific experts before he published it in a local journal in Brünn (p. 61), a rejection of which no other historian is aware. Pearson and Galton's biometry is supposed to have been based on a "blending theory of inheritance" (p. 145) even though Pearson explicitly denied assuming any theory at all and Galton reported experiments to refute the blending theory. William Jennings Bryan is supposed to have been an "expert witness for the prosecution" (p. 115) in the Scopes trial, rather than what he was: the prosecutor who famously agreed to be an expert witness for the defense. Thanks to molecular biology, genes are supposed to have been "[broken] down into ordered strings of amino acids" (p. 135); one wonders what happened to DNA nucleotide bases. All microevolution is supposed to have been designed by humans (p. 141); presumably ancient humans were privy to enough biological warfare techniques to design malaria and cause the spread of the sickle cell allele in tropical and subtropical populations.

The modern theory of evolution is often interpreted to be a synthesis in the 1930s of Mendel's theory of inheritance with Darwin's theory of natural selection (along with natural history). But, for Fuller, it was a synthesis "between molecular genetics and natural history" and it is supposed to have happened a decade before 1955 (p. 58) even though there was no possibility of a molecular genetics before the Watson-Crick double helix model of DNA which, incidentally, appeared in 1953. (Elsewhere in the book he accepts the standard interpretation of the synthesis [e.g., p. 134].)

Now in the "review" of Nagel, Fuller declares Kripke a functionalist and, even more bizarrely, writes,

Fodor and Nagel were the leading non-naturalist philosophers of mind of the 1980s, in relation to which students such as myself had to stake out their own positions. Interestingly, both wrote their doctoral dissertations in the 1960s exploring Existentialism from an analytic-philosophical standpoint - Fodor on Kierkegaard, Nagel on Sartre.

Put aside the weirdness of calling Fodor a "non-naturalist," what's even stranger is that Fuller simply makes up out of whole cloth the claim that Fodor wrote a dissertation on Kierkegaard and Nagel on Sartre.  No, they didn't.  Fodor worked with Hilary Putnam at Princeton, and Nagel with John Rawls at Harvard, and neither wrote one on Kierkegaard or Sartre.  No wonder Fuller was an expert witness for the Intelligent Design folks in the Dover case:  facts don't matter!

An actually interesting observation about the tabloid melodrama involving General Petraeus and his mistress

Here; an excerpt:

So over the weekend I read All In, Paula Broadwell's slobberific  biography of General David Petraeus. It was nothing special, just a typically  crappy piece of fawning, noncritical journalism, full of passages like the  following:

"At Petraeus's change of command in Baghdad in the summer of 2008, Secretary  Gates claimed that 'history [would] regard Petraeus as one of the nation's great  battle captains . . .' Petraeus's success on the battlefield, his status as a  military intellectual and his will to succeed allowed him to shape not only  doctrine but also organizational design, training, education and leadership  development in the Army and, in many respects, the broader military . . .."

You can pretty much guess the rest of the plot from there. Every environment  Petraeus enters is instantly bettered by his majestic personage. We see him  passing through destroyed hamlets in Afghanistan, the weight of the world on his  rugged shoulders, scratching his figurative chin as he worries which strategies  to choose "so that villagers could once again live in peace and prosperity"....

Spinoza on the radio

Actually, Susan James (Birkbeck), Beth Lord (Dundee), and Steven Nadler (Wisconsin) talking about him.

(Thanks to Dirk Felleman for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Spinoza is on twitter too.  (Thanks to Kevin A. for the pointer.)

New Philosophy App: Phi2Phi

Courtesy of philosopher Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto); this is a peer-to-peer iPhone/iPad app for philosophers to test counterexamples, ask questions, and float ideas-—all anonymously.  And it's totally free! 

Rawls won the election, Nozick lost!

According to an article in Slate.  I suppose put that way, it's true, though the difference principle, or something vaguely like it, hasn't done much work in Democratic politics since LBJ.

(Thanks to John Doris for the pointer.)

Steve Fuller is a Shill for Intelligent Design

(The reason for the title of this post will become clear, below.)

Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education called my attention last week to this putative review by Steve Fuller of Nagel's Mind and Cosmos; the review was aptly described by another correspondent as "a largely content-free mix of self-promotion and derogation of his Enemies, in which you held the place of honour."  (Michael Weisberg, co-author of the review in The Nation, is not on Fuller's "Enemies list" so was erased from Fuller's score-settling.)  Just to give the flavor of Fuller's "review," a short excerpt:

On-line courses...

...story in The Washington Post.

Twenty Million Visits

It was only in February 2010 that this blog crossed the ten million threshold, and now today we crossed the twenty million visitor mark.  It took not quite seven years to hit ten million visits, and less than three years to add another ten million, a tangible indication that, even as the philosophy blogosphere has become busier and more lively, blog readership is not a zero-sum game:  more and more philosophy students and faculty (as well as others) continue to read, and to read more blogs.  I've nothing really to add to my reflections from the 10 million mark, but I will reiterate my thanks to you, the readers, and to the many who send me interesting material and links, which makes it feasible to keep the blog going while doing my actual job!

Undergraduates in China interested in exchange programs in the US

A reader in China writes: 

I am a Chinese undergraduate philosophy major who wants to pursue a PhD degree in North America. For 2012-2013 I have a chance to study philosophy at a U.S. department as an exchange student. My experience in the States so far has made me realize how unlikely it will be for a Chinese student to be admitted to a good program. 

As there are more any more students who enjoy analytic philosophy (China has been greatly influenced by continental philosophy) want to get their degrees abroad, especially in North America, I believe my situation is not particular. On behalf of them, and of course me myself, I want to get to know whether US professors can provide some advice. Further, will they accept students from another country whose english isn't perfect and who in their college education analytic philosophy isn't emphasized, though they try very hard on their own to study analytic philosophy?

Can you post my concerns on your blog so people can talk about it and more students from China may benefit?

Thoughts from readers--e.g., students from China now studying in North America, or faculty who have done admissions and admitted students from China to their PhD programs?  Also, of course, any information about exchange programs for undergraduates from China would be welcome.

Leave it to the far right Jerusalem Post to issue the decisive call for genocide

One can't make this up:

We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza.  The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering  fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.

There should be no electricity in  Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call  for a ceasefire.

Were this to happen, the images from Gaza might be  unpleasant – but victory would be swift, and the lives of our soldiers and  civilians spared.

 

Co-authorship rates by discipline?

Jason Clark, a postdoc at the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrueck, writes:

It seems clear that philosophers co-author papers far less often than scientists do, but while there has been some discussion on your blog as to the market value of co-authored works, I haven't found any mention of comparative data on co-authorship rates by discipline (not to mention the potential significance of such differences).  Do you know of any such research, or could you post this question for comments?

Thoughts/information from readers?

Harvard's Richard Moran...

...at 3AM.

Women as academic authors

Interesting charts from CHE.

(Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)

Cambridge's Tim Crane...

...at 3AM.

Philosophy Faculties by American Academy Membership

MOVING TO FRONT, WITH CORRECTIONS

Here are the faculties with at least two elected Fellows of the American Academy (bear in mind the usual caveats about how the Academy works):

1.  New York University (Block, Boghossian, Dworkin [cognate, part-time], Field, Fine, Garrett, Longuenesse, Nagel, Parfit [part-time], Scheffler, Schiffer, Waldron [cognate, part-time], Wright)

2. University of California, Los Angeles (Burge, Copenhaver, Herman, Kaplan, Martin, Normore, Parsons, Shiffrin)

3.  Princeton University (Appiah, Burgess, Cooper, Garber, Harman, Nehamas, Pettit [cognate])

4.  University of Pittsburgh (Brandom, Grunbaum, Gupta, McDowell, Rescher, Wilson)

5. Columbia University (Elster [cognate], Greenawalt [cognate], Ph. Kitcher, Peacocke, Raz [cognate, part-time])

5.  Harvard University (Kamm, Korsgaard, Parfit [part-time], Scanlon, Sen)

5.  Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Fodor, Goldman, Parfit [part-time], Sosa, Stich)

5.  Stanford University (Bratman, Cohen, Friedman, Mints, Skyrms [part-time])

5.  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Anderson, Gibbard, Railton, Regan [cognate], Sklar)

10.  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (R. Adams, Blackburn [part-time], Hill, Wolf)

11. Brown University (Guyer, Kim, Larmore)

11.  Carnegie-Mellon University (Glymour, Seidenfeld, Sieg)

11. University of California, Berkeley (Dreyfus, Searle, Stroud)

14. Massachussetts Institute of Technology (Stalnaker, Yablo)

14. University of California, Irvine (Maddy, Skyrms)

14. University of Chicago (Nussbaum, Pippin)

14. University of Notre Dame (Ameriks, van Inwagen)

14. University of Southern California (Higginbotham, Soames)

14. University of Wisconsin, Madison (Hausman, Sober)

14.  Yale University (Benhabib [cognate], Darwall)

And just to put this in some perspective, past philosophy members of the American Academy include Harry Berger, Julius Bixler, Jacob Bronowski, Victor Cousin, Irwin Edman, Franklin Gamwell, William Hamilton, Levi Hedge, Laurens Hickok, George Lindbeck, Henry Mansel, Arthur Murphy, James Pratt, Francisco Romero, James Walker, John Wild, and James Woods--and also Henri Bergson, Rudolf Carnap, Benedetto Croce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Karl Popper, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry Sidgwick, and William Whewell.  

Richard Davenport-Hines Did Not Like David Halperin's Book

As part of our periodic series of scathing book reviews, from the TLS:

The tragedy of queer studies is that a subject of exceptional importance to  humanity is left in the clutches of show-offs who reduce it to self-centred  banality. Sexuality and gender are at the heart of understanding human  motivation. Treated with intelligence and authorial modesty, the innate  differences, indoctrinated codes and enforced disciplines of masculinity and  femininity – to say nothing of the sumptuous diversity of sexual  inclinations and expressions – should be central to historical  understanding. These inspiriting topics underlie many kinds of conduct:  aggression, loyalty, fear, altruism, envy, intuition, hatred, creativity.  Instead, the subject is dominated by inhumane pedants who pride themselves  on meretricious mental perversity and teach their pupils to use words such  as virtuous, self-respecting and dignified as pejorative epithets.

More evidence that white men in the U.S. need to be disenfranchised

Here.

More Audio Lectures

Reader Sean Wellock writes:

I was happy to see your recent posts with links to the valedictorian speech by G.A. Cohen, and to the collection of philosophy podcasts.  I think free audio lectures can be a great resource, particularly for recent graduates like myself.  In case some other readers are interested, here is a link to an excellent collection of audio lectures on topics in  European Cultural History from 1500 through 1920 given by George L. Mosse at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In my opinion, Mosse,  John Searle, Daniel Robinson (Oxford), and James Hall (University of Richmond) are among the best free lecturers on the airwaves today.    

I haven't had a chance to listen to this yet, but perhaps some readers will enjoy it.

O'Connor on Adorno

This is the newest volume in the Routledge Philosophers series I edit, and it's one I'm particularly pleased about.  Adorno is one of those famously difficult German philosophers, who also gave reasons for why his prose needed to be so difficult.  But Brian O'Connor (University College Dublin) is remarkably lucid in his exposition, both of why Adorno claims the need to write as he does and about the substance of Adorno's thought.   Having struggled with Adorno, both on my own and in the classroom, I found this book eye-opening.  It is undoubtedly the single best treatment of Adorno's thought to date, and I hope it will lead to a wider interest in Adorno among philosophers.  I'm particularly pleased to be celebrating the book's publication, and other publications by UCD philosophers, at World Philosophy Day events later this week.

Edinburgh Faculty Introduce...

...anyone in the world to philosophy.  Nice!

Want your article to be widely cited?

Get it rejected first!

(Thanks to Brad Wray for the pointer.)

Council for the Defense of British Universities

Let us hope it succeeds.  More information here.

Velleman's "Against the Right to Die" in Less than 100 Words

In The Economist, courtesy of philosopher Jason Waller (Eastern Illinois).

UPDATE:  Actually, the main bit of the argument mentioned in this letter comes from an article Velleman cites:  Gerald Dworkin, “Is More Choice Better Than Less?”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy (Social and Political Philosophy), (ed.) P. French (University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

Interesting and apt post-mortem election remarks...

...from Robert Paul Wolff.

Rutgers' Frances Egan...

...at 3AM.

How the Republicans Won the House While Losing the Election

A clear explanation courtesy of my colleague Geoffrey Stone.

Old racist habits die hard...

...even among the nominally "educated."

Papineau on a Different Way of Teaching Logic to Philosophy Students

I asked David Papineau (King's College, London) to share a bit about how he teaches logic at KCL, since I thought it might be of general interest:

Once philosophy students get beyond the foothills, they are likely to start coming across passing references to ideas like denumerability, Bayesian conditionalization, modal scope distinctions, logical completeness, and so on.  Yet often there will be nothing in their education designed to explain these technical notions to them.

For the past few years I’ve been teaching a course at King’s College London that aims to remedy this.  I’ve just published the course as a text with OUP, called Philosophical Devices.  (The book’s four sections cover: sets and numbers, starting with the membership relation and ending with the generalized continuum hypothesis; analyticity, a prioricity and necessity; probability, including objective versus subjective probability, conditionalization and correlation; metalogic, starting with syntax and semantics, and finishing with a sketch of Godel’s theorem.  All in under 50,000 words including exercises and solutions.)

No doubt the techies will think that a book like this can only be a bluffer’s guide.  But I think that I explain everything properly, and moreover make it philosophically interesting.  Of course I don’t provide the depth available from higher-level courses in mathematical logic and the like.  But for those many aspirant philosophers who will never go near such courses, I at least offer a way of understanding what the experts are talking about.

My course at King’s uses half the twenty weeks the first-year students used to spend on elementary logic. I’ve long been unsure about the point of normal introductory logic courses.  It is doubtful they do anything to improve argumentative skills, and they tend not to leave time for any philosophically significant metalogic.  Of course, they are a necessary prerequisite for those who are going to go on in logic.  But for the many who aren’t, it is not obvious what the philosophical payoff is.

Not that this need be a competition.  Ideally I’d want the students to do some introductory logic alongside my introduction to technical ideas.  That’s what our students at King’s now do.  But if they did have to choose, I think that my course would do more for their philosophical education than an extended training in elementary logical exercises.     

Survey on faculty experiences with mental health issues

Information via Feminist Philosophers.

Happy (U.S.) Veterans' Day

Here.

APA Guide to Graduate Programs for 2012

MOVING TO FRONT FROM TWO DAYS AGO--SEE THE UPDATES--IT LOOKS LIKE THE APA 'GUIDE' HAS SOME SERIOUS OMISSIONS

It's now on-line.  No qualitative assessments, needless to say, but a lot of useful data and information.  In most cases, there is more job placement data on-line at department websites than is offered here, but it's still a useful resource.

UPDATE:  Donald Hubin, the Chair at Ohio State, writes with an important cautionary note:

In reviewing the APA Guide to Graduate Programs for 2012, the Ohio State Department found significant and puzzling errors.  We are currently working with Andres Colapinto, the APA researcher overseeing the report, to correct the data for our department.  Mr. Colapinto has been extremely responsive and the APA is committed to correcting any errors in the report quickly and reposting corrected PDF on the website.  I believe that this report holds the promise of being a useful tool for prospective graduate students.  However, until departments have had a chance to review this report and correct any errors, prospective graduate students should not rely on the accuracy of the report.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Stephen Menn (McGill/Humboldt) writes:

The APA Guide to Graduate Programs for 2012 says that it's giving "information about Ph.D., M.A., and equivalent degree programs in the United States and Canada." But in fact neither their Doctoral nor their Master's program guides include any information at all about Canadian programs. Both of the guides have notes at the end saying "the following schools did not submit data for this report," and giving a list, and neither of those lists includes any Canadian schools. So it's not that the Canadian schools didn't respond. Rather, it looks as if the APA sent out questionnaires to a list of schools (of which some responded and some not), but that they simply forgot to send the questionnaire to any Canadian schools. The effect of the APA's Guide will be to tell prospective graduate applicants that there are no Canadian graduate programs worth bothering about. Canadian philosophers (unlike Europeans and Mexicans and so on) pay full APA dues, for full membership in APA divisions, and this is not how we want our dues money spent. I don't think the APA can cure this simply by changing their wording and saying "information about Ph.D., M.A., and equivalent degree programs in the United States," and never mind the Canadians. At an absolute minimum they should say, "for information about Canadian graduate programs, see http://www.acpcpa.ca/en/departments.php", which will at least give their readers links to the departmental websites. But it would be better if they took the webpage offline and made a more serious effort next year--or this year if there is still time to do it ahead of the graduate application season, but there won't be much time remaining for everyone to get their information together.

AND STILL MORE:  Rebecca Kukla (Georgetown) writes:

The Georgetown entry in the APA guide is also fully of errors and weirdnesses. I have no idea how the information got collected or transmitted or by whom so I am not blaming anyone in particular. But our write-up underreports our minority and female students, and the list of our strengths is very odd. For instance the list does not mention feminist philosophy, ethics, or political philosophy, which I would think are much more clearly strengths of ours than is philosophy of language. Anyways it seems that guide should be taken with a grain of salt.

Given the unfortunate extent of the errors and omissions, I'm opening comments for other examples.  Signed comments only:  full name and valid e-mail address.  Please comment only on your own department's listing (or omission).  As noted last week, comments may take awhile to appear due to other pressing obligations.  Please be patient.

The "madhatter" of philosophy

Roy Sorensen (Wash U/St. Louis) of course!