Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Edwin Mellen Press Continues with Meritless Harassment of Bloggers

The people who run Edwin Mellen Press are pretty clearly nuts.  (Calling these folks "nuts" isn't actionable in the United States, but, for the record, my lawyer is based in the same jurisdiction as Mellen Press, New York, though maybe my wife's law firm here in Chicago would enjoy assigning the case to a junior associate for practice.)  This time they're pursuing the "Scholarly Kitchen" blog, for a blog post that is clearly not actionable, and for a comment on that post that is also probably not actionable.  Here's the "offending" post by Mr. Anderson of the blog:  nothing in it is libelous, even if Mellen Press and Mr. Richardson were private citizens, rather then public figures.  The letter from the Press's lawyer says, obviously falsely, that the blog has a "legal obligation" to deal with possibly defamatory comments; the comment in question is probably not defamatory, but even if it were, the Scholarly Kitchen blog has no obligation to remove it.  The law in the United States is as clear as can be on this point.  As best I can tell, Ms. Amendola, the Press's lawyer, is a 2010 graduate of the law school at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who worked briefly for a Buffalo law firm, and is now a solo practitioner.   If state bar associations were more aggressive, she should be disbarred for sending nonsense threats like the one she sent to the "Scholarly Kitchen" blog.

I predict that the Edwin Mellen Press will be out of business within the next few years.  Good riddance, given this disgraceful pattern of harassment.  May I suggest that any authors of serious monographs with the Mellen Press contact them now and urge them to reform their "public relations" practices?

UPDATE:  More from IHE.

 

New Books in March

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

Contemporary Metaethics:  An Introduction by Alexander Miller (2nd ed., Polity Press, 2013).

Tocqueville:  The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty by Lucien Jaume, trans. A. Goldhammer (Princeton University Press, 2013).

Forgotten Justice:  The Forms of Justice in the History of Legal and Political Theory by Allan Beever (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Decomposing the Will edited by Andy Clark, Julian Kiverstein & Tillmann Vierkant (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Agency and the Foundations of Ethics:  Nietzschean Constituvism by Paul Katsafanas (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Hard Feelings:  The Moral Psychology of Contempt by Macalaster Bell (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Paradoxes by Roy T. Cook (Polity Press, 2013).

The Neural Basis of Free Will:  Criterial Causation by Peter Ulrich Tse (MIT Press, 2013).

(Belated) thanks to Rebecca Kukla for her contributions to the blog...

...while I was in South America the last two weeks.  You can see her contributions here.

APA Meeting Suggestions

Philosopher David Braun (Buffalo) wrote me several days ago (while I was in Brazil, hence the delay in posting):

I am currently at the Pacific APA.  There was a serious problem with registration for the conference.  The registration desk was NOT open the night before sessions began (Tues night), and did not open till 8:30 am on Wed, which was one-half hour before the sessions began.  There was a long long line formed well before 8:30 am.  It included people who were supposed to give talks at 9:00 am, or comment on such talks, or chair such talks, or who wanted simply to hear such talks.

I think the APA should do one, or preferably both, of the following:  (1)  Open the registration desk the night before sessions begin.  (2) Print the room numbers for the sessions for the first morning in the printed program.

Sensible suggestions, which I imagine the APA will try to act on.

10th Anniversary of a World-Historic Crime

We recently marked the 10th anniversary of the criminal war of aggression against Iraq by the United States.  This item is a useful reflection on the disgraceful performance of the "free" press in America during that episode.  Here's what we posted on the occasion of the 5th anniversary.

Stanley from Rutgers to Yale

Jason Stanley (philosophy of language, epistemology, history of analytic philosophy), Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Yale University, where he will start July 1 (this is subject to Board approval, but that is expected).  That's a significant appointment for Yale, which will continue that department's upward trajectory over the last decade.

Friday poem: "What is lost remains"

What is lost remains

           
What is lost remains

Invisible always present

Remembered and forgotten

 

It is the seal

That holds the present whole

Though porous when stirred

 

Is it not my memory

That keeps me hopeful

Even as darkness approaches

 

Peopled by those lost

And those lingering

Who add yesterdays to today

 

And make becoming

More than illusion

Tomorrow almost feasible

          
1/30/13-1/31/13

Copyright 2013 by Maurice Leiter.

Posted with permission.

My Nietzsche blog

I haven't posted a link to it in a long time, but perhaps there is some stuff there of interest to some readers (I don't update it very often, maybe once or twice a month).

Zupko from Winnipeg to Alberta

Jack Zupko (medieval philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of religion), currently Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at the University of Winnipeg, has accepted appointment as Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at the University of Alberta, effective July 1.

Robert Fisk on the disaster of Internet anonymity

Here.  Of course, it's not always a disaster, as anonymous commenting on this blog, I believe, shows.  But moderation keeps away trolls and wackos, and the quality of the readership insures that the anonymous comments are substantive and worthwhile.

Bar-On, Simmons from North Carolina to U Conn

Dorit Bar-On (philosophy of language and mind, metaethics) and Keith Simmons (philosophy of language and logi, philosophical logic), both Professors of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have accepted senior offers from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where they will start in fall 2014.  This is the latest in a series of senior and junior hires that has almost doubled the size of the department in recent years, and given the program especially notable strengths in areas such as philosophy of logic and language.

New Journal: Critical Philosophy of Race

First issue on-line. (Thanks to Chike Jeffers for the pointer.)

Information Technology helpdesk, circa 1200

Here.

(Thanks to Lisa Selden for the pointer.)

Collective Creativity on Facebook (Kukla)

There is something kind of beautiful happening on Facebook right now, as people riff on an image honoring the goal of marriage equality on the day SCOTUS hears opening arguments. This kind of super-fast, bottom-up, collective creativity is one of the most interesting and delightful things enabled by the Internet, I think. If you haven't logged on today, you should check out your feed.

Playing Infinite Chess with Joel David Hamkins

at 3am.

Decision theory: your frequently asked questions...

....answered.

William Lycan elected Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities

More information here.

Honderich in The Guardian

Thanks to philosopher Phil Gasper for calling my attention to this profile, which is both interesting, but also a bit surprising:

Honderich may be in for further trouble with his revised edition of the Oxford Companion to Philosophy. He's typically downbeat about his part in the original project. "I think I was only asked because I was considered reliable," he says. "Other philosophers had said they would do it and then failed to deliver on deadline. I imagine they thought it wasn't proper work for a philosopher."

This time round, free from the constraints of the academic circus, he's been free to make 300 additions, including "ableism" - "it basically means being condescending to cripples" - and "zombies". But it's the subtractions that will cause the biggest stir, as they are mostly philosophers who have failed to live up to their promise or with whom Honderich has had spats. He declines to list them - "you could check both volumes" - but he does offer an explanation. "There are bonds of civility we all owe to other people," he says. "If people break those bonds we are under a lesser obligation to maintain them ourselves." 

One wonders whether OUP was aware of this editorial approach to the second edition?  And I'm guessing there will not be an entry for Colin McGinn!

UPDATE:  A couple of readers point out that this article is actually several years old, which I had not notice; Prof. Gasper sent it to me only recently.

A one-year, on-line BA?

A 50-year-old professional plans to try it.  And he's got some philosophy offerings in there!

(Thanks to Lee McIntyre for the pointer.)

Nigel Warburton on Cosmpolitanism

Here.

Call for Nominations: Distinguished Woman Philosopher 2013 (Kukla)

Each year the Eastern Division of the Society for Women in Philosophy comes together to honor a woman philosopher whose contributions to the support of women in philosophy and to philosophy itself are outstanding and merit special recognition. A panel and reception celebrating the honoree's accomplishments will be organized for the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, December 27-30, 2013.

Nominations should include a copy of the nominee's curriculum vitae and a minimum of two supporting letters, which summarize the nominee's contributions to philosophy and support of women in philosophy. NOTE: Two-thirds of letter writers for any given nomination must be members of the society for women in philosophy, in good standing.

Please e-mail all nominations to Rochelle Green, ESWIP Distinguished Woman Philosopher Award Secretary ([email protected]) no later than April 1, 2013.

 

(H/T Sally Haslanger)

Emergence of the Global South

Interesting facts courtesy of historian Juan Cole (Michigan).

"First Things" on "Why Tolerate Religion?"

First Things is a conservative Catholic intellectual magazine.  An unsigned editorial in the April 2013 issue opines that,

A recent book by...Brian Leiter outlines what may well become the theoretical consensus used to reinterpret the First Amendment.  "There is no principled reason," he writes in Why Tolerate Religion?, "for legal or constitutional regimes to single out religion for protection."  He buys the ideological [sic] attack on religion, describing religious belief as a uniquely bad combination of moral fervor and mental blindness.  It serves no public good that justifies special protection.  More significant--and this is his main thesis--it is patently unfair to provide it with such.  Why should a Catholic or Jew have a special right while Peter Singer, a committed utilitarian, doesn't?  Evoking the principle of fairness, Leiter argues that everybody's conscience should be accorded the same legal protections.  Thus he proposes to replace religious liberty with a plenary "liberty of conscience."

Without dwelling on some of the mischaracterizations of my argument (the general thrust of it they have right), it's striking to me that they believe this "may well become the theoretical consensus used to reinterpret the First Amendment."  I would welcome that, but I don't expect it to happen in my lifetime.  I do think there's more potential in Canada and the European countries, many of which already recognize "liberty of conscience," but have yet, in practice, to extend that much beyond religious claims of conscience.  (Of course, I also think there should be no exemptions from laws respsecting the principle of toleration and that promote the general welfare, unless those exemptions do not shift burdens on to others.)

Readings by Women for Intro Classes (Kukla)

Here is a nascent useful wiki.  

As far as I can tell no one is vetting this to assess how suited all of these readings actually are for intro classes. (Color me dubious about some of them.) And for my part, I wish it were a broader database that included canon-stretching readings of ALL sorts and not just readings by women. All the same it seems to me to be a useful initiative, and it may grow into an even more useful one.

UPDATE: Here is another, similar database coming out of Australia. This one has a nicer interface and some vetting. It's for readings by women for undergrads, not just intro classes. Thanks to Patrick McGivern for the tip!

Spam! (Kukla)

Thomas Nadelhoffer just pointed me towards a spam folder whose filter was overzealously censoring many of you, including me. I have now posted comments that were hanging around in there. Many apologies to those of you who have been wondering why your comments were not showing up.  

"Peripheral Speech", Gender, and Blog Participation (Kukla)

Recently, Cassie Herbert (one of my grad students at Georgetown) and I have been thinking and writing about what we have dubbed peripheral speech. Peripheral speech is a kind of speech within expert communities – that is, any communities held together by shared expertise combined with a shared social identity.  These could be professional communities (tort lawyers, physicists, philosophers, philosophers of race, experimental philosophers…) or avocational communities (trekkies, antique car restoration fanatics…). Peripheral speech is not institutionally sanctioned expert speech such as giving colloquia, teaching, or publishing an article, nor is it just expertise-irrelevant chit-chat. It’s speech that draws on the shared expertise and social identity of the community but in an informal way, around the margins of official expert speech. It is often but not always playful. It can include blogging, professional gossip, facebook interactions, and professional ‘insider’ jokes, for instance. (One of our favorite examples is the ongoing circulation of the ‘Philosophers' Proofs that P’.) There is no crisp line between peripheral and regular expert speech, of course, and while peripheral speech is often pleasurable it is not inherently bad or good; it can have powerful positive and negative effects, we argue.

Cassie’s and my main philosophical interest here is in the pragmatics of peripheral speech, and in particular in how the performative force of peripheral speech acts can serve to include and exclude expert community members, as well as to solidify, constitute, and negotiate community norms. 

Pragmatics aside, Cassie noticed something suggestive, a couple of days ago, about who engages in peripheral philosophy speech, at least on blogs. She got interested in the gender of the commenters on this blog and the Newapps blog, both of which often take up issues pertaining to the discipline as a whole. Here were her Totally Unscientific and Already Out of Date Yet Suggestive findings. In the last eight blog posts on this blog (as of a couple of days ago) that received at least 16 comments, 71% of the commenters were identifiably male, 7% were identifiably female, 11% were by the post author (rightly a separate category) and 18% were anonymous, pseudonymous, or unidentifiable.  In the last eight corresponding posts on Newapps, 55% were identifiably male, 11% female, 24% by the post author, and 11% were anonymous/pseudonymous/unidentifiable.  She also found that on both blogs, later commenters were nine times less likely to refer explicitly back to female commenters as to male commenters. It’s not clear that this means that individual women got significantly less uptake, but it is an interesting snapshot of who is in the conversation.

Again this is all wildly unscientific but it is suggestive of interesting trends concerning who engages in peripheral speech in philosophy and who receives uptake for doing so. The relationship between this and issues of participation in formal expert speech is worth exploring, I think. If peripheral speech really does play a central role in solidifying and negotiating expert communities and their boundaries, then who participates in it can have all sorts of interesting consequences.

(Bonus thought: Cassie could not collect meaningful numbers for the Feminist Philosophers blog, because such a high percentage of the bloggers and commenters there use pseudonyms. She pointed out that this in itself has an interesting dynamic to it, since the identity of those folks is somewhere between private and public. Many of us know who is speaking and whom we are addressing when we comment on FPB, and many of us do not. It occurs to me that this in itself raises questions about inclusion, exclusion, and the pragmatics of peripheral speech; the use of semi-private pseudonyms can create a kind of insider discourse and identity for those ‘in the know’ and can have an exclusionary effect on others.)

CUNY's Virginia Held at 3AM

Here.  (Sorry for the somewhat belated link.)

Chatting with Kate Norlock, Chair of the APA Committee on Sexual Harassment (Kukla)

Recently, the APA appointed a new ad hoc committee on sexual harassment in the discipline. I chatted with the inimitable Kate Norlock (Trent University), who is chairing the committee, about the committee itself and more generally about sexual harassment in academic philosophy. There is much more to be said than we could fit into one conversation, so I encourage discussion in the comments thread. (Although I will be using plenty of moderator's discretion on this one as needed!)

Rebecca: Why are we forming a sexual harassment committee now? Why are we just now facing the fact that the discipline has a real sexual harassment problem? How much of that has to do with the power of the Internet?

Kate: I recently looked back at the number of entries on the What is it Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy? blog labeled "sexual harassment." In the word-cloud label on that blog it's one of the biggest labels, and I count 71 entries so categorized. I remember when Jenny Saul started that blog, she asked what labels she should create for the different entries. I suggested that she wait and see what patterns emerged, and the labels would suggest themselves. I don't think either of us expected so many stories of harassment so early. I think the power of the Internet, and more importantly, the power of motivated and caring users, is that philosophers who have experienced or witnessed harassment are finally able to find each other on blogs like What It's Like. I'm dead grateful that women in the profession like Jenny Saul have gone out of their way to provide gathering places for collecting accounts of harassment.

Rebecca: In your view, why it important that we, as a discipline, address sexual harassment?

Kate: I think the effects of harassment piggyback on the effects of a lot of other marginalizations that are evident in philosophy. The experiences of minorities in a field that is predominantly white, predominantly male, and predominantly middle- and upper-class can be discouraging, and perpetuate imbalances in the demographics of our profession. I think harassment amplifies that discouragement.

Other fields make it clearer in policy and organizational statements that harassment of some sorts is a crime - that it's not just not-acceptable but illegal. We're a bit behind in that respect. Some of the APA's more recent documents discourage interviews in private hotel rooms and so forth, with the implication that past practices are regrettable. But this runs the risk of making it seem as though the culture of bad practices is a norm that we disparage, not an unacceptable arrangement.

E. J. Lowe Interviewed

at 3am.

Conference on Diversity in Philosophy (Kukla)

Given the vigorous interest many philosophers clearly have in the composition of the discipline, and in what we can do to diversify it in appropriate ways, readers may well be interested in this conference on diversity in philosophy, hosted by the APA committee on the status of women.

X-Phil meets...

...aesthetics.

Master's Degrees, Postdocs, and the Hyperprofessionalization of Philosophy (Kukla)

Hi everyone!  I am grateful to Brian for giving me the honor of guest-blogging here again. It’s been about a year and a half since my last stint, and there have been all sorts of vigorous and controversial discussions going on in the discipline since then; I hope to touch on several of them over the next week.

In the mean time I will start with something seasonally appropriate, as this year’s job market starts to wind down just as the Amazing Graduate Admissions Race hurdles towards its April 15^th climax.

I’ve been on the graduate admissions committee at Georgetown for the last several years. It is striking to me what a hefty – and I think growing – percentage of the students we admit are coming out of terminal MA programs, or in some cases other sorts of graduate programs. The large majority of the people we admitted this year had some graduate training already. My informal sense is that it’s getting hard for undergraduates to compete for spots in PhD programs. And while I have no numbers, I know it’s not just us, because top-ranked programs like Pitt, Stanford, and NYU keep scooping our admits (curses!). A quick glance at the placement records of good terminal MA programs like Georgia State and Tufts reaffirms that students with MAs are nabbing top PhD spots, although that’s not comparative data obviously.

Anyhow all this seems to me to be a sea-change. Doing a terminal MA in the US was quite uncommon back when I was a grad student, and it certainly wasn’t any kind of prerequisite for getting into a good PhD program, to understate the point.

Meanwhile, though again I have no systematic data, clearly more people are doing postdocs before they settle into tenure track jobs.  There are 29 postdocs listed so far on this Brian’s annual list of hires and I suspect there will be many more to come. This too is a sea change.

It’s unclear to me what is driving all this. Why are people doing terminal MAs? Why are people funding philosophy postdocs? (It’s not mysterious why people are taking them.) 

It seems to me that one clear co-traveling phenomenon is a sharp increase in professionalization among young philosophers. I am certainly blown away by how professionalized the PhD applications are from the top people coming out of MA programs; these people have mastered the form and tone of professional philosophical writing and often have several conference presentations and even publications. I can’t tell how much is cause and how much is effect here, although surely the causality goes both ways. (Students need MAs to be professionalized enough to compete, partly because so many of their competitors have MAs…) And on the other end, people coming out of postdocs and into tenure-track jobs have mind-blowingly impressive cvs. The post-doc model is clearly pushing us more in the direction of the sciences, which traditionally have a different publication rhythm than we do.

My question is, what should we make of all this? What are the upsides and downsides of this kind of professionalization and this new and increasingly routine trajectory? How if at all is it changing our evaluative standards? What are the consequences for people’s lives of extending the whole path to a secure job at both ends? We might think about two sorts of questions here:

• Does this all make for better or worse philosophy getting done, in the end? Or neither?

• If a terminal MA and a postdoc become standard parts of the career path, might this create disadvantages (or advantages) for already-vulnerable would-be philosophers, such as people from working class backgrounds, or people with family responsibilities?

My own tentative view is that things cut both ways on both sets of questions. Anyhow, thoughts? I’d love to hear from anyone, but it would be especially interesting to hear from people who have recently chosen to do MAs and/or postdocs.

UPDATE: Some people are posting anonymous comments using fake email addresses. I am not going to post those. Some of these seem to me to be completely reasonable comments, and I encourage people to re-post using a real email address (and ideally your name, but that's not necessarily a deal breaker). 

UPDATE: See above update.

New Books in Philosophy Podcast

Jesse Prinz's The Conscious Brain.

(Thanks to Dirk Felleman for the pointer.)

Please welcome guest-blogger Rebecca Kukla

I'm very pleased to report that philosopher Rebecca Kukla (Georgetown) has agreed to return as a guest-blogger here for the next week (and perhaps a bit beyond, her schedule permitting).  I may have a few items as well during this time, but Professor Kukla will be the main attraction.

More on the faculty unrest at NYU over President Sexton's plans

Story here.  (Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos" Finally Has a Zealous Defender: Leon Wieseltier

I guess this means the book is finished for sure.

(Thanks to many different readres who sent me this gem.)

UPDATE:  A reader writes, "He didn't address any of the substantive criticisms of the book."  To which I replied, "Of course not!"

A belated 'thank you' to the Danish Philosophical Association...

...for having me as one of the two keynote speakers at their annual conference last week.  It was a real pleasure and an honor.  Special thanks to Prof. Nikolaj Nottelmann and his colleagues for their extroardinary hospitality and stimulating company.  My talk, "Nietzsche Against the Philosophical Canon," will go up on SSRN in April, I hope.  (The other keynote was a terrific presentation by Jessica Brown [St. Andrews] on intuitions as evidence in philosophy, arguing against Max Deutsch, Hilary Kornblith, and Timothy Williamson.  As those two rather different topics indicate, the Danish philosophical community is admirably diverse in its interests!)

Krauss v. Albert cont.

Curious.

Philosopher on the Front Page!

It's John Martin Fischer (UC Riverside) and his "Immortality Project" in the Los Angeles Times.

"The Boundaries of the Moral (and Legal) Community"

This was the 2011 Meador Lecture at the University of Alabama.  A number of readers gave me helpful comments on a draft that was on SSRN, and are acknowledged in the footnotes.  Many thanks!

Miami's Colin McGinn...

...at 3AM.

Why Tolerate Religion? Some practical ramifications...

...are well-illustrated by this Illinois case.

More on "What Mary Can't Expect When Expecting"...

...at the NPR blog.  One long-time reader, not a philosopher, observed that the conclusion of the paper was obvious.  But as I replied, "Not to philosophers!"  But maybe now it will be!

Philosophers discuss the Unabomber

Unusual!

Memorial for R.G. Frey

Information here.

A critical look at "outcomes assessment"...

...by philosopher Steven Hales.

Plutocracy Watch: Chomsky Edition

Here.

UPDATE:  And here's a video (thanks to Tim Connolly for that link).

Male/Female enrollments by PhD program

Some data here; I imagine the author would welcome corrections and additions.

An audio of Freud speaking in English

Here (thanks to Matthew Keeler for the pointer).

Holton, Langton from MIT to Cambridge

Richard Holton (ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of action, philosophy of law) and Rae Langton (Kant, ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, feminist philosophy), both Professors of Philosophy at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, have accepted Professorships at Cambridge University, effective September 1.  That is a major hiring coup for Cambridge, and coming on the heels of recent Professorial appointments of Tim Crane and Huw Price, as well as a number of junior appointments, probably puts Cambridge Philosophy in its strongest position in several decades.