Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

New Books in July

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

Omissions:  Agency, Metaphysics, and Responsibility by Randolph Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Faith & Wisdom in Science by Tom McLeish (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Equal Recognition:  The Moral Foundations of Minority Rights by Alan Patten (Princeton University Press, 2014).

Why Not Capitalism? by Jason Brennan (Routledge, 2014).

Moral Psychology:  A Contemporary Introduction by Valerie Tiberius (Routledge, 2014).

Philosophy of Social Science:  A Contemporary Introduction by Mark Risjord (Routledge, 2014).

Philosophy, Science, and History:  A Guide and Reader edited by Lydia Patton (Routledge, 2014).

Unruly Words:  A Study of Vague Language by Diana Raffman (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Henry Siegman on Gaza: an interview at "Democracy Now"

Here.  An excerpt:

[Israel] has what seems on the surface a justifiable objective of ending these attacks, the rockets that come from Gaza and are aimed—it’s hard to say they’re aimed at civilians, because they never seem to land anywhere that causes serious damage, but they could and would have, if not for luck. So, on the face of it, Israel has a right to do what it’s doing now, and, of course, it’s been affirmed by even president of the United States, repeatedly, that no country would agree to live with that kind of a threat repeatedly hanging over it.

But what he doesn’t add, and what perverts this principle, undermines the principle, is that no country and no people would live the way Gazans have been made to live. And consequently, this moral equation which puts Israel on top as the victim that has to act to prevent its situation from continuing that way, and the Palestinians in Gaza, or Hamas, the organization responsible for Gaza, who are the attackers, our media rarely ever points out that these are people who have a right to live a decent, normal life, too. And they, too, must think, "What can we do to put an end to this?"

And this is why in the Politico article that you mentioned, I pointed out the question of the morality of Israel’s action depends, in the first instance, on the question: Couldn’t Israel be doing something in preventing this disaster that is playing out now, in terms of the destruction of human lives? Couldn’t they have done something that didn’t require that cost? And the answer is: Sure, that they could have ended the occupation, with results—whatever the risks are, they certainly aren’t greater than the price being paid now for Israel’s effort to continue and sustain permanently their relationship to the Palestinians.

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

Senators unveil new legislation addressing sexual assault on campus

IHE has an account.

Haaretz editorial denounces Bar-Ilan Dean for his "McCarthyist values"

Here.

Philosopher Samir Chopra and other academics arrested in New York at protest against slaughter in Gaza

Prof. Chopra's account here.

The reader polls so far: a summary of the results

The chart below summarizes the reader poll conducted over the past month or so--all got between 1200 and 1700 responses, roughly.   Readers can scroll through to find the precise wording, but in each case there were five choices:  a "central, foundational" part of the discipline; a major area of research; "useful when" either integrated with pertinent sciences (e.g., metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, language, mind) or integrated with contemporary philosophcial questions (e.g.,. logic, history).

 

Area/Opinion	Central, foundational	Major research area	Useful when…	Minor area	(Dismissive option)
Metaphysics	29%	21%	21%	8%	20%
Epistemology	56%	14%	13%	3%	15%
Philosophy of Language	31%	21%	21%	7%	21%
Philosophy of Mind	34%	25%	28%	5%	8%
Ethics (theoretical, not applied)	54%	22%	11%	4%	9%
History of Philosophy	55%	25%	12%	6%	2%
Logic	51%	12%	23%	5%	9%

 

Judging from hiring patterns, it would seem that top-ranked PhD programs take a different view of what is central and foundational than the readership as a whole--not surprising, given that the readership is much broader than faculty and grad students at top PGR departments.  What do readers make of the results?  (I'll be running some more polls, on more specialized sub-fields [e.g., X-phil, phenomenology, feminist philosophy etc.] soon.)

Because I am on the road, comments may take awhile to appear--please post them only once.

UPDATE:  Thanks to reader Rashed Ahmed for this nice diagram of the results.

Petition in support of Hanoch Sheinman

I would urge readers to sign this well-crafted petition in support of Prof. Sheinman, drafted by philosophers Matthew Kramer (Cambridge) and Sergio Tenenbaum (Toronto).

Plato in Michigan?

Jason Stanley (Yale) comments on "Detroit's Drought of Democracy."

Statement by Israeli academics opposed to the slaughter in Gaza

Here.

(Thanks to Huw Price for the pointer.)

Bar-Ilan legal philosopher Hanoch Sheinman generates "outrage" by sending e-mail...

...expressing the hope that his students and their friends and families are not among the victims of the violent conflict in Gaza and the surrounding areas.  The Dean at Bar-Ilan, whose reaction is quoted at the link, is a disgrace.

Comedians talk about philosophers

Free podcasts!

(Thanks to Kylie Wakefield for the pointer.)

Should philosophy of religion be taught at secular universities?

A curious discussion going on in the bowels of cyberspace apparently launched by an atheist radio personality.  I would think the answer is pretty clearly "yes," given that a number of important metaphysical and epistemological issues are raised in the context of philosophy of religion, both contemporary and historical, though it is certainly true that too much of it now functions as Christian apologetics.

(Thanks to David Killoren for the pointer.)

CUNY's Godfrey-Smith to take up half-time appointment at Sydney

Peter Godfrey Smith (philosophy of biology & mind), Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center, has accepted a half-time appointment at the University of Sydney, where he will spend every Northern Hemisphere summer and every other spring term.

Geneva makes offer to UCSD's Wüthrich (UPDATED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 16---UPDATED

 

Christian Wüthrich (philosophy of science and physics, metaphysics), associate professor of philosophy and of science studies at the University of California, San Diego, has been offered an associate professorship for philosophy of science at the Department of Philosophy, University of Geneva, Switzerland.

 

UPDATE:  Prof. Wüthrich has accepted the offer from Geneva, where he will start in August 2015.

U Conn's Michael Lynch on the NSA and privacy

Here.

Sandel on the moral limits of markets

A podcast.

(Thanks to Dirk Felleman for the pointer.)

Kant specialist Allais considering senior offers from Michigan and UC San Diego (UPDATED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 13--UPDATED

Lucy Allais, a specialist in Kant who currently teaches at the Universities of Sussex and Witwatersrand, has senior offers from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and the University of California, San Diego (the UCSD offer is for the new Henry Allison Chair in the History of Philosophy).  Hopefully her situation will be resolved before the fall PGR surveys.

UPDATE:   Prof. Allais has accepted the post at UCSD, where she will spend the Winter and Spring quarters each year, remaining the rest of the time at Witwatersrand.  This appointment may well push UCSD, already a strong place for Kant studies, into the very top ranks.

Two philosophers win Australian Future Fellowships

They are  Mark Kelly (Western Sydney) for a project on normativity in science, law and ethics; and Colin Klein (Macquarie) for a project on neuroimaging and theories of mind.

(Thanks to John Hadley for the pointer.)

 

 

In Manhattan's future?

The Onion probably nails it.

UPDATE:  Egads, The Onion is late:  such doors already exist in London!  (Thanks to John Dupre for the pointer.)

ANOTHER:  It's a reality (or soon to be one) in New York too!  (Thanks to Eric Wolf for the pointer.)

Still more on Gaza, from David Enoch

Philosopher David Enoch (Hebrew U) tells me that the translation is not his.  It's well worth reading, and makes a nice point.

Ludlow's defamation lawsuit against newspapers that falsely accused him of "rape" dismissed

There is a news account here; I have not seen the opinion, so am only going on this account (though it strikes me as plausible, given what I know about the local judiciary).  The result is a case study in what is wrong with American defamation law, and helps explain why our media, including our cyber-media, are such cesspools of falsehoods and garbage. 

Consider:  a student accuses Jon of groping her breasts and buttocks; Jon's behavior is both wrongful and illegal--it is both tortious and criminal.  The newspapers, however, report that Jon is accused of "rape," which is defined in most jurisdictions as non-consensual penetration of the vagina or anus of another person, or non-consensual contact between the genitals of one person and the mouth, vagina or anus of another (this is not, however, the precise definition in Illinois, which probably helped the defendants here).  Legal definitions aside, everyone knows that being accused of non-consensual groping is not as heinous as being accused of rape.  Even the defendants know that, since they revised their original misdescription of the allegations and removed the word "rape"!

I should emphasize, given the general level of insanity surrounding this whole issue, that everything I have written above about Ludlow's lawsuit against the newspapers is correct even if every actual allegation against Ludlow by the student is correct.

UPDATE:  I respect the important work philosopher Heidi Lockwood has done to assist victims of sexual assault and sexual harassment, and have benefitted in the past from her knowledge of Title IX.  Her intervention on this particular issue is, however, confused and irrelevant.  Rape is always a kind of sexual assault, but not all sexual assaults are a kind of rape, and this is true even in jurisdictions that do not use the term "rape" but define sexual assault in terms of degree, with rape always being first-degree (i.e., not all sexual assaults are first-degree sexual assault).  The latter is the only issue here, not the former.  More to the point, Illinois defines rape as "criminal sexual assault" involving "sexual penetration," the latter defined as follows:

Means any contact, however slight, between the sex organ or anus of one person and an object or the sex organ, mouth, or anus of another person, or any intrusion, however slight, of any part of the body of one person or of any animal or object into the sex organ or anus of another person, including, but not limited to, cunnilingus, fellatio, or anal penetration. Evidence of emission of semen is not required to prove sexual penetration.

There was never an allegation of sexual penetration against Ludlow by the undergraduate student, so there was never an allegation of criminal sexual assault, i.e., rape.  Defendant Sun-Times recognized this once contacted by Ludlow's attorney:  that is why they revised their headline, removing the word "rape" and replacing it with "sexual assault."  In other words, defendant newspaper recognized the meanings were different.  Judge Flanagan, according to the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, found that the "the defamation and false light claim...fail on the basis of the fair-report privilege":

That privilege protects a publisher of defamatory matter when the matter fairly and accurately summarizes statements in public documents or proceedings at official public meetings, such as court documents or hearings.

“There is a fair abridgment of a proceeding where the sting of the defamatory statement in the proceeding is the same as a sting of the defamatory report,” Flanagan wrote. “The hallmark of the privilege is the accuracy of the summary, not the truth or falsity of the information being summarized.”

The only question, in other words, is whether the "sting" of being accused of rape is the same as the "sting" of being accused of sexual assault (not criminal sexual assault).  The Sun-Times did not think so, but the Judge did.  The most plausible explanation I can think of for so finding is bias against the plaintiff on the part of the judge--a bias consistent with what I have been told by a lawyer with twenty years of experience of litigating defamation cases in Cook County courts (where Judge Flanagan sits).  More generally, American libel law tends to err on the side of sacrificing the plaintiff's reputation in the alleged interest of the "public"--the fair-report privilege, as applied in this instance, is an example.  That line of law began with New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964, but it was Sullivan's progeny that adopted the foolishly capacious approach to "public figures" and "public interest."  (Interestingly, when I ran a poll of law faculty on the 50th anniversary of Sullivan, the vast majority thought Sullivan itself rightly decided, but a majority thought its legacy had not been a good one, which is my own view as well.)

ANOTHER:  Prof. Lockwood's additional reply.  Most of the latter is non-responsive, so I will keep it brief.  That some victims of sexual assault experience it as being as bad as rape (undoubtedly true) is irrelevant to Ludlow's defamation action, unless it were the case that the population generally shares that view (undoubtedly false).  For unless both kinds of sex crimes are viewed as equally heinous generally, being falsely accused of rape will still constitute per se libel.  In addition, as pointed out here, Prof. Lockwood has misrepresented one of her central examples, the law in Ohio.

Interesting article about and interview with Gideon Levy

Here. An excerpt:

He appeals to anybody who is sincerely concerned about Israel’s safety and security to join him in telling Israelis the truth in plain language. “A real friend does not pick up the bill for an addict’s drugs: he packs the friend off to rehab instead. Today, only those who speak up against Israel’s policies – who denounce the occupation, the blockade, and the war – are the nation’s true friends.” The people who defend Israel’s current course are “betraying the country” by encouraging it on “the path to disaster. A child who has seen his house destroyed, his brother killed, and his father humiliated will not easily forgive.”

It is testimony to the remaining vibrancy of public debate in Israel that Levy can serve as a columnist with the country's most important newspaper; in the U.S., of course, he would long ago been driven to the margins by Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz, and the other smear merchants of the Israeli right.

Geneva's Pascal Engel interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Neuroscience vs. Philosophy, once again

Discussion with Margaret Boden (Sussex) and Barry Smith (Birkbeck), among others.

"Sein und Zeit? More like sein und shite"...

...and other "unfair philosophical criticisms."

University of Warwick embarrasses itself on the world stage...

...as it brings an English Professor up on charges of "insubordination"!  Have English universities gone insane?  What's going on here?  Links and more information welcome.

So what do readers think of philosophy of mind?

It turns out that, mostly, they like it!  With over 1400 votes (pretty good for the middle of summer, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere), 34% thought philosophy of mind "a central, foundational part of the discipline," and another 26% described it as "a major area of research."  27% more deemed it "useful when integrated with psychology and the cognitive sciences":  so that's 87% with the most favorable options.  4% described it as a "minor area of research," and only 8% chose the most dismissive option.

Even the "liberal" U.S. media can't tolerate critical discussion of Israeli policy

A telling incident.

It would be grossly immoral to cut off electricity and water in Gaza...

...but is it legal?  12 Israeli scholars argue it is not.

SEIU's drive to organize adjuncts

Interesting IHE story, including about some schools where adjuncts voted against joining the union (I will bet they come to regret that).

Aspiring PhD students interested in Ancient Philosophy will want to keep an eye on this

Marko Malink, Associate Professor of Philosophy here at the University of Chicago, and Jennifer Whiting, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, both have senior offers from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh.  (Malink also has a tenured offer from another top department, though I don't yet have permission to name the one.)  While both Chicago and Toronto will continue to have strong ancient philosophy programs if they lose these faculty, Pitt will go from being strong in ancient to one of two or three best programs in the U.S. if they can recruit them both.  Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be resolved in time for the current PGR surveys.  (Pitt has already made a junior lateral hire of Jessica Gelber in ancient from Syracuse.)

Another reader poll: what do you think of philosophy of mind?

As usual, choose the option closest to your own view, even if you might not put it quite the way the poll has it.

QuestionPro

A young philosophy grad from the Hebrew U on events in Israel

Quoted here.

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

At last, the perfect briefcase for the late Frankfurt School theorist in your life

Here.

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

Another Israeli academic displays his humanity

This is extraordinary.  (I've been hearing about it, unsurprisingly, from friends who are Israeli academics who are in disbelief.)

UPDATE:  More here, including the university's response.

Philosophical marriage

Parfit & Radcliffe Richards.

(Thanks to Aleja Santos for the pointer.)

The APA Code project, once again

The MLA code is here, and seems unobjectionable, though one wonders what difference it actually makes.  (Does anyone know?  Any examples?)

Leading American Research Universities in the Sciences based on NAS Membership

The National Academy of Sciences is somewhat more selective than the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, though has some of the same "friends of friends" problems in its membership, but perhaps not as bad.  Many of the schools on this list do not have medical schools (e.g., Berkeley, MIT, Princeton, Cal Tech, among others), while some are essentially only medical schools (e.g., UT Southwestern and UC San Francisco).  In any case, for your amusement, here are the American universities with the most elected Fellows

1.    Harvard University (153)

2.    Stanford University (144)

3.    University of California, Berkeley (127)

4.    Massachussetts Institute of Technology (114)

5.    Princeton University (81)

6.    California Institute of Technology (71)

7.    University of California, San Diego (67)

8.    Yale University (58)

9.    Columbia University (51)

10.    University of Washington, Seattle (49)

11.    University of California, Los Angeles (39)

11.    University of Chicago (39)

13.    University of California, San Francisco (38)

13.    University of Wisconsin, Madison (38)

15.    Cornell University (36)

16.    New York University (35)

17.    University of California, Santa Barbara (31)

18.    Rockefeller University (30)

19.    Johns Hopkins University (26)

20.    University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (25)

20.    University of Pennsylvania (25)

22.    Duke University (24)

22.    University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (24)

24.    Rutgers University, New Brunswick (23)

25.    University of California, Davis (22)

26.    University of California, Irvine (20)

27.    University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas (19)

28.    Northwestern University (18)

28.    University of Colorado, Boulder (18)

28.    University of Texas, Austin (18)

28.    Washington University, St. Louis (18)

32.    Pennsylvania State University (14)

32.    Scripps Research Institute (14)

32.    University of Florida, Gainesville (14)

32.    University of Maryland, College Park (14)

36.    University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul (12)

36.    University of Southern California (12)

38.    Arizona State University (11)

38.    Ohio State University (11)

38.    University of Arizona (11)

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

42.    State University of New York, Stony Brook (10)

43.    Brandeis University (9)

43.    University of California, Santa Cruz (9)

45.    Brown University (8)

45.    Indiana University, Bloomington (8)

45.    University of Utah (8)

48.    Baylor College of Medicine (7)

48.    Boston University (7)

48.    Michigan State University (7)

48.    Rice University (7)

48.    University of Oregon (7)

48.    University of Rochester (7)

48.    Vanderbilt University (7)

Other schools studied:

Texas A&M University (6)

University of California, Riverside (6)

University of Missouri, Columbia (6)

Emory University (5)

University of Georgia (5)

Florida State University (4)

Purdue University (4)

University of Hawaii (4)

University of Iowa (4)

Georgetown University (3)

University of Virginia (3)

Gideon Levy on Israeli racism

Here.

More from the "The Stone" blog

Philosopher David Auerbach (North Carolina State) writes:

This Stone article [http://tinyurl.com/lmqsuf4 ] is remarkably flabby. But it had an interesting consequence (?)—the level of reader commentary was remarkably high (I’m grading on the usual curve here; there were the usual “there’s the trouble with academic philosophy…” comments). Here’s one of the comments:

"As a father of two sons, I actually conducted the experiment described in the article 25+ years ago (this was shortly before strong guidelines for human subjects research had been put into place nationally).

"First, I imposed a delay of several minutes before the moment of my older son’s conception. As the article predicts, the procedure eliminated his birth and later existence. Not only that, instead of a son, my firstborn was a daughter!

"The first outcome could have been a fluke, so, a few years later when the time came to conceive my second son, I decided to replicate the initial trial, this time by slightly anticipating the moment of conception. Confirming the earlier study, the second experiment also produced a positive result: my younger son never came into existence either! And, conformant to the initial outcome, my second child was also a daughter. In other words, by slightly delaying or anticipating the moment of conception, not only I was able to block completely the existence of both of my sons, I was also able to substitute two daughters for them!

"Philosophy is truly a powerful tool. 'Ah ! la belle chose, que de savoir quelque chose!'"

The only way to really remedy a "tone" problem

Dadahead had the answer long ago. 

Philosophical theologian George Pattison (Glasgow) interviewed...

...at 3AM.

(Link now fixed.)

Was a law professor behaving badly? Prof. Bell replies to Prof. Enoch

Here.

UPDATE:  Enoch's reply to Bell has been added at the link, as well as a link to an English version of the document where Prof. Bell does indeed defend the legal permissibility of "gross immoralities," as Prof. Enoch said originally.

Big year for philosophers at the British Academy

The 2014 elections to the Fellowship have been announced; philosophers elected include:  Susanne Bobzien (Oxford); Matthew Kramer (Cambridge, Law); Rae Langton (Cambridge); Christian List (LSE); and Cecilia Trifogli (Oxford).  In cognate fields also elected were the classical philosophy scholar Stephen Halliwell (St. Andrews) and the criminal law scholar and theorist Jeremy Horder (LSE).

Data on journal submissions--BPA and APA to undertake collection of information

A propos this item, philosopher Kimberly Brownlee (Warwick) writes:

I’m writing on behalf of the British Philosophical Association Exec. Committee about your post this week on journal submission data. At the last BPA Exec. meeting, the committee agreed that we’d like to gather this kind of data from journal editors, as it will be useful for early career researchers deciding where to send their work and for faculty applying for promotion.

We hope to collaborate with the APA to set up a webpage that will make this information publicly available. We’ll keep you informed as this initiative develops. 

PGR survey update

We received requests from 17 departments in the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australasia for inclusion in the 2014 PGR surveys.  Members of the Advisory Board were given the faculty lists and asked to vote on inclusion based on whether they thought the faculties in question might rank in the top cohort in their region of the world (top 50 in the US, top 15 in Britain, top 5 elsewhere).  A majority of the Board voted in favor of adding two faculties to the 2014 survey:  those at Texas A&M University and at the University of Manchester.  The next draft of the faculty lists will include them.  (Faculties not included in the 2014 surveys can still be included in the specialty rankings, based on past PGR performance and/or recommendations of members of the Advisory Board in the relevant specialties.)

(We can not include all PhD-granting faculties in the surveys because of the burden on evaluators.  We are already including more faculties for fall 2014 than in the last iteration.)

Atheist offers invocation at council meeting in town that was subject of recent US Supreme Court case

Story here.  Kant gets quoted!

(Thanks to Michael Swanson for the pointer.)

British Academy report comes out against excessive use of imprisonment in the criminal justice system

An interesting development; hopefully similar efforts will be made in the U.S. to reverse our insane penal policies.  (The Committee responsible for the report was Chaired by the distinguished philosopher of criminal law R.A. Duff [Stirling/Minnesota].)

Law professors behaving (very) badly

Lawyer/philosopher David Enoch (Hebrew U) is calling one out.

More on Zizek and plagiarism

Here.

(Thanks to Mark Westmoreland for the pointer.)