Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Spiros: Philosophy needs to be saved...

...from the "idiots who run the rest of the Humanities."

Brown's Summer Immersion Program for underrepresented groups

Nick Alvarez calls my attention to Brown's program:

The Brown Philosophy Department is pleased to announce a call for applications for the Summer Immersion Program in Philosophy at Brown University. SIPP@Brown is a two-week residential program for members of traditionally underrepresented groups in philosophy, including women and students of color. This year's program will run from May 31, 2015 to June 13, 2015 and will feature seminars taught by Brown faculty and the SIPP@Brown research conference. Students will have travel and lodging expenses covered and will receive a $500 stipend. More information is available at http://www.sippatbrown.com/

The application deadline is March 15.

Reader poll #5: what is your political ideology/outlook

QuestionPro

Miami's Berit Brogaard dispels more illusions about love...

...in Time Magazine.

Reader poll #4: your religious identity

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 10--RESULTS BELOW

Choose the category below that best fits your religion (or non-religious) beliefs/commitments:

(UPDATE:  I made an error below for the Muslim choices:  "Shia Muslin" should have been "Sunni Muslim."  If you identify as a Shiite Muslim, choose that one, and if you identify as a Sunni Muslim please chose "Shia"--sorry about that, but once the poll starts, I can't edit it without losing all the votes.)

 

QuestionPro

ANOTHER UNFORTUNATE OMISSION: the Eastern Orthodox Church.  Sorry about that.  I'd urge readers to choose Catholic, since I can not edit the poll at this point.

UPDATE:  So with almost 1900 votes, here's the reader breakdown:

70% of readers are either atheists or agnostics (52% atheist [978 readers], 18% agnostic [336 readers]).

Religions with at least 1% of the readership:

Catholic:            `   9% (165)

Other Protestant:    5% (97)

Episcopalian:           3% (64)

Jewish:                    3% (60, with roughly 1% each in Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism)

Calvinist:                  2% (39)

All of the following had 1% (with number of readers in parentheses):  Baptist (16), Lutheran (28), Mormon (16), Shiite Muslim (11), Buddhism (27), and Jainism (14).

 

Latest in Republican stupidity: no need to fund education...

...since Socrates taught Plato "on a rock."  As the philosopher John Armstrong (Southern Virginia), an actual ancient philosophy scholar, notes in the first comment: "Plato observed Socrates in the public square. Aristotle studied at Plato's estate. Both had wealth that freed them to pursue their inquiries full time."

On the importance of Castaneda

William Rapaport (Buffalo) writes:

We were disappointed that Brian Leiter's survey of "Most Important Anglophone philosophers, 1945-2000: the top 20" omitted Hector-Neri Castaneda (1924-1991).  At Leiter's invitation, we submit the following observations on his significance. 

Castaneda was Guatemalan by birth and early education.  However, his philosophical training at Minnesota and Oxford, his professional affiliations at Wayne State and Indiana, and his numerous publications surely qualify him as anglophone.  For his autobiography (parts of which--notably section I.4--could easily be dramatized!), see Castaneda 1986.

We believe that there are philosophers on the poll who do not match Castaneda in influence or insights.  He made significant contributions to both philosophy and the profession of philosophy.

His philosophical contributions include his groundbreaking work on:

(1)  the private language argument (Castaneda 1967);

(2)  reference, in particular, his theories of indexicals and quasi-indexicals (Castaneda 1966; 1977; 1989; 1999, Chs. 1-2);

(3)  self-consciousness (Castaneda 1999, Chs. 3-10);

(4)  a unified ontology of physical objects and thought contents, notably, his ambitious guise theory of intentionality (Castaneda 1972a, 1989);

(5)  the methodology and history of philosophy (especially the ontologies of Plato and Leibniz) (Castaneda 1972b, 1980); and

(6)  imperative and deontic logic, on practical and normative reasoning, and on action theory and meta-ethics (see Castaneda 1974, 1976).

Perhaps his most significant contribution to the profession was his founding and editing of Nous, but it should also be remembered that he was a prominent philosopher in the analytic style who came from a socially and economically underprivileged background and thereby became an inspiration to many.

Surveys of his work include Tomberlin 1983 & 1986, Orilia & Rapaport 1998, Rapaport 2005, and Palma 2014.

William J. Rapaport

Associate Professor Emeritus of Computer Science;

Affiliated Faculty Emeritus, Philosophy and Linguistics;

Member Emeritus, Center for Cognitive Science

State University of New York at Buffalo

Written with the assistance of Julio Covarrubias (Washington), Tomis Kapitan (Northern Illinois), Michael McKinsey (Wayne State), Franceso Orilia (Macerata, Italy), and Adriano Palma (Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa).

References:

Castaneda, Hector-Neri (1966), " 'He': A Study in the Logic of Self-Consciousness”, Ratio 8 (1966): 130–157

Castaneda, Hector-Neri (1967), "The Private Language Problem", in P. Edwards (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York:  Macmillan and Free Press) 8: 240-247.

Castaneda, Hector-Neri (1972a), "Thinking and the Structure of the World", Philosophia 4 (1974) 3-40; reprinted in 1975 in Critica 6 (1972) 43-86.

Castanda, Hector-Neri (1972b), "Plato's Phaedo Theory of Relations", Journal of Philosophical Logic 1: 467-480.

Castaneda, Hector-Neri (1974), The Structure of Morality (Springfield, IL:  Charles C Thomas).

Castaneda, Hector-Neri (1976), Thinking and Doing (Dordrecht, The Netherlands:  D. Reidel).

Castaneda, Hector-Neri (1977), "On the Philosophical Foundations of the Theory of Communication:  Reference", Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2: 165-186.

Castaneda, Hector-Neri (1980), On Philosophical Method (Bloomington, IN: Nous Publications)

Castaneda, Hector-Neri (1986), "Self-Profile", in Tomberlin 1986, pp. 3--137.

Castaneda, Hector-Neri (1989), Thinking, Language, & Experience (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press).

Castaneda, Hector-Neri (1999), The Phenomeno-Logic of the I:  Essays on Self-Consciousness (James G. Hart and Tomis Kapitan, eds.) (Bloomington, IN:  Indiana University Press).

Orilia, Francesco, & Rapaport, William J. (eds.) (1998), Thought, Language, and Ontology:  Essays in Memory of Hector-Neri Castaneda} (Dordrecht, The Netherlands:  Kluwer Academic Publishers).

Palma, Adriano (ed.) (2014), Castaneda and His Guises (Berlin: de Gruyter).

Rapaport, William J. (2005), "Castaneda, Hector Neri", in J.R. Shook (ed.), The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers (Bristol, UK:  Thoemmes Continuum): 452-457.

Tomberlin, James E. (ed.) (1983), Agent, Language, and the Structure of the World (Indianapolis:  Hackett).

Tomberlin, James E. (ed.) (1986), Hector-Neri Castaneda (Dordrecht, The Netherlands:  D. Reidel).

Philosophy belongs in the "core curriculum"

A Notre Dame undergraduate makes the case.

(Thanks to Michael Swanson for the pointer.)

Open thread on issues in the profession for the week of February 16, 2015

Submit your comment only once, I will approve comments at various intervals during the day.

UVA's Brie Gertler at...

...The Brains Blog.

Princeton's Daniel Garber interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Sorry for the dearth of postings here...

...I am just returned from talks at Pomona and UC Riverside in lovely Southern California.  I am catching up on e-mail, and will get back to those who wrote over the next couple of days.  At Pomona, I was especially impressed that so many undergraduates (from the various Claremont colleges) came to the talk on a late Friday afternoon and also asked quite interesting questions.  UC Riverside was, as always, a pleasure, both at the Wednesday paper ("Normativity for Naturalists") and at what turned into a 3+ hour seminar on Thursday about Nietzsche's metaethics with the excellent graduate students, as well as Maude Clark and Pierre Keller.  Riverside appears to be at the vanguard of the Ernst Cassirer "revival":  Keller and Erich Reck are, again, running a well-attended reading group on Cassirer, and one of UCR's outstanding recent PhDs, Samantha Matherne (now on tenure-track at UC Santa Cruz), will be writing the volume on Cassirer in the Routledge Philosophers series.

Badiou interviewed about "Philosophy for Militants"

This is curious.

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

A topic for social epistemology: how to get people to believe what...

...most scientists believe about matters that demand scientific knowledge.

(Thanks to Michael B. for the pointer.)

Blast from the past: David Koepsell shows how not to respond to a book review

From 2009.  (Although I had removed that post after Mr. Koepsell asked me too, he's been cyber-stalking me ever since.)

ANNALS OF JUVENILE STUPIDITY: Mr. Koepsell, not being grown up, actually e-mailed my Dean, asking him to "investigate" (!) my having allegedly defamed him! (My Dean gets lots of e-mails from crazies complaining about anyone on the faculty who may have said something offensive to some random crank--he doesn't respond, needless to say, though he usually forwards them so that faculty are aware of their cyber-stalkers.) If Mr. Koepsell doesn't want to be described as a cyber-stalker, then he should not have spent the last couple of years obessiviely tweeting and re-tweeting hundreds of insulting, abusive or defamatory comments about me, or showing up in comment thhreads where I have commented or been mentioned in order to insult or harass me.

Feedly's Philosophy site

Never saw this before; I wonder how they come up with their estimates of readerships?  Post in the open thread if you know or shoot me an e-mail.

UPDATE: A couple of readers suggest that the "readership" count is really the number of readers who use Feedly to access the RSS feed of the site, which seems to make sense.

Science and virtue?

A Boston Review essay by the historian of science Steven Shapin (Harvard).

Ideological delusion watch: Americans overestimate social mobility

That's convenient for the ruling class.

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

In Memoriam: Irving Singer (1925-2015)

Professor Singer spent his entire academic career at MIT, where he was emeritus at the time of his death.  The MIT obituary is here.

Miami's Brogaard on love...

...in The Miami Herald.

Christian origins of liberalism?

Intellectual historian Samuel Moyn (Harvard) discusses a recent book.

On the Marxian theory of ideology

An excerpt at 3AM from this essay, courtesy of Richard Marshall.

The priceless sayings of Werner Herzog...

...turned into posters (even more here).   Here's a gem:

And another:

 

 

UPDATE:  And if Werner Herzog read Curious George.  (Thanks to Matt Lister for the pointer.)

 

Heidegger blames the Jews for the Holocaust

This stuff is so pathetically disgusting, and so deeply entwined at points with other parts of his philosophical outlook, that I expect there is going to be a marked decline in interest in Heidegger in the coming decades.

Good piece in The Atlantic on the Marquette travesty

Here. 

No "personal enrichment" courses while in grad school

A philosopher elsewhere forwards an e-mail sent recently to graduate students at a top department, which said:

Just a reminder that your funding is for your program of study. It does not pay for you to take classes of mild interest or for the purpose of personal enrichment. 

My correspondent added:

The email advises students to check with the DGS for special cases, so it's nice to see that there's some way to get around this (it's hard to see how one would do a specialization in philosophy of science or ancient philosophy without that), but suggests that tuition for non-philosophy courses will not usually be covered. It strikes me as dismaying almost to the point of absurdity that something like "personal enrichment" would be explicitly discouraged for philosophy graduate students.  It seems to me that graduate students of any discipline ought to be encouraged to explore and study as widely as possible, and that this is particularly true for philosophy grads.  A policy like this breeds insularity, which something that professional philosophy struggles with in the best of cases. 

I'm curious what others think.  Are policies like this common?  How is "personal enrichment" interpreted?

Illinois Governor Rauner: union buster

Karen Lewis, alas, was right.  I hope he goes down in litigation flames.

Anthony Brueckner memorial conference at UC Santa Barbara...

...this weekend.

(Thanks to John Martin Fischer for the pointer.)

Columbia's Christia Mercer on Christian bloodshed and violence...

...at Talking Points Memo.

(Thanks to Elizabeth F. for the pointer.)

Britain leading the way for an Orwellian future in the universities

At the LRB site, from philosopher Amia Srinivasan (UCL):

More novel is the bill’s requirement that schools and universities conduct surveillance on their students. Section 25.1 states that education institutions are among the ‘specified authorities’ – along with councils, prisons, hospitals and police chiefs – that must ‘have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’....Administrators must conduct ‘risk assessments’ to uncover ‘where and how’ their students might be drawn to extremist ideology, including ‘non-violent extremism’. All staff members should be trained in ways to ‘challenge extremist ideas’, and if they find anyone who appears ‘vulnerable to being drawn into extremism’, refer them to local anti-terrorism panels for ‘support’....

In addition, all visiting speakers must be vetted for their anti-extremist credentials at least two weeks in advance, and their lecture notes and slides scrutinised. Maybe this will help procrastinating academics to plan their lectures ahead of time. Or perhaps they will just stop speaking.... 

(Thanks to Sean Whitton for the pointer.)

Odds of dying in America

Everything from bee stings to heart disease to asteroids to falling down the stairs.

Open thread on issues in the profession for the week of February 9, 2015

Submit your comment only once, I will approve comments at various intervals during the day.

More on the California vaccination disaster

Here.  What's really remarkable is the only two states to have a sensible rule--namely, exemptions only for medical reasons--are Mississippi and West Virginia. Who would have guessed? 

Fear of death after a terminal diagnosis: read Sartre...

(MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEB. 6, UPDATED)

...or drop acid?  (This is truly weird.)

UPDATE:  Longtime reader Roger Albin, a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, writes:

What Pollan describes in the New Yorker piece is not as weird as it appears.  To a considerable extent, its a reflection of the considerable frustration experienced by psychiatrists with the presently limited treatments for substance abuse and refractory depression.  Some useful therapies have been discovered through efforts like these.  One of the most effective treatments in psychiatry, Lithium for bipolar disorder, was discovered via what can be described only as a parody of science (if you're interested, look up the concise and accurate account in the Wikipedia entry on John Cade, the psychiatrist who made the initial key observations). 

And in a follow-up e-mail, he adds:

Pollan's discussion of the interesting phenomenon of the default mode network (DMN) is naive, though he may have been misled by his informants.  The piece makes much of the weakening of the DMN after psychedelic ingestion but the DMN weakens in many situations, so correlations with the phenomena experienced during psychedelic use are not specific.

What "Rate My Professors" tells us about gender and bias

Interesting, and not (alas) surprising.

Toronto's Diana Raffman interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Scott Walker's world...

...as represented by his version of historical and contemporary documents.

Blast from the past: fun with Steve Fuller

Here.

Reader poll #2: gender

Readers, what is your gender?

QuestionPro

UPDATE: So with over 1500 votes cast since Friday, 89% of respondents were male, 11% were female.  About 16% of tenure-stream faculty are female (at least in the US), though my impression is a higher percentage of current graduate students are female.  It would be interesting to know the gender breakdown at other blogs.  (Far more than 11% of commenters here are female, interestingly.)

Reader poll #1: age

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY

I'm going to run a series of polls of the readership over the next couple of weeks, and would be grateful if readers would respond.  We'll start with age:

QuestionPro

UPDATE:  So with 1700 votes cast, here's the age breakdown of the readers who responded:

 

17 or younger:    1% (19)

18-22:                5% (83)

23-30:                35% (589)

31-40:                29% (501)

41-50:                14% (230)

51-60:                8% (135)

61-70:                5% (90)

71 or older:        3% (53)

 

An unknown, of course, is whether particular age groups were less likely to respond to such a poll--I would guess that older readers might be less likely to respond, but that's just a guess.  (While the poll was running, the blog has had close to 20,000 visits, so plainly many visitors did not participate--of course, some may not have been regular readers, but given the consistency of traffic, many surely were.)  If anyone knows of research on that question, feel free to post in the comments.

Spiros did not like a book review

It was a very weird and poorly done review.

Ludlow's lawsuit against Northwestern, various administrators, one colleague, and one graduate student...

...has been dismissed.  Unlike his defamation suit against the media outlets that falsely reported he had been accused of "rape"--which was wrongly dismissed by a state court judge--this decision seems well-reasoned and on some points clearly sound.  (Note that this case, unlike the earlier one, was in federal court, where the quality of the judges is higher on average.)  Note, however, that the judge leaves open that Ludlow may file an amended complaint on some of the counts; in a motion to dismiss, as the judge's opinion explains (see p. 6), the court accepts the plaintiff's statement of facts, and then determines whether they state legal claims.  (In some instances, as the court does here, the court may also conclude that no reasonable jury could find in favor of the plaintiff on the facts as pleaded.)  Some of Ludlow's claims may be salvaged with an amended complaint--most obviously, the defamation claim against the graduate student, which was dismissed because of failure to allege facts sufficient to find that the student's "qualified privilege" in reporting misconduct should be forfeited.  (On the issue of privilege, see this earlier discussion; note that the defamation claim against Professor Lackey was, correctly as far as I can see, dismissed because of the statute of limitations.)   (Remember, too, that Professor Lackey and the graduate student have been indemnified by the University for their legal expenses--the latter because of Professor Lackey's foresight in the matter.) 

Go Karen Lewis!

She put Rahm Emmanuel in his place a couple of years ago, now she's going after our new Republican Governor (I hope she's wrong with the Scott Walker comparison, but since these people all confer with each other and none are capable of actual critical thought and decision-making, I fear she may be right).

Marquette moves to fire tenured political science professor McAdams who blogged about philosophy instructor

IHE has the story, and here is the quite unbelievable letter from the Marquette Dean, which shows he understands neither academic freedom nor tenure despite citing the AAUP principles.  (See the useful discussion by John K. Wilson.)  The Dean's disgraceful letter does include a transcript of the exchange between the philosophy instructor attacked by McAdams and her student, and as far as I can see, McAdams is correct to assert that the transcript supports a number of the original allegations he made.  But the accuracy of his blog post isn't the issue; the issue is whether it's really the case that a tenured faculty member in one department can not blog about the professional conduct of instructors in other departments.  Is it really a detenuring and firing offense at Marquette to do so unless it is 100% accurate and is based on due diligence in telling the complete story and from all angles?  Apparently.

(The last time I blogged about this sorry episode, a junior philosopher elsewhere took to cyberspace to denounce my "cognitive dissonance"; when I asked him to explain the dissonance, he pointed to the fact that I had sided with a student and against a faculty member in a sexual harassment case.  As I pointed out, sexual harassment in the workplace is, in fact, unlawful, even when carried out with speech.   Criticism of someone's pedagogy is not unlawful, or at least not yet!  This simple distinction was apparently lost on this PhD in philosophy, alas, who, I infer, subscribes to the New Infantilism principle:  "Any criticism by a tenured person of a student is an offense against decency."  Alarmingly, this now appears to be Marquette's "official" position.)

UPDATE:  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that Justin Weinberg (South Carolina), the leading cyber-cheerleader of the New Infantilism, should be on the wrong side of this issue, but his comment in response to someone pointing out, correctly, that Marquette's action is a "chilling attack on academic freedom"  is unbelievable:

It is nothing of the kind. McAdams is not being disciplined because of his research, his teaching, his academic views, nor his political views. He is being disciplined because he recklessly, libelously, and obnoxiously used students and colleagues at Marquette in an attempt to advance his own agenda.

Remarkably, over 100 readers "liked" this nonsensical comment.  The AAUP statement on academic freedom includes freedom to make extramural statements among the components of academic freedom, and I would be surprised if Marquette did not endorse the AAUP statement and incorporate it, contractually, with its faculty.  (One might make a stronger claim:  namely, that academic freedom ought to protect the right of faculty to criticize institutional practices, including pedagogical ones.)  Although there has been a lot of bluster by Weinberg and others about "falsehoolds" and "libel," it simply isn't clear, even from the Dean's letter, that McAdams actually said anything false, let alone libelous.  (In any case, there are remedies for libel that do not include revocation of tenure.)  One can agree that McAdams behaved obnoxiously, but that is not a firing offense, at least not consistent with tenure.   What the difference is between "us[ing] students and colleagues...in an attempt to advance his own agenda" and "criticizing the pedagogical practices of a colleague" I do not know.   Is Weinberg's criticism of McAdams "an attempt to advance his own agenda" (promoting the New Infantilism) at the expense of McAdams?  If not, why not?  (Faculty are not, in any case, under a generalized Kantian obligation to treat everyone as an end, never as a means!) 

Even worse, in the same thread, someone who supports Marquette's actions writes:

[W]hen I see comments such as the ones from the first commenter “This is an absolutely chilling attack on academic freedom, and I hope the philosophy community will condemn it as such” (and the 17 “likes it has at this point), it makes me truly appalled to know that I am part of a profession whose members are willing to prioritize a tenured male’s freedom of speech over the safety of women graduate students and their reputation.

But McAdams, in his speech, did not threaten anyone's safety; others did, but McAdams is not legally responsible for that, nor should he be, at least if one thinks freedom of speech deserves some protection, even for men.   One may hope this comment was posted by a benighted undergraduate who might yet revise his/her view with the benefit of more education and experience.

A propos absolutely nothing...

...but still super cute, babies and dogs (plus one cat).

Cambridge philosophy students petition faculty to "save Marx"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM EARLIER-SEE UPDATE

Not surprising, given Raymond Geuss's retirement and the nature of recent appointments.  It would be a bit pathetic, though, for philosophy students at Cambridge to be unable to find faculty to work with on Marx or Nietzsche.

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Richard Holton, Chair of Philosophy at Cambridge, writes:

Marx will continue to be taught in the Cambridge philosophy faculty. The proposal is to contextualize Marxism, along with theories of equality in one course, and with feminism and anarchism in another. Faculty and students discussed the proposals together at a productive Staff-Student Committee meeting earlier this week. The petition had been circulated and signed before that meeting, and thus before students knew the full proposals; so we're puzzled that it was published on Change.org  afterwards, as though the meeting had never taken place. The Hegel and Nietzsche course remains.

Mother Teresa takes another hit

Nietzsche would have loved this.

More on philosophy and alleged "innate talent"

Berkeley's Alison Gopnik, the well-known philosophically-minded psychologist, writes:

I’m attaching a link to my WSJ column taking off from the Leslie & Cimpian Science study on innate talent in philosophy. I had no room in the piece to say this but the more I’ve thought about it the odder it seems that philosophers, of all people, haven’t taken the time to see how incoherent the “innate talent” concept actually is. Maybe its because its so seductive as part of “folk psychology". In fact, when I first read the Science piece my first thought was “But that doesn’t apply to me because I’ve always known that  I had a strong innate talent for philosophy, much more than for psychology, and I made my major affiliation to psychology for all sorts of other intellectual reasons”. But literally as I was thinking this I was also preparing the very first standard lecture in my intro developmental psychology course which is about why the nature/nurture distinction for psychological traits doesn’t make sense.

What would an innate talent for philosophy actually mean? That there is some set of genetic instructions that evolved in the pleistocene which just happens to consistently lead to an "appetite for Hume” phenotype? That some newborn infants are particularly good at asking piercing questions at seminars? That by the age of twenty the vagaries of genes, motivation, environment and culture have all interacted to produce a “sit around late at night asking about the meaning of life” phenotype that is immutable from then on? That heritability estimates for ethical reasoning will be constant across all the possible environments in the past and future? 

Its weird, though certainly not unprecedented, that philosophers in their everyday life would endorse an idea that in their thoughtful professional  life they would surely see is about as useful as the medieval theory of elements.

Perhaps too much weight is being put on the idea of "innateness" (which Prof. Gopnik aptly criticizes).  What seems true in my own experience, both when I was in graduate school, then in 20 years of working with PhD students, is that some students arrive in graduate school with more "talent" for at least the styles of philosophy dominant in the Anglophone world than can be explained simply by prior education. 

Kvanvig from Baylor to Wash U/St. Louis

Jonathan Kvanvig, a leading figure in both epistemology and philosophy of religion, currently at Baylor University, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Washington University, St. Louis, effective fall 2016.  (Wash U, which jumped from 31st in 2011 to 24th in 2014, may be on track to crack the top twenty before long.)

ASU English professor being targetted by right-wing media for teaching a course on...

..."The Problem of Whiteness."  Pathetic.

(Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)