Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

New books in September

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

American Prophets:  Seven Religious Radicals & Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice by Albert J. Raboteau (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Normative Subjects:  Self and Collectivity in Morality and Law by Meir Dan-Cohen (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Fugitive Democracy and Other Essays by Sheldon S. Wolin, ed. by Nicholas Xenos (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Moral Brains:  The Neuroscience of Morality ed. by S. Matthew Liao (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Technology and the Virtues:  A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting by Shannon Vallor (Oxford University Press, 2016).

The Law's Flaws:  Rethinking Trial and Errors? by Larry Laudan (College Publications, 2016).

The Wisdcom of Frugality:  Why Less is More--More or Less by Emyrs Westacott (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Trash Talks:  Revelations in the Rubbish by Elizabeth V. Spelman (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Village Atheists:  How America's Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation by Leigh Eric Schmidt (Princeton University Press, 2016).

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology edited by Herman Cappelen, Tamar Szabo Gendler & John Hawthorne (Oxford University Press, 2016).

USA Today Repudiates Trump

This may be significant, since USA Today, America's news-lite national paper, has never before endorsed or dis-endorsed any candidate for the Presidency.   That, together with their ordinary right-leaning "even-handedness," gives them credibility with an ill-informed segment of the electorate who might have entertained voting for Trump.   Trump is clearly "unfit" for the Presidency; he's "unfit" for any actual job, but it will suffice if he is deflected from the Presidency.

A reaction to the recent keynote speaker controversies

A philosopher elsewhere writes with an amusing reaction to this week's melodrama:

This shit makes me want to retire.

I already don't "go out" in the philosophy blog-o-sewer, and maybe I'll stop going to conferences too.

Many of these people are not able enough to both do good philosophy and engage constantly in sanctimonious, and often quite nasty, moral police work.  Many of them seem to be getting paid a lot to do mediocre scholarly work and spend 80% of their working  hours on Facebook.

Best PhD Programs for Metaethics for 2016-17 (CORRECTED)

Following up on this post, and once again taking account of faculty changes since the fall 2014 PGR, here's an attempted update of the top (3.5 or higher) programs for metaethics for 2016-17, again by rough "clusters" of peer programs:

Group 1 (1-3)

Princeton University

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

University of Southern California

Group 2 (4-5)

New York University

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Shafer-Landau from North Carolina back to Wisconsin

Russ Shafer-Landau (ethics, metaethics), who moved from the University of Wisconsin at Madison to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015, will be returning to Wisconsin beginning in 2017-18.  Since this is significant for the metaethics specialty ranking (esp. for Wisconsin, Chapel Hill has other prominent figures in that area), I will be posting a revised version shortly.

Groningen's Chiara Lisciandra interviewed...

...at 3AM.

There are about 10,000 philosophy professors in the U.S....

...and three are going public that they plan to vote for Dopey Donald Chump!  (Thanks to reader David Gordon who called this to my attention.)

Obviously, it is embarrassing that educated people would vote for Trump, but it isn't that hard to explain.  Dan Bonevac and Rob Koons--my former colleagues at Texas (with whom I had a very enjoyable reading group back in the 1990s)--are both conservative Christians, though of different denominations.   Trump's invisible running mate, Mike Pence, the former Indiana Governor, is a very conservative Christian, and many people suspect that given that Trump is a narcissist with a short attention span, that his VP would really govern.  I am hardly surprised my former colleagues are supporting Trump under those circumstances.

USC's Scott Soames, whom I do not know except through his work, is a more puzzling case, though I had long heard that he was on the political right (now that is confirmed!). My guess is that his "reasons" are not unlike the reasons proferred by the handful of right-wing law professors supporting Trump, like Stephen Presser (emeritus, Northwestern) and Ronald Rotunda (Chapman).  This is perhaps worth emphasizing:  there are a lot of conservative and libertarian law professors (whereas there are few philosophy professors, proportionally, in those camps).   Most are not supporting Trump:  some are voting for Gary Johnson, the libertarian candidate; most seem to be sitting out the election; and another large group are voting for Clinton, for a simple reason, that reflects their legal knowledge:  domestically, the President operates under various constraints, but in terms of foreign policy, there are almost no meaningful limits to what the President can do.  Entrusting that power to a psychologically unbalanced narcissist isn't a good bet, obviously.

Assistant Prof. of S. Asian Studies at Berkeley sues three sexual harassment complainants for defamation

Story here.  Is it possible that two graduate students and one undergraduate conspired to make false allegations against Prof. Wentworth?  Yes. Is it likely?  No, not at all.  So this seems to me an effort to intimidate the complainants, but in any case, if it moves forward, it will put the matter into the hands of real courts, which can also probe quite deeply into the plaintiffs' past.  Given that Prof. Wentworth's academic career is over unless he prevails, this gamble would make prudential sense even if he is guilty as charged.

(Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)

Why Berkeley's handling of the sexual harassment case of former Dean Sujit Chouhdry violates central norms of due process

I touched on this case briefly in my CHE piece, but this discussion by NYU law professor Rick Hills is thorough and well-informed.   I should note that, unlike Prof. Hills, I am not Prof. Chouhdry's friend, and I'm not sure I've ever even met him.  But due process matters, for all the reasons Prof. Hills articulates so well.

University of Nebraska President defends the right of football players not to stand for the National Anthem to protest police violence against African-Americans

Good for him and lucky for Nebraska!

More on the Midwest SCP conference and Prof. Swinburne's talk...

...from the local organizer, philosopher Brandon Schmidly (Evangel U).  (My earlier post is here, to which Prof. Schmidly briefly alludes.)

More on the philosopher Paul Weiss

Philosopher Tom Carson (Loyola/Chicago) writes:

Your readers might be interested in this anecdote about Paul Weiss. 

I have a close male friend going back to high school whose mother I knew quite well; she was my friend for many years.  She was an English Professor who had a great interest in philosophy.  She was very pleased when I decided to study philosophy.  But she was surprised and disappointed to learn that I didn’t know anything about Paul Weiss and hadn’t read anything that he wrote.  She praised Weiss’s teaching in extravagant terms and told me the following story.  Around 1940, she was a student at Bryn Mawr.  She took a course with Weiss.  Weiss told the students that philosophy involved the radical questioning and examination of all our important beliefs.  He said that his students needed to examine all of their important beliefs and that they needed to actively question and suspend their most cherished beliefs as part of their work for the class.  She took Weiss to mean that students shouldn’t continue to act on their moral and religious beliefs before examining them.  Dutifully following Weiss’s instructions, she stole a vase from an antique’s store.  She was almost immediately stricken with guilt and after suffering considerable anguish she returned to the store with the vase hidden under a large coat.  She awkwardly returned the vase and ran out of the store.

Weiss had powerful influence on many of his students.  Many impressionable young women at Bryn Mawr were very attracted  by what my friend described as Weiss’s tough New York street-wise persona that was foreign to most of them.  Weiss was very notable as a teacher and for his role in founding The Review of Metaphysics, which was a very major journal while he was its editor.  Hardly anyone reads him any more and I don’t think that he was ever an important figure in mainstream philosophy. 

Brand Blanshard deserves praise for his role in hiring Weiss at Yale.  But many people think that his role in helping to deny Charles Stevenson tenure (because of his disdain for Stevenson’s emotivism) reflects very poorly on him.  ​

I thank Professor Carson for permission to share this great story!

The NY Times reviews a new biography of Hitler...

...but the review's actual subject is Donald Trump, though the latter's name is never mentioned. 

Coming soon:  a NYT opinion piece on whether assassinating Hitler in 1932 would have been justified.

What is it like to be a philosopher? David Chalmers edition

Here.  Quite an entertaining and interesting read!

Thoughts on the PGR from a foreign student

A graduate student writes:

I am a student of philosophy and a refugee coming from a Middle Eastern country [name omitted]. I obtained my most recent degree from [a university in Canada].  Let me clarify that my current refugee status is a direct result of my “conscientious objection” to the military operations of the [name omitted] army which involve flagrant violations of international human rights law committed against [a] civilian population in [my country].  [S]pecial thanks are due to you for being the creator of the Philosophical Gourmet Report. The PGR has long been a guiding light especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds such as myself. I know very well that there are countless students sharing my thoughts on the extraordinary usefulness of the PGR.

Against Canary Mission, redux

Following up on this (many of you signed), there is now a website with the letter and the full list of signatories.  Someone really needs to create a list of faculty and students behind "Canary Mission," since a list of disgusting fascists would be useful!

Even if Clinton wins the election, we won't be done with Trump

This is worth emphasizing:  the Trump nightmare won't end with the election.  Even if (as I still expect) Clinton wins, we know (he's told us) that Trump won't be a graceful loser, since he's psychologically incapable of that.  The threat to the constitutional and democratic order will continue, as Trump hurls reckless accusatiosn of voter fraud and a stolen election, accusations that will be repeated by the increasingly openly fascist mass media--Fox on TV, Breitbart on-line--that threaten civilization.   Like any broken clock, or psychopath, Trump is occasionally right, and one thing he may be right about is that our speech laws permit too much falsehoods (he is wrong about what is false, obviously, which is also telling).  Until we can shut down Fox and Breitbart and Drudge, we are all in danger, not only in America, but in the world, since this benighted country continues to be the greatest threat to human well-being on the planet.  I have no faith, alas, that this country is capable of closing down only the sociopathic morons, so the libertarian legal regime that sanctions 24-hour lies and stupidity may mark the future for this dying empire.  

SCP/Swinburne controversy, redux

Now there's a letter calling for the SCP to apologize to Professor Swinburne!  (Earlier post for context.)  If anyone hears of a letter from SAF members calling for an apology to Prof. Shelby, please let me know.

Best PhD Programs for Philosophy of Mind for 2016-17

Following up on this post, and once again taking account of faculty changes since the fall 2014 PGR, here's an attempted update of the top (3.5 or higher) programs for philosophy of mind for 2016-17, again by rough "clusters" of peer programs:

Group 1 (1)

New York University

Group 2 (2)

Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Group 3 (3-4)

City University of New York Graduate Center

University of California, Los Angeles

Group 4 (5-19)

Australian National University

Brown University

Columbia University (incl. Barnard)

Harvard University

 

Debate post-mortem...

...from data maven Nate Silver.  I didn't watch it, so have no comment at all!  I hope Silver is right.

UPDATE:  And see this from a right-wing columnist at the New York Post.

AND ANOTHER complete with transcriptions of Dopey Donald Chump being dopey.

Another keynote speaker rebuked (not as badly) at the Society for Christian Philosophers midwest meeting

The other keynote speaker controversy making the rounds concerns a talk by philosopher of religion Richard Swinburne (Oxford) at a regional meeting of SCP at Evangel University in Missouri.   This appears to be a sympathetic account of what transpired  from someone in attendance.  Briefly:  Swinburne offered the usual awful arguments for anti-gay bigotry that "natural law" theorists and Christian philosophers usually trot out.  No one outside the sect takes the arguments seriously, because they aren't serious arguments, but put that to one side.   This talk was given inside the "sect":  should anyone have been surprised that a keynote address at a Christian philosophy conference included familiar arguments rationalizing anti-gay bigotry?  Many self-identified Christian philosophers reject such arguments, but many others plainly do not.   As philosopher Chris Swoyer (Oklahoma) noted:

A substantial portion of Christians hold views like those attributed to Swinburne and do so on the basis of their understanding of Christianity. So it's surely not surprising for him to express such views in the setting he did.

That is surely right, and poses a difficult question for those Christian philosophers who repudiate such views about whether they want to be in that "setting" as it were.  

In the case of the other keynote speaker controversy du jour, Professor Shelby was asked by a Black woman in his Q&A why he had not cited or discussed any Black feminist authors; Professor Shelby, unsurprisingly, was dismissive of the question, calling it a request for a "bibliography" and indicating he was just trying to do philosophy.  He, correctly, supposed that a question of the form, "Why didn't you mention authors with particular racial and gender attributes?" is not a serious philosophical question, in contrast to, say, the question, "Why didn't you address the following argument by author X [who is also a Black feminist]?", which is an appropriate question.   (Readers should review the full statement by the aggrieved audience member at the end of this post.) Other audience members shared this aggrievement as well.  The organizing committee, instead of taking the opportunity to educate the aggrieved philosophy graduate student about the intellectual norms of the profession she plans to enter instead sent out a missive to all those who attended the conference stating that,

In particular, we apologize for the effects of the Saturday keynote address [by Prof. Shelby] and for our failure to do more about a situation in which SAF members felt personally and collectively hurt. When members identify effects including the erasure of Black women’s bodies and words, then we have to do better. What was said was wrong, and inappropriate at a feminist conference, and we take responsibility for our roles in the events that took place.

So one initial difference between the two cases is that Professor Swinburne's views really are a philosophical embarrassment, whereas Professor Shelby's views and his response to an inappropriate question were not.  Indeed, the philosophical embarrassment is that the organizing committee of a philosophy conference caved in to meritless aggrievement by someone who apparently does not know what constitutes an appropriate philosophical question.   The other difference involves the "official" SCP response to the Swinburne talk.  Michael Rea (Notre Dame), the President of SCP, made the following public statement in the wake of attention being called to the Swinburne talk:

I want to express my regret regarding the hurt caused by the recent Midwest meeting of the Society for Christian Philosophers. The views expressed in Professor Swinburne's keynote are not those of the SCP itself. Though our membership is broadly united by way of religious faith, the views of our members are otherwise diverse. As Preisdent of the SCP, I am committed to promoting the intellectual life of our philosophical community. Consequently (among other reasons), I am committed to the values of diversity and inclusion. As an organization, we have fallen short of those ideals before, and surely we will again. Nonetheless, I will strive for them going forward. If you have thoughts or feedback you would like to share with me, I would welcome hearing from you via email or private message. 

Like the SAF conference organizers, Prof. Rea rebukes the speaker to the extent of feeling the need to apologize for the effects of the talk (both statements apologize for "hurt").   Unlike the SAF conference organizers, Prof. Rea at least does not pronounce "what was said" to be "wrong" and verboten "for a Christian conference," which would, for the reasons noted by Prof. Swoyer, be a difficult position to defend in this "setting."  Prof. Rea's response would have been better had it just consisted in the statement that "The views expressed in Professor Swinburne's keynote are not those of the SCP itself. Though our membership is broadly united by way of religious faith, the views of our members are otherwise diverse."  If he'd left it at that, this would not be notable at all.

Dick Cavett on Paul Weiss

From an interview with the former T.V. host about his undergraduate days at Yale:

Q: To what extent did Yale teach you the art of critical thinking?

DC: Any critical thinking that I got from Yale was in my undergraduate courses, maybe in the true sense of the term, from the great Paul Weiss, Sterling professor of philosophy. Paul Weiss taught his class Socratically, asking to have questions fired at him, and he never failed to take down any five students simultaneously, if he needed to. I later put him on television, on the Jack Paar Tonight Show, and then I had Paul Weiss on my own show, as I did William F. Buckley, [whose] faculty advisor was Paul Weiss.

Weiss, by the way, was the first Jew hired with tenure in philosophy at Yale.  (The episode is described in Neil Gross's biography of Richard Rorty:  basically, Brand Blandshard championed the appointment, but it met with opposition from his anti-semitic colleagues and administrators, but Blandshard prevailed.)  Fifty years on, the former Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale is now barely known or read.

(Thanks to Joseph Shieber for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  David Gordon calls to my attention that Prof. Weiss was also on Buckley's TV show.

Tommie Shelby (Harvard) suggests that moral duties apply to the "oppressed" too and the Society for Analytic Feminism apologizes for his remarks (MOVING TO FRONT FROM EARLIER TODAY, SEVERAL UPDATES/CORRECTIONS)

The comical sanctimony of certain segments of the philosophy "profession" is a regular topic of conversation and head-shaking among adults, but the insulting treatment of philosopher Tommie Shelby (Harvard) after his keynote at the meeting of the Society for Analytic Feminism (SAF) sets a new low.  Justin Weinberg (South Carolina), who always has his finger on the racing pulse of the hyper-sensitive, offers this account:

At the SAF, some members of the audience found the keynote talk by Tommie Shelby (Harvard), drawn from his forthcoming book Dark Ghettos, highly objectionable. My understanding (which may not be entirely accurate) is that the controversy concerned some remarks in the talk about procreative ethics, how (as he puts it in an earlier article), “basic duties are not suspended or void because one is oppressed,” and whether what he said was disrespectful to poor, black women. Some attendees apparently thought that an apology was in order, perhaps from the organizers. (UPDATE: two days after the SAF conference ended, its organizers sent an email to the participants issuing an apology, and requesting feedback from them regarding the event and future conferences.) (UPDATE 2: further details regarding Shelby’s talk can be found in the comment below from “a poor black woman who was there.”)

I suppose Professor Shelby (and everyone else) has learned an important lesson here, namely, that the meeting of the Society for Analytic Feminism is not really a philosophical conference, but one in which failure of ideological purity (which is marked by giving "offense"--heavens!) is verboten and results in an "official" repudiation by the organization.  

Again, if we were dealing with professionals--it appears we are not--then we would expect SAF to issue an apology to Prof. Shelby for this shameful treatment at what was supposed to be a philosophical event.  (I should add that the sins of SAF should not be visited on those who work in feminist philosophy, though there is, of course, some overlap in the two groups.  But I guess if I were a job candidate, I would get SAF off my CV, lest the sins of the SAF organizers be visited on the innocent.)

UPDATE:  Philosopher Kate Norlock (Trent) tells me that Professor Weinberg's account is not accurate, and therefore the inferences I have drawn from it are not warranted.  She writes:

Tommie Shelby spoke to an attentive and quiet audience without interruption.the question-and-answer period afterward involved many members of the audience providing substantial and critical comments and questions to him.  I can attest, since I was there, that their objections were not to the notion that the oppressed can have moral duties.

Interestingly, one of the more unfortunate moments in the discussion period was a moment when Shelby attempted to deflect a robust criticism with the comment that he was "just doing philosophy." Since the unfortunate implication of this ill-chosen deflection is that his questioner may not be trying to do the same, I found myself asserting, as I closed the event, that I appreciated the extent to which we all, including our keynote speaker, remained engaged and did philosophy together. It is therefore disappointing to read your statement that "the meeting of the Society for Analytic Feminism is not really a philosophical conference."

Presentations at our conference included the works of philosophers from 30 different states and 3 countries. I provide you the link to our program so that you may be better informed as to the philosophical content of our conference: 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12YSn2mOjrGM-Q1beDjncb7lixClOiPhagceMunOeZ2s/edit

I know you care about truth and fact more than your post indicates. I believe that you wish to be accurate and right. Your post about SAF is neither. It is not reflective of actualities and instead seems to merely echo Justin Weinberg's likewise uninformed post at Daily Nous. Your recommendation that my organization should not appear on a philosopher's CV may be well-intended but is predicated on misunderstanding on your part.

Last, please provide me with any proof that I or my organization officially repudiated Tommie Shelby or owes him an apology. Proof should include more than your repetition of Justin Weinberg's gossip. That the blogs cite each other does not constitute proof. Again, I know that you know this, or would ordinarily know this.

I appreciate the additional detail, but I am, I confess, still puzzled.  I am surprised that Prof. Weinberg's posting would remain uncorrected on these points after more than a day and despite dozens of comments including from members of SAF. (UPDATE:  Prof. Weinberg's post was updated to reflect this point after I posted this.)  I have asked Prof. Norlock for the apology e-mail organizers allegedly sent to members; Prof. Norlock's message to me was silent on tHis.  When I have more information, I will post more. 

ANOTHER UPDATE:   Another SAF meeting attendee has forwarded me the e-mail sent out by the organizers, which confirms the crucial part of Prof. Weinberg's original account:

We write to all participants in the SAF 2016 conference so that those of us not on Facebook or social media have the same access to our acknowledgement of the harms some participants have already identified, and opportunities to participate in addressing them. 

In planning this conference, we wanted to create a safe and nurturing space for feminist philosophers and feminist philosophies.  We recognize that this was not the case for everyone present, and for that we apologize. In particular, we apologize for the effects of the Saturday keynote address [by Prof. Shelby] and for our failure to do more about a situation in which SAF members felt personally and collectively hurt. When members identify effects including the erasure of Black women’s bodies and words, then we have to do better. What was said was wrong, and inappropriate at a feminist conference, and we take responsibility for our roles in the events that took place.

Meanwhile, the Society for Christian Philosophers...

...yes, I'll get to that one too, but today is the first day of the quarter, so there's work to be done, and I've already spent too much time on the earlier brouhaha.  The details of this one are available here.  I'lll just note the comment of philosopher Chris Swoyer (Oklahoma) at Prof. Rea's FB page:

A substantial portion of Christians hold views like those attributed to Swinburne and do so on the basis of their understanding of Christianity. So it's surely not surprising for him to express such views in the setting he did.

More later.

Reading's Patrick Tomlin wins 2017 Berger Prize in Philosophy of Law

The APA announcement is here.

For those following the race between the neoliberal war-monger and the mentally unstable authoritarian fraud...

...for leadership of the most dangerous country on earth, you'll want to watch some of the debates.  It turns out they don't matter very much, but the odds that Dopey Donald Chump can control himself are low, so hopefully they will generate lots of negative headlines, which will help the Democrats.

"Live Like a Stoic"

That time of year is coming again.

Best PhD Programs for Philosophy of Biology for 2016-17

Following up on this post, and once again taking account of faculty changes since the fall 2014 PGR, here's an attempted update of the top (3.5 or higher) programs for philosophy of biology for 2016-17, again by rough "clusters" of peer programs:

Group 1 (1-2)

University of Sydney

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Group 2 (3-5)

Australian National University

Duke University

University of Bristol 

Still more on the irony of the evolution of standpoint epistemology

Following up on last week's post:  of course, the first standpoint epistemologist in the contemporary, "inverted" and unMarxian sense was Lukacs who, in the 1920s, proposed that, in fact, the proletariat, in virtue of their class position, had special epistemic access to the pathologies of capitalism.   The pedigree of that idea--an unabashed Left Young Hegelian who later became an unabashed Stalinist--would perhaps give one pause, but since most analytic philosophers, in their blissful historical ignorance, don't know anything about the pedigree, the unhappy history of 20th-century standpoint epistemology does not arise as a concern.

(Last week, I was in Vienna for a conference on relativism in German-speaking philosophy in what Martin Kusch (Vienna) calls, aptly enough, "the long 19th-century," roughly from Herder through the 1930s.  Among the things I learned, thanks to an excellent paper by Johannes Steizinger (also at Vienna), is that the Nazis, and their philosophers (there were a lot of them!), were also (in a way) standpoint epistemologists, though for them the relevant standpoint was defined by the racial group, with each racial group having its own epistemic criteria.  Since the Nazis also believed in an objective hierarchy of races, this required some philosophical gymnastics to square that with their epistemic relativism!)

It's time to take a stand against "ethical [sic] eating"!

Indeed:

We need to update the seven deadly sins. Take out gluttony — what’s wrong with the odd bit of gorging? — and replace it with ethical eating. Noble foodies, who refuse to pollute their bodies with what they view as ‘evil’ grub, are far greater irritants than compulsive cake-eaters.

Ethical eaters are everywhere. There’s the veggie army, those bunny-pitying meat-dodgers, which seems to grow every year. Vegans are on the march, too. In 2006, 150,000 Brits were engaged in the daily self–flagellation that is a plant-based diet; today, 542,000 are.

Trend analysts believe that social media — filtered photos on Instagram of a bowl of lentils looking deceptively delicious or Gwyneth Paltrow positively glowing after downing a test-tube of pureed spinach — plays a major role in coaxing naturally carnivorous humans to switch to leaves and nuts. I love how ethical eaters fancy themselves as brave resisters of the consumer culture that tells us all to scoff dead animals and yet they can be tempted into a lifetime of salad-only self-denial by the flutter of a celeb’s eyelashes.

Then there’s locavores, who only eat foodstuffs harvested in a 100-mile radius of where they live. Didn’t we used to call this protectionism? If ethical eaters think it’s good to prop up local industries by shunning the juicy, sun-dappled fare of dirt-poor African or Latin American farmers, then they and I have different takes on the word ‘ethical’....

There are now restaurants that promise ‘guilt-free dining’. Like The Grain Store in London, which offers diners an organic, carbon-neutral eating experience. So the grub doesn’t only nourish your body — it massages your ego; it flatters your moral pretensions. This is what I find so grating about ethical eating: it’s so self-regarding. It isn’t about changing the world. Hordes of caring teens opting for -beanburgers at Leon rather than Big Macs at McDonald’s are not going to overthrow The System, or even make much of a dent in the number of cows killed for meat. No, it’s about keeping oneself morally clean, unpolluted by the junk that other people eat.

It’s part of what the French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu called ‘distinction’, where one bigs up one’s moral status by contrasting it with the antics of the less switched-on. In this sense, vegans and freegans and locavores need McDonald’s to keep frying meat, and nasty corporations to continue flying fruit from Kenya to Tesco, because without all that wicked behavior they’d have nothing to distinguish themselves from.

York's & CUNY's Catherine Wilson interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Nationwide outbreak of Dunning-Kruger Disease

Breaking news:

“We regret to announce that all 50 states are now reporting several cases of DKD” said CDC epidemiologist Mark Webber. “DKD is characterized as expressing or believing that one has vast and expert knowledge in a subject which they actually do not....”

There is currently no known cure for DKD, but scientists are hopeful with more education and isolation, it can be contained.

“We haven’t seen this level of DKD since Jenny McCarthy started spreading her vaccine causes autism bullshit” said Webber. “I fear the DKD level will continue to rise as more and more people with DKD have access to the internet, as well as there being several celebrities with the disease.”

Some say the worst part of DKD is that the carriers have no idea they are infected, nor how easily they can spread it to others.

 (Thanks to Tommy Crocker for the pointer.)

On an irony about the evolution of "standpoint epistemology"

It was Marx and Marxists who were the inventers of "standpoint epistemology," the idea that one's "social" position--for Marxists, "class," for later writers, race, gender, and so on--exercises an important, sometimes decisive, influence on a person's beliefs.  For Marxists, the key thought was that the "standpoint" resulted in distortion of one's knowledge, because it was tainted by the interests associated with one's social position.  In the Marxist version of standpoint epistemology, the working classes did not have any special epistemic access to the actual facts about their situation--to the contrary, their understanding of the actual state of affairs was distorted by the ideology propagated by a different, dominant class, which systematically distorted social reality in its own interests.  Marxists, like Marx, assumed (correctly) that there is an epistemically superior description of social reality that is not tainted by standpoint, and which can serve as a check on the ideological delusions promoted by dominant groups.

By contrast, in recent bourgeois academic philosophy--that is, philosophizing by well-to-do professors who never challenge the prerogatives of the capitalist class, which is basically almost all of current philosophy in the Anglophone world--standpoint epistemology has, ironically, been turned on its head.   Now the social position of the purported "knower"--usually "race" or "gender" or "sexual orientation"--is not taken to be a distorting influence on cognition, but rather an epistemic advantage, one which even demands epistemic deference by others.  We have travelled rather far from Marx.

(I thank Clifford Sosis for a stimulating e-mail exchange on this topic, though the ideas are strictly my own!)

Best PhD Programs for Philosophy of Physics, 2016-17

Following up on this post, and once again taking account of faculty changes since the fall 2014 PGR, here's an attempted update of the top (3.5 or higher) programs for philosophy of physics for 2016-17, again by rough "clusters" of peer programs:

Group 1 (1-4)

Oxford University

University of California, Irvine

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

University of Western Ontario

Group 2 (5-8)

Cambridge University

Columbia University (incl. Barnard)

New York University

University of Pittsburgh

Inside Higher Ed's descent into the sewer

In the last year, the notorious law gossip website Above the Law eliminated its comment section entirely, since it had become an even more idiotic cesspool than previously.  During that same time, the Chronicle of Higher Education, after being quite hands-off with comment moderation, realized that was a disaster, and has started to moderate aggressively to produce substantive discussions.   Meanwhile, the Inside Higher Ed website, which always had some moderation, has gone the opposite route, becoming even more hands-off, with the predictable result:  its comment sections are increasingly sewers of ad hominem abuse, tangential ranting, and assorted nonsense consistent with the First Five Laws of Cyber-Dynamics.  I fear this is probably related to IHE's takeover by a private equity firm that invests heavily in for-profit colleges.  Comment sections, even appallingly stupid ones, generate traffic and interest.    Until they reform their practices, I am going to generally refrain from linking to them.  I would urge others with blogs to do the same.

Another Northwestern political scientist weighs in on the case of Prof. Stevens

Professor Benjamin Page (whose important work on American plutocracy is briefly described here) has circulated a statement regarding Prof. Stevens and recent events at Northwestern:

To: Colleagues at Northwestern and elsewhere

From: Benjamin I. Page, Fulcher Professor

Concerning:  Jacqueline Stevens

September 22, 2016

            In intellectual terms I have great respect for Jackie.  She is very smart.  Always provocative and interesting.  I have enjoyed a number of lively interactions with her.  Politically (in the world and national sense) I usually agree with her views, including some that others may consider far-out.  Personally, we have always been on friendly terms.  She has never caused me the slightest harm or discomfort – unless one counts my impatience with some of her lengthy discourses at department meetings; but that is par for the academic course.

            Unfortunately, however, on matters of departmental citizenship and collegiality Jackie has fallen sadly short.  She seems to have allowed her strong views on various substantive and (especially) procedural issues to provoke her into extreme actions that have traumatized a good many departmental colleagues – faculty, staff, students, and especially Chairs, the last three of whose lives she has made miserable repeatedly and over extended periods.  Jackie’s recent scorched-earth policy of tendentiously blogging about normally confidential personnel matters threatens to disrupt the very functioning of the department.  It has led our outstanding current department leaders Sara and Al – and most of my senior colleagues, including myself – to question whether it could be possible for any of us to serve as Chair with Jackie actively making trouble in the department.

    This is a bad business.  My sense is that several departmental colleagues and university administrators have been working very hard to avoid disaster.  But Northwestern (and probably other universities as well) does not seem well prepared to deal with highly unusual situations in which extreme behavior by a single tenured faculty member threatens the functioning of a whole department.  I am hopeful that this particular situation can be resolved.  Perhaps new procedures will also be needed to protect against anything similar happening in the future.

    The Political Science Department at Northwestern has been a wonderful intellectual home for me.  I like and respect every one of my colleagues.  I have greatly enjoyed working and talking with them.  It is probably accurate to say that there is no other department in the country that could have been so helpful to the flourishing of my scholarly work.  I would be extremely distressed, and would consider it a terrible loss to the university and the country, if anything were allowed to seriously damage such a fine group of scholars and human beings.

Retrocausality and action at a distance

Philosopher Huw Price (Cambridge) and a physicist discuss.

(Thanks to Larry Franz for the pointer.)

A short (and amusing) interview with philosopher turned journalist David Johnson

Here.

Why utilitarianism (and effective [sic] altruism?) are the ideology of capitalism

Well, perhaps:

What matters in the narcissistic world of late capitalism is not what you think or do but how you feel. And since how you feel can’t be argued against, it is conveniently insulated from all debate. Men and women can now stroll around in continuous self-monitoring mode, using apps to track their changes of mood. The brutal, domineering ego of an older style of capitalism has given way to the tender self-obsession of the new....

What Davies recognises is that capitalism has now in a sense incorporated its own critique. What the system used to regard with suspicion – feeling, friendship, creativity, moral responsibility – have all now been co-opted for the purpose of maximising profits. One commentator has even argued the case for giving products away free, so as to form a closer bond with the customer. Some employers have taken to representing pay increases they give to their staff as a gift, in the hope of extracting gratitude and thus greater effort from them. It seems that there is nothing that can’t be instrumentalised....

Happiness for the market researchers and corporate psychologists is a matter of feeling good. But it seems that millions of individuals don’t feel good at all, and are unlikely to be persuaded to buck up by technologies of mind control that induce them to work harder or consume more. You can’t really be happy if you are a victim of injustice or exploitation, which is what the technologists of joy tend to overlook. This is why, when Aristotle speaks of a science of well-being, he gives it the name of politics. The point is of little interest to the neuroscientists, advertising gurus or mindfulness mongers, which is why so much of their work is spectacularly beside the point.

 

(Thanks to Michael Swanson for the pointer.)

Best PhD Programs for 19th-century Continental Philosophy for 2016-17

Following up on this post, and once again taking account of faculty changes since the fall 2014 PGR, here's an attempted update of the top (3.5 or higher) programs for 19th-century Continental Philosophy for 2016-17, again by rough "clusters" of peer programs:

Group 1 (1)

University of Chicago

Group 2 (2-4)

Brown University

Columbia University (incl. Barnard)

New York University

University of California, Riverside

Group 3 (5-9)

Georgetown University

Johns Hopkins University

Stanford University

Syracuse University

University of Warwick

(Note:  Cornell, Princeton, and Sheffield were all close to Group 3)

Adolf Reed is voting for Clinton...

...and his reasons seem right to me!

The latest capitalist defense of the "liberal arts"--and what all this really means

Reader Nick Gardner kindly calls to my attention this essay from The Atlantic.   I've noted a number of perfectly sensible pieces like this over the last couple of years, but let's step back a bit and ask what it all means:

1.  The cost of higher education in America is now quite extravagant, far more than most families in America can afford.   Tuition, room & board, miscellaneous expenses at a private liberal arts college can easily run $60,000 per year. 

2. The cost of higher education in America is not extravagant because of a vast conspiracy of malevolent actors:  it is extravagant because, for reasons the economist William Baumol diagnosed long ago, the cost of hiring highly educated individuals to work closely with young people in developing their knowledge of literature, science, and arts is expensive, and gets more expensive over time, because what they do can not be automated, yet these teachers still have to pay their bills. 

3.  One alternative, of course, is to turn the teaching over to people who will do it for less.  The unknown in the capitalist economics of higher education is what difference this makes.  We honestly do not know the answer to that question. Equally honestly, the experiment involved in finding out the answer--it is not natural, since it is dictated by the demands of capitalist efficiency--involves sacrificing people in a way that, I assume (perhaps naively), most ethics boards would not approve.

Robert Paul Wolff: "All Hands on Deck"

Do as you're told!

Best PhD Programs for Kant for 2016-17 (UPDATED)

Following up on this post, and once again taking account of faculty changes since the fall 2014 PGR, here's an attempted update of the top (3.5 or higher) programs in Kant for 2016-17, again by rough "clusters" of peer programs:

Group 1 (1)

Brown University

Group 2 (2-6)

Indiana University, Bloomington

Johns Hopkins University

New York University

Stanford University

University of California, San Diego

The bizarre LA Times/USC poll

This one has been an outlier throughout mot of the electoral season, and now is alone among national polls in showing Trump ahead of Clinton by five points or more.  It is clear the race has tightened, ever since the new campaign managers got Trump to shut up and read from a teleprompter more often.   While some reputable national polls have shown Trump ahead of Clinton by one point, most still show Clinton ahead nationally by 2 points or more.  So what's going on with the Los Angeles outlier?  It's a very unusual poll, surveying the same 3000+ people throughout the electoral cycle.  But how were they chosen?  Here's where the trouble starts.  

The poll "weights the sample to account for how people say they voted in 2012: It’s set so that 25% of the sample are voters who say they cast a ballot for Mitt Romney and 27% for President Obama. The rest are either too young to have voted four years ago or say they didn’t vote."  The problem is that people frequently misreport who they voted for in a prior election--those who voted for the loser often report they voted for the winner, or reported not voting at all. That means, of course, that Republican voters are overrepresented in this sample (perhaps dramatically over-represented), hence the screwball results.  For more details, see the NYT discussion.

Northwestern Professor Stevens may return to campus and will teach this fall...

...but may still face disciplinary proceedings for her conduct.  Prof. Stevens's response (prior link) to the Dean's straightforward letter is, alas, par for the course.

Best PhD Programs for Ancient Philosophy for 2016-17 (UPDATED)

Following up on this post, and once again taking account of faculty changes since the fall 2014 PGR, here's an attempted update of the top (3.5 or higher) programs in ancient philosophy for 2016-17, again by rough "clusters" of peer programs:

Group 1 (1-5)

Cambridge University

Oxford University

Princeton University

Stanford University

Yale University

A new biography of Habermas

The intellectual historian Peter Gordon (Harvard) offers an informative review of the new biography of Habermas.  Among other things, I was struck by the irony that Habermas--always an admirable critic of post-Nazi complacency in Germany, as Gordon emphasizes--secured his habilitation and first academic post thanks to the influence of the disgusting Nazi and lifelong anti-semite Gadamer!  (I wonder if Habermas knew?  For a long time, Gadamer was quite good at keeping it under wraps.)  Gordon, in my view, significantly overstates Habermas's philosophical importance (in contrast to his invaluable role as a public intellectual holding post-War Germany to moral account).  When Marxism returns, as it no doubt will, in something more like Marx's form, Habermas will be remembered mainly as taking the philosophically feeble (and irrelevant) attack on instrumental reason that began with Horkheimer and expanding it to the point that so-called "Critical Theory" collapsed into precisely the kind of bourgeois moral theorizing Marx loathed.  (For anyone interested, I discuss this in a bit more detail here.)

A victory for academic (and intellectual) freedom at Berkeley

As everyone knows, the major threat to free speech at American universities comes not from hyper-sensitive and narcissistic millenials (though they can be a nuisance at some schools) but from those who want to police discourse about Israel and Palestine, and punish those who hold insufficiently pro-Israel views.  Several readers have flagged for me the latest incident at Berkeley, which has now been resolved in favor of academic freedom and against the would-be censors.  (Thanks to Arthur Smith for this link.)   Nothing has done more damage to Israel in America than the consistently disgusting behavior of its alleged friends.

What should we do with sexual harassers in the academy?

I have a piece in CHE, which touches on some cases well-known (alas) to the philosophical community.