Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Sunday Classical: Brahms, Symphony No. 1

 

 

Restaurant review: Trump Grill

This is quite funny.

CUNY's John Kleinig interviewed...

...at 3AM.

America is doomed, part 391: the collapse of democracy

This is a sober and straightforward analysis of how the Republicans have taken us to the brink of democratic collapse and authoritarian takeover; just one taste:

An even more basic norm under threat today is the idea of legitimate opposition. In a democracy, partisan rivals must fully accept one another’s right to exist, to compete and to govern. Democrats and Republicans may disagree intensely, but they must view one another as loyal Americans and accept that the other side will occasionally win elections and lead the country. Without such mutual acceptance, democracy is imperiled. Governments throughout history have used the claim that their opponents are disloyal or criminal or a threat to the nation’s way of life to justify acts of authoritarianism.

The idea of legitimate opposition has been entrenched in the United States since the early 19th century, disrupted only by the Civil War. That may now be changing, however, as right-wing extremists increasingly question the legitimacy of their liberal rivals. During the last decade, Ann Coulter wrote best-selling books describing liberals as traitors, and the “birther” movement questioned President Obama’s status as an American.

Such extremism, once confined to the political fringes, has now moved into the mainstream. In 2008, the Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin linked Barack Obama to terrorism. This year, the Republican Party nominated a birther as its presidential candidate. Mr. Trump’s campaign centered on the claim that Hillary Clinton was a criminal who should be in jail; and “Lock her up!” was chanted at the Republican National Convention. In other words, leading Republicans — including the president-elect — endorsed the view that the Democratic candidate was not a legitimate rival.

Trump chooses Zionist Sociopath who would make Alan Dershowitz blush as Ambassador to Israel...

...and NYT merely reports the choice is "polarizing".  But it fits the pattern:  all in the Mafia family.  And this guy, Friedman, is a real consigliere, though previously only about bankruptcy.

Pettit, McGeer to remain half-time at Princeton (as well as at ANU)

Philip Pettit (moral & political philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of social science) and Victoria McGeer (philosophy of mind, moral psychology) have turned down part-time offers from Stanford University, which would have replaced their half-time posts at Princeton.  (They will both continue to spend half the year at the Australian National University as well.)

Bad sense of humor at Wilfrid Laurier?

You lose your job for it, at least if you're at the mercy of the maniacs there in the Graduate Students Association.  The irony of costing a human being his livelihood over a joke about wanting to hire a "slave" to "boss" around is unbelievable.  Kudos to philosophy professor Byron Williston for speaking out:

The sudden closure drew criticism from many of the café’s customers. Laurier ethics professor Byron Williston penned a scathing open letter to the graduate students association, accusing them of acting like “spoiled children.”

“I suppose it’s a sign of the times, especially on university campuses whose student bodies — undergraduate and graduate — seem to have been taken over by the terminally thin-skinned and self-righteous,” Williston wrote. “Perhaps you should direct your moral outrage at some of the many real problems in the world rather than behaving like petty bullies.”

Williston said the termination was a gross overreaction to a joke, even if it was in poor taste.

“I wrote the letter because I think the operator has been morally wronged. I think it’s important for somebody to speak out for him,” he said in an interview.

(Thanks to Mark Capustin for the pointer.)

"Crying wolf" about Trump?

Several readers have pointed out this piece trying to debunk the idea that Trump is a white supremacist, a racist, an anti-gay bigot, etc.   The author limits the evidence considered to events during the campaign, ignoring longer-term evidence of Trump's "casual racism" (as I originally called it), but if you read on, he doesn't really deny the causal racism.  But I agree that Trump is not ideologically committed to white supremacy, let alone anti-semitism or anti-gay bigotry etc.:  this is partly because, as Chomsky remarked, he has no discernible ideology at all, being too ignorant and shallow to have such commitments.  Unfortunately, he has now surrounded himself with some ideologically (meaning, religiously) committed anti-gay bigots, and perhaps worse.  But the author does make one very good point, that is worth quoting:

I don’t think people appreciate how weird this guy is. His weird way of speaking. His catchphrases like “haters and losers!” or “Sad!”. His tendency to avoid perfectly reasonable questions in favor of meandering tangents about Mar-a-Lago. The ability to bait him into saying basically anything just by telling him people who don’t like him think he shouldn’t.

If you insist that Trump would have to be racist to say or do whatever awful thing he just said or did, you are giving him too much credit. Trump is just randomly and bizarrely terrible. Sometimes his random and bizarre terribleness is about white people, and then we laugh it off. Sometimes it’s about minorities, and then we interpret it as racism.

Speaking of fascists...

...the Republican legislature in North Carolina doesn't even need a Reichstag fire to display its contempt for democracy.  On the bright side, they didn't yet vote to impeach the newly elected Democratic governor, but give them time.

More on our NeoNazi philosophy PhD du jour

A curious piece at IHE, which is mostly just a composite of various blog postings, including from here.  It appears IHE had trouble finding anyone to defend this character, so they reached out to the bizarre Carol Swain (Vanderbilt)--see, e.g., here--whose contribution is to assert that since Jorjani has not advocated violence, he is not a NeoNazi.  Apart from that amusing non-sequitur, there's not much of additional interest:  no evidence yet that Stony Brook is re-evaluating the award of his PhD, for example (which, as I've said already, they would have no basis for doing).

On nothing

Philosopher of science James Ladyman (Bristol) and others discuss.

Brian Leiter watch

An occasional series:  Brian Leiter, cross-country coach.

Blast from the past: Nietzsche and Ayn Rand

I love Nietzsche, for his wickedness, truthfulness, and posing the most serious challenge to Marx, but he's got nothing to do with Ayn Rand.  Poor Fred!  A literate, sensitive, psychologically astute intellect and champion of aesthetic excellence, a thinker of world-historic significance, conjoined with a sophomoric apparatchik of bankers and flatterer of narcissistic mediocrities!  Could there be a more grotestque irony?

Philosophical Gourmet Report, 2016-17

Well, not really, but several students asked for a post with links to all the pertinent information I've been posting over the last six months trying to update the 2014 PGR in light of faculty changes in the interim. So here it is:

Faculty moves since the fall 2014 PGR.

Updated overall rankings for 2016-17 (strictly by peer groupings, the order within a peer group is not an ordinal ranking)

Updated specialty rankings for 2016-17 for:

Philosophy of Language

Philosophy of Mind

Metaphysics

Epistemology

Philosophical Logic

General Philosophy of Science

Philosophy of Physics

Philosophy of Biology

Philosophy of Cognitive Science

Who is faster, the tortoise or the hare?

The hare, obviously, but the tortoise, being stupid, is more single-minded, while the hare is easily distracted.  No comment on which one is Trump.

 

 

Actual NY Times headline today: "Tillerson Put Exxon Priorities Ahead of American Policy"

Understand that Tillerson was the CEO of Exxon, that America is a capitalist country in which the pursuit of profit is paramount and not subject to the generic limitation that it comport with government policy, and that the NYT headline writers hopefully know both these things.   And this, remember, is the "best" newspaper in this benighted country.

Meanwhile, also in the NYT, Thomas "no ideas and the ability to express them" Friedman declares Russian interference with the U.S. election "an act of war."   I'm very glad it's Tillerson, and not Friedman, who may become Secretary of State.

It's good for philosophers to be in the EU!

Bence Nanay (University of Antwerp) has just received a 2-million Euro grant from the European Research Council for five years to do research on mental imagery and the role it plays in everyday perception. 

Charles Pigden (Otago) on John McCumber's "silly" book on McCarthyism and "analytic" philosophy

The book is, indeed, silly (and basically incompetent), but I've never seen the point put so succinctly:

It seems to me absurd to suppose that McCumber’s book comes within cooee of excellence . He argues that the triumph of the unduly disengaged school of analytic philosophy in the USA was due to McCarthyism. It is a moot point whether analytic philosophy IS unduly disengaged (Russell, Ayer and Hart, for example, were notable as as public intellectuals and one reason that so many logical empiricists had to flee to America was because of the anti-fascist tendencies of their thought) , but whether it is or not, McCarthyism can’t be the chief explanation of its triumph in America since analytic philosophy *also* triumphed in other Anglophone countries where McCarthyism was either muted or non-existent. The book is typical of one of the two ways in which American scholars tend to go astray. Because America is such a big, powerful and important country, they find it hard to keep the rest of the world in focus. As a result they are prone to two opposing errors: seeking a global explanation for what is mainly an American phenomenon or seeking a specifically American explanation for what is a global phenomenon. McCumber gives an American explanation for the triumph of analytic philosophy which is a global or at least a pan-Anglophone phenomenon (though one should not forget the triumph of analytic philosophy in countries such as Sweden and Finland). There is the further problem that analytic philosophy had largely triumphed in America BEFORE the political advent of McCarthy whose glory days were from 1950-1954. Now you can get around this difficulty by defining McCarthyism more broadly to encompass the red-baiting anti-radical and anti-Communist hysteria (often with an anti-New Deal agenda) that began in the nineteen-thirties and found institutional expression in the House Un-American Activities Committee which began its sessions in 1938 as well as the its predecessors such as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee whose co-chair, Dickstein, turns out (hilariously) to have been in the pay of the NKVD. But in that case the theory becomes even more bizarre as the most high-profile victim of this kind of proto-McCarthyism was Bertrand Russell, one of the founding fathers of analytical philosophy, who was blocked from a job at CUNY in 1940 because of his social and sexual radicalism and his anti-religious writings, reducing him temporarily, to near destitution. So McCumber’s thesis metamorphoses into the claim that philosophers sought to avoid the fate of Bertrand Russell by philosophizing in the style pioneered by -– Bertrand Russell. Well that’s not quite right (someone might reply); the point is that the triumph of analytical philosophy is to be explained by the fact that philosophers sought to avoid the fate of Bertrand Russell a) by philosophizing in the style of Bertrand Russell whilst b) *eschewing the public role that Russell had played for so many years as an activist for left-wing causes*. But then it seems that what McCarthyism (in this extended sense) explains is not the triumph of analytic philosophy (which was well on the way by 1940 and which happened elsewhere without the aid of McCarthyism) but the relative silence of left-leaning philosophers on social issues that was characteristic of American philosophy in the forties and fifties. In other words, what McCarthyism explains is not the triumph of analytic philosophy in America but the retreat of those triumphant analytic philosophers to the ‘icy slopes of logic’ . (This is confirmed by the fact that in other countries, where McCarthyite tendencies were relatively weak, you get the triumph of analytic philosophy without the retreat to the icy slopes: Russell, Ayer and Hart were all pretty vocal on social issues in the forties, fifties and sixties.) But this is not McCumber’s thesis but Reisch’s thesis as developed in ‘How the Cold War Transformed the Philosophy of Scince’. I have reservations about Reisch’s book but at least it isn’t as obviously silly as McCumber’s.

 So it turns out that equally silly thread on Babette Babich's fantasies about the Continental traditions in philosophy produced several useful comments!

Shorter APA Code of Conduct

A reader (who asked not to be identified, lest he be deemed insufficiently ethical) suggests that the Committee responsible for the silly Code of Conduct could have saved a lot of time by just adopting the Hopewell School District's "kindergarten classroom rules."

NeoNazis respond to Jason Reza Jorjani's denial that he is a NeoNazi

You really couldn't make this stuff up--from the comments that follow Jorjani's defense:

The irony is that Jason really, really isn't one of us. He doesn't want to secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. He is not even a fellow traveler; he is just a LARPer who thinks he is a zoroastrian Magi, who likes to watch anime and jerking off to Heidegger books, like so many 'intellectuals" here.

BTW, Heidegger was not a Nationalsocialist. Yes, he was a card carrying party member, but he fucked Arendt, what kind of Nationalsocialist have sex with jews?

On misrepresenting Chomsky

A never-ending saga, it seems.

(Thanks to Mark Pavlick for the pointer.)

Plato and fake news

Political theorist David Lay Williams (DePaul) comments.

Blast from the past: Decoding letters of reference

Originally from 2010, but reaching back even further.

Perennial questions: why does Thomas Friedman have a column at the New York Times?

Perhaps it's only to let Matt Tiabbi have fun at his expense.

Jason Reza Jorjani (PhD, Stony Brook) denies he is a NeoNazi

It's a rousing defense--in response to an earlier posting here--for which paraphrase would not be adequate; some highlights:

I have never understood what “Neo” is supposed to mean in the context of “NeoNazi”, other than an evocation of Hollywood depictions of “skin head” militiamen. A National Socialist is a National Socialist. Martin Heidegger, the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, was a National Socialist. I am not one, even if I have argued, rightly (in my October Stockholm speech), that National Socialist Germany was the only political regime to seriously consider the implications of mainstream scientific recognition and widespread cultivation of those latent human capacities hitherto marginalized as “paranormal.” To put my relationship to National Socialism in the language of the Left, since most of my accusers fancy themselves of that political persuasion, to call me a National Socialist is like calling someone a Stalinist simply because he is a Marxist. A Trotskyite would certainly be defamed by such an epithet, and would be rightly outraged to be subjected to that kind of slander. I am not any kind of nationalist.

Some important distinctions here:  Jorjani stands to Nazism as Trotsky stands to Stalinism.  The latter two both self-identify as Marxists, of course, but disagree about implementation of the revolution.  So, too, the former two are both pan-Aryan racists and authoritaraians, but disagree about...well, apparently "nationalism."  Onward:

It makes no more sense to equate my views with those of Richard Spencer (let alone Adolf Hitler) simply because he patted me on the back on stage for a minute than it does to claim that Barack Obama is a Wahhabi responsible for all of Saudi Arabia’s routinely inhuman barbarity because he knelt and kissed the Saudi King’s hand or sheepishly accepted a medal from him.

In fact, the latter is far more evidence of Obama being an Islamic fundamentalist traitor than my interaction with Spencer is evidence supporting any description of me as an “Aryan White Supremacist” or “NeoNazi.” Even Richard Spencer cannot be fairly described in these terms, let alone myself. You make it seem as if we are supporters of that terribly confused and grotesquely misnamed ‘Aryan Nations’ terrorist group. That is more absurd than if one were to conflate any supporter of the state of Israel with a militant Zionist.

I don't recall anyone mentioning the pat-on-the-back from the NeoNazi Richard Spencer as the key piece of evidence, as opposed to Jorjani's voluntary decision to speak at a meeting of pathetic white people acting out NeoNazi fantasies--a speech, by the way, in which Jorjani declared "Aryan culture" uniquely worthy of affirmation, and denounced democracy, liberalism, and human rights.

But now for some good news: some of Jorjani's best friends (and influences) are Jews!

I am certainly not an “anti-semite”. Thinkers of Jewish descent have been among the deepest influences on my worldview and among my closest confidants: Henri Bergson, Franz Kafka (I have written an entire unpublished manuscript on Kafka), Leo Strauss, and Jeffrey Mishlove. And before anyone adds insult to injury by hurling the epithet “NeoCon” at me, I am not a Neoconservative in any way, shape, or form. I loathe them and consider their geopolitics a disgrace to the subtlety of Professor Strauss – especially his interpretations of classical thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle and his esoteric understanding of the dialectical relationship between Athens and Jerusalem.

The hundreds of hyper-intellectual millennials that I encountered at the 2016 National Policy Institute conference this November, where I was representing Arktos Media as a book distributor, included a number of Jews that I had the pleasure of spending more time with than anyone else over the weekend. In fact, three of them were among the seven (yes it was only seven!) people out of the three hundred attendees who were caught on film or in photographs giving the “Hail Victory!” Roman salute. The Atlantic’s smuggled footage was shot from two camera angles and spliced in order to make it appear otherwise, which, frankly, is more evidence in favor of Richard Spencer’s legitimate use of the term lügenpresse. The young folks that I spent time with are Jewish adherents of Fascism, like some of Benito Mussolini’s staunchest and closest supporters during his early years (in the 1920s) when his vision most extensively overlapped with that of Italian Futurism.

 Whoops, there's that Nazi trope, lügenpresse.  Never mind, let's get to the intellectual substance to show how far Jorjani is from Nazism:

One of the key points of my very brief speech at NPI 2016 was that as Editor-in-Chief of Arktos I intend to increase the dialectical tension between the already exceptionally wide range of thinkers published by our press. We publish people who have nothing less than diametrically opposed viewpoints. For example, I am currently editing Alexander Dugin. Although we have common points of departure in the ontology of Martin Heidegger and the political theory of Carl Schmitt, our interpretations and developments of these thinkers could not be more sharply opposed. If Dugin were to read Prometheus and Atlas, he would probably consider me the incarnation of the coming Anti-Christ that he evokes in his books. Still, I find his writing interesting and constructively outside the box of the entrenched and dead-ended establishment ideology that you are so intent to safeguard. You are the totalitarian thought police and soma dispensers. I am a futurist, and a revolutionary.

This is definitely a big tent, stretching from the Nazis Heidegger and Schmitt to the authoritarian racist Dugin. 

And the first posted comment on Jorjani's rebuttal to being called a NeoNazi?  I quote it in full and verbatim:  "Your accusers are likely to be jews."

So one thing that's instructive about this delusional display is that the narcissism of small differences really matters to these folks, and they really hate to be called Nazis, even if that's what they are to those outside the narcissistic circle.  

By the way, while Stony Brook faculty and students certainly can criticize this alum, I see no grounds on which they could revoke his PhD, as Jorjani's post alleges they are talking about (the evidence is a bit scarce on this point).  Alas, Stony Brook owns this clown; perhaps it might prompt some self-scrutiny about the criteria on the basis of which they award degrees.  (Recall Jorjani's dissertation abstract.)

Finally, I want to emphasize, as I did originally, that academic freedom protects Jorjani's right to be a monstrous fool; as long as he is discharging his pedagogical duties in a competent manner, his institution should not penalize him.   At the same time, everyone else in academic philosophy should know that Jason Reza Jorjani is, indeed, a monstrous fool.

Blast from the past: Davidson v. Anscombe

From 2011.  Interesting comment section too.

New aesthetics essay prize, named in honor of Arthur Danto

Details from the APA here.

On the Russian-hacking-and-the-election distraction

I commend Greenwald's take.  Even if Russian hackers wanted Trump to win, so what?  There's no evidence they had any effect on the outcome, which seems to be entirely due to about 100,000 formerly Democratic voters in three states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) flipping to Trump, and the depressed turnout among African-American voters, who turned out in much larger numbers in 2012.

Reed College Dean of Faculty speaks out against student disrupters

Rightly so (see page 2); context here.

Free on-line course: Berit Brogaard (Miami), "On Romantic Love"...

...at the IAI Academy.

I try to let most stupidity pass in silence...

...but in a world with lots of blogs run by people with varying levels of knowledge, sometimes stupidity finds an audience, and innocents need to be warned.  The only thing that Babette Babich knows less about than the Continental traditions in post-Kantian European philosophy is what is going on in Anglophone "analytic" philosophy, but on neither topic is she an informed or reliable commentator.   As one commenter correctly remarked:

I think you do the Continental Philosophy tradition a serious disservice by raising this (to my mind very important) topic in the context of a rant by Babich and one of her acolytes. She’s well known to try to discredit speakers at Continental Philosophy conferences by insulting them on Twitter (sometimes with the retort that they are secretly “Analytic”, and sometimes with more mundane insults). She’s barely taken seriously by Continental Philosophers anymore, except for a small die-hard crop of apologists who are thankfully diminishing in numbers fast.

And another patient commenter, Jonathan Mitchell, responds effectively on the "merits" of this intellectual muddle:

As someone who writes on Nietzsche I find much of what Babich has to say quite poorly motivated (for reasons I will explain below). But first I want to start by quoting Babich’s definition of ‘continental philosophy’:

The question the interviewer sets up is this:

“CC If, as I am suggesting, logical argumentation is at the heart of the analytic methods, can you express the essence of the continental practices in philosophy?”

“BB: Continental philosophy includes a historical sense, a sense of historical context which it does not name ‘the history of philosophy.’ If Heidegger writes about Anaximander he is not reflecting on philosophy’s history as if this were a thing once done, passé, whereas we now, today, do some other sort of thing when we ‘do’ philosophy. At the same time the continental tradition also emphasizes everything that has to do with context, with interpretation, as a difference that makes all the difference.”

For starters, there is no obvious reason why one can’t study philosophy with a ‘historical sense’, where this involves paying due attention to historical context, and at the same time be involved in ‘logical argumentation’, if by the later one is taken to mean providing reasons, arguments and evidence for the claims one makes (especially, but not least, claims of exegesis). The two would only seem mutually exclusive if one had an incredibly narrow understanding of what ‘logical argumentation’ amounted to (i.e. equivalent to applying the most abstract of formal logical methods which is not the trend in Nietzsche studies!).

Capitalism in action

Chances of earning more than your parents in America used to be over 90% and declined to 50% by 1980 (I bet money it is even lower today).

(Thanks to Bill Edmundson for the pointer.)

Sunday Classical: Schubert, String Quartet No. 14 in D minor ("Death and the Maiden")

 

 

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: The Nice, "Diamond Hard Blue Apples of the Moon," 1968

The late Keith Emerson's first successful band, the progressive/psychedelic band The Nice debuted with its best album The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack in 1967, but this tune was actually a b-side from a single taken from that album and released in 1968 (the a-side was the song "America").  Although successful in the U.K., they never broke into the American market.  Emerson left the band in 1970 and went on to greater success worldwide joining forces with Greg Lake (who died last week) and Carl Palmer:

 

 

Toronto's Ainslie wins JHP Book Prize for 2015

Philosopher Deborah Nails (emerita, Michigan State), the book review editor of JHP, asked me to share this announcement, which I am happy to do:

Donald C. Ainslie, University of Toronto, is this year's winner of the Journal of the History of Philosophy $5,000 prize for the best book in the history of philosophy published in the previous year.  His Hume's True Scepticism was published in 2015 by Oxford University Press.

Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson emerges as Trump's likely choice for Secretary of State

Some details here.  This isn't as odd as it seems once one recalls that what attracted Trump to Mitt Romney as Secretary of State was that he "looked the part" (remember, this is an ignorant man, whose view of everything is through television).  Tillerson looks the part, and he has two other virtues from Trump's point of view:  a businessman and someone who is on friendly terms with Vladimir Putin growing out of past business dealings.  I view the latter as a positive, since I still think reducing the risk of nuclear war with an unstable ignoramus in the White House is paramount.  I also note that when Tillerson was head of the Boy Scouts of America, he was instrumental in lifting the ban on openly gay Scouts participating.   Again, against my very low bar of expectations, this would probably be a salutary outcome.  Hopefully he and Secretary of Defense Mattis will prevent Dopey Donald Chump from annihilating civilization.

"The Philosopher Snowboard"

Just in time for Xmas, though it is really the "Plato snowboard," so do not give it to any Aristotelians, Humeans, or Nietzscheans in your life.

(Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)

Reed College students embarrass themselves

Unbelievable.  Where are the adults on that campus?

End "hair-trigger alert" for nuclear weapons...

....before the psychologically unbalanced ignoramus enters the Oval office.  At the end, there is a link that will take you to a letter to be sent to President Obama.  Urge him to do this in his final month!

Elizabeth Irvine (Cardiff) and Eran Tal (McGill) receive 2016 Popper Prize for best articles of the year in....

....the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

Which major American city will fare best over the next century of climate change?

Chicago!  Admittedly, next week the low temperatures, without taking account of windchill, will be around zero farenheit, but it's quite clear that winters are milder here overall than they were thirty years ago.  And if, as predicted, Chicago summers become more like Atlanta summers in 2100, I do wonder what Atlanta summers will be like then!

Wisconsin's war on tenure, continued

The latest:

Also Thursday, the regents added stronger language to a policy that faculty members already believe takes power out of their hands and places it in the hands of campus administrators.

The new language spells out that every five years, campus administrators must do "independent, substantive reviews" of tenured faculty, a process that faculty members fear could open the door to arbitrarily overturning positive performance reviews given by faculty peers, and ultimately justify a firing.

Regent Tony Evers, the state's superintendent of public instruction for K-12 schools, said the policy seemed to be "a solution seeking a problem, and I don't think this is a problem."

(Thanks to Alan White for the pointer.)

A useful snapshot of the right-wing crazies Trump (i.e., Mike Pence) is putting in his cabinet

Here.

"Intra-left" debates about identity politics: the case of "white supremacy"

This is a striking tale.

(Thanks to Jordan Rosen for the pointer.)

Academic fields of readers

So with over 1100 votes in our poll from the other day, here are the results:

Readers: what is your main academic field?

Philosophy               62% Law    5% Medicine    1% History    1% English/Comparative Literature/Foreign Languages    3% Theology or Religious Studies    1% Psychology or Cognitive Science    1% Political Science or Public Policy    2% Economics    1% Linguistics    1% Other social sciences (e.g., sociology, anthropology etc.)    1% Biology    1% Mathematics    1% Computer Science    1% Other natural sciences (e.g., chemistry, physics, earth sciences)    1% None of the above    3% I am not an academic    14%

Unsurprisingly, philosophy was the primary academic field of readers (with over 700 votes, accounting for not quite two-thirds of the responses).   5% come from law (59 votes), while 14% are neither faculty nor students (135 votes).   3% (33 votes) study or teach English, Comparative Literature or foreign languages & literatures, while 2% (28) come from Political Science or Public Policy.  The 1% in many other fields conceals differentials in vote totals, ranging from 17 votes in each of History, Medicine, and Psychology/Cognitive Science, to just 6 in Computer Science.  I'm pleased that the blog is of interest to a significant number from other academic disciplines, as well as to those outside the academy.

Thanks to all for reading!

The Frankfurt School, the "culture industry," and Trump...

...in The New Yorker.

So who is responsible for drafting this travesty of a "Code of Conduct"?

We have commented on the ridiculous but probably irrelevant APA "Code of Conduct" over the last few weeks.  The biggest risk is that this document will be used as an excuse to fire some temporary faculty, citing the authority of the Dear Abbys of the APA.  But a number of readers have asked:  who wrote this nonsense?  

The document was, as it happens, produced by the following committee:

Nancy J. Holland (Chair) (PhD, Berkeley), Professor of Philosophy at Hamline University.  Specialties include Continental philosophy (esp. Heidegger) and feminist philosophy.

Scott A. Anderson (PhD, Chicago), Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia (he appears to have been at the Assistant Professor rank since 2003).  Specialties include ethics, social & political philosophy, and philosophy of sex and gender.

Leslie P. Francis (PhD, Michigan; JD, Utah), Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of Utah.  Specialties include bioethics, environmental ethics, philosophy of law, disability law, and health law.

Ned Markosian (PhD, U Mass/Amherst), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst.  Specializes in metaphysics.

Diane Michelfelder (PhD, Texas), Professor of Philosophy at Macalester College.  Specialties include 20th-century Continental philosophy (esp. phenomenology), philosophy of technology, and applied ethics.

Julinna Oxley (PhD, Tulane), Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Coastal Carolina University.  Specialties include ethics, applied ethics, social and political philosophy, and feminist philosophy.

Breaking news: turns out Trump will represent the short-term interests of his economic class after all

Shocking!

Has physics made philosophy obsolete (redux)

Philosophers Angie Hobbs, Mary Midgley and others talk with the world's dumbest physicist, Lawrence Krauss.

More on the attack on tenure in Wisconsin

An informative piece on the latest mischief.  The key point:  if you give administrators independent and unchecked power to terminate tenured faculty, that power is ripe for abuse.

(Thanks to Alan White for the pointer.)