Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

PhD Programs behaving badly! (MOVING TO FRONT FROM EARLIER TODAY--UPDATED)

A major North American PhD program is pressuring a student to accept by this Friday (today)--in violation of (sensible) APA rules--in order to get a particularly good scholarship.  I know this because another major North American PhD program is interested in the same student, and alerted me to the misconduct  I will not name names just yet, but the guilty parties know who they are.  Abide by the rules, children!  Or face exposure!

UPDATE:  It turns out there is a university rule with respect to some forms of financial aid that this department must abide by.  Once I get permission, I'll post more.

ANOTHER:  The Chair of the Department in question kindly gave permission to post the following explanation:

Allow me to make two clarifications: (1) Our program abides by the APA rules. All admitted graduate students have until April 15 to decide on whether or not they accept our offer of admission. We do not pressure students to accept earlier. (2) Our university has two university-wide graduate student entrance fellowships reserved for international students, for which more than 70 different graduate programs compete. There are only two dozens of these fellowships in total, so the competition is fierce. Now it is these - extremely selective - fellowships that come with a shorter deadline. We are constantly lobbying our university for future changes and we ask as forcefully as we can for deadline extensions. But given that our university is not bound by the CGS deadline, there isn’t much else our department can do. (We are a Canadian university and the April 15 pledge is a resolution of the US Council of Graduate Schools; only US schools are signatories to the pledge.) However, we’d like to emphasize that we take our department to be bound by the April 15 pledge just as much as if our university had signed the CGS agreement. But with respect to these rare university-wide fellowships, our only other option is not to apply for them, and this would just deprive some international students from the opportunity to have a more attractive financial package. This is why we choose to continue nominating students for these fellowships with the understanding that they would still receive one of the standard financial packages if they cannot give us an answer by the fellowship deadline. 

New Books in March

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

Philosophy, Law and the Family:  A New Introduction to the Philosophy of Law by Laurence D. Houlgate (Springer, 2017).

Vagueness and Law:  Philosophical and Legal Perspectives edited by Geert Keil & Ralf Poscher (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Aristotle, Politics, a new translation with introduction and notes by C.D.C. Reeve (Hackett Publishing, 2017).

Analytic Philosophy:  An Interpretive History edited by Aaron Preston (Routledge, 2017).

Engaging Bioethics:  An Introduction with Case Studies by Gary Seay & Susana Nuccetelli (Routledge, 2017).

Entanglements:  A System of Philosophy by Crispin Sartwell (SUNY Press, 2017).

PGR, 2016-17

I've noticed a lot of traffic to the attempted updates of the PGR, no doubt because decision time is looming.  Here again is the post that includes all the relevant links. 

Best Anglophone philosophers since 1957?

470 votes were cast, and here's the top ten:

1. W.V.O. Quine  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

2. Saul Kripke  loses to W.V.O. Quine by 166–163

3. David K. Lewis  loses to W.V.O. Quine by 170–139, loses to Saul Kripke by 181–130

4. John Rawls  loses to W.V.O. Quine by 181–125, loses to David K. Lewis by 165–151

5. Hilary Putnam  loses to W.V.O. Quine by 196–112, loses to John Rawls by 163–146

6. Derek Parfit  loses to W.V.O. Quine by 204–103, loses to Hilary Putnam by 190–111

7. Bernard Williams  loses to W.V.O. Quine by 208–104, loses to Derek Parfit by 143–134

8. Donald Davidson  loses to W.V.O. Quine by 221–63, loses to Bernard Williams by 139–133

9. Thomas Nagel  loses to W.V.O. Quine by 218–88, loses to Donald Davidson by 128–123

10. P.F. Strawson  loses to W.V.O. Quine by 240–53, loses to Thomas Nagel by 138–117

David Lewis fans were caught rallying votes late in the process, thus displacing Rawls at #3!   G.E.M. Anscombe trailed P.F. Strawson by just five votes.  Filling out the top 20 were the following philosophers:

Two philosophers win ACLS Fellowships in 2017 competition

They are:  Lydia Moland (Colby) and Tad Schmaltz (Michigan).

"Attack of the Offendotrons"

This is funny and all too apt--it's not just a phenomenon of academic philosophy, of course, but it's pathetic that despite the pretense of so many members of this profession, the exact same thing happens here.  "Human, all-too-human" as a certain German philosopher observed.

"Justifying Academic Freedom: Mill and Marcuse Revisited"

A new draft paper that may be of interest to some readers; the abstract:

I argue that the core of genuinely academic freedom ought to be freedom in research and teaching, subject to disciplinary standards of expertise. I discuss the law in the United States, Germany, and England, and express doubts about the American view that distinctively academic freedom ought to encompass "extramural" speech on matters of public importance (speakers should be protected from employment repercussions for such speech, but not because of their freedom qua academics).

I treat freedom of academic expression as a subset of general freedom of expression, focusing on the Millian argument that freedom of expression maximizes discovery of the truth, one regularly invoked by defenders of academic freedom. Marcuse argued against Mill (in 1965) that "indiscriminate" toleration of expression would not maximize discovery of the truth. I show that Marcuse agreed with Mill that free expression is only truth- and utility-maximizing if certain background conditions obtain: thus Mill argues that the British colony in India would be better off with "benevolent despotism" than Millian liberty of expression, given that its inhabitants purportedly lacked the maturity and education requisite for expression to be utility-maximizing. Marcuse agrees with Mill that the background conditions are essential, but has an empirical disagreement with him about what those are and when they obtain: Mill finds them wanting in colonial India, Marcuse finds them wanting in capitalist America.

Perhaps surprisingly, Marcuse believes that "indiscriminate" toleration of expression should be the norm governing academic discussions, despite his doubts about the utility-maximizing value of free expression in capitalist America. Why think that? Here is a reason: where disciplinary standards of expertise govern debate, the discovery of truth really is more likely, but only under conditions of "indiscriminate" freedom of argument, i.e., academic freedom. This freedom is not truly "indiscriminate": its boundaries are set by disciplinary competence, which raises an additional question I try to address.

In sum, the libertarians (Mill and Popper) and the Marxists (Marcuse) can agree that academic freedom is justified, at least when universities are genuine sites of scientific expertise and open debate

 

In Memoriam: Richard Tieszen (1951-2017)

Well-known for his work in philosophy of logic and mathematics, in both the analytic and phenomenological traditions, he was at the time of his death Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University in California.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

(Thanks to Charles Carlini for the information.)

UPDATE:   Philosopher Charles Parsons (Harvard) kindly writes with more information about his former student, Prof Tieszen:

Tieszen was born in 1951 and received a B. A. from Colorado State University, I believe in 1975, and an M. A. from the New School for Social Research in 1978, where he studied with J. N. Mohanty. Thus he had a background in Husserl and phenomenology when he entered the graduate program at Columbia University, where he received the Ph. D.in 1987. I was the main director of his dissertation. This led to a book, Mathematical Intuition: Phenomenology and Mathematical Knowledge (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989). He was a productive writer in the philosophy of logic and mathematics; he published a collection of his essays, Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics (Cambridge University Press, 2005). In late years he turned to writing on Gödel and published After Gödel: Platonism and Naturalism in Mathematics and Logic (Oxford University Press, 2011). Before his death he completed a book on Gödel for a general audience, Simply Gödel [which will be published Mr. Carlini's publishing house in New York, Simply Charly].

After a couple of temporary jobs, Tieszen joined the faculty of San Jose State and remained there until his death. He and I kept in touch throughout his career.

He is survived by his wife, Nancy, sisters Patricia Anderson, Pamela Hobbs, Sandra Tait and parents Beverly and James Tieszen.

Smear merchants at "Campus Watch" object to being correctly described

This is rather funny.  In my "Academic Ethics" column last week for CHE, I wrote:

The Daily Caller, The Washington Times, Campus Watch, The College Fix, Breitbart, and College Insurrection, among others, devote themselves with some regularity to policing faculty speech, and then presenting it — sometimes accurately, mostly inaccurately — in order to inflame public outrage and incite harassment of academics who expressed verboten views. Because American law gives very wide latitude to malicious speech for partisan political ends, there is little legal recourse for faculty members subjected to such harassment.

Only "Campus Watch" felt the need to call attention to itself and respond, in a letter CHE published (I don't fault CHE for posting their self-serving and fact-free nonsense, about which I'll say more in a moment).   Now Wikipedia reports rather candidly, with sources, on "Campus Watch" and its reputation as smear merchants who incite harassment, so none of this is even remotely controversial, but the goal of smear merchants is always to distract attention with sanctimonious posturing.  The letter itself, written by one Winfield Myers, is comedy gold, looked at the right way.  We begin, as required by every known law of psychoanalysis, with projection:

Brian Leiter, in “Academic Ethics: Defending Faculty Speech” (The Chronicle, March 22), smears Campus Watch and mischaracterizes its mission.

Of course, it is Campus Watch that smears faculty who depart from its far right line on permissible views about Israel and the Middle East, but the first rule of being a smear merchant is to pose as a victim.

Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, critiques Middle East studies by holding professors accountable for their work. 

The "Middle East Forum" is the vehicle of Daniel Pipes, who has been aptly described as a "misinformation expert."  So "Campus Watch" is really just the creation of Daniel Pipes, but the first rule of being a front organization for a political polemicist is to pretend to be an organization (a "forum," no less, suggesting reasoned dialogue and debate) rather than a front for an individual's ideological jihad.

 It does not “police faculty speech”; how could it when it lacks any and all police power?

You know you've fallen down the rabbit hole of slimy dishonesty when simple metaphors, familiar to any competent speaker of the language, are dismissed with the help of literalism ill-befitting a middle school English student.   The response might have been relevant had I written that Campus Watch "exercises its powers as deputized officers to regulate faculty speech," but I didn't write that of course.  Every competent speaker of the language knows that "to police" is a synonym for, e.g., to "watch over," to "protect," to "patrol," to "control" and so on, depending on context of usage.  So Mr. Myers's flat-footed rhetorical flourish about lacking "any and all police power" is obviously irrelevant and non-responsive. 

 It does not “inflame public opinion and incite harassment” of academics but engages in careful, multiple fact-checked analyses.

Trump and the Dunning-Kruger Effect...

...with a surprise appearance by philosopher Steven Nadler (Wisconsin)!

(Thanks to John Doris for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Steve Nadler writes with a useful bit of context:

Thanks for the notice about the Times OpEd piece.  However, just to clarify, lest I come across as a poseur: I did not present myself as a “foreign policy analyst”, nor did I expect him to identify me as such (and I don’t even play one on TV).  Rather, Edsall, who is an OpEd writer for the Times, wrote me an email after I had published an opinion piece on Spinoza and the Dutch elections that was syndicated:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/dutch-election-wilders-spinoza-by-steven-nadler-2017-03

Edsall asked me a bunch of policy questions. I told him I was not an expert on such things, but did draw some comparisons between the ignorance of Trump and the ignorance of Euthyphro. I had no idea what he was going to do with all this.

And so there it went.

Heuer from Leeds to UCL

Ulrike Heuer (ethics, practical reason, philosophy of action), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds, has accepted an offer to become Reader in Philosophy at University College London, starting this September.

(Thanks to Jose Zalabardo for the information.)

Should we aim for self-discovery?

Philosopher David Chalmers and others discuss.

Battaly from Cal State/Fullerton to U Conn

Heather Battaly (epistemology, ethics, virtue theory), Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

Best Anglophone philosophers of the past sixty years?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--I'LL LET THIS RUN ABOUT ANOTHER DAY OR SO, AND POST RESULTS BY FRIDAY

We haven't had a poll in awhile, so here's a new one.  74 choices (you don't have to rank them all!), across all fields.  Only those philosophers over 70 in 2017 or no longer living are included.   I'll post the top 10 (maybe the top 20), I hope I've got all viable candidates for the top 10 or 20 among the choices.  Have fun!

UPDATE:  Some errors of omission called to my attention:  Philip Kitcher, Ruth Millikan, Richard Rorty, Peter van Inwagen.  I doubt, though, any of these eminent philosophers would have made the top ten or twenty, but I'm sorry to have left them off.

ANOTHER:  As several readers pointed out the last half-century would be 1967, not 1957, as marked in the poll.  Since 1957 was the benchmark, I've changed the title of the poll!

Against "secret" waitlists in PhD admissions

Philosopher Tim O'Keefe (Georgia State) writes:

I’d like to speak up against having “secret” or “hidden” waitlists, as the practice has been described to me by applicants to graduate programs. (Those are their names for what’s going on.) Basically, programs accept, waitlist, and reject a bunch of applicants, but there is still a group of people in limbo, hearing no word about the status of their application for a long time. In at least in some cases, programs are using this group of applicants as a sort of backup, informal “hidden” waitlist—applicants who have a very low chance of ultimately getting in, but who are being held in reserve just in case they end up being needed. (That this is what is going on is confirmed by word from some departments after they’re contacted by applicants asking what’s up.)

I think that this is a really crappy way of treating applicants. They deserve to know in a timely manner what’s going on with their applications so that they can start making informed decisions about what they’ll be doing for next year, and being kept in limbo when a bunch of decisions from a program have been released sparks a lot of anxiety. It also jams up the overall admissions process as people can’t start accepting offers when they don’t know what’s up, and they have to contact departments individually to try to find out where they stand.

I can’t think of any good reason to do this, but maybe I’m missing something, and I’d be curious to hear from departments that do this what their reasons are. (Or more generally, reasons for not informing people of their status fairly soon - within a couple of weeks - after making their initial round of acceptances.) Why not just decide on a reasonable size for the WL pool, based on past admission seasons and factoring in how uncertain things are, and then put that number of people on the WL and formally reject everybody else? Or if people think they need a backup pool, then go ahead and explicitly inform people that that’s where they stand. Say something like the following: “We are not formally denying you admission at this time, and if an unexpectedly high proportion of people we admit (including people currently on our waitlist) turn us down, there is a possibility we’ll offer you admission. However, the chances of this happening are fairly low.” Obviously, this wouldn’t be the most welcome news to most applicants, but they’d greatly prefer hearing it than simply being kept in limbo with no word. And I don’t see the benefit to the graduate programs either in keeping people in the dark, rather than letting people know where they stand.

Thoughts from readers?

Kipnis on "Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus"

The publisher kindly sent me a copy, which I've been reading and will have more to say about, since its main case study is the Ludlow affair at Northwestern, and its verdict on that case should be of interest to everyone in academic philosophy--on her telling, there are a lot of philosophy faculty and students who have a lot to make amends for. 

Kipnis is often funny and cutting about the weirdness of parts of the contemporary academy; for example (p. 2):

Feelings are what's in fashion.  I'm all for feeling; I'm a standard-issue female, after all.  But this cult of feeling has an authoritarian underbelly:  feelings can't be questioned or probed, even while furnishing the rationale for sweeping new policies, which can't be questioned or probed either.  (I speak from experience here.)

The "experience," of course, was having a frivolous Title IX complaint filed against her by two graduate students in philosophy, a complaint that was then rationalized by the usual clueless suspects in philosophy cyberspace.   (She returns to that in a whole chapter of the book.)

AAUP reports finds College of Aurora in Colorado fired philosophy instructor for failing to dumb down his class!

What an embarrassment for the College of Aurora.  (Thanks to the AAUP for sending this report to me.)

CEU in Budapest under threat of closure by Hungarian government

This is appalling, but Hungary is currently led by an authoritarian anti-semite.  Among other things, CEU has a strong philosophy faculty among its many departments.

ADDENDUM: More from CEU here about the proposed legislation.

"Naturalism in Legal Philosophy" now revised and updated at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy...

..and also now co-authored with Max Etchemendy, our Law & Philosophy Fellow this year at Chicago.

John Searle may be guilty of sexual harassment...

...and that, according to Jenny Saul (Sheffield), suggests that "[I]f you can avoid teaching/discussing [him], that may be the best strategy."  This calls to mind that other remarkable endorsement of educational malpractice by James Sterba (Notre Dame), namely, that one should not teach Thomas Pogge because of his (unrelated) alleged misconduct.  I am curious what readers make of proposals like this.  Is there some merit in them I am missing?  Or are they as outrageous as they seem from the standpoint of responsible teaching and research?

Not John Searle's first litigation

As a landlord, he brought suit concerning rent control laws in Berkeley.

The profundity of Ayn Rand

Robert Paul Wolff comments.

Reconciling materialism and dualism?

Philosopher John Heil (Wash U/St. Louis) comments.

Summer blogging hiatus, revised

Back in early January, I announced an intention not to blog this summer.  I heard from a lot of unhappy and/or concerned readers about this!  This response from a philosopher elsewhere--whom I've never met (that I can recall), though I have admired her work for a long time, so it was especially nice to hear from her--is representative:

I just wanted to write a quick note, since I know (from your remarks this morning on your blog) that you are reassessing things. I wanted to say how valuable and positive your blog has been for me personally. It's the only one I've ever read (literally, the only one i have bookmarked and the only one i can remember actually logging onto, aside from a few physics things, for special reasons). I know you hear from lots of folks, but I'll miss it if you don't post regularly. There's lots of folks like me, I expect.

Others were unhappy at the prospect that the only audible "voices" in the philosophy blogosphere would be that of the New Infantilists, the politeness police, the thought police, etc.  In any case, I've decided on a somewhat revised summer plan:  I will plan on posting some material on Mondays and Fridays during the summer, perhaps more often when warranted.  I may also invite some guest-bloggers to contribute.  Summer advertising rates will be, accordingly, cut in half:  top spots will be $350, 2nd from the top $300, and 3rd from the top $250 per month.

Thanks to all who wrote to me and to all who read!

BU philosophy major teaches philosophy at shelter for homeless women

Interesting!

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

Many thanks to last week's guest-bloggers

Warm thanks to Darlene Deas, Barry Lam, and Christopher Pynes for their contributions last week.  You can see their postings by clicking on their "Guest Blogger" link, below.

In Memoriam: Marilyn McCord Adams (1943-2017)

MOVNG TO FRONT FROM MARCH 23

A distinguished philosopher of religion and scholar of medieval philosophy, Professor Adams taught for more than two decades at UCLA, and then over the last 20+ years at Yale University, Oxford University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and most recently, Rutgers University at New Brunswick.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

(Thanks to Laurie Paul for the information about her passing.)

UPDATE:  A brief notice from Christian Today.

ANOTHER:  A more detailed obituary, as well as information about memorial services and donations.  (Thanks to Paul Weithman for the pointer.)

MIT's Brad Skow interviewed...

...at 3AM.

CHE article on Searle case, and what I actually wrote to the reporter

CHE story is here; the reporter wrote to me as follows:

I’m gathering reactions from both the Berkeley community and the philosophy community, and gauging the significance of these allegations for Berkeley, which has faced ongoing scrutiny for harassment by its professors since 2015, and for philosophy, a discipline that has seen cases like this many times before. I wonder what you think this news suggests both for Berkeley, where officials said they had reformed their approach to harassment in early 2016 (yet this behavior allegedly took place last summer), and for philosophy, which has struggled to deal with this issue, and now another one of its star scholars is facing serious allegations.

I know you’ve written pieces for CHE about this issue and talked with my colleague Robin a number of times, so I figured you’d be a good source. Would appreciate it if you could give me a quick call today, on either number below, or send an email.

Since I am travelling, I wrote back via e-mail as follows:

I have no comment about Berkeley and its practices, which I know little about.

I have heard rumors for more than 30 years that John Searle had sexual relationships with his students.  I do not know any details about those rumors or about the present case.  The whole point of a lawsuit is that the matter will hopefully be adjudicated fairly, and then we will know.

I have no doubt that academic philosophy has had a sexual harassment problem, I do not know whether it is worse than other fields.  And I am increasingly worried that some of the most prominent cases may have been unfair to the accused.  So we should proceed with caution here, until a court can shine a light on what transpired.

At the moment, there is only one of the prominent cases where I now have serious doubts, but I'll write more about that in due course.  I hope that a court will get the chance to adjudicate the allegations against Searle.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Dust, "Stone Woman," 1971

This American rock trio recorded two albums, before going their separate ways.  This tune comes from their debut album:

 

The Future of Hi-Phi Nation

Two more new episodes remain for season 1 of Hi-Phi Nation at this point, one on the philosophy of love, the other on truth/realism/anti-realism. The stories that bring you there will hopefully be surprising. Hi-Phi Nation is gaining enough of an audience that I think it is worth a gamble for me to do a second season next academic year even at a financial loss. I will be applying to the granting agencies, wealthy foundations, and public media companies, but as many of you know, these are low-probability options in the typical case, even lower probability in nonstandard cases. I'm remembering Ken Taylor's experiences at the NEH with Philosophy Talk.

For those of you in the profession, I invite the adventurous to take a dive and think about whether you want to produce or partly produce a segment, episode, or a piece of investigative work, that will make it to the second season of the show. Its a new style and a new medium, it might not be a line on your CV, but you will reach people. The work could be within your comfort zone or you can take the full plunge, with a mic and recorder doing embedded philosophizing. All you need to do is contact me, keep up with the Hi-Phi Nation blog/newsletter, the Twitter account, or Facebook page.

For others, if you think there is a value of this work to your students, philosophy clubs, or family or community outreach locally, let me know what kind of episodes I should produce that would bring value to the classes you teach, clubs you advise, discussion groups you lead, etc. When I have time, I will put together sample syllabi and reading lists that make it easy for you to teach with Hi-Phi Nation and other story-driven shows, where the content truly is complimentary rather than supplementary to lectures and readings. If you are a high school or community college teacher already using or committed to using some of the content in your classes, let me know how you're doing it so I can share it with others.

Thanks to Brian Leiter for giving me a platform this week to talk about this wild ride of a project. Thanks to all the subjects of the first season, and the upcoming subjects in the second, they're all listed on the website and you hear their voices in the episodes. The first season couldn't have happened without support from Mark Johnston, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Jennifer Nagel, Tom Kelly, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and StoryLab at Duke including Carlos Rojas, Eileen Chow, and Clare Woods.

The Future of Public-facing ventures in Philosophy

As I'm writing this, I'm sitting in a two-day conference about digital and public humanities at Duke, where the takeaway is that Deans and the humanities as a whole need a coherent way to vet, review, and evaluate risky and adventurous work that is digital and/or public reaching in order to start the process of making it count toward career advancement. Deans, funding agencies, and department review committees request outside letters, outside letters so far are only from experts who evaluate research expertise. As a result, committees can't count things outside of the model of "research expertise" toward tenure, promotion, and raises that don't speak as meaningfully to other scholarly ventures as they do to standard research (service? are you kidding me? You have service reviews?) I couldn't have done Hi-Phi Nation as a junior faculty, and I can't do it now if I still cared about becoming "Full," whatever satisfaction that's supposed to bring me.  But some of you out there do care, and also care about outreach and risky non-standard projects, and the unfairness that younger people do it only out of a labor of love (shout out to my wonderful friends at Wi-Phi) rather than as part of their career, with the risk of it actually hurting their careers.

So while I have this platform, I guess I can put a call-out to senior people in the field who would be interested in doing such vetting for the benefit of the field, and maybe we should think about how to organize such a group through the APA. You can email me and I'll keep a list and see if anything can be done with it. If this already exists, excuse my ignorance.

How ought universities respond to attacks on faculty speech?

I take up this topic, with examples that will be familiar to longtime readers, in my latest column for CHE.

Berkeley alumna and former research assistant to John Searle files lawsuit against him and the university alleging sexual assault, harassment, and retaliation

Story from The Daily Californian, including a copy of the complaint (which I have not had a chance to review).

Why are arguments about killing civilians more civil than ones about statistical research methods?

I did two episodes on the philosophy of science, the first on the distinction between science and pseudoscience, and the second on the epistemology of statistical inference. That's the professional way to put it. Here's the story-driven way: the first episode was about ESP and the second was about why entire fields of science are betting against their own methods.

Despite the fact that I did episodes on torture in war, the ethics of killing, comparative Christian and Muslim theology, and whether we should defund a group of orphans in PA, I wasn't prepared for how controversial talking about replication in the statistical sciences would be. It was naive on my part. The tone of arguments in the statistical sciences literature and blogs did not strike me as anything out of the ordinary in academia and, by the standards of philosophy, seemed entirely tame. I had assumed that behind the scenes, everyone was still friendly and the dispute was entirely about disagreements about the merits of certain statistical and experimental methods. Applied epistemology par excellence. Boy was I wrong. I've been sheltered in the last decade at my liberal arts school. Once I got to Duke, I learned that we're talking about a controversy over which some people feel their careers are being destroyed by bullies who are creating an anti-science climate that is threatening research funding (particularly under this presidential administration), while others believe that impervious careerists who have no concern for truth are just protecting themselves and their friends from embarrassment.

Once things were put to me this way, it was kind of like this: are you going to participate in the ongoing anti-science climate, or are you going to protect sub-par epistemological standards? How's that for framing a choice for someone? I didn't in the end kill the story like I was advised, but I did go the extra mile to try and be fair. The episodes are what they are, thousands of people have listened to them, and I haven't gotten flak since the release, as I went the extra mile to try and be fair. Even the chair of parapsychology research at Edinburgh reacted positively. There are a ton of philosophers much more expertly knowledgeable about these issues than I, maybe they can weigh in.

What is the mood of a philosophical argument?

A film has a mood, a story has a mood. What is the mood of philosophy? What is the beauty in a particular argument, its grotesqueness, its tensions, and resolution, and what does that mood sound like?

This is an odd question, but for Hi-Phi Nation, I had to assume that these questions had answers, and I had to answer them. That's because a good sound-rich piece of audio production has music, sound-tracking, and sound design in general, and that's the show that I wanted to make for philosophy, which has a lot of other wonderful alternative forms of audio, like Philosophy Bites, Philosophy Talk, Elucidations, History of Philosophy without any Gaps, and so forth. Story-driven audio has an emotion and aesthetic component that you might not notice just like you might fail to notice sound design in film when you are completely engrossed in it, but when you watch a film without a soundtrack, its isn't a coherent experience. And when you're trying to do story-driven audio for philosophy, you're left with this odd, almost category-mistake of a question. But it isn't a category mistake, and it turns out there are good and bad answers to it, though I will spare you the bad answers in this post.

 

One note about soundtracking for podcasting; I had to rely on the corpus of open licensed music available for podcasts due to the outdated laws concerning copyright in this country, and my own limitations as a musician (I'm not going to compose and score the thing!). Given these constraints, at the end of a particular edit of an episode, I have to think long and hard about the mood of a piece of philosophy. These are two decisions I made from Episode 3 too illustrate, which features a discussion of revisionist just war theory with Jeff McMahan, Helen Frowe, Major Ian Fishback, and others.

 

This little clip from a piece by musician Jason Staczek is the most used piece in this season of Hi-Phi Nation. I just love it for philosophy. Its a perfect mix of wonder and puzzlement.

Cheap SuitSample

Here is where I use it to explain a famous thought experiment from revisionist just war theory, followed by a statement of the conclusion by Helen Frowe.

RevisionismThoughtExperimentFrowe

The following piece by the group Blue Dot Sessions, who create so much of the music that podcast producers are using these days because they're open-licensed, is one I put in the folder of "nicely moves the discussion along." There is a kind of tension I want to create in the presentation of certain philosophical views I think are deserving of tension and anticipation, rather than reflective contemplation. I love this piece for that purpose, and use it a lot in other episodes.

The SummitSample

Here is how I use it to draw out one of the most objectionable consequences of Jeff McMahan's revisionist just war theory.

RevisionismSegmentMcMahan

Scoring and soundtracking has been one of the most pleasing surprises in this project. I definitely do not want to farm it out in the future. If you're a philosopher, I'd be curious to know what the soundtrack you think is to your work.

How to do story-driven philosophy for audio

The Humanities-writ large initiative at Duke University is responsible for allowing me to work full time this entire academic year to produce the first season of Hi-Phi Nation. I have done nothing but this project, and since it is most likely very different from the daily work flow of professional philosophy, I thought I would share the production process for those interested.

From start to finish, each episode oh Hi-Phi Nation takes about 3 months to complete. I record about 20 hours of raw tape for each 40 minute episode.

Step 1: Read philosophical and other academic work, contact philosophers. Wait for responses for availability.

Step 2: Seek out the subjects of the story; using methods learned in investigative reporting bootcamp; and then contact them.

Step 3: Write out a long list of questions for all subjects, philosophers, and academics.

Step 4: Travel to different location to interview subjects/philosophers, or hire a professional producer to do a tape-sync, or last resort, do a Skype call (quality of audio is everything).

Step 5: Transcribe all interviews with time-stamps every 2min.

Step 6: Take 200 pages of transcriptions/episode, highlight quotable lines. Cut and paste quotables into one document. Code each quotation by theme, topic, and arrange "Tom Cruise-Minority Report" style.

Step 7. Delete all "ums" "uhs" false starts, and gaps in audio clips.

Step 8. Write a script around the story, around the philosophy, and organize the audio around the script.

Step 9: Record. Listen. Rewrite. Rerecord. Listen. Rewrite. Rerecord.

Step 10: Get wife to listen to draft, redo with her notes.

Step 11:. Sit and listen to 20-30 music tracks. Select tracks, mix, cut, and loop for scoring, soundtracking, and soundscaping. Insert into episode at strategic moments of wonder, reflection, curiosity, outrage, etc.

Step 12: Adjust EQs for each voice, adjust loudness meters and compression for whole episode.

Step 13. Go home, bathe toddler, sing her to sleep.

Step 14. Write the show notes for upload by midnight.

Step 15: Repeat x10 for Season 1.

 

What a mix looks like. This is the opening to Episode 4:

Scouting, STEM, and...Philosophy?

One thing that philosophy seems to struggle with is wider public influence and understanding. How do we get people before they get to college or independent of college to know about and appreciate philosophy?

A story titled “the exact age when girls lose interest in science and math” appeared 28 February 2017 on CNN.com. There is an accompanying video to the story titled: Girl Scouts: building robots and tech leaders that is available on YouTube. In this short video, the CEO of the Girl Scouts, Anna Maria Chávez, promotes STEM mentoring in the Girl Scouts. She then says that 75% of female U.S. Senators are Girl Scout alumnae—that is an amazing fact.

Given that information, one might wonder how many Congressmen were or are associated with the Boy Scouts America (BSA). A BSA list for the 113th Congress provides the following totals: youth members (174), Eagle Scouts (28), and adult volunteers (57). According to Congressional Research Service report there were 432 men in the 113th Congress, which means 40% of men in Congress were in the BSA with 13% active as adults.

If you want to increase early knowledge of philosophy AND possibly have lawmakers with some passing familiarity, then get philosophy into Scouting, both Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts.

Daniel Dennett profiled...

...in The New Yorker.

Better story, harder philosophy

When I started driving home to Poughkeepsie from Hershey, PA after a two-day trip for what ended up being Episode 1, I said to my assistant, "Am I taking the side of a bunch of corrupt millionaires against a group of poor orphans?" Sometimes the implications of your philosophical views end up surprising you.

Producing a program that is both story-driven and philosophy has been a lot like doing a Fitch-style proof in intro logic. You can work backwards from the conclusion, or forward from the premises. This season I often found the philosophy first, and sought out a story whose conflict is the philosophical issue I wanted to talk about. But in the episodes, I usually run the story first and philosophy second. This was the case with Episode 1, on the case of the Hershey fortune and the possibility of posthumous harm. I had for years puzzled over the question of how testation and the right to control posthumous wealth could be justified. I wanted to find that one legal or historical case that would bring out all of the philosophical questions behind this issue. I went through many different legal cases involving conditional bequests, charitable trusts, and dynasty trusts, and settled on the Hershey story.

Seeking stories after you know what philosophy you want to present is harder than coming to a story that just invites philosophy (Rachel Dolezal and racial ontology, or my Episode 4 story on Larycia Hawkins).  Human stories are not neatly packaged like philosophical thought experiments. They have nuance and complexity precisely of the kind philosophers like to abstract away from to make arguments. I went into the episode wanting to find a story where the state's enforcement of dead-hand control led to a kind of absurdity that almost any impartial observer, no matter the political or philosophical leanings, would say, "well, okay, that's unjust." I thought I found it with the Hershey story, but in reality, the story kept getting more and more complicated, and it started departing from the nice neat little example I wanted to use to make the case for my philosophical thesis. The Board of Managers of the Hershey trust have essentially been trying to evade the laws requiring them to abide by Hershey's wishes, while the Orphan Army (the episode explains who they are) have been fighting the state to uphold the original Milton Hershey deed. I was trying to argue against the justifiability of perpetual posthumous control of wealth, placing me in alliance with the millionaires spending money on golf courses and against the orphans who just wanted to serve more orphans! That's my example of injustice? But, then, if you heard the episode, there was yet another turn to the story. How to manage the philosophy in the presence of an out of control story?

From this experience, I learned that what you lose in tidiness you gain elsewhere, as long as you're up to the challenge of confronting rather than asking your audience to abstract away from the complexity. Complexity in story can be valuable in making a listener desire to think longer and harder about the connection between the the turns of the story and the philosophy, and just desire to know how to resolve the philosophical issue. The intro books on documentary audio production look a lot like rules for intro-writing rules: make sure there is signposting. But just like in print, if there is too much signposting and hand-holding, your reader can lose the valuable experience of making the connections on their own, and wanting to work toward the conclusion. Maybe this can be more valuable in terms of outreach than the outright assertions of connections and clarity of sign-posting we're used to in analytic philosophy, at least if the form of outreach is bridging narrative storytelling with philosophy.

Going Sideways

Analogy lovers (or anyone who's befuddled by techie-things but embarrassed to admit it) might be interested in this tech dictionary that uses analogies to explain tech terms and concepts. Here's a sample...

2-Factor Authentication: It's like being a spy. You need to prove your identity to a contact but they are paranoid and demand something in addition to the password to prove who you are.

API: It’s like a LEGO brick. An application without an API is like a LEGO brick without nodules (are they called nodules?) – it’s not much fun and you can’t build anything new with it.

Does Philosophy have a dictionary like this? If it does, then direct me to it! 

Robin Wilson’s Chronicle Series on Philosophy

Over the last few weeks I have had the pleasure to talk with Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Robin Wilson on a couple of occasions about promoting philosophy and the role of faculty senates on campus.  She has a nice three part series titled “Avoiding the Ax.”  All are behind a pay wall, but they include: An interview with APA director Amy Ferrer, a discussion about avoiding elimination where my colleague and former department chair, Grodon Pettit, is interviewed, and three suggestions on supporting philosophy.

Some of these topics may seem familiar to regular readers of the Leiter Reports from some of my previous posts over the last two years.  Here are just a few that readers who missed them might find instructive.

• University Structure and the Success and Failure of Philosophy
• Growing, Improving, and Diversifying Philosophy, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
• Evaluating Philosophy Programs: A Cautionary Tale about the IBHE

Steve Bannon's reading

Provincial Catholic reactionaries find each other.  (Previously.  And see also)

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

Girle’s 2nd Edition Modal Logic Book Errata Collection

I am using Rod Girle’s Modal Logics and Philosophy (second edition) this semester. I find it to be a really nice introductory text for those students who want to study modal logic, but may not have much formal logic background, which isn’t uncommon in a small program.

The main issue with the second edition concerns the printing errors that slipped past the original editing process. For anyone who would like to have an errata page, I am asking you to join with me in crowdsourcing it. You can comment below, email me, or Professor Girle to help create an errata page. When completed, we will ask the publisher, McGill-Queen’s, to host it on their website.

Additionally, I recently contacted Professor Girle and he kindly gave me a workbook he uses with the text; it is extremely useful. If we can get the errata page completed and hosted, then perhaps Professor Girle could be encouraged to make the workbook available via the publisher’s site as well.

Thanks for anyone willing to help.

Tricky Decisions of Public Philosophy

I released an episode today about norms of gender that begins with the story of the opening up of combat arms to women under Obama. I use the story to explore the view that militaristic cultures and their need for self-sacrificial protectors engaged in war help to explain certain norms of masculinity and femininity. The episode arose out of interesting conversations I had with Professor Graham Parsons about the positive reception to feminist philosophy in his courses at West Point, an institution that is around 80% male for students, and likely higher for faculty.

In the process of production for this episode, I had to make a decision about whether and how much I wanted to raise the issue of sexual assault in the military. There were competing considerations that made it difficult for me to be confident in whatever decision I ultimately made. For one, the issue has loomed large in the press for a long time. Reforms have been slow, and on the eve of the release, we had the Marine online photographs scandal. In light of this, how could I make an episode about gender issues in the military without a mention of the issue of sexual assault? The competing consideration is that many military women I talked to and read have expressed consternation that all that ever gets covered in the press about women in the military is related to sexual assault. Their other challenges, achievements, and the day-to-day experiences, namely the things that make up 95% of their lives, make up 5% of what people talk about when they talk about them at all. Moreover, because of the big public relations concerns of large institutions such as DOD, the Army, and USMA, the subjects of the episode had very real concerns about how they would be portrayed, even in a start-up podcast. The considerations pulled me in opposite directions, but ultimately I had to make a decision, one that others might have made differently.

This is a theme that will reoccur as I post this week. As philosophers, we aren't always in direct contact with people who stand to be affected by the philosophy that we produce. The same has not been true of producing Hi-Phi Nation. When subjects of the stories agree to talk to me, that does not mean they are necessarily agreeing that their experiences be premises in a philosophical argument, their lives examples in a thought experiment, or their story fodder for a take-down of some competing view. But these are central practices of philosophy, so how do you connect story to philosophy without them? In the kind of philosophy I'm doing for the public, I am trying to make connections back to the lives of people, but this raises some very tricky ethical concerns I hadn't anticipated.

Philosophy of....the mashup?

In hindsight, it shouldn't be surprising to me that a Hi-Phi Nation episode on popular music would be the fastest growing and most popular. If my goal was to bring people to philosophy who otherwise didn't know or didn't care about it, why not follow in the footsteps of the philosophy and (insert pop culture phenomenon here)? But during the pre-production and post-production of the episode, I had the most doubts about this one in terms of its potential success in the mission, which is to weave philosophy with story successfully, rather than just pay lip service to each, and to do it without fluff.

Philosophy of music is one of those areas that just cries out for audio rather than print, so I had to do it even though I didn't know much about it. But what musical genre to pick, and what to say about it?  The decision ended up being fortuitous rather than planned. Because of the budgetary constraints on a one-person operation, I had to limit myself to day trips by car, and it turned out two mashup scholars lived in the same town about 3 hours from Durham, NC, musicologist Christine Boone and philosopher Chris Bartel. I was surprised too, mashup scholars? This is what I love about academia.

Ultimately, the thought that mashups were the musical equivalent to the hot-dog stuffed-crust pizza was what drove the central aesthetic issue of the episode and it came to me late, in the week leading up to the release. But the idea that the genre emerged first as a form of musical vandalism, and then as a critique of the social divisions involved in popular music, came out of my discussions with the actual artists themselves, as well as from a long extended discussion I had with Christine Boone about the Beyonce-Andy Griffiths mashup. Christine was worried that our amusement comes at the expense of Beyonce, with the theme to the Andy Griffiths show representing all that is ideal about America, in its wholesomeness and whiteness, whereas I saw it the other way around, the most iconic, popular, and admired pop artist of this entire generation paired with all that is lame about the idealized America of the past.

In the pre-production stage, I tried to get various famous mashup artists for the show. This was my first time dealing with professional publicists and all that is awful about media. They don't train you for that in graduate school. Ultimately, DJ Earworm was gracious enough to agree to a Skype interview within days of contact, and he is a trained musicologist in addition to being a famous mashup artist. Steve Stein aka Steinski was a great interview also, and to be honest 80s hip-hop was music I was actually familiar with going in. I'm actually a little on the old side for mashups. We met in a NYC hotel room while I was preparing for, of all things, a Sanders Foundation meeting. (Talk about switching gears quickly!) While this episode may not be the most timeless of season one, as generations older and much younger will probably just not get it, I think it ended up satisfying the mission well; bringing philosophy to people who just didn't care about it in the first place.

The rich didn't all get richer: university endowments 2007-2016

Data gleaned from an interesting interactive chart at CHE (behind a paywall) shows that from the end of 2007 (just before the financial crisis) to the end of 2016, many universities with huge endowments did not get richer in inflation-adjusted dollars.  Harvard, for example, went from an endowment of over forty billion to one less than thirty-five billion dollars (again, adjusted for inflation)--a loss of 14% over the ten-year period!  Yale lost not quite a billion dollars on its endowment during this period, representing about a 3% decline. 

Several schools were basically flat during this ten-year period, including my own (Chicago), despite running a capital campaign during this time.   Stanford and Princeton posted modest gains, but the really big winners included the University of Texas and Texas A&M University Sytems, which increased their endowments by roughly a third to, respectively, over 24 billion dollars and over 10 billion dollars--but per student, given the huge size of these systems, the value is much less than at the rich private schools.  Among the latter, the big winners were the University of Pennsylvania, which grew its endowment by 39% (!) during this time, to nearly 11 billion dollars, and Northwestern University, which increased its endowment 27%, to just under 10 billion dollars.

Philosophy on a Plane

Last time around I wrote about elevator pitches (there are some really great comments on this post that you may find useful), and this time Barry Lam is sharing some really cool stuff he’s doing at Hi-Phi Nation (I’ll definitely be adding this to my bag of tricks). So, now seems like a good time to share a story about philosophy on a plane.

But first…like a lot of people I’ve been moping since the election. I can frequently be heard saying things like, “Oh my God! We need philosophy now more than ever!” Really what I mean is more people who aren’t philosophers need to know a little philosophy and be better critical thinkers. I’ve even said that philosophers may have a moral duty to push back against poor reasoning, to which my philosopher husband replied we’d first need to define moral duty (I rolled my eyes). Be that as it may, I still think “the people” need philosophy.

From my pitch post, it was clear that not all philosophers share my enthusiasm for spreading the good word. Luckily, people like Barry Lam, Stephen West, and countless others make sharing philosophy easy...

I recently took a transcontinental flight (in the middle seat). I usually refuse Kantian recognition to my seatmates, but on this particular flight I made an exception. The guy to my right moved furniture for a living--that he did physical labor was no surprise, judging from the size of his biceps. He spouted numbers at me: pounds lifted in a day, a week, a month. He was quite chatty. I learned of his new girlfriend who was driving an hour to pick him up, that he had an irreverent sense of humor, and that he sometimes liked to play online poker. With all that frenetic energy, I surmised he might benefit from a little Existential Philosophy (Schopenhauer is my homeboy).

I asked him if he liked listening to podcasts, to which he replied yes. I then asked him if he liked Philosophy, and while he wasn’t sure what I meant, he said…maybe. I pulled up Episode #79: Kierkegaard on Anxiety from Philosophize This! on my iPhone and handed it to him along with my headphones. It was just a hunch, albeit a good one. He listened to the podcast in full and even jotted down quotes.

Sure, it was just one podcast, and he was just one guy, but that’s how we do it! That’s how we make better thinkers--one podcast at a time. Well, that and a philosophy class. Seriously, though, talk to people (outside of the classroom and conferences) about philosophy, and meet them where they are--Existentialism seems like an easy place to start. I mean, who isn't endlessly fascinated by themselves? 

March madness! Flat-Earthers and Basketball

The National Basketball Association (NBA) has some famous athletes who are expressing the belief that the Earth is flat, with Dr. Shaquille O’Neil being one of them.

Kyrie Irving who made the game winning shot for the Cleveland Cavaliers in game 7 of the NBA finals last year believes the Earth is flat. Kyrie Irving did attend Duke University for one year. You might think this is a great argument against the one-and-done rule for the NBA, but that doesn’t explain Shaq's beliefs.

Dr. Shaquille O’Neil, who has an Ed.D. from Barry University, recently defended Kyrie Irving and the belief that the Earth is flat by claiming the Earth is flat.

Luckily falsely believing the Earth is flat doesn’t have the same consequences that anti-vaxxers false beliefs have, but we should still be worried that famous, successful, public figures have such a basic false belief.  Why?  Because they vote!

Dworkin on Gorsuch's book (his Oxford DPhil) on assisted suicide

This is illuminating.  As Dworkin notes early on, the dialectically feeble anti-gay bigotry and other sectarian prejudices of his supervisor John Finnis should not be imputed to Gorsuch, and while the book does not license much in the way of predictions about he will decide cases, it is not a persuasive argument on its own merits.