Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

New books in August

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

Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World by Iddo Landau (Oxford University Press, 2017).

The Philosophical Parent:  Asking the Hard Questions about Having and Raising Children by Jean Kazez (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Exploring Inductive Risk:  Case Studies of Values in Science edited by Kevin C. Elliott & Ted Richards (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Ethics at 3:AM:  Questions and Answers on How to Live Well edited by Richard Marshall (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Hegel's Social Ethics:  Religion, Conflict, and Rituals of Reconciliation by Molly Farneth (Princeton University Press, 2017).

"Knowledge and Affect: Perspectivism Revisited"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 30, 2017 FOR THOSE WHO MIGHT HAVE MISSED IT DURING THE SUMMER

I haven't written a serious paper on the (vexed) topic of Nietzsche's "perspectivism" since 1994, and this new paper has been reworked repeatedly over the last year under dialectical fire from Chris Janaway and especially Ken Gemes, and, originally, from those attending Martin Kusch's illuminating conference on relativism in Vienna almost a year ago.  I did something unusual in this paper, even relative to my own prior work, namely, I focused directly on the only two published passages in which "perspectivism" is discussed.  The results surprised me.  I welcome comments.  

"Nietzsche and Aestheticism," 1992

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 28, FOR THOSE WHO MIGHT HAVE MISSED IT DURING THE SUMMER

This was my first peer-reviewed publication (back in 1992, in Journal of the History of Philosophy), which I thought I'd make more easily available.  Here's the abstract:

Alexander Nehamas’s 1985 book Nietzsche: Life as a Literature offers an elegant synthesis of themes from other (then au courant) readings of Nietzsche by Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Paul DeMan, and Richard Rorty. He effected this synthesis primarily through the introduction of a novel interpretive rubric: what Nehamas calls "aestheticism." According to aestheticism, "Nietzsche... looks at [the world] as if it were a literary text. And he arrives at many of his views of human beings by generalizing to them ideas and principles that apply almost intuitively to the literary situation, to the creation and interpretation of literary texts and characters". For Nehamas, then, the literary text is Nietzsche's "overarching metaphor" (164), the "model" he "always depended on" (194) in pursuing his philosophical inquiries, "the single thread running through" his work.

I show that aestheticism is, in fact, not Nietzsche’s view, and that Nehamas fails to adduce a single passage from Nietzsche in which he actually embraces aestheticism. I also show how aestheticism leads Nehamas to an idiosyncratic reading of Nietzsche’s "positive" ethical views. I conclude that this intelligent but sometimes idiosyncratic book is not really about Nietzsche.

Dartmouth's Amie Thomasson wins APA's 2017 Sanders Book Prize...

...for Ontology Made Easy.

Hurricane Harvey in Houston

A bracing view on the ground from philosopher Anne Jacobson.

Lawfare blog calls for start of impeachment proceedings

These folks are hardly radicals, more like center right American policy/law wonks.  So it's a hopeful sign that they're raising this; as Dopey Donald continues to antagonize the Republicans in congress, the odds of something happening go up as well.

Virtual dissertation groups, once again

Joshua Smart writes:

VDG is a free service that connects graduate students to provide feedback on dissertation work. Members are grouped with two others working in the same general area of philosophy. About once a month, one member sends some work (3-6K words) to the others, who return feedback and comments in a week or so.

While advisors and committees are important, it can be incredibly helpful to discuss one’s work with peers in a lower-stakes environment, and it can be particularly enlightening to do so with those who take a different approach, outlook, or focus. Not only that, but there is evidence from psychological research that thinking about problems in relation to persons who are geographically distant can increase creativity. With students in programs from many states, countries, and every continent with a philosophy Ph.D. program, Virtual Dissertation Groups is a great way to capture some of these benefits!

You can sign up to participate here. Open sign-ups go through Sep. 15. (Conditional sign-ups through Sep, 22.)

I would be glad to hear from past participants whether this was valuable.  Comments are open for that.

Doe v. Kipnis & Harper Collins: Doe's opposition to the motion to dismiss by defendants

Plaintiff's opposition brief is here:  Download 31 Plaintiff's Memorandum in Opposition to Defendants' Motion to Dismiss 08.21.17.  The motion to dismiss is here.  I find the "opinion" defense to the defamation claim incredible, so I think plaintiff will prevail on that, and if she prevails on that, everything is open to discovery.   I still expect some of the claims to be dismissed, but I think this will move forward.  But discount for the fact that I'm no Illinois defamation lawyer!

Church-state relations in Sweden captured in one photograph

The canons on the castle in Uppsala, aimed directly at the largest cathedral in Scandinavia:
 God Bless Sweden!

Photo courtesy of legal philosopher Jakob Holtermann (Copenhagen)

Dartmouth President Philip Hanlon doesn't understand his job

As President, one of his jobs is to defend academic freedom, not to denounce members of his faculty.  The Dartmouth Trustees should remove him from office.

College students in America: a reality check

Philosopher Tom Carson (Loyola/Chicago) calls my attention to this sobering piece: 

Of the country’s nearly 18 million undergraduates, more than 40 percent go to community college, and of those, only 62 percent can afford to go to college full-time....

The typical student is not the one burnishing a fancy résumé with numerous unpaid internships. It’s just the opposite: Over half of all undergraduates live at home to make their degrees more affordable, and a shocking 40 percent of students work at least 30 hours a week. About 25 percent work full-time and go to school full-time.

The typical college student is also not fresh out of high school. A quarter of undergraduates are older than 25, and about the same number are single parents....

Last year, more than $41 billion was given in charity to higher education, but about a quarter of that went to just 20 institutions. Community colleges, with almost half of all undergraduate students, received just a small fraction of this philanthropy.

2017 Gittler Prize in Philosophy of Social Science....

...goes to Ronald Mallon (Wash U/St. Louis).

San Francisco State's Bas van Fraassen interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Oxford's Michail Peramatzis interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: After Tea, "Jointhouse Blues," 1970

This Dutch psychedelic/blue rock band formed in 1967 and continued well into the 1970s, though never made it on this side of the Atlantic.  This is from their 1970 album of the same name:

 

PGR Draft Faculty Lists for Fall 2017 Survey

MOVING TO FRONT--ORIGINALLY POSTED AUGUST 22

The draft list of faculties for the 2017 PRG survey is ready for review and correction.

Download PGR Faculty Lists 2017-18 draft

The benchmark for the faculty list is fall 2018, so, e.g., faculty who will be retired by fall 2018 are not included on the list, or faculty who have already committed to be elsewhere, are listed with the department they will be with (assuming it is part of the survey).

Cognate Faculty Questions: If you have concerns or questions about the cognate faculty category, please see this post about PGR cognate faculty.

Please post comments and corrections here.  Email me, Christopher Pynes, at cpynes-at-gmail-dot-com if matters are sensitive.

Only faculty at the department in question should post corrections.  Signed comments only.

Selective historical memory watch: American Confederacy edition

This is quite interesting, courtesy of a colleague in the History Department here.

This guy nails Trump...

...better than anything I've seen; an excerpt:

I don’t think Donald Trump really is a Nazi, in the same way and for the same basic reasons I don’t think he’s really a Confederate apologist, or a Republican, or a Russian operative, or anything. Honestly, even his white supremacism is a second-order thing, an artifact of the coincidence that he, himself, is white, and cannot tolerate less than personal supremacy. He likes the things in the world that gratify him, and those things happen to be good for preserving the power of white people, men in particular, literally any of whom he’d run over with a combine harvester in a moment if it got the New York Times to treat him like a True New York Big Shot.

He’s too fucking stupid and narcissistic for being something other than Donald Trump, for sublimating any part of himself into any bigger idea of how the world ought to do anything other than direct its attention at Donald Trump. It would take at least some minor capacity to imagine himself as a discrete thing moving within a larger reality, as opposed to the entirety of that reality. It would require a cerebral cortex, even one as depressingly smooth and unwrinkled as his son-in-law’s.

UPDATE:  This piece is also apt.  (Thanks to Brian Campbell for the pointer.)

Walsh from UC Irvine to UCLA

Sean Walsh (philosophy of logic and mathematics, mathematical logic), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Irvine, has accepted a tenured offer to begin January 1, 2018.  This is the third senior hire UCLA has made in the last year (the others were Michael Rescorla from UC Santa Barbara and Sherrilynn Roush from King's College, London).

Mediocre white person watch: Richard Spencer edition

He read some Nietzsche, didn't get much out of it.  (The linked essay makes a few good points, but for a more serious discussion of related issues, see this review essay of mine.)

(Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)

"Push Trump off a cliff again"

This is funny, and if you don't like cliffs, you have a choice also of volcanoes, sewers, and dinosaurs.

Chomsky to take up part-time professorship in Linguistics at U of Arizona

Story here.  He's been emeritus at MIT for a number of years now.  I imagine it will be nice to spend the Winter terms in beautiful Tucson!  I imagine philosophy PhD students will also try to take advantage of his seminars.

(Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)

Vice News report: "Race and Terror in Charlottesville"

This is pretty grim, though it conveys powerfully how ugly things were:

 

 

Some nuance about the use of the term "nuance"

It's on the rise, even in philosophy.

A striking paragraph in today's NYT report about the fiasco of Trump's apologetics for Nazis and racists

This paragraph lept out at me:

The president’s top advisers described themselves as stunned, despondent and numb. Several said they were unable to see how Mr. Trump’s presidency would recover, and others expressed doubts about his capacity to do the job.

Now one might laugh at mere "doubts about his capacity to do the job," since he obviously can't do the job.  But those who work for him apparently thought otherwise, until now.  This, together with the Vice-President's sudden return from a foreign trip makes one wonder whether we are about to see the 25th Amendment put into action.  The Vice-President and a majority of the cabinet can declare to Congress that the President is "unfit," which is fairly obvious to everyone by now, including most Republicans in Congress.  Here's Trump's cabinet.  There are a couple of true loyalists and longtime friends there (Mnuchin, Pompeo) who presumably wouldn't go along, but there are enough people Trump has humiliated previously (e.g., Rick Perry) or recently (e.g., Jeff Sessions, or Elaine Cho, who is married to Mitch McConnell), or who had opposed him at an earlier time (e.g, Niki Haley), that it's easy to see them sympathetic to such a move--and one can imagine arch religious conservatives like DeVos, Carson and Price finding Mike Pence much more appealing.  And then there are the professionals with actual experience in the world--Tillerson, Mattis, Acosta, McMaster (if he counts for 25th Amendment purposes, I'm unsure)--who must surely recognize that Trump is an incompetent and reckless buffoon.  Unknowns are some of the billionaires in the cabinet, though in most cases, they too are relatively normal members of the Republican ruling class who must surely harbor doubts.

We'll see what the next few days bring.

UPDATE:  More hopeful speculation, by someone who knew Trump well.

DeNiro on Trump (from last October)

It's clearer and clearer how right he was:

 

Philosopher's Annual: Best Papers from 2016

Professor Grim forwarded the announcement this morning to all the Nominating Editors (I've added institutional affiliation of the author for 2017-18 in parentheses); I'm pleased to see several excellent historical papers among the winners this year:

The final selection--

The Philosopher’s Annual volume 36

from the literature of 2016

Luc Bovens (LSE, but moving to North Carolina in January), “Selection Under Uncertainty: Affirmative Action at the Shortlisting Stage,” from Mind.

Fabrizio Cariani (Northwestern), “Deontic Modals and Probabilities: One Theory to Rule Them All?” from Deontic Modality, N. Charlow and M. Chrisman (eds.), Oxford University Press.

 Shamik Dasgupta (Berkeley), “Metaphysical Rationalism,” from Noûs.

 Cian Dorr (NYU), “Against Counterfactual Miracles,” from the Philosophical Review.

Jacob Klein (Colgate), “The Stoic Argument from Oikeiōsis,” from Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy.

 Samuel Levey (Dartmouth), “The Paradox of Sufficient Reason,” from the Philosophical Review.

Anat Schechtman (Wisconsin), “Substance and Independence in Descartes,” from the Philosophical Review. 

Jean-Luc Solère (Boston College), “The Coherence of Bayle's Theory of Toleration,” from the Journal of the History of Philosophy. 

Una Stojnić (Columbia), “One’s Modus Ponens: Modality, Coherence and Logic,” from Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Alex Voorhoeve (LSE) and Marc Fleurbaey (Wilson School, Princeton), “Priority or Equality for Possible People?” from Ethics.  

These will be posted with links at www.philosophersannual.org with a general introduction shortly.  Our thanks to the Nominating Editors for a wonderful set of initial nominations and for extremely useful survey input and comments. 

We hope that you will join us as a nominating editor again next year, and that you will be keeping your eye out for excellent work in the literature of 2017 in the meantime.

With all the best,

Patrick Grim

Boris Babic

Caroline Perry

Joseph Shin

 

On Antifa, the anti-fascist movement

This is informative.

(Thanks to Daniel Buk for the pointer.)

On the history of America, the "White Settler" nation

Robert Paul Wolff comments with his usual clear eye for the facts that are morally relevant.  (And see also.)

Ways of doing metaphysics

A useful short typology courtesy of philosopher Amanda Bryant (Trent).

The forgotten history of Korea, north and south

A useful capsule summary of work by the noted historian Bruce Cumings, whose books I also commend to anyone interested in understanding how North and South emerged from the ashes of World War II.

(Thanks to Jerry Dworkin for the pointer.)

Cal Tech's Christopher Hitchcock interviewed...

...at 3AM.

NY Times makes its contribution to "normalizing" the NeoNazis...

...by putting a "balanced" article on its front page about whether they're being "normalized." 

The APA's draft "good practices guide"

I haven't had the time or motivation to engage with this, though several people have written me about the indefensible section on the pseudo-science of "implicit bias", and now there is some cogent pushback at the APA blog discussion of this section.    It's embarrassing that the draft should have included such a one-sided and misleading section on "implicit bias," but perhaps it was prepared before this research agenda so visibly fell apart over the last six months or so.

The "hard problem" of consciousness is not THAT hard

Philosopher John Heil (Wash U/St Louis) comments.  (This is a very nice short essay, that clearly explains the official "hard problem" and clearly states its objections.)

A clinical psychologist comments on the appeal of Ayn Rand

Amusing, but not deep (there may not be anything deep to say, admittedly, about the mediocre narcissists who are Rand's usual prey).

(Thanks to Michael Swanson for the pointer.)

Mediocre White People Watch: Peter Cvjetanovic edition

Josh Marshall has the amusingly pathetic details.  Meanwhile, his University of Nevada, Reno classmates really go to town on their now notorious colleague.

Trump is an accidental Nazi...

...as this rather sober report from Politico makes clear.  His narcissism and mafia mentality overwhelms everything else.   He doesn't hate Jews, he knows how to do business with them and his son-in-law is one, so they're safe.  Blacks, well they pay their rent, mostly, so he can abide them, especially when they behave nicely like Barack and Omarosoa and that idiot who runs HUD.  He wouldn't let the mediocre white people who make up the alt-right into his clubs or his apartment, unless he needed to win an election (he hasn't gotten that desperate yet).   His narcissistic class hatred is actually color-blind.  But the "banality of evil" was a deep observation.  

UPDATE:  No further comment necessary:

 

Great rock 'n' roll instrumentals (#1): Allman Brothers Band, "Jessica," 1973

Concluding our series of great rock 'n' roll instrumentals, I'm not sure this is really the best of them all, but it's one of the best of the genre.  Next week we resume the regular "obscure" items!

 

Mediocre white people to rally in Charlottesville...

...in effort to convince themselves that their mediocrity and misery is the fault of "those" people.

Marygrove College (Detroit) closing all its undergraduate programs...

...which will presumably affect the three faculty in philosophy, though at this point I don't have further details.  Feel free to add links or information in the comments.

(Thanks to  Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)

Dunning-Kruger Effect Watch: Nassim Taleb edition

Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY) comments.  (One need not agree with Pigliucci's own polemic against "scientism" to see that Taleb is a blowhard.)

"German philosophy goes viral"

Many readers have sent along this article; unfortunately, most of those mentioned are, as Markus Gabriel (Bonn) aptly says about one, "philosophical performer[s]," which is probably too generous a description of the absurd Sloterdijk.   Indeed, Gabriel and Habermas are about the only serious living philosophers mentioned in this article. 

Wilson from Alberta to La Trobe

Robert A. Wilson (philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and biology), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta, has accepted appointment as Professor of Philosophy at La Trobe University in Australia.  That's a significant loss for Alberta, and gain for La Trobe.

Capitalism is the problem

A younger generation is noticing.  The quote from Nancy Pelosi, spokesperson for the more-or-less prudent wing of the ruling class, is priceless.

Klein from Macquarie to ANU

Colin Klein (philosophy of mind, psychology, & science), currently Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University, has accepted appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University.

The administrative nightmare of U.K. academic life?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM AUGUST 3--INTERESTING DISCUSSION, MORE COMMENTS WELCOME.

Is this accurate or overblown?

On feasibility

Philosopher Nick Southwood (ANU) discusses.

Southampton's Fiona Woollard interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Martin from UCL to Oxford

Mike Martin (philosophy of mind), Professor of Philosophy at University College London, will become Wilde Professor of Mental Philosophy at Oxford University in 2018, succeeding Martin Davies, who faced mandatory retirement.  Martin will continue to teach fall semesters at Berkeley, as he has done for a number of years.