Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

New Books in February

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

Must Politics Be War?  Restoring Our Trust in the Open Society by Kevin Vallier (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Blockheads!  Essays on Ned Block's Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness edited by Adam Pautz & Daniel Stoljar (MIT Press, 2019).

Wittgenstein's Family Letters:  Corresponding with Ludwig trans. by Peter Winslow, edited by Brian McGuinness (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

Why Nationalism? by Yael Tamir (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Dimensions of Normativity:  New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence edited by David Plunkett, Scott J. Shapiro & Kevin Toh (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Moral Puzzles and Legal Perplexities:  Essays on the Influence of Larry Alexander edited by Heidi M. Hurd (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Is Whistleblowing a Duty? by Emanuela Ceva & Michele Bocchiola (Polity, 2019)

Perceptual Learning:  The Flexibility of the Senses by Kevin Connolly (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Why Free Will is Real by Christian List (Harvard University Press, 2019).

Freud and Philosophy of Mind, volume 1:  Reconstructing the Argument for Unconscious Mental States by Jerome C. Wakefield (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

The Scientific Attitude:  Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience by Lee McIntyre (MIT Press, 2019).

The Right to Do Wrong:  Morality and the Limits of Law by Mark Osiel (Harvard University Press, 2019).

How to Think Like a Roman Emperor:  The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius by Donald Robertson (St. Martin's Press, 2019).

 

"Joint know-how": humans do it, other primates don't

Philosopher Jonathan Birch (LSE) comments.

Solid majorities of Americans (across racial groups) disfavor consideration of race, legacy status, and athletic ability in college admissions

This is striking.  I do expect the quite conservative U.S. Supreme Court to bar race-based affirmative action on constitutional grounds within the next couple of years. 

A very different take on Venezuela...

...one quite consistent with past U.S. practice vis-a-vis Latin America.

UPDATE:  Longtime reader S. Wallerstein calls my attention to this interview with the U.N. Rapporteur for human rights, whose report on Venezuela has been entirely ignored in the mainstream media.   He says there is no humanitarian crisis there, among other things.

Bloated salaries in the nonprofit sector

Illuminating critique by economist Dean Baker.

Pettit on Brexit...

...at The New Statesman's philosophy series.

Q&A with investor (and Johns Hopkins philosophy supporter) Bill Miller...

...about how his philosophy training affected his approach to the stock market.

In Memoriam: Pamela M. Huby (1922-2019)

A scholar of Greek philosophy, she taught for many decades at the University of Liverpool.  Her son, Bart Huby, writes:  "She published papers and books over a more than 60 year period from 1957 to 2018, still working into her early nineties.  In particular in recent years she collaborated with Professor Sir Richard Sorabji of Oxford University on translations of commentators of Aristotle, and with Professor Dimitri Gutas of Yale University and Professor William Fortenbaugh of Rutgers University, and the late Professor Bob Sharples of UCL London on a major project over several decades recording the works and commentaries of Theophrastus of Eresos, a Greek philosopher of the Peripatetic school, and immediate successor of Aristotle in leadership of the Lyceum in Athens."  Funeral information is here.

Karl Marx in Teen Vogue

Really.  This is from last year, but still remarkable.

(Thanks to Matt Lister for the pointer.)

Yale-NUS's Robin Zheng interviewed...

...at 3AM.  Shockingly, after gathering "more information", she found the reasons for the harassment of Rebecca Tuvel "much more urgent and compelling."  

UPDATE:  A young philosopher writes:

Zheng 'confesses' that she didn't completely grasp the force of the arguments being made in the open letter. I confess to finding those arguments manifestly absurd, as do many others. But, she tells us, she had faith that a large group of academics working in a highly moralized and politicized area of study would not collectively and publicly display their anger about something like this without good reason. As a result of this faith, she was open to hearing about several other views, which apprised her of some basic facts she hadn't known. She was grateful to others for letting her know of these views and facts. In light of these views, she found the arguments in the open letter much more compelling.

A busy few days here in Chicago with Steven Lukes

Steven Lukes (NYU) is here, participating in the Law & Philosophy Workshop today (talking about Marx and morality), and giving our annual Dewey Lecture on Wednesday (the latter is open to the public).  So posting may be a bit lighter the next couple of days.

Neo-Nazis in Ukraine

Another triumph of American policy.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Dust, "Pull Away/So Many Times," 1972

We haven't featured this early 70s hard rock outfit in a couple of years; here's the lead track from their second and last album:

 

On being 97

A video about philosopher Herbert Fingarette, who died last year.  For anyone who has had the experience, as I have, of caring for a very elderly parent or relative, it is especially illuminating and moving.

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

McDaniel from Syracuse to Notre Dame

Kris McDaniel (metaphysics), Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.   That's a real loss for Syracuse, and will further enhance Notre Dame's already strong position in metaphysics.

On the current situation in Iran

See this and then this.

What is it like to be a philosopher? Alastair Norcross edition

Here, courtesy of Clifford Sosis as always.

Diversity blather watch: Stanford edition

Stanford set up a program whose aim was to present diverse viewpoints on various topics but the program was criticized for not being "diverse" in terms of the race and gender of the speakers.   But the two kinds of "diversity" are not the same, and the value of the first (call it Millian diversity) has almost nothing to do with the values of the second, which used to be called affirmative action before Justice Powell confused an entire nation, including its alleged intellectuals.   Sensible reasons for affirmative action include compensatory justice, social inclusion, and providing role models.  Millian diversity, by contrast, aims to promote discovery of the truth through exposure to competing ideas and arguments.

UPDATE:  Philosopher John Dupre (Exeter) writes with an interesting observation:

As a former Stanford faculty member I was interested to read and briefly follow up your blog post on Stanford’s program of presenting diverse views to its community.  While I certainly cannot argue with your distinction between Millian diversity of views and diversity of the identities of holders of the views (though both might be a good idea), you don’t mention the rather ironic fact that, at least as far as I can find out online, the failings with regard to the second point are dwarfed by the failings with regard to the first.  An opening session with two billionaire funders of Facebook, one, Peter Thiel, a well-known extreme libertarian conservative, and the other apparently a good friend of his, chaired by the notoriously right wing historian Niall Ferguson, is hardly a paradigm of diverse perspectives. 

According to the website subsequent speakers included the IQ and race theorist Charles Murray on inequality, and a conversation on sexuality and politics between the well-known anti-feminist philosopher Christina Sommers and a right-wing Catholic journalist.  Francis Fukuyama looks about the most liberal speaker mentioned.

The critics may have got their criticism confused, but they certainly had much to criticise. As the Chronicle article suggests Stanford now recognises, a more diverse (sensu 2) planning committee might well have been a good way of getting a more diverse program (sensu 1).

Indeed, that program of speakers is not exactly a triumph of Millian diversity, although the way to get that is not with affirmative action on the planning committee, but Millian diversity on the planning committee, or simply a principled commitment to speakers with genuinely competing views.   The Federalist Society in U.S. law schools is actually a good model of the latter:  Federalist Society events always involve a commentator or respondent with opposing views to the conservative speaker.  (The Federalist Society does, in my view, too often give a platform to mediocre academics simply because of their politics, but even when that happens, they still have a respondent with an opposing view.)

Philosophical papers on Bell's Theorem available at BJPS...

...to mark the 55th anniversary.

The Democratic nominee for 2020

So there were over 800 votes in the poll since yesterday, although some suspicious voting for Gabbard/Bloomberg at one interval, so I'm going to list the top six, since Sherrod Brown was at times in the top five:

1. Bernie Sanders  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

2. Elizabeth Warren  loses to Bernie Sanders by 411–284

3. Amy Klobuchar  loses to Bernie Sanders by 406–322, loses to Elizabeth Warren by 452–265

4. Tulsi Gabbard  loses to Bernie Sanders by 460–230, loses to Amy Klobuchar by 320–240

5. Kamala Harris  loses to Bernie Sanders by 453–231, loses to Tulsi Gabbard by 314–279

6. Sherrod Brown  loses to Bernie Sanders by 484–136, loses to Kamala Harris by 271–219

Given the left-leaning tenor of this blog, and many of the readers, the only real surprise here, to me, is Klobuchar.  But comments are open, I'm happy to hear from readers about their choices, whether in the top six or not.  My own preference would be for Sanders or Warren, who have an actual social-democratic policy agenda.   Brown is also good on that score, and in some ways, Gabbard, although she has a lot of odd baggage related to her religiously-inspired bigotry in the past.  Please submit your comments only once, they may take awhile to appear.

Kamala Harris's father (a Marxist economist at Stanford) criticizes his daughter's identity politics pandering

This is curious, although one can imagine why--since he has an actual world view as opposed to a panache of sound bites and slogans--he would find this stunt so offensive.

Einstein read and was influenced by Hume

How about that?

(Thanks to Peter Kail for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Matias Slavov, a visiting scholar in philosophy at UCLA, writes:

Thank you for providing the link to the Daily Telegraph, which features Hume’s impact on Einstein’s special relativity. As a regular reader of your blog, I got the news from you. But I wish to point out that the Telegraph article gives a fallacious picture of the Hume-Einstein connection. It is well-known and has been subject of scholarship for a long time. Victor F. Lenzen, for example, examined this relation already in his 1949 paper in the volume of Library of Living Philosophers that was dedicated to Einstein. More recently, John Stachel (2002) and John D. Norton (2010) have perused this relation: Stachel’s argument is that Einstein got a relationist ontology of space and time from Hume, whereas Norton argues that Einstein learned an empiricist theory of concepts which he then implemented in his argument for the relativity of simultaneity. When I (2016) wrote my article that essentially intertwines the relationist and empiricist arguments, I remember having difficulties of coming up with a novel interpretation because the Hume-Einstein connection had already been treated so many times.

The English translation of the correspondence with Schlick in which Einstein acknowledges his debt to Hume (and Mach) is in (1998) The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 8: The Berlin Years: Correspondence, 1914-1918. Ed. Robert Schulmann et. al. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Who do you support for the Democratic nomination for President in 2020?

No doubt the pundits have been waiting to see what the blog readers here think, so get on it!  Rank your candidates from first to last (you can also choose "no opinion" for those you have no opinion about).  I'll post results in a couple of days. Have fun!

UPDATE:  Would the person repeatedly voting for Tulsi Gabbard as #1 and Michael Bloomberg as #2 please stop and get a life.

Another Templeton windfall: $1.3 million for philosophy of religion to Houston's Luis Oliveira

News release here.

(Thanks to David Phillips for the pointer.)

There is no sexual morality

Philosopher Alan Goldman (William & Mary) comments.

Rutgers makes bid for Michigan's Caston

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JANUARY 23--UPDATED    

Victor Caston (ancient philosophy, philosophy of mind), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.   Students considering either place with an interest in ancient philosophy will want to keep an eye on what happens.

UPDATE:  Professor Caston has declined the Rutgers offer, and will remain at Michigan. 

Athens Review of Books, redux

Finally, an op-ed about the ARB case, which really deserves more media attention.

Enoch on Case on arguing from epistemic realism to moral realism

Nice discussion here.  Of course, I'm inclined to think these same considerations just confirm epistemic anti-realism (vide Chapter 4 here.)

Steven Salaita today

Longtime readers will recall Steven Salaita, illegally fired by the University of Illinois for his constitutionally protected speech, who got a cash settlement, but not his tenured faculty position.  Having been effecively blacklisted by the Zionist thought police from the academy, he trained for and is now driving a school bus.  He writes about his new life here.  It's long, but extremely interesting and at times poignant, especially his relationship with his father.

Blast from the past: Hume's personal ad

Back in 2003.

Great moments in public boogie-woogie piano playing

By chance, I discoverd this whole YouTube genre of boogie piano players who record themselves playing in public places,like train stations, airports, and shopping malls.  Here's a few.

Henri Herbert:

Terry Miles:

"Marx and Marxism" and relativism

A new essay, co-authored with an excellent PhD student here, Lawrence ("Dusty") Dallman (he is the lead author), which will eventually appear in The Routledge Handbook of Relativism, that the great Martin Kusch (Vienna) is putting together.

Twitter "believe it or not," part 1

Some guy with a PhD in comparative literature from Emory (seriously!)--who appears now to be a free-lance journalist--denounced me on Twitter as a "mediocre thinker."  The Twitterrabble loved it!  My self-esteem, alas, will never recover.

Concept inflation

Philosopher Spencer Case analyzes the phenomenon, focusing especially on "violence" and "gaslighting," but we could expand this to "harm, "silencing" and other concepts whose extension has been strangely expanded in recent years.  It's really an instance of what Charles Stevenson called "persuasive definition," except it is rarely persuasive, and mostly transparent hyperbole.

Warwick's Quassim Cassam interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Blast from the past: Nietzsche's personal ad

Here.

The "N word" and the use/mention distinction

Several readers have been writing me about the travesty at Augsburg College, and I will say more about it soon, but this piece by law professor Randall Kennedy (Harvard) makes some important points.

Roger Crisp (Oxford) makes the case for "open borders"...

...in The New Statesman.

The real diversity problem in Anglophone philosophy

It's usefully illustrated by the MIT Department, which helpfully lists the research areas of its faculty clearly.  Excluding emeriti, there are 14 tenure-stream faculty.  Here are the areas of philosophy as represented:

Metaphysics:   9

Epistemology:  5

Philosophical logic or logic:  5

Philosophy of language:  5

Philosophy of mind:  4

Ethics:   4

Philosophy of science:   2

Feminist philosophy/Philosophy of Race or Gender:  2

Philosophy of physics:  1

Philosophy of biology:  0

Ancient philosophy:  1

Medieval philosophy:  0

17th-century philosophy:  0

18th-century philosophy:  0

19th-century Continental philosophy:  0

20th-century Continental philosophy:  0

Non-Western philosophy:  0

So much for the idea that Anglophone departments are departments of "Western" philosophy:  MIT ignores several centuries worth of Western philosophy, and although MIT is a bit extreme, it is not atypical in its emphases.   Take the "top ten" programs in the 2017-18 PGR:   NYU, Rutgers, Princeton, Michigan, Pittsburgh, Yale, MIT, USC, Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA.   Rutgers, Michigan, MIT, USC, and UCLA have no specialists in either 19th- or 20th-century Continental philosophy:  none!   Princeton has one specialist in one major figure of 19th-century Continental philosophy, Pittsburgh has two (although their primary interests lie elsewhere), Yale has one, and Berkeley has one and has just hired another.   Only NYU, Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford have two or more faculty with research interests in 19th- and 20th-century Continental philosophy--although one of NYU's two senior faculty in these areas will be retiring soon.  The irony, of course, is that undergraduate demand for courses on figures like Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault remains huge, and yet many of the leading PhD programs can't be bothered.  (ADDENDUM:  As some readers point out, both Yale and NYU are presently looking at junior Continental candidates; we'll see what happens.)

UC Irvine philosophers in the public schools too!

Story here.

(Thanks to Howard Gillman for calling this to my attention.)

Blast from the past: Kant's personal ad

Here.

Per student value of university and college endowments at end of 2018

CHE has compiled the state of university and college endowments at the end of 2018; here is the per student value of these endowments, which tells a different story than simply the "gross" numbers CHE lists.  The per student value is in parentheses after the school name.  One school that has been climbing the "ranks" here over the years has been Penn.  Note that neither Columbia's nor NYU substantial real estate holdings in New York City, which they rent out to faculty at reduced rates, figure in their endowment numbers.

1.  Princeton University ($3,133,000)

2.  Yale University ($2,384,000)

3.  Harvard University ($1,741,000)

4.  Stanford University ($1,612,000)

5.  Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($1,428,000)

6.  Pomona College ($1,362,000)

7.  Swarthmore College ($1,306,000)

7.  Williams College ($1,309,000)

9.  Amherst College ($1,285,000)

9.  California Institute of Technology ($1,287,000)

11.  Grinnell College ($1,163,000)

12.  Bowdoin College ($902,000)

13.  Rice University ($894,000)

14.  University of Notre Dame ($873,000)

15.  Dartmouth College ($857,000)

16.  Wellesley College ($851,000)

17.  Berea College ($739,000)

18.  Washington & Lee University ($708,000)

19.  Smith College ($646,000)

20.  University of Pennsylvania ($638,000)

21.  Claremont-McKenna College ($619,000)

22.  University of Richmond ($608,000)

23.  Duke University ($536,000)

24.  Northwestern University ($523,000)

24.  Hamilton College ($521,000)

26.  Brywn Mawr College ($505,000)

27.  Washington University, St. Louis ($501,000)

28.  Trinity University (San Antonio) ($496,000)

29.  University of Chicago ($482,000)

30.  Emory University ($478,000)

Bringing philosophy to the Philly public schools

Impressive work by Penn philosopher Karen Detlefsen.

Speaking of fascists in Hungary, there are now Neo-Nazis marching in Budapest

Are human beings so pitifully stupid and ignorant as to forget what Nazism did the last time?

Pro-Israel bi-partisan consensus quickly disciplines Minnesota legislator for pointing out the obvious...

...namely, that lobbyists and interest-group organizations, like AIPAC, aim to sway legislative votes.  And lobbyists use campaign donations to do that a lot of the time.  Why is any of this news?  Someone wrote a book about this, as I recall.  The fact that this representative could be so swiftly condemned by both parties and forced to do a mea culpa simply raises the question that book meant to answer.  For some more perspective, see here.

$1.2 million to Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia) for work on free will

Professor Vargas asked me to share this announcement, which I'm happy to do:

The John Templeton Foundation has awarded $1.2 million dollars to the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia for a project on Free Will, Agency, and Responsibility that aims to cultivate work on these topics, especially in Latin America. This is the biggest award the John Templeton Foundation has made to a university in Latin America. The project will bring together senior scholars with graduate students and early career scholars from throughout the Americas looking to develop expertise on these topics. It will host a series of summer seminars and will appoint two 2-year postdoctoral research positions. 

Review of the postdoc applications will begin March 11, so interested parties should submit soon; mid-year seminar applications are due April 24.

The project is directed by Santiago Amaya (Universidad de los Andes) and Manuel Vargas (UC San Diego). 

More details can be found at: https://mindandaction.uniandes.edu.co/index.php/free-will-latam

 

Vanishing insects

At first, one might think, "Thank God," until one remembers the whole ecosystem depends on them.  Yikes!

Blast from the past: Indexicals, children, and Kant

Back in 2004.

Fascists in Hungary now set their sights on the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Matthew Kramer (Cambridge) kindly shared this message he received:

Dear Colleagues,

Please, spread the word.

The Hungarian government is, probably unlawfully and certainly arbitrarily, introducing a new system of research funding, which will seriously undermine the scientific autonomy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the greatest research institution in Hungary with 5000 employees. Negotiations have proven to be useless as the government handles the issue with manipulation and division. We badly need the attention and solidarity of the international academic community.

A good summary in English is here:

https://sciencebusiness.net/news/government-continues-crackdown-academic-freedom-hungary

Further information on the site of the site of the employees' forum:

https://adf2019.wordpress.com/english/

Best regards,

Prof. Dr. András Jakab

Elected member of the governing body of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (választott közgyűlési tag); former Director (2012-2017) of the Institute for Legal Studies at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest

Professor of Austrian Constitutional and Administrative Law, University of Salzburg Honorary Fellow, Pázmány Péter Catholic University Budapest

In Memoriam: Vere Chappell (1930-2019)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 4--UPDATED

Emeritus at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, Professor Chappell was probably best-known for his important work on Locke and other figures in early modern philosophy, although he also published on contemporary topics in philosophy of mind.  Chappell was one of a small number of then distinguished early-to-mid-career faculty who moved from other leading departments to form a major PhD program at U Mass/Amherst in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see the biography of Bruce Aune here for more details).  (Chappell came from the University of Chicago in 1970.)  There is a brief obituary here.  I will add links to other memorial notices as they appear.

(Thanks to Catherine McKeen for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  The U Mass memorial notice is here.