Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

$250,000 grant from the McDonnell Foundation to philosopher Santiago Amaya (U of Los Andes, Colombia) to study moral problem-solving

Details of the grant and the interesting project here.

Advertising update

September, October, and November are now fully booked, except for 4th from the top spots ($450), which I have started to sell again due to demand.   There are still spots in December (including one top spot), as well as in subsequent months.  E-mail me for details.

New open-access journal: Philosophy of Medicine

Details here.

American autocracy on display at the Repug convention

Apt comparison from a former Ambassador to Russia.

COVID cases at Arizona State University

Many years ago, my father quipped that, "Farmers hope for rain, journalists hope for floods," because disaster is more newsworthy.  So too with some of the COVID reporting, as in this piece from Phoenix.  It's headline reports that cases have "tripled" in a matter of days ("flood"!), but if you read the article, you see the positivity rate on tests is only a bit over 1% (very low, especially compared to the nearly 7% rate in Arizona)) and you also find this:

Officials said there were 452 positive cases out of the approximately 74,500-person student body in addition to 28 positive cases out of the 12,400 faculty and staff members. 

More than half of the positive cases reside off-campus within the Phoenix area. Officials said 205 of the approximately 9,600 students living on the Tempe campus were in isolation on Friday.

Given the prevalence of COVID in Arizona this summer, these are remarkably good statistics:  a bit more than half of one percent of students have tested positive (most of whom live off campus), and the rate is even lower for faculty and staff.   Of course, if growth is exponential then maybe this will turn into a disaster.  But so far these numbers are quite moderate, although you wouldn't know it from the emphasis in the headline.

(Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)

Informative piece on the history of police unions in the U.S....

...in The New Yorker.   I did not know that it was the victory of the teachers' union in the early 1960s in NYC that paved the way for the police to finally unionize effectively.  But I was particularly struck by this observation (which brought to mind something written a few years ago):

According to Paul Hirschfield, a Rutgers sociologist who has written about international law-enforcement practice, the difference [in rates of police killings in the U.S. vs. Europe] is partly in the basic work environment. “American police encounter conditions that are more like Latin America than northern Europe,” he told me. “These vast inequalities, the history of enslavement and conquest, a weak social safety net. The decentralization. Police are more likely to encounter civilians with firearms here...."

Discussion of "police reform" is a bit like the blather about "urban school reform," it largely avoids the actual issue that drives the problems (police killings, poor performance in urban public schools), since that actual issue would demand systematic changes that neither ruling class party cares to tackle.

Northwestern University makes the wrong COVID choice

Colleges should certainly reduce the number of students in campus dorms, but they shouldn't exclude freshmen, who are new to the college experience:  they should prioritize those new to college life, and those who have to be on campus for their work (e.g., labs).  

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Bang, "Questions," 1971

Philadelphia-based hard rock/proto-metal band, this single actually cracked the Billboard top 100!  It's a great number!

 

In Memoriam: Nicholas L. Sturgeon (1942-2020)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM AUGUST 25--UPDATED

Professor Sturgeon, who joined the Cornell faculty in 1967 and taught there until his retirement, was best-known for his naturalist moral realism and his contributions to the debate about "moral explanations" in the 1980s and 1990s.  I will add links to memorial notices when they appear.

ADDENDUM:  Philosopher John Doris, who was an undergraduate at Cornell and is now on the Cornell faculty, writes:  "Nick was incredibly generous to me when I was an undergraduate.  He was an extraordinary teacher not only of ethics, but also history, and his course on the Empiricists was a classic.  I can still see him, almost always in the same tan chamois shirt, sitting on a desk and lecturing, noteless, armed only with an impossibly battered copy of Locke's Essays."

UPDATE:  A memorial notice from Cornell.  (Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

The actual platform of Trump's Repugs

This seems about right.

Parker from Durham to Virginia Tech

Wendy Parker (philosophy of science & climate science), previously at the University of Durham, is now Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, which continues to have a notable terminal MA program.  (They've also made a good number of strong junior hires as well.)

Julia Child's little known guide to preparing "Chat au vin"

U of Arizona nips COVID outbreak in the bud by testing wastewater from dorms

Interesting,  I hope other schools take note!

Templeton extends funding for the "Geography of Philosophy" project...

...directed by philosophers Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh) and Stephen Stich (Rutgers), along with anthropologist Clark Barrett (UCLA).

You thought the crazed "wokerati" were familiar, didn't you?

87 Reasons to Vote...

...the monster-child out of office, plus lots of useful resources and links (including how to register to vote, get absentee ballots etc.).

The case for aersol transmission of COVID (with a useful analogy to cigarette smoke)

Here.  I guess I'm persuaded it's clearly a factor (much more than fomites), but it's not that easy, as the author explains via helpful analogy:

[I]t is useful to use cigarette or vaping smoke (which is also an aerosol) as an analog. Imagine sharing a home with a smoker: if you stood close to the smoker while talking, you would inhale a great deal of smoke. Replace the smoke with virus-containing aerosols, which behave very similarly, and the impact is similar: the closer you are to someone releasing virus-carrying aerosols, the more likely you are to breathe in larger amounts of virus....

Richard Marshall interviews Darren Bradley (Leeds)...

...at 3:16 AM.

In Memoriam: Gerald ("Jerry") Gaus (1952-2020)

MOVING TO FRONT, UPDATED--ORIGINALLY POSTED AUGUST 20

I'm very sorry to report that Professor Gaus, a distinguished political philosopher, died unexpectedly yesterday.   Since 2006, he was part of the powerhouse political philosophy program at the University of Arizona.  Before that, he taught at Tulane University and the University of Minnesota at Duluth, and held research and/or teaching appointments in Australia, mainly at the Australian National University.  He took his PhD in political science at the University of Pittsburgh, working with John Chapman.  You can find out more about his work here.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

UPDATE:   A memorial notice in the U of Arizona student newspaper.

ANOTHER:  A long memorial from the PPE Society, which is informative about his work.

AND ANOTHER:  A memorial notice from the ANU, where Professor Gaus began his career.

AND MORE:   A memorial notice at the Pea Soup blog with many personal remembrances in the comments.

"Consciousness Live"

A podcast hosted by philosopher Richard Brown (CUNY), in which Professor Brown talks with philosophers, scientists, and artists.

Kim Kardashian meets Kierkegaard

Yikes.

(Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)

A poll for regular readers regarding Twitter use (if any)

Please take the poll!

UPDATE:  So with about 400 votes since this morning, about 60% of respondents do not have Twitter accounts, while 40% do.  I expect that overstates the percentage of readers with Twitter accounts, since older readers tend to participate less in the polls, and they are also less likely to use Twitter (I also suspect Twitter users are more likely to participate in a poll "regarding Twitter use."   Anyway, thanks to those who readers who responded!

Even when Trump loses the election, November to January is going to be crazy...

...given the nature of the monster-child and the Repugs, no doubt encouraged by the Fascist Fox network.   It's a chilling read, but worth being informed about.

APA announces 2021 Eastern and Central division meetings will be online

Details here.

$4.4 million from Templeton Foundation for the "Honesty Project"...

...to be run by philosopher Christian Miller (Wake Forest) and psychologists at both Wake Forest and Carnegie-Mellon.

Rosati from Arizona to Texas

Connie Rosati (ethics, philosophy of law), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, has joined the department of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin this fall.   With the recent addition of Julia Driver from Wash U/St. Louis, Texas now has the two current editors of the journal Ethics, as well as the former editor (John Deigh).

"COVID immune responses explained"

This is informative; an excerpt:

Our immune system consists of two different layers. The first layer is the innate immune system, which acts within minutes of infection to provide kind of a rapid response. This doesn't require any specificity; it is engaged after any kind of infection. But this innate activation is important to triggering the second layer of the immune system, which is the adaptive immune system. In the adaptive immune system, the key players are B cells and T cells; they eventually acquire specificity and memory, which are the basis of the vaccinations. Having those T- and B lymphocytes that are specific to a particular pathogen and provide a memory response in the long term is very important....

If you follow COVID-infected patients over time, their antibody levels do seem to wane to some degree within 2-3 months. But that is not a cause for alarm because that's what happens when you get infected or when you become immunized for the first time. The antibody levels peak within the first couple of weeks and then eventually come down over a few months. That's okay because you still have memory B cells specific to that antigen as well as a T-cell immune response to the viral antigen. So the second time you're exposed to the same virus, you can mount a rapid, specific, and robust immune response. It's likely that you won't feel anything the second time you're infected. It will be a pretty mild or asymptomatic infection....

In Memoriam: Joseph D. Sneed (1938-2020)

I only just learned that the philosopher of science Joseph Sneed, a longtime member of the faculty at the Colorado School of Mines, passed away earlier this year.  Philosopher Franz-Peter Griesmaier (Wyoming), who called this to my attention, noted that Professor Sneed was "largely responsible for a particular form of scientific structuralism, which applies the Bourbaki-model from mathematics for an analysis of the structure of theories.....He was one of my teachers when I was in the MA program at CU Boulder. He was an amazing teacher and an absolutely terrific person. His work has received much more attention in Europe, especially in Germany, than in the US, which is unfortunate."

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Bobby Fuller Four, "Misirlou," 1965 (live)

Bobby Fuller was famous for "I Fought the Law," but I'd never heard his live version of that 60s staple "Misrlou," which sounds more like 1968 acid rock in his rendering:

(Thanks to Tom Carson for the pointer.)

 

Does old tuberculosis vaccine really limit spread/severity of COVID?

That's what these Israeli researchers claim.    Is this just a correlation/causation confusion, or is there some plausible mechanism at work?   Links to other commentary welcome.

 

Alabama Governor spearheads a serious public health effort aimed at opening universities

Interesting.  I hope it works!  

An aside:  some academics on social media seem to mainly hope these efforts fail, so they can then say, "I told you so!"   Grocery stores and hospitals, among other facilities, have been operating without massive outbreaks; universities present more challenges in some respects, less [than hospitals] in others.  What's disappointing about faculty hostility to efforts to reopen universities is the complete indifference to the fact that students overwhelmingly want to be able to come back to campus.  Apparently some faculty don't care and I suppose faculty indifference to students shouldn't be news, but it's still discouraging to see.  If campuses can't open, it's a tragedy, not an occasion for glee (or armchair idiocy like this from academics with no relevant competence acting like they have deep insight--this guy is sufficiently confused that he thinks [correctly] that Baumol's cost disease applies to higher education, but then claims [falsely] that none of the increase in tuition goes to faculty salaries). 

(Thanks to philosopher Gregory Pence [UAB] for the pointer to the NYT article.)

ADDENDUM:  Professor Pence writes:

Not the Governor’s idea, but she is taking some credit. We created our own rapid test (before FDA allowed it, to safeguard our patients and docs), partnered with Apple and Google to create our own ap, and used CARES to fund testing of students BEFORE they return. Yeah, two week window is not perfect, but better than not testing them at all . We are also doing sentinel testing of random faculty and students. So far, that rate is less than half of 1%.But high school football in BAMA starts tonight = amplification systems. We shall see.

The injustice to Sarah Braasch continues: Connecticut denies her request for access to the police tapes from the night of the fake "sleeping while Black" incident

A criminal defense lawyer comments.  (Earlier coverage.)

Another great anti-Trump ad from the Lincoln Project

Quoting those who worked for and with him:

 

Economics with a moral compass?

Amartya 'Sen (Harvard) and Angus Deaton (Princeton) discuss.

(Thanks to Alex Boche for the pointer.)

Blast from the past: Best Anglophone Philosophers of action since 1945

Back in 2016.

Philosopher Peter Ludlow interviewed...

...by a well-known "transhumanist" blogger; they cover a lot of ground, from New York in 1979 to crypto currency and crypto anarchy, from consciousness (and why Ludlow fears he might be a zombie), the external mind, and the dynamic lexicon, to why Ludlow is not a libertarian.  ("Transhumanists" are a fairly juvenile crowd, lots of enthusiasm for Ayn Rand, for example—Ludlow tries to set the interviewer straight!.).  

The key to COVID immunity: T-cells

And they appear to work.  Let's hope these research findings hold up.  Informed comment on this research, including links, welcome.

Richard Marshall interviews John Schwenkler (Florida State)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Philosopher Sophie-Grace Chappell (Open U) interviewed by philosopher Jean Kazez...

...at The Philosopher's Magazine.  This part of the interview, I thought, was especially interesting:

Biological sex is not a social construct. But even if it was, it wouldn’t follow, for heaven’s sake, that biological sex “is not real”. Money is a social construct. Crime is a social construct. Science is a social construct. War & Peace is a social construct. Music is a social construct. This interview is a social construct. Yet all of these things are perfectly real. They have the reality of historical and social formations. They don’t have the reality of the natural kinds that science is concerned with, like Panthera Tigris Tigris and H2O and tungsten. But whoever said that the only real kinds of things were the natural kinds?

By contrast with biological sex, gender is a social construct. It’s real, but it’s a historical and social reality. Das ewig Weibliche exists. Though “ewig” is a bit of an exaggeration.

Does that mean that gender is more easily changed than biological sex? No, not necessarily. Just because something is a social construct it doesn’t follow that it’s easy to change; just because something is a natural kind it doesn’t follow that it’s not easy to change. You will sooner extirpate the weeds from your garden than end the history of racism. For similar reasons, the fact that gender is a social construct does not imply that gender is easily abolished or even readily malleable.

"Virtual Dissertation Groups," once again

Via Joshua Smart, per usual:

What it is: VDG is a free service for those working on their doctoral dissertations in philosophy. Since 2014, we’ve connected students from over 30 countries to provide peer feedback on dissertation work with a minimal time commitment.

How it works: Each dissertator is placed in a group of three on the basis of a short survey about their project/area of work. About once a month, one member sends some work to the others—3,000 – 6,000 words—who then return feedback and comments in a week or so. (While this has typically been in the form of written comments, the survey now includes an option to indicate a preference for holding video discussions.)

Why it’s good: 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 even just thinking about problems in relation to persons who are geographically distant can promote creative insights. With students in programs from many states, countries, and every continent (well, except Antarctica), Virtual Dissertation Groups is a great way to capture some of these benefits!

How to Join: To sign up, just fill out the short survey at www.jasmartphilosophy.com/virtual-dissertation-groups. Sign ups are open through August 29th (conditional on availability afterward).

"The Hard Problem of Breakfast"

How does it emerge from bacon and eggs?  But it doesn't:  it's just token identical with them.  Indeed breakfast is multiply realized--it can even be identical with cold pizza eaten at the right time of day.

(Thanks to Peter Carruthers for the pointer.)

Blast from the past: when Brett "no ideas and the ability to express them" Stephens smeared Chomsky...

...and compared him to Heidegger.

Does anything non-physical exist?

Philosopher Nancy Cartwright (UC San Diego/Durham) and others discuss.

On the aesthetic seductiveness of Nazism

This essay makes some important points:

Knausgaard attempts to reconstruct the thoughts and emotions of those who were attracted to National Socialism, under the principle that it is impossible to understand the emergence of Nazism—“the last major utopian movement in the west”—without understanding what moved the people of Germany, and later of other European countries, to embrace it. And what moved them, in Knausgaard’s view, was not the Nazis’ promise to redistribute income, or Hitler’s analysis of world affairs, or even, initially, their hatred of the Jews. What moved them was, rather, the joyful feeling of togetherness and community, of being able to transcend not only the fragmented democracy of the Weimar period but politics altogether.

“In National Socialism,” writes Knausgaard, “philosophy and politics come together at a point outside the language, and beyond the rational, where all complexity ceases, though not all depth.” Riefenstahl’s film communicates the pleasure the people experienced—how “good” it felt to them—at having escaped the quotidian chaos of their shabby republic and their trivial private lives, at being liberated from the restrictions of rationality and deliberation, at being on the brink of achieving something large and lasting, deep and simple....

In their focus on the emotional pull of Nazism—its promise to liberate citizens from the frustrations and banalities of an alienated, lonely existence, to connect them with a mass of like-minded souls in “unconditional joy”—the works of Malick and Knausgaard expose us to aspects of how fascism works that it would be laughable to think could yield to academic analysis, no matter how accessibly arranged.

“Establish a private life,” warns [historian Timothy] Snyder. “Listen for dangerous words.” Do we really imagine it was advice such as this that interwar Germans lacked?

What we do and don't know about COVID after 7 months

A  useful review (compare an earlier amateur discussion back in June).

U.S. Justice Department finds Yale discriminates in admissions against whites and Asian-Americans

This is pretty dramatic, and will no doubt lead to similar findings of violations by other schools, since all elite universities in the U.S. do exactly what Yale is doing (which is really discriminating in favor of African-Americans in a zero-sum game, i.e., admissions).  The resulting litigation will eventually makes its way to the Supreme Court, where the "plain meaning" textualism that yielded a happy outcome with respect to sex discrimination against transgender people will yield an unhappy outcome here:   affirmative action will be found to violate the civil rights law.   As I've remarked before, I do expect all affirmative action programs in universities to be found unlawful (in the case of private universities) and unconstitutional (in the case of public universities) by this conservative Supreme Court.  (By contrast, I am pretty confident this Court will not overrule Roe v. Wade, but will continue to approve practices that burden but do not wholly abrogate the right to choose abortion, which has been the Court's approach for the last thirty years basically.)

"[E]xtant racism isn't what principally produces our inequality and anti-racism won't eliminate it"

Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels are, of course, exactly right, and it explains why corporate America and the ruling class have gotten squarely behind anti-racist pablum.  More from Professors Reed and Michaels:

If the objective is to eliminate black poverty rather than simply to benefit the upper classes, we believe the diagnosis of racism is wrong, and the cure of anti-racism won't work. Racism is real and anti-racism is both admirable and necessary, but extant racism isn't what principally produces our inequality and anti-racism won't eliminate it. And because racism is not the principal source of inequality today, anti-racism functions more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for eliminating it....

It is well known by now that whites have more net wealth than blacks at every income level, and the overall racial difference in wealth is massive. Why can't anti-racism solve this problem? Because, as Robert Manduca has shown, the fact that Blacks were over-represented among the poor at the beginning of a period in which "low income workers of all races" have been hurt by the changes in American economic life has meant that they have "borne the brunt" of those changes. The lack of progress in overcoming the white/black wealth gap has been a function of the increase in the rich/poor wealth gap.

In fact, if you look at how white and Black wealth are distributed in the U.S., you see right away that the very idea of racial wealth is an empty one. The top 10% of white people have 75% of white wealth; the top 20% have virtually all of it. And the same is true for black wealth. The top 10% of black households hold 75% of black wealth.

Four ways to vote safely without depending on the post office that Trump is trying to destroy

Useful information.

ADDENDUM:  A bit more information about what's going on with the post-office that I noted on Twitter.

"Racial capitalism" explained...

...by two philosophers no less.   Illuminating, short essay--I had associated the term with Cedric Robinson, but they paint a fuller picture.

10th European Congress of Analytic Philosophy online starting tomorrow

I don't usually post these kinds of announcements, but these are unusual times and this is notable: philosopher Daniel Cohnitz (Utrecht) writes:

The 10th European Congress of Analytic Philosophy will go online tomorrow (August 17) with about 300 contributed papers, additional keynotes and invited talks, etc. So far 350 philosophers have registered in order to participate in this. I believe that such a big online conference is an important experiment for our profession and we’d be happy to also welcome participants from outside Europe. Thus, we’d greatly appreciate if you could inform readers of your blog about this event and that it is still possible to register and to participate in the conference. You can find more information about the congress here: https://ecap10.sites.uu.nl/