Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Dimitri, "Got a Dog Named Sally," 1967

Dutch psychedelic band, this is certainly a catchy tune, very much of its moment:

 

Blast from the past: the best post-WWII Anglophone scholars of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy

Back in 2016.

Another university succeeding despite COVID

This time Cornell University--but, in typical journalistic hysteria-mongering, the article treats this as "rare" rather than the norm.

All eyes on Pennsylvania

More election worries.  If Biden takes Florida, this won't matter, but that's a big "if."

Coronavirus infection: it's not just the nose, it's also importantly the mouth!

This is interesting.

(Thanks to Dr. David Ozonoff for the pointer.)

In Memoriam: J. Adam Morton (1945-2020)

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM OCTOBER 27--UPDATED

Professor Morton's work ranged widely across epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of the emotions and other areas.  He taught in the 1970s at Princeton University, where he also took his PhD, and then for more than two decades at the University of Bristol, and then held a Canada Reserch Chair at the University of Alberta and taught as a visitor at the University of British Columbia through much of the 2010s.  You can learn more about him and his work at his personal page.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

UPDATE:   A very nice memorial from the UBC department.  (Thanks to Dominic McIver Lopes for the pointer.)

Another philosopher on the autism spectrum...

...reflects on the issues we've been discussing.

Where should students interested in post-Kantian German Idealism be applying this year in the US...

...given that two strong choices, Columbia and Chicago, have both suspended admissions.  Even if they hadn't, Johns Hopkins would be one of the top choices anyway (Michelle Kosch, Yitzhak Melamed, Dean Moyar), and deserves a serious look from all students interested in post-Kantian Idealism.  Other schools with tenure-stream faculty members (including at least one tenured) working on German Idealism that deserve a look include UC San Diego (Hardimon, Tolley, Watkins), UC Riverside (Keller, Newton), Harvard (Matherne, Rosen), Yale (Franks), Syracuse (Beiser), Northwestern (Alznauer, Zuckert), BU (Sedgwick, Speight, Dahlstrom), Berkeley (Novakovic), Georgetown (Pinkard), Purdue (Yeomans).  (Allen Wood at Indiana tells he may retire in the near future, so I don't think Indiana makes sense any longer.)

ADDENDUM:  Philosopher Karin Nisenbaum (Boston College) informed me that Frederick Beiser at Syracuse is no longer accepting graduate students.  It's also worth noting that Nisenbaum is one of two junior faculty at Boston College (the other is Elisa Magri) working on post-Kantian Idealism.

Blast from the past: when Kathleen Stock had to complain to the APA Blog about the misconduct of one of its then-editors (Nathan Oseroff)

Back in 2018.  (The APA Blog subsequently adopted policies to protect against the kind of misconduct Nathan Oseroff engaged in.)   Those crazies seem to have quieted down since their reign of social media "terror" a year or two ago.

Law & Philosophy Fellowship at University of Chicago for 2020-21

The ad is here.  Fit with the Workshop theme (bolded below), as usual, is crucial.   Here's the core text of the ad:

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LAW SCHOOL. The University of Chicago Law School seeks a Law and Philosophy Fellow, appointed with the rank of Lecturer, for the academic year 2021-22.  This is a twelve-month appointment and is expected to begin July 1, 2021. A PhD in philosophy is preferred, though in unusual cases a PhD in a related discipline, with a successful defense of the dissertation required before the appointment begins, or a JD accompanied by strong training in philosophy will be considered. Applications welcome from new or recent PhDs or tenure-stream faculty interested in spending a year at the Law School. The Fellow will co-teach the Law & Philosophy Workshop with Martha Nussbaum on the theme of “Asian Philosophy and Law,” which will focus on Indian (Buddhist and Hindu) and Chinese philosophy, both ancient and modern, and the ways these give rise to distinctive approaches to political and legal issues. AOS: Asian philosophy, with knowledge of relevant languages and of substantive issues in political and legal philosophy essential; AOC: open. Visiting speakers will be prominent scholars working on these issues. The Workshop with visiting speakers will meet roughly 8-10 times over the course of the year, but there will be initial student sessions devoted to giving students a grounding in basic texts and issues. The Fellow will also be asked to supervise student papers, and to contribute to the intellectual life of the Law School, as well as pursue his or her research. Salary $60K + benefits + superb research environment. 

"Fundamentalism is the mortal enemy of all civilized humanity," redux

Case in point.  RAWA knew.

On interpreting the works of great philosophers

Lots of wisdom here, as usual, from Robert Paul Wolff; an excerpt:

[I] you are presented with Hilary Hahn and Itzhak Perlman playing the [Beethoven Violin] Concerto, it would be absurd to say that one of them must be doing it wrong since they are doing it differently. I believe that the same can be said of the interpretation of a great work of philosophy. There can be endlessly many wrong ways of reading it but there is surely no single right way. Indeed, the case of interpreting a work of philosophy is even more complicated than that of playing a great work of music....

I have in my long life engaged deeply and seriously with the thought of only three great thinkers: Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and Karl Marx. In each case – I am not sure why – something in their writings seized me and virtually compelled me to struggle with those writings. As the Good Book says, Genesis chapter 32, in each case I have wrestled with the text and have refused to let it go unless it blessed me.

Blast from the past: where the (untenured) tenure-track faculty at the U.S. top 20 got their PhD...

...back in 2005!

More thoughts on living with autism and social interaction

A very smart former student of mine from the University of Texas, Mark Engelson, who is on the autism spectrum, writes:

I read the post you shared on the blog with great interest, and I share your doubts about ableism.

There are things that I do (at times, not at others) that can be deeply unsettling to others. My voice has a tendency to crescendo without my conscious intention, for example. This is of a piece with a particularly verbose, larger-than-life manifestation of my autism which is, to be fair, a lot. This combines with a distinct lack of grace (I can't drive, and I once broke a partner's toe when I tried folk dancing as a college freshman). As much as I might like to believe otherwise, I can very much be the bull in the proverbial china shop.

While I had some sense of this about myself, it wasn't really clear to me just how unsettling these traits are until I saw them in someone else. I had the opportunity to meet one of my heroes in music - I don't want to call anyone out - but this gentleman does the exact same thing with his voice, and his affect was like a coiled spring that had just done a line of coke. When I spoke to him, I experienced a brief moment of uncertainty in which I was afraid the guy was going to go apeshit - possibly violent - on me; he actually hugged me. While I know of no history of violence by this individual, his bearing had that effect on me.

Another pretend ethnic minority unmasked

An historian at Furman University.   I wonder how many of these cases involve attempts to take advantage of "diversity" initiatives in hiring?  It certainly seems like the clearest grounds on which such fraud could lead to loss of an academic position.

Richard Marshall interviews Henrik Lagerlund (Stockholm)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Regional patterns in polling errors in 2016, 2018

Polls underestimated Republican votes in the Midwest, Democratic votes in the Southwest.  Some useful comparisons with Clinton/Trump polls in 2016 too.  Bottom line is this analyst thinks Biden will win.

Writing a "trade book" in philosophy

Philosopher Tamler Sommers (Houston) recounts his experience and offers some advice.

Academic freedom does not protect your "freedom" not to do your job

It cheapens the value of academic freedom for professors to invoke it as protecting their right not to teach their classes in "solidarity" with what they deem a worthy social movement.    Academic freedom does not cover failure to discharge professional duties; indeed, just the opposite.  Faculty who consistently fail to carry out their professional duties--whether teaching or research--can be terminated consistent with academic freedom. 

Academic freedom protects the freedom of faculty in their teaching and research, subject only to standards of disciplinary competence as assessed by their peers in the discipline.  That means faculty can design their classes as they see fit, and can explore any directions in their research--in both cases, subject only to the constraints imposed by their disciplinary competence.  A sociologist can certainly choose to focus on issues of race in their teaching and research, as long as what they're doing is competent sociology.  But a sociologist teaching a class on race in American society can't cancel class to make a political statement:  academic freedom does not cover that choice.

Philosophy PhD didn't know Australia is a country, fails student for knowing that it is

Oy veh!

538 says there's now a 13% chance (up from 12%) of Trump winning the election...

...which might seem like a 13% chance of the apocalypse, so way too close for comfort.  While it would obviously be very bad if Trump were genuinely re-elected--especially for what it says about the level of pathology in this country--it's worth remembering that the other elections count too.  If the Democrats take the Senate and keep the House, then Trump's reelection is much less bad, since his greatest unconstrained power will be in foreign affairs, where he has been fairly benign compared to traditional Republican and Democratic war-mongers.  Domestically, he can still make a lot of mischief (especially if Republican Senators continue to refuse to hold him to account), especially through executive orders and control of administrative agencies.

On the other hand, if Trump is re-elected and the Republicans hold the Senate, that will be much, much worse, since the House can not really hold Trump to account without Senate support, as the impeachment earlier this year (remember that?) made very clear.

The *real* origin of Kenutcky Fried Chicken

Survey on "The Concept of Representation in the Mind Sciences" seeking participants

I was asked to share the following announcement, which I'm happy to do:

I am Dr. Edouard Machery, Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh (www.edouardmachery.com). I would like to you to participate in a 15-minute research study about the meaning of the notion of representation. 

If you decide to participate in this study, you will be presented with four short scenarios describing a neuroscientific experiment and asked a few questions about each. You will also be asked a few general questions and a few demographic questions. The survey is entirely anonymous. There is no risk associated with participating to this study. Although we do not currently have plans to share the data, should we do so in the future, your data will be shared in an anonymous manner. Also, your data will anonymous in any related publications or presentations. Again, participation is completely voluntary. You can choose to be in the study or not. You are also free to withdraw from the study once you begin. However, if you withdraw, any responses you provided will potentially be used. 

Here is the link to the survey to please fill out as soon as possible, but no later than November 15, 2020: 

Amerliorative analysis [sic] and Humpty Dumptying

This is amusing.

ADDENDUM: And here's the 2005 paper by philosopher Nicholas Shackel (Cardiff) that introduced this terminology.  (Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)

On being a philosopher with autism

Parts of this interview are quite eye-opening; for example:

[I]t’s not that uncommon for people to tune me out completely in the way that people in a public setting tune ou[t nearby conversations. The result is that people often treat as empty the space that I occupy in a social situation. For example, they make eye contact with everyone else while their gaze merely passes over me or they fail to hear (literally) my contributions. This treatment is most noticeable when I’m trying to socialize with people who are all, for example, standing around chatting at a conference during a break. Often when a group of people are talking while standing, how they stand in relation to each other depends on the size of the group. A group of four people might be standing at the four corners of a rough square. If one person leaves, then the others temporarily remain standing where they are so that they appear to be standing at three corners of a square, with the fourth corner empty. If no one else comes to fill the space, they tend to move in closer to form a rough equilateral triangle.

Hospitals in Utah preparing to ration care...

...due to surge of COVID patients.   Utah has a 7-day rolling average of about 1,400 cases per day in a population of a bit more than 3 million.  By way of comparison, Illinois has a 7-day rolling overage of about 4,100 cases per day, but with a population four times the size; Illinois is, not yet, facing such a crisis, but Illinois also has a fairly good ratio of beds to persons compared to many other states.  (Illinois has 2.8 ICU beds per 10,000 people, while Utah has 2.2.)

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Irish Coffee, "I'm Lost," 1971

Belgian rock band, this was the concluding track on their debut album:

 

A good summary of the backtracking and dissembling by the NYT about its error-ridden 1619 Project

From analysts at the World Socialist Website, which has been at the forefront of exposing the scholarly problems and errors.

As COVID cases surge, one bit of good news is that doctors are now much better at averting death

A useful overview of the changes:

Two new peer-reviewed studies are showing a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The drop is seen in all groups, including older patients and those with underlying conditions, suggesting that physicians are getting better at helping patients survive their illness....

The study, which was of a single health system, finds that mortality has dropped among hospitalized patients by 18 percentage points since the pandemic began. Patients in the study had a 25.6% chance of dying at the start of the pandemic; they now have a 7.6% chance.

That's a big improvement, but 7.6% is still a high risk compared with other diseases....

 

Horwitz and her colleagues looked at more than 5,000 hospitalizations in the NYU Langone Health system between March and August. They adjusted for factors including age and other diseases, such as diabetes, to rule out the possibility that the numbers had dropped only because younger, healthier people were getting diagnosed. They found that death rates dropped for all groups, even older patients by 18 percentage points on average....

COVID on campus: an update

Philosopher Gregory Pence (Alabama/Birmingham) kindly shared this list of universities with the biggest outbreaks of COVID on campus.  What they have in common is that they are all large, mostly state schools, most of which have big fraternity/sorority scenes.  (One surprise on the list is BYU, which is large, but is an alcohol-free campus, which one would have expected to contribute to more sensible behavior by students.)   But these schools are the outliers, as even the NYT data reveals, despite their best journalistic effort to emphasize the negative:

More than 35,000 cases [COVID] cases have been identified since early October.

Though some colleges moved all their fall classes online, many campuses remained open even as positive tests accumulated by the hundreds or thousands. Of more than 1,700 institutions surveyed by The Times, more than 50 reported at least 1,000 cases over the course of the pandemic. More than 375 colleges have reported at least 100 cases.

Translated into non-hysterical English:  3% of universities account for about a third of all the cases on campuses, and one-quarter of the schools account for almost all the cases--meaning about 70% of colleges and universities are doing quite well.  Considering that COVID is spreading out of control in huge parts of the country, colleges are performing admirably overall.

Some more reasons to worry about the electoral college map

You can play with the electoral map here.

If you look at the high quality polls at 538 (e.g., those with A-range ratings), Biden is at best slightly ahead in Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona, states that often land in the Republican column.  If those polls are missing anyone, it is surely Trump voters:  folks who believe in QAnon aren't going to be talking to pollsters one suspects.  So let's assume the missing folks all vote Trump, and Florida, North Carolina and Arizona go for Trump again.

Forget about Ohio and Georgia:  those polls sometimes show Biden up by a point or tied, but mostly show Trump ahead.  If Ohio and Georgia really go Democratic, then we're in Biden landslide territory, but I doubt it's going to happen (in part for reasons that some Trump voters reveal here:   that Trump is a bad person isn't enough reason to vote Biden if you basically like Republican policies.  As in 2016, the Democrats are counting too much on "Trump is an awful person.")

So if all the frequent or typical Republican states vote for Trump, that means all Trump has to do is to recapture one of the states he won in 2016.  The best bets are Wisconsin and Pennsylvania:  although Biden leads in both, the lead is not as strong as in Michigan (and nothing like his double-digit leads in places like Virginia).  If Trump flips Wisconsin, then no one wins the electoral college, and oh boy are we in for a nightmare (then, as I understand it, everything will turn on whether the Democrats capture a majority of states in the House of Representatives).  If Trump flips Pennsylvania, then he wins the electoral college, no matter how many millions more vote for Biden in California, Illinois, New York, New England, the Pacific Northwester, Colorado, Minnesota etc.

On the other hand, if Achen and Bartels (Democracy for Realists) are right, then Trump should lose in a landslide because of the pandemic and the economic carnage.  We'll find out soon enough.

QAnon and age-old anti-semitic tropes

Great news that millions of Americans believe this stuff now!  I'll have more to say about this later, but right now I have to get on a conference call with other members of the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy to make some decisions about what kind of economy we want for 2021.

New study of non-voters in the U.S.

Here; from the summary of the main findings:

• Non-voters have less faith in the electoral system than voters. Non-voters say they don’t vote for many reasons, including not liking the candidates and feeling their vote doesn’t matter. Compared with voters, they have less faith in the electoral system, don’t feel they have enough information, and are less likely to think increased participation in elections is good for the country. They are more likely to think “the system is rigged.” 

• Splitting the vote in 2020. If non-voters all turned out in 2020, non-voter candidate preferences show they would add nearly equal share to Democratic and Republican candidates (33 percent versus 30 percent, respectively), while 18 percent said they would vote for a third party.

• Evenly divided on Trump. They are more evenly divided on current political issues and President Trump than previously thought. Fifty-one percent have a negative opinion of Trump, versus 40 percent positive. While non-voters skew center-left on some key issues like health care, they are slightly more conservative than active voters on immigration and abortion.

• Non-voters are less engaged with news and information. They consume less news, are more likely to accidentally “bump into” news rather than seeking it out actively, and more likely to say they don’t feel informed enough to decide who to vote for.

• Eligible Gen Z voters say they are less interested in politics and 2020 election than non-voters. Americans aged 18 to 24 are less interested in politics and less informed. They are the age cohort least likely to say they will vote in 2020, and 38 percent say they don’t have enough information to decide who to vote for.

Richard Marshall interviews Carlos Montemayor (San Francisco State)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Blast from the past: what might the philosophy profession look like in 2043?

Back in 2013.

Post-election scenarios

Suppose Biden wins and the Democrats end up with at least 52 seats in the Senate.  Robert Paul Wolff comments.

Another take on the election

Optimistic analysis, but not wholly!

(Thanks to Christopher Pynes for the pointer.)

On our remarkable sense of smell

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Ann-Sophie Barwich (Indiana/Bloomington) comments.

Some election musings

On October 20, 2016--about 2 1/2 weeks before the election--Nate Silver's operation gave the odds as follows:  Trump had a 14% chance of winning, and Clinton was about 7% ahead in the national polls.  (Do read the rest of Silver's 2016 analysis for grim amusement:  that he thought Clinton's debate performance locked things up shows how little he knows about voter behavior.)

Now here we are on October 21, 2020 (with the election less than two weeks away), and according to Silver, Trump has a 12% chance of winning, although Biden's lead over Trump is about 10%.   Pollsters have apparently made changes since their 2016 fiasco, to better account for the votes of whites without college education, so perhaps this year's numbers are better.  On the other hand, does anyone think that  the 50% of Trump's supporters who believe Democratic and some Republican elites are running a secret child-sex-trafficking ring are the kinds of people who are likely to participate in polls by mainstream polling outfits?  The big unknown here is what proportion of the country is bat shit crazy and likely to cast a vote?

Do philosophers make the world a better place? Thoughts from the late John Gardner (Oxford)

I posed the question back in 2013, and thought I'd re-up the late John Gardner's interesting answer at that time (and invite reader thoughts/reactions):

I'd be the first to say that the world is a better place - constitutively - just in virtue of containing more good philosophy, and more good philosophers. But I take it that the questioner is asking about making the world a better place instrumentally by his or her work, owed to to the dissemination of good ideas in it. Beyond helping students and other scholars to solve puzzles or to frame arguments, I do not believe that my philosophical work has any significant consequences via such dissemination and I do not intend it to have any. I do not intend it to have any, partly because I suspect that any consequences it would have, if it had any, would be really bad. Not because it is bad philosophy (though maybe it is) but because philosophy (in my subfields: moral, political, legal) is ripe for abuse. It is better not to have any effects than to have predictably unwelcome effects through the kind of people who are likely to put my work to use. On the very rare occasions when I have seen my work used by judges, policymakers, journalists, etc. - what Andrew [in a comment above] callled 'intermediaries' - I have very much disapproved of what they did with it and wished that I had managed to keep it much more secret.

Philosophy course at Wesleyan gets a nice-write up in the NY Times

"Living a Good Life," taught by philosophers Stephen Angle, Steven Horst, and Tushar Irani.

STAT News runs a very useful COVID-19 "tracker" of drugs and vaccines in development...

...here.

Blast from the past: best philosophical stylists for students to emulate?

Back in 2011.

Gideon Rosen (Princeton) answers "five questions"...

...about himself, his work, his conception of philosophy, his fears, as part of the podcast series run by philosopher Kieran Setiya (MIT).  I've listened to a couple of these, but this was one of the most interesting I thought.

2020-21 Update for the top ten U.K. schools ranked in the 2017 PGR

MOVING TO FRONT--ORIGINALLY POSTED OCTOBER 14 (changes to:  Leeds)

Since the 2020-21 PGR has been delayed, this is a summary of changes at the tenured (or almost tenured) ranks at the top 10 PhD programs in the United Kingdom since the 2017 Philosophical Gourmet Report; more precisely, these are changes that were not reflected in the faculty lists evaluators saw for the 2017 PGR surveys (some moves that weren't official until 2018 were reflected in the faculty lists for the 2017 surveys).  (Please e-mail me any corrections or additions, thanks.)   My thanks to Mitchell Barrington for his assistance in compiling this information.  (I will fill out the top 15 from the UK at a later date.)  (The Canadian updates are here, the U.S. updates are here.)

Oxford University (#1 in the UK, #2 in the world):  Added Catherine Abell (philosophy of art) from Manchester; Joel David Hamkins (logic) from CUNY; Nicholas Jones (metaphysics) from Birmingham; Amia Srinivasan (epistemology, social-political philosophy) from UCL; John Tasioulas (ethics, philosophy of law) from King's College, London; and Mark Wynn (philosophy of religion) from  Leeds.  Lost Ralf Bader (Kant, political philosophy, ethics) to Fribourg (Switzerland); John Hyman (philosophy of action and mind) to UCL; Brian Leftow (medieval philosophy, philosophy of religion) to Rutgers.  Stephen Blamey (logic, philosophical logic) and Elizabeth Fricker (epistemology, philosophy of language) retired.  John Gardner (philosophy of law, ethics) passed away.  Will surely remain #1 in the UK, and probably #2 in the world.

Cambridge University (#2 in the UK, #19 in the world): added Alexander Bird (philosophy of science & medicine) from King's College, London.  Lost Tim Button to UCL; Tom Dougherty (moral & political philosophy) to North Carolina/Chapel Hill; Huw Price(philosophy of science and physics, philosophy of language, metaphysics) to retirement (although he retains a half-time role at Cambridge, but has no formal teaching duties); Maarten Steehagen (aesthetics, philosophy of mind) to Uppsala.  Will probably still remain #2 in the UK.

University of St Andrews/University of Stirling Joint Program (#3 in the UK, #24 in the world).   Lost Barbara Sattler (ancient) to Rohr University Bochum.  Added Franz Berto (logic, metaphysics) from the University of Amsterdam.  Crispin Wright (philosophy of language, math and logic, epistemology) is also now back part-time at the University of Stirling (he is at NYU the rest of the time).   St Andrews has also added a number of short-term visitors, mostly from the U.S.

"Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk"...

...reviewed at the LARB.

The Swedish COVID disaster

The chart here certainly sums it up:  Sweden has had 59.3 deaths per 100,000 people, compared to 11.8 per 100,000 for Denmark, 6.3 for Finland, 5.2 for Norway, and 11.7 for Germany, all proximate countries that were far more proactive in managing it.  Sweden is up there with other countries whose response everyone knows has been disastrously incompetent, including the U.S. (66.3 death per 100,000) and the U.K. (64.5 deaths per 100,000).

Divers from Leeds to Trinity College Dublin

John Divers (metaphysics), Professor of Philosophy at the Unviersity of Leeds, will take up the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin in June 2021.  (He succeeds the emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy, Peter Simons, a metaphysician who was also recruited from Leeds!)

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Freedom, "Nobody," 1970

A terrific number (the lead track) from the second album of the British blues/rock band we featured in the late summer:

 

Good news about air travel and the risk of contracting COVID...

...although it does  require that passengers wear masks!  A question for anyone who has flown recently:  are airlines enforcing mask wearing?