Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Drudge Report had only 1.4 million unique visitors in August

That detail is buried in this NYT story (the subject of the latter was obviously lifted from this blog!).  According to my public stat counter, this blog had a quarter-million unique visits in August (and that was coming off my July hiatus when I only posted a few times), and 300,000 last month.  In a typical year, there are several months with 360,000 to 400,000 unique visits.  Somehow it seems like I should be a lot richer given these numbers!

The author lived through societal collapse (in his case, the Sri Lankan civil war)...

...and describes what it's like.  An excerpt:

I moved back to Sri Lanka in my twenties, just as the ceasefire fell apart. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens.

This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.

I was looking through some old photos for this article and the mix is shocking to me now. Almost offensive. There’s a burnt body in front of my office. Then I’m playing Scrabble with friends. There’s bomb smoke rising in front of the mall. Then I’m at a concert. There’s a long line for gas. Then I’m at a nightclub. This is all within two weeks....

In Memoriam: Dan W. Brock (1937-2020)

A moral philosopher, Professor Brock became especially well-known for his influential work in bioethics.  He taught philosophy at Brown University for many years, and spent the later part of his career in the Department of Biothics at Harvard Medical School.  The Harvard memorial notice is here.

UPDATE:  Philosophy Tom Carson (Loyola/Chicago) writes:

I am very sorry to learn of Dan’s death.  I knew him well in the 1970s when I was a graduate student at Brown.  He was an outstanding philosopher who did very important and seminal work in bio-ethics.  Dan was also a wonderful teacher.  He directed my doctoral dissertation and my late wife Judy’s.  He was everything a director and mentor should be: helpful, generous with his time, prompt, and diligent.  Dan was very encouraging and supportive, but he also let students know when their work was wanting.  He helped and guided many students through the difficulties and disappointments of job hunting and beginning their careers.  I still have his hand-written comments on several drafts of my dissertation and several of my graduate papers.  I didn’t fully appreciate how apt and helpful his comments were when I was a student.  Some of my early work would have been better if I had followed his suggestions more closely.  Judy was his TA at Brown for a time.  The first time she graded a set of papers for him, she gave most of them Cs and Ds.  Dan made her raise the grades which she did very reluctantly.  She always insisted that she was right in her original grades, because the arguments given by most of the papers were weak or non-existent.  Dan thought that the grades she initially assigned were unfair given the prevalence of hyper grade inflation at Brown in the 1970s.  He wasn’t a cause of that hyperinflation, but he took account of it.  Judy and I and many others were very fortunate to work with Dan and be guided by him. 

The truth about philanthropy

Some facts about where the money is going.   There should be no need for philanthropy; the state should impose an essentially confiscatory tax on all income and wealth above some appropriate threshhold ($10 million?  25 million?).  Then we could have a civilized society!

Annals of tunnel vision

A reader (who asked not to be identified for the obvious reasons) called this bizarre post by Twitter's favorite feminist philosopher to my attention:

Professor Manne is the proverbial "one trick" pony, but unfortunately, she doesn't recognize when the trick doesn't apply.  (We've seen this before.)  As commenters quickly pointed out, people had called for Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer to resign.   As others pointed out, Justice Scalia was only 68 when George W. Bush was re-elected; Justice Ginsburg was 79, when Barack Obama was re-elected, and Justice Ginsburg had a much worse history of health problems than Justice Scalia.

Manne's tunnel vision and tendency to do "philosophy by anecdote" are both usefully discussed in this review of her recent book Entitled (the review got a huge amount of Twitter attention after Manne had a tantrum about it, no doubt amplifying its effect significantly).