Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

FDA approval being sought for rapid COVID test using saliva...

...developed by researchers at Tulane University.   Are there other such tests being considered by the FDA?  Information and links welcome.

(Thanks to Edward Johnson for the pointer.)

Blast from the past: the best or most important philosophy books/articles from 2000-2009

A pretty good list, courtesy of readers (back in 2009).  I'll open a thread for publications since 2010 later this week.

Hedden from Sydney to ANU

Brian Hedden (decision theory, epistemology, ethics), currently Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sydney, has accepted a tenured appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, starting early in 2021.

The Frankfurt School in exile in America

Interesting interview with the historian Martin Jay (emeritus, Berkeley), that also touches on Walter Benjamin, and the post-WWII return to Germany.

Five important books in philosophy of language...

...lucidly described by Scott Soames (USC).

Demand for testing knowledge of the classics is now so great...

...that they're setting up tents on street corners:

Find your "place in line" for a vaccine in the U.S.

A useful interactive tool.

(Thanks to Gregory Pence for the pointer.)

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Blues Creation, "Atomic Bombs Away," 1971

Japanese hard/blues rock band, this is the lead number from a 1971 album:

 

Cambridge University adopts robust free expression policy

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--UPDATED

Cambridge philosopher Arif Ahmed played a role in the policy.

(Thanks to Nick Zangwill for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  As reader Joe Cairns points out to me, despite this laudable endorsement of free expression, Cambridge has also adopted a tendentious defintion of anti-semitism that can clearly be deployed to restrict debate about Israel and its policies (including debates and criticisms that would be lawful and permissible in Israel itself).  They did so, it appears, under pressure from the Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson.   What an embarrassment.

The quality of reporting at Inside Higher Ed is really getting awful

We've noted this before, but this latest piece offers more evidence of declining standards at IHE.   Reading this article, you'd get no sense of the appalling defamatory harassment to which classicist Thomas Hubbard was subjected:   being falsely called a pedophile is defamation per se, meaning no damage needs to be proved for Professor Hubbard to prevail.  

The latest lawsuit (earlier one) brought by Professor Hubbard against his defamers named a graduate student at UT Austin as the defendant, whose tweets, if false (some plainly are), are also clearly defamatory.  She was put on notice about the tweets and was asked to remove them; she did not.  Now she is being sued.

Trump's attempted coup and America's future

As usual, Robert Paul Wolff makes the right points:

We are now watching a full-scale fascist coup attempt in slow motion with assorted comic interludes. The attempt will almost certainly fail, thank God, but we are coming a great deal closer than most people, myself included, would have thought possible.

In order to seize control of the United States, Trump needs some or all of six elements of the American power structure: the Army, the Republican Party, the corporate elite, the judiciary, the senior administrative hierarchy of the federal government, and at least a good deal of the state and local administrative hierarchy. He has complete control of two of these six – the Republican Party and the senior administrative hierarchy of the federal government. But he has failed to take control of any element of the judiciary, he has little or no support of the state and local administrative hierarchy, the corporate elite has clearly decided to sit this one out, and far and away most important of all he has no control of the Army.

Trump is a buffoon and many of his closest aides – most notably Rudy Giuliani – are buffoons as well, but it would be a very bad mistake to suppose that because of his personal inadequacies, which are legion, he is not really a threat. Sophisticated, accomplished, well-educated elites perpetually underestimate fascist wannabes whom they would shrink from inviting to a dinner party....

Now ZAS Berlin is flat out lying about the no-platforming of Professor Stock

Here on Twitter they have the audacity to claim: 

@ZASBerlin

Replying to

@Docstockk

ZAS had to retract the abstract because it did not fit to the scientific theme of the workshop (oppressive speech & communication) and contained language that was inconsistent with the values of the ZAS. We regret that the abstract went online.

11:38 AM · Dec 10, 2020·Twitter Web App

This is really shameless dissembling:   as we saw, Professor Stock's abstract was squarely on the theme of the session on "Bodies, Gender Identity, and Misogyny"; contained no inappropriate language (though apparently expressed a verboten point of view); and, in any case, Professor McCready has admitted to complaining about Professor Stock's participation which resulted in her being no-platformed (Professor McCready has now deleted her tweet confessing her role in this; being an innocent fellow, I didn't bother to take a screen shot, but I quoted it accurately in the prior post).  [ADDENDUM:   The Wayback Machine captured Professor McCready's tweet here.)

Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) is a disgrace, cancels philosopher's talk for political reasons

UPDATED BELOW WITH IDENTITY OF ACADEMIC WHO INITIATED THE COMPLAINT

Philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) was invited to speak in a session on "Bodies, Gender Identity, and Misogyny" at a conference, whose main them is "oppressive speech," with a sub-theme on free speech.   After first accepting Professor Stock's abstract for the session, the organizer of the panel (a junior person, who was clearly pressured to do this by others) wrote back to say that Professor Stock would not be included, finally admitting that the talk was too politically controversial.  (The organizers even changed the theme of the session, I suppose to justify their exclusion of Professor Stock for political reasons.)  Professor Stock tweets about it here.  I print Professor Stock's abstract below the fold.  

If anyone knows who is responsible for this no-platforming of Professor Stock, please e-mail me.   And I do hope that the many fine philosophers on these panels will withdraw from the conference in protest.  (Some participants are on record as having open contempt for academic freedom, but most are not:  I hope they will stand up for principle here.  I'll post a follow-up about what happens.)

What is wrong with people in Boise, Idaho?

They're watching too much Fox TV I guess, but this is still grotesque:

In Boise, Idaho, public health officials about to vote on a four-county mask mandate abruptly ended a meeting Tuesday evening because of fears for their safety amid anti-mask protests outside the building and at some of their homes.

One health board member tearfully announced she had to rush home to be with her child because of the protesters, who were seen on video banging on buckets, blaring air horns and sirens, and blasting a sound clip of gunfire from the violence-drenched movie “Scarface” outside her front door.

“I am sad. I am tired. I fear that, in my choosing to hold public office, my family has too often paid the price,” said the board member, Ada County Commissioner Diana Lachiondo. “I increasingly don’t recognize this place. There is an ugliness and cruelty in our national rhetoric that is reaching a fevered pitch here at home, and that should worry us all.”

Philosopher Torbjörn Tännsjö (Stockholm) wins the "Ethics Prize" from the Swedish National Council on Medical Ethics

The announcement, in Swedish, is here.   What makes this particularly notable is that, as Professor Tännsjö told me, "Thirty years ago the leader of the Swedish Christian Democratic party, Alf Svensson, demanded that I be sacked from my position as 'dozent' at Stockholm University, since I was a utilitarian who defended the right of free access to prenatal diagnosis and abortion."  (All political parties,including the Christian Democrats, are represented on the Swedish National Council.)

I discuss "Moral Psychology with Nietzsche" at Trinity College Dublin...

...here, with Professors Donna Lyons (TCD), Brian O'Connor (University College Dublin), and Alexander Prescott-Couch (Oxford).   If you haven't read the book (which will be out in paperback in Spring 2021), my essay for the Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology will give you a pretty good overview of the main themes.

(As an aside, Professor Lyons has been running a delightful workshop series discussing recent books with authors, mostly by law professors, but some others too.

Richard Marshall interviews Ana Maria Mora Marquez (Gothenburg)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Vaccine update

The Pfizer vaccine is very effective, the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine only moderately so.   Since the UK government got its act together to purchase large amounts of the Pfizer vaccine, we'll find out in the next month or two whether there are any rare side-effects (the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine does seem to produce modest side-effects in most patients--some mix of fever, chills, aches).

"Should we continue to honor George Washington?"

Philosopher Thomas Carson (Loyola/Chicago) comments.

Brandon Warmke (Bowling Green) talks about "moral grandstanding"...

...on Brain in a Vat.

Canadian Association of University Teachers passes motion of censure of University of Toronto...

...for permitting outside political interference in the appointments process at the Law School.  CAUT censure means all faculty are discouraged from attending conferences at Toronto, collaborating with faculty there, etc.  A shame the Law School's misconduct may bring this sanction down on the entire university in six months.  (Earlier coverage.)

Blast from the past: Kitcher on the need for "reconstruction in philosophy"

Back in 2011, with a lively discussion in the comments, including contributions from David Wallace, Peter Ludlow, Colin Farrelly, Laurie Paul, Keith DeRose, and many others, and replies from Philip Kitcher.

Historian of logic...and personal secretary and bodyguard toTrotsky

An interesting life.

Alexa site rankings

Browsing wikipedia, I discovered an entry for the Daily Nous blog run by philosopher Justin Weinberg (South Carolina), to which we occasionally link.   In that entry, there was a link to the Alexa ranking, which in turn took one to Alexa traffic rankings for other philosophy-related sites.  I don't know how accurate these are, but according to Alexa here's how several philosophy blogs/sites rank worldwide:

Crooked Timber              197,362 (group blog, including some philosophers)

Leiter Reports                224,454

APA website                   405,598

Daily Nous                      529,875 (although 90 days ago, it ranked #362,241)

Philosophers' Cocoon       547,311

Digressions, Impressions  939,895

Pea Soup (ethics blog)   1,573,961

By way of comparison, The New York Times website ranks #76, Pornhub ranks #56 (!!!), The New York Review of Books site ranks #46,383, while the London Review of Books site ranks #94,741.

This blog averages over 10,000 unique visits per day, but I don't know how that translates into differences in ranking, assuming they are actually sensitive to differences in traffic.  (The odd fluctuation for the Daily Nous blog leads me to think either that Alexa isn't reliable or that small differences in traffic have huge effects on a site's rank; on the other hand, this blog was ranked only slightly higher, around 216,000, three months ago according to Alexa).

 

In Memoriam: Raimo Tuomela (1940-2020)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOVEMBER 25--UPDATED

Best-known for his contributions to philosophy of action and philosophy of social science, Professor Tuomela was emeritus at the University of Helsinki, where he spent most ofhis career.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

UPDATE:  A memorial notice from the International Social Ontology Society, including remembrances of Professor Tuomela by various philosophers (including Margaret Gilbert, Michael Bratman, Philip Pettit, and others).  (Thanks to Michael Schmitz for the pointer.)

Another ominous sign for New York's post-COVID future

Goldman Sachs looking to move some of its operations to Florida or Texas.

From uncertainty to knowledge

Philosophers Simon Blackburn, Phillip Goff, and others discuss.

Blast from the past: Does having publications hurt a job seeker at schools whose primary mission is teaching?

Back in 2009.

ADDENDUM:   A senior philosopher elsewhere writes:  "My sense is things may have changed a bit since 2009: with the exception of community colleges, almost everybody wants pubs.  Most students [at a top 30ish PhD program where this philosopher taught] compete for teaching jobs, and our sense there was things start to look good after 3 pubs.  Quality of venue mattering much less at weaker places."   I'm opening this for further comments on whether things have chnaged since 2009 and what people's experience is more recently.

"Good jobs"

Interesting paper prepared by the political philosopher Joshua Cohen, now at Apple University (and part-time at Berkeley as well).

Morton from North Carolina to Penn

Jennifer Morton (philosophy of action, moral & political philosophy, philosophy of education), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has accepted a tenured offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where she will be Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy, starting July 1, 2021.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: The Human Instinct, "Black Sally," 1970

New Zealand rock band, active since the late 1960s, this is probably their best-known tune from their second album (and what a great psych/acid rock number it is):

 

Artist sues Vermont Law School to prevent destruction of murals depicting the underground railroad

The murals were deemed "offensive" by benighted students flexing their muscles, and the school caved, hence the lawsuit. As Nietzsche observed:  the "secret desire to be tyrants is [often] wrapped up in virtuous words!"

Here is the image in question (not sure it will all fix here, but enough will):

Philosophers, unsurprisingly, overclaim what philosophy accomplishes

Case in point from the interesting interview with Rebecca Goldstein noted a couple of weeks ago:

Philosophical advances in epistemology and in ethics profoundly shape our points of view. We don’t see them precisely because we see with them. It’s like the fish who responds to the question “How’s the water today?” with “Water? What’s water?” When people hold the view, for example, that science has discovered that simultaneity is not absolute, as counter-intuitive as that seems, or that chattel slavery is an abomination, which once also had seemed counter-intuitive, they don’t realize the laborious philosophical reasoning that had laid the groundwork for their views. It takes philosophical work to claim that science can correct our fundamental views of the way the world is. It takes philosophical work to claim that we can discover, without consulting any holy books (that in fact sanction slavery), truths about the way humans can and can’t be treated. Philosophy is committed to the view that we can use human reason to come to ethical conclusions, overcoming biases, tradition, and religious authority.

Where is the evidence, though, that careful philosophical argument explains why people accept the conclusions of physics or the wrongness of chattel slavery?  I can't think of any.

Signs of the COVID times in the academy: cuts, cuts, cuts

At the University of Colorado, Boulder:  "[W]e propose to rebalance the ratio of tenure-track faculty to instructors. Currently, that ratio, by head count, is 3.3:1 (TTT to instructors). Reducing tenure-track faculty by 50 and adding 25 instructors would yield a new ratio of 2.8:1. Accounting for related savings, making this move would free $6.2 million annually."  [Instructors typically teach 4/4 loads, rather than 2/2 loads.]

At the University of Vermont:  The "plan would terminate majors including Geology, Religion, Asian Studies and several language programs such as Greek, Latin and German. Minors in many of these subject areas would also be cut, plus others in Theatre and Vermont Studies. Master’s programs to be cut include Greek & Latin and Teaching Latin, Geology and Historic Preservation.  The plan would wipe out the college’s Classics, Geology and Religion departments. Other departments would be consolidated."  Some tenure-stream faculty may lose their positions altogether.

ADDENDUM:  And wealthy private universities are offering financial incentives for faculty to retire.  Yale is offering up to 200K for faculty who retire by next summer, while I know Penn is offering two years of salary as a retirement incentive to certain senior faculty to retire by next summer (for faculty in the professional schools this could amount to 750K or more).

Blast from the past: Brian Bruya makes things up

Five years ago, I predicted that Bruya's fraudulent and confused criticisms of the PGR and the whole Bruyahaha spectacle (and here) would have no influence on the PGR, and it didn't.   Meanwhile, Metaphilosophy was discredited by its handling of the matter, but we did learn a few useful lessons.

In Memoriam: Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929-2020)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOVEMBER 21--UPDATED

A longtime member of the MIT faculty, Professor Thomson was best-known for her contributions to applied ethics (most famously 1971's "A Defense of Abortion"), but also wrote widely in political philosophy, metaethics, metaphysics and other topics.  There is a brief biography here and a more philosophical biography here.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

UPDATE:  A NYT obituary has appeared.

ANOTHER:  The MIT memorial notice.  (Thanks to Alex Byrne for the pointer.)

AND ONE MORE:  In a poll of readers of this blog back in 2016, Professor Thomson was deemed one of the 15 most important moral and political philosophers of the post-WWII period.

Students at McGill demand the university revise and restrict its notion of academic freedom

At least these not so crypto-fascists are direct about what they want!   Since McGill's status as a serious research university would evaporate over night were they to heed these demands, I assume nothing will happen...this time, anyway.  But that the students are not ashamed by their demands is stunning.

"Finding Meaning"

A series of essays at 3:16 AM, with contributions from Mark Anderson (Belmont), Ken Gemes (Birkbeck), Simon Glendinning (LSE), Daniel Kaufman (Missouri State), Paul Moser (Loyola/Chicago) and others.

List & Valentini from LSE/KCL to LMU Munich

Christian List (decision theory, philosophy of action, philosophy of social science), Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the  London School of Economics, and Laura Valentini (political philosophy), Professor of Philosophy, Politics & Economics at King's College London, have both accepted senior offers from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, to start in early 2021.  Valentini will hold a Chair in Philosophy and Political Theory, while List will hold a Chair in Philosophy and Decision Theory, and become a co-director of the well-known Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, along with Professors Hannes Leitgeb and Stephan Hartmann.  It's fair to say that LMU Munich is clearly the leading center for analytic philosophy, especially its formal dimensions, on the European Continent.

Berg on Manne and "public philosophy"

An interesting critique of the work of Kate Manne (Cornell) by philosopher Anastasia Berg (Hebrew University) at CHE.  I was particularly struck by this:

Many of Manne’s critics have seized on elements in her style and method, or pointed out the ways in which her ideological commitments limit her analysis. They are not wrong: Manne cherry-picks her evidence (e.g., discussing the 2020 Democratic primary, Manne insists misogyny is responsible for Warren’s defeat but fails to note that Warren didn’t lose only to men, but, in a significant moment for her campaign, to Amy Klobuchar, in New Hampshire); engages in dubious psychological conjecture (e.g., when discussing the case of a man accused of serial rape, she asserts that “many will hence instinctually reach, with a sense of moral necessity, for any excuse in the book as to why he’s innocent, and all the women who testify against him can’t be trusted” — the man was unanimously convicted by a jury of his peers and sentenced to 236 consecutive years in prison); indulges in selective hyperbole (e.g., she equates the pressure women feel not to disappoint a romantic partner with the experience of the participants in the infamous Milgram shock experiments); and is reluctant to consider alternative explanations for the phenomena she’s interested in (she never so much as raises the possibility that Donald Trump defended Brett Kavanaugh because he was his nominee, not because of “himpathy,” or that, similarly, the father of Brock Turner, the Stanford student convicted of sexual assault, defended him because he is his father; that at least some conservatives oppose abortion because they sincerely believe it is a religious and moral wrong, not because they wish to keep women in their place; that at least some of the white women who voted for Trump did so because they favored the Republican platform, not merely because they sympathized with their husbands’ sense of patriarchal entitlement, etc.).

As Professor Berg notes, Manne "is guilty of all of this," although she goes on to raise a different set of criticisms of Manne's work.

GPT-3 bot posts on Reddit for a week, and no one realized it was a bot

This may tell us more about Reddit than AI, however.

(Thanks to Blake Myers for the pointer.)

On institutions that demand individual uploads of letters of recommendation for undergraduates applying to grad school

A senior philosopher elsewhere writes:

It's the season to write graduate and professional school applications for undergraduates.  As always, the letter has to be uploaded separately for each institution applied to.  I just did this for a student who applied for 12 programs (probably about typical), and I spent more than an hour engaged in such enriching activities as  repeatedly typing in my address, and  repeatedly answering the "in what capacity have you known the applicant?" question. (Thank you -- I'd never thought to address this question in a letter.). To add to the fun, the Harvard and Duke platforms crashed 3 times each, so I was able to engage in the joyous exercise 4 extra times. 

If one writes for multiple students a season, the tedium, of course, aggregates.  Surely there are better uses of faculty -- or anyone's -- labor.  And this labor is of course in addition to actual writing of the letter, which can, depending on circumstances, run to several hours a student. 

The "collegenet" platform is of little help, since one has to enter and upload individually for each institution.

Supporting students in developing their careers is, obviously, one of the most meaningful parts of our job.

Enduring hours of grating, and avoidable, tedium is not.

Richard Marshall interviews Martin Lin (Rutgers)...

...at 3:16 AM.

White English professor at Pomona accused of "literary blackface" by colleagues for teaching Ralph Ellison

He recounts this episode and offers reflections on some of the current derangement in the academy.

(Thanks to Michael Clune for the pointer.)

Blast from the past: when Robin James reported some important "theorizing"...

...that still hasn't seen the light of day alas.

Hobbes on Trump

Political theorist David Lay Williams (DePaul) comments.

"Cancel culture": the Venn diagram

This is amusingly apt:

(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer.)

COVID isolation periods should be shorter

Peak infectiousness is in the two days before symptoms start, and for five days thereafter.  From the article:

In September, France dropped its required period of isolation to seven days from 14 days, and Germany is considering shortening it to five days. (Isolation refers to people who are ill; quarantine refers to people who have been exposed to the virus and may become ill.)

I talk about the Supreme Court and legal realism...

...at Brain in a Vat.  I enjoyed this discussion a lot, and also learned a bit about South African constitutional law.

Masks work against the coronavirus...

...and cloth masks work better than other kinds.  (Full study here.)