Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Hairy Chapter, "There's a Kind of Nothing," 1971

German hard/acid rock band, this is the lead number of their debut album:

 

New editors of the journal "Analysis" announced

Philosopher Ben Colburn (Glasgow), Secretary to the Analysis Trust, asked me to share this announcement, which I'm happy to do:

The Analysis Trust is delighted to announce that it has appointed Dr Stacie Friend, Dr David Liggins and Dr Lee Walters as joint editors of Analysis from September 2021 onwards. We would like to thank David for his excellent work as editor over the past five years, and look forward to working with him, Lee and Stacie to maintain Analysis's exciting and distinctive role in the philosophical ecosystem.

Blast from the past: against "secret" waitlists in PhD admissions

Back in 2017, but timely again.  Do see the discussion as well.

First, the fake "napping while Black" scandal at Yale, now the fake "eating while Black" scandal at Smith

1/22 UPDATE:  Four months ago, Richard Painter began viciously attacking Sarah Braasch, as part of his unhinged vendetta against me (one of his own Minnesota colleagues had to call out his lies about me!).  Despite acknowledging Ms. Braasch's mental health problems, Painter has continued to harass her on a regular basis.  As I wrote previously in response to Painter's abuse of Braach:

Ms. Braasch was vilified in the media as a "racist" in in 2018 in the misnamed "napping while Black" incident at Yale:   Ms. Braasch had called campus police about an unknown person (who turned out to be Black--Ms. Braasch couldn't see who it was, a fact not reported at the time) sleeping in the common area on her floor in the middle of the night (Ms. Braasch was the only resident of that floor). Yale, in fact, withdrew racial harassment charges against Ms. Braasch, a fact which also received almost no media attention.   Yale law and philosophy professors (including Alan Schwartz and Scott Shapiro) have vouched for Ms. Braasch's character, and her commitment to racial justice and civil rights.  The journalist Cathy Young, after a thorough investigation, wrote a lengthy article about Ms. Braasch (including her history of personal and family trauma, and her past issues with safety in Yale housing), which--while hardly uncritical of Ms. Braasch--exonerated her fully from the charge of racial animus (consistent, of course, with Yale dropping the charges against her).

I never described any of this as a "hoax," just a terrible misunderstanding.

==================

We recently noted the outrageous treatment of Sarah Braasch by Yale, but now comes a similar story from Smith College, where an alleged racial incident attracts wide media attention, but then turns out to be nothing of the kind.   The only difference this time is that the NYT has noted that the original story was a fake:

In midsummer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at Smith College, recounted a distressing American tale: She was eating lunch in a dorm lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer walked over and asked her what she was doing there.

The officer, who could have been carrying a “lethal weapon,” left her near “meltdown,” Ms. Kanoute wrote on Facebook, saying that this encounter continued a yearlong pattern of harassment at Smith.

“All I did was be Black,” Ms. Kanoute wrote. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”

The college’s president, Kathleen McCartney, offered profuse apologies and put the janitor on paid leave. “This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias,” the president wrote, “in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives.”

The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN picked up the story of a young female student harassed by white workers. The American Civil Liberties Union, which took the student’s case, said she was profiled for “eating while Black.”

Less attention was paid three months later when a law firm hired by Smith College to investigate the episode found no persuasive evidence of bias. Ms. Kanoute was determined to have eaten in a deserted dorm that had been closed for the summer; the janitor had been encouraged to notify security if he saw unauthorized people there. The officer, like all campus police, was unarmed.

 

Richard Marshall interviews Jean-Philippe Deranty (Macquarie)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Williamson on the "necessity of realism"

Once again at IAITV.

In Memoriam: Fabrizio Mondadori (1943-2021)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 22--UPDATED

A specialist in early modern philosophy, metaphysics and philosophy of language, Professor Mondadori spent most of his career at the excellent terminal MA program in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.  An obituary is here (although it states wrongly he taught early on at Penn State--it was at the University of Pennsylvania).

(Thanks to Ed McCann for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  The UWM memorial notice is here.  (Thanks to John Koethe for the pointer.)

McGill University announces return to in-person classes in fall 2021

Here.  Have other schools already announced fall plans?  Feel free to include links to announcements in the comments.

In Memoriam: Richard N. Boyd (1942-2021)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 22--UPDATED

A longtime member of the philosophy faculty at Cornell, where he was emeritus, Professor Boyd was especially well-known for his forms of scientific and moral realism.   I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.   

UPDATE:    The Cornell memorial notice is here.  (Thanks to John Doris for the pointer.)

Blast from the past: the most important Western philosophers of all time?

A poll and discussion, back in 2017.

The "California variant" of the coronavirus

Reasons to be worried?   Links to better-informed discussions of this development welcome.

UPDATE:   This article is quite misleading; see the link in the first comment.

MC Hammer, rapper and online defender of philosophy

Sometimes philosophy finds friends in surprising places.

(Thanks to Mark Brenchley for the pointers.)

New study out of the UK on the impact of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines on serious illness

This is welcome news:

Research led by Public Health Scotland found at four weeks after the first dose, hospital admissions were reduced by 85% and 94% for the Pfizer and AstraZeneca jabs respectively.

It is the first sign of the real world impact of vaccination in the UK.

Figures for England are expected to be released later.

Among the over 80s, there was an overall 81% reduction in the numbers admitted to hospital.

Sarah Braasch's legal battle with Yale continues

1/22 UPDATE:  Not quite one year ago, I posted (below) about Ms. Braasch's legal efforts to get Yale to release crucial evidence regarding the incident portrayed in the media as the "Napping while Black" scandal.  Roughly four months ago, Richard Painter began attacking Ms. Braasch, as part of his unhinged vendetta against me (one of his own Minnesota colleagues had to call out his lies about me!).  Despite acknowledging Ms. Braasch's mental health problems, Painter has continued to harass her on a regular basis.  The result has been her increasingly desperate attempts to defend herself.  Several observers on Twitter have noted what's really going on here.

=====================

Readers will recall that Ms. Braasch was the victim of an Internet-fueled "cancellation"--the fake "napping while Black" case at Yale--and that she is now locked in a legal battle with Yale to release the police bodycam footage that she believes will vindicate her account of what happened.  Ms. Braasch writes about the status of the case here; as her legal costs mount, please consider supporting her either with payment directly to her lawyers (put "Sarah Braasch" in the reference line) or through her GoFund me page.

(For a useful short account of what happened to Ms. Braasch, see this New York Daily News piece by Cathy Young.)

In Memoriam: James Bohman (1954-2021)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JANUARY 20--UPDATED

Well-known for his contributions to political philosophy (esp. democratic theory), Professor Bohman spent almost his entire career at Saint Louis University, where he was emeritus.  I will post links to memorial notices as they appear.

UPDATE:  The St. Louis memorial notice is here.  (Thanks to Nick Zavediuk for the pointer.)

Spinoza made simple

Blast from the past: Best Anglophone philosophers of the last 60 years?

Back in 2017.

Rosen from Harvard to Pittsburgh

Jacob Rosen (ancient philosophy), currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, has accepted appointment as Associate Professor (with tenure) of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where he will start this fall.  With the recent addition of Sara Magrin (from Berkeley Classics) and, before that, Jennifer Whiting (from Toronto), Pittsburgh will now be one of the top choices for students interested in ancient philosophy in North America, along with Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Toronto, and Chicago.

(Thanks to James Shaw for the information about Professor Rosen.)

Schopenhauer made simple

"God is dead" and with Him goes moral egalitarianism

I return to Brain in a Vat to discuss these themes in Nietzsche (related to this paper).

Boston Review marks the centennary of Rawls's birth...

...with a collection of essays here.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Felix Pappalardi & Creation,"She's Got Me," 1976

After Mountain, bass player (and record producer) Pappalardi teamed up with the Japanese band formerly known as Blues Creation to record a forgettable album, except for the lead track, which isn't bad:

 

JHP Article Prize for 2020

Deborah Boyle (Charleston), the editor of Journal of the History of Philosophy, writes:

The Journal of the History of Philosophy is pleased to announce that its sixteenth annual prize for the best article to appear in the pages of the JHP over the past year has just been awarded to Jari Kaukua for “Avicenna’s Outsourced Rationalism” JHP 58.2 (April 2020): 215–40. The prize comes with a cash award of $1,500. The article can be read at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/752857

Blast from the past: Liberal "bias" in philosophy?

A discussion back in 2006.

COVID herd immunity by April in the U.S.?

Although this appears on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, the author is not a crank, but a serious medical professional at Johns Hopkins; an excerpt:

Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?

In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast. Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.

There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection. As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.

There's more detail in the essay.  Is this assessment plausible?

International Society for Nietzsche Studies meeting

What was to have been the 5th annual meeting was postponed due to the COVID disaster; it will now take place in Oxford in June 2022.   The deadline for the CFP is next January, so plenty of time to submit for those who are interested.

Condescension from below watch: Matt Taibbi edition

It's clear the silly Taibbi--who is sometimes an amusing polemicist but is equally obviously a lightweight--did not understand a word he read, and didn't even read the "Repressive Tolerance" essay in its entirety (he doesn't realize that Marcuse is a Millian, and that his dispute with Mill is about the background conditions under which liberty actually produces good consequences).   I do not recommend reading the essay, unless one wants to be reminded that anti-intellectual hatchet jobs are not wholly proprietary to right-wing pundits.

(Thanks to Prabhu Venkataraman for the pointer.)

Richard Marshall interviews Jenann Ismael (Columbia)...

...at 3:16 AM.

"The Other Woman"

Pleasingly quirky and evocative reflections by my colleague Agnes Callard.

In Memoriam: Andreas Teuber (1942-2021)

A longtime member of the philosophy faculty at Brandeis University, Professor Teuber was best-known for his work in political philosophy and aesthetics, especially the aesthetics of Stanley Cavell.  The Brandeis memorial notice is here.

"Meaning in Life"

Philosophers Thaddeus Metz (Pretoria) discusses at Brain in a Vat.

Far right extremists and racists in the U.S. military?

Not many confirmed cases, fortunately, but at least the military is worried about it and taking proactive steps.

The inflation of "bullying," a continuing saga

I've mentioned a number of times before the sociologist Randal Collins's excellent diagnosis of the inflation-of-bullying phenomenon, a key part of the New Infantilism that has gripped parts of academia and the culture at large. Like other cases of "concept inflation," the aim is a kind of Stevensonian "persuasive definition" in which the "inflaters" piggyback on the negative emotive valence of the original concept, but change the concept's referent as a way of weaponizing it for different purposes--in this case, for purposes of speech suppression (or making the speech too costly for the speaker by associating it with the negative valence of the original concept).

Will U.S. graduate enrollments shrink in the years ahead?

That's one prediction in this CHE piece:

Whether by cohort reductions or would-be students leaving the pipeline, graduate education will reach an eventual new equilibrium that may not match the graduate-student populations of the last decade, says Earl Lewis, who was president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from 2013 to 2018 and is now director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Social Solutions.

“By the time we get to ’25 or ’26, we may look back and realize that we’ve reached a new plateau, that it was not as high as it was in 2010, let alone 2015,” Lewis says.

Will this mean the job market will be better in 2025 or 2030?   Unfortunately, I'm not optimistic, given the general retrenchment in investment in higher education.

Blast from the past: Tenure reviews and the length of articles

Back in 2014.

Loury on "truths" about race in America

African-American economist Glenn Loury (Brown) has penned an essay that is generating, unsurprisinlgy, a lot of discussion.  As regular readers know, I think "diversity" blather is a fraud, and that racism, while obviously real, is mostly an epiphenomenon of the class politics of capitalism.   And while Loury has sometimes been scathingly accurate about the absurd posturing of the academy about race issues, this latest essay seems to me more deluded than illuminating, many of its "truths" being falsehoods, predicated on a quasi religious faith in autonomous or moral agency (no doubt this faith was important to his own recovery from personal traumas and missteps).  

More on COVID and Vitamin D3

From the abstract of a forthcoming article in The Lancet:

Our study aims to elucidate the effect of calcifediol [25(OH)D3] treatment on ICU admission and mortality, in patients admitted to COVID-19 wards of Hospital del Mar, Barcelona, Spain. A total of 930 participants were included. Participants (n=551) were randomly assigned to calcifediol treatment (532 ug on day one and 266 ug on day 3, 7, 15, and 30) at the time of hospital admission or as controls (n=379).

Findings: ICU assistance was required by 110 (11.8%) participants. Out of 551 patients treated with calcifediol at admission, 30 (5.4%) required ICU, compared to 80 out of 379 controls (21.1%; p<0.0001). Logistic regression of calcifediol treatment on ICU admission, adjusted by age, gender, linearized 25(OH)D levels at baseline, and comorbidities showed that treated patients had a reduced risk to require ICU (RR 0.18 [95% CI 0.11;0.29]). Baseline 25(OH)D levels inversely correlated with the risk of ICU admission (RR 0.53 [95% CI 0.35;0.80]). Overall mortality was 10%. In the Intention-to-treat analysis, 36 (6.5%) out of 551 patients treated with calcifediol at admission died compared to 57 patients (15%) out of 379 controls (p=0.001). Adjusted results showed a reduced mortality for more of 60%. Higher baseline 25(OH)D levels were significantly associated with decreased mortality (RR 0.40 [95% CI 0.24;0.67]). Age and obesity were also predictors of mortality.

Interpretation: In patients hospitalized with COVID-19, calcifediol treatment at the time of hospitalization significantly reduced ICU admission and mortality.

(Thanks to Joshua Selby for the pointer.)

"The Argument for Anarchism"

Philosopher Michael Huemer (Colorado) discusses at Brain in a Vat.

Blast from the past: T.M. Scanlon, "teenage logical positivist"

Back in 2017.

Academic freedom does not include lawful extramural speech at the University of New Hampshire

We mentioned this case last December, but now IHE reports that the chemistry professor involved has "resigned" in the wake of the university "investigation"; one doubts that was a voluntary decision.  (Oddly, they do not name the professor, although their prior coverage did.)   I cannot see how a public university would have any grounds for disciplining a professor for pseudonymous speech on matters of public concern; the professor's decision to adopt a persona not his own was meant to improve his standing to advance certain political and moral views, and so also constituted protected First Amendment expression.  (No state could make it unlawful to pretend to be a different race or gender for purposes of advocating positions on matters of public importance.)   I hope that F.I.R.E. is looking into this case and/or that the professor has legal representation.  Unless there is some unreported misconduct at issue, nothing in the public record can support lawful disciplinary or termination proceedings here.

"Be Here Now"

More thoughts from philosopher John Martin Fischer (UC Riverside).

"Impossible colors"?

Following up on our earlier discussion of the new pigment of blue, philosopher Michael Newall (Kent) calls my attention to a new paper of his.  He writes:  "My article is about another 'new' shade of blue: yellowish blue, a particular kind of impossible colour, which philosophers and scientists have traditionally viewed with suspicion. For those who'd like to see these colours, it includes some examples - I found these worked on about 70% of the subjects in my study. Anyone without institutional access is welcome to get in touch with me directly ([email protected])."

Putnam on Quine, ontology, and abstract objects

 

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Nicky Hopkins, "Pig's Boogie," 1973

Another solo number by the great rock pianist (a variation on the 1966 version we posted last year):

 

Bill to eliminate tenure advances in Iowa legislature

If this is actually enacted, two things might happen:  either the exodus from the University of Iowa and Iowa State University will force the legislature to change course; or other legislatures in benighted states will follow suit.    Tenure, like all forms of job security, is obviously out of sync with the neoliberal ideology that has ruled us since Reagan.

(Thanks to Dirk Felleman for the pointer.)

"Wokism" and the theory of ideology

Yes.

Blast from the past: Is philosophy in the doldrums? A poll and discussion

Back in 2015.

The next time "The Guardian" asks for a donation...

...don't give them a dime.  This is disgraceful (and my view of Mr. Robinson is mixed, but his being terminated for a tweet critical of Israel is appalling, and the editor's rationalization of it even worse).

Norms for job hunting by faculty recently hired into the tenure-track

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--MORE COMMENTS WELCOME

A philosopher elsewhere recently wrote to me wondering about what norms there are (or should be) regarding junior faculty in tenure-stream or equivalent positions shopping around for other jobs.  Of course, academia operates on something like a "free agency" system:  while schools may have obligations to tenure-stream faculty regarding continued employment, faculty do not have comparable legal obligations to schools.  But aside from legal obligations, faculty presumably have some at least modest obligations of loyalty to their institutions.   If a school, for example, makes special accommodations for a new faculty member (e.g., in teaching load, or in support for an external fellowship, etc.), then is it bad form for that new faculty member to immediately begin shopping for a new post?   But what if the new faculty member is asked by a school elsewhere to apply, is it then acceptable to apply for that post?  Does it depend on the reasons a junior faculty member is shopping around:  e.g., is it more acceptable when the junior faculty member is trying to solve a "two-body" problem, then if s/he is just trying to land a "better" job along some dimension.  Thoughts from readers?  Submit comments only once, they may take awhile to appear.

Physics departments under threat at many colleges

Relatively few majors, and fairly expensive to run.  But what kind of college doesn't offer physics?  Or philosophy.