Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Richard Marshall interviews Anya Plutynski (Wash U/St. Louis)...

...at 3:16 AM.  Quite interesting:  is cancer a natural kind? and other questions.

In Memoriam: Joseph Margolis (1924-2021)

A longtime member of the faculty at Temple University, Professor Margolis wrote very widely in philosophy, perhaps being best-known for his version of pragmatism and his contributions to aesthetics.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

(Thanks to Noel Carroll for the information about Professor Margolis's death.)

President of Ireland gives address on academic freedom

Here.

(Thanks to Mehmet Erginel for the pointer.)

More on the COVID lab leak hypothesis

This looks to be a balanced evaluation of the evidence; bottom line is that the evidence doesn't rule out a leak from a virology lab, but the evidence is also compatible with a natural origin.

(Thanks to Dr. Roger Albin for the pointer.)

Patricia Churchland talks about the neurophilosophy of non-conscious decisions and morality...

...at IAITV.

Princeton classics majors no longer need to learn Latin or Greek

Bizarre.  As a colleague on Facebook noted, if you want to read ancient texts only in English, you can major in philosophy or history or literature!

The instinctive striving for "herd-organization"

The photo below reminded me of this observation of Nietzsche's (On the Genealogy of Morality III:18):  "Out of a longing to shake off the dull listlessness and the feeling of weakness, all the sick, the diseased strive instinctively for herd-organization...."

 

 

Philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) talks about her new book "Material Girls"...

...at the Brain in a Vat podcast.

Unfortunately, when the podcast hosts posted the podcast link on the Teaching Philosophy Facebook page, some of the usual suspects--Rebecca Kukla (who now appears to go by "Quill" rather than Rebecca) (Georgetown), Mark Lance (Georgetown), Robin James (UNC-Charlotte), among others--protested its presence, and the page administrator Thi Nguyen (Utah) removed it.

This nonsense has been going on for awhile now, with a small noisy band of repeat players embarrassing the philosophy profession and consistently opposing basic academic freedom.  I have no idea whether most philosophers agree or disagree with Professor Stock, but I know most oppose these efforts to try to shut her down.    More philosophers need to speak up against these "living caricatures" with their "puritan outrage, the over-the-top sanctimony, moralizing, and preaching."  They represent everything philosophy as an academic discipline should oppose.

Interesting autobiographical interview with Amartya Sen...

...at the Harvard Gazette.

Blast from the past: what counts as 'service to the profession' at your university?

A discussion, back in 2010.

"The Stone" blog at the NY Times is dead

A reader points out that the new opinion editor at the NYT has cancelled the various special topics blogs, including the awful "Stone" blog that was ostensibly about philosophy.  (For earlier coverage of the "Stone" spectacle, see here, here, here and here.)  For every decent blog column it ran over the years, there must have been at least a dozen weak or embarrassing ones.  It also gave a highly misleading and selective sense of what philosophers work on, no doubt because of the hack moderating it, whose friends were over-represented as contributors. 

The basic problem is that too many of those who want to do "public philosophy" aren't very good at philosophy, and, so unsurprisingly, their public philosophy is no better.  The best public philosophy is by those who are really good philosophers who also have a talent for communicating their research with an educated public (think Tim Maudlin [NYU] or Hanna Pickard [Johns Hopkins].   No doubt that work will continue to appear, but fortunately the field will be spared the further embarrassment of mediocrities doing "public philosophy" under the NYT banner--as well as competent philosophers simply peddling their trendy and trite political ideas with a little philosophical garnish under the same imprimatur.

Great moments in live rock 'n' roll: Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Killing Floor," 1969

Recorded in Stockholm, this is a pretty raw version of the blues classic, the one an unknown Jimi Hendrix played just three years before on a club stage in London, leading Eric Clapton to walk off after being upstaged:

 

Blast from the past: Maintaining a personal web page while on the job market

A discussion in 2012.  By now, such pages are pretty much required.

A Marxist movement within the Democratic Socialists of America

Hard to quarrel with this:

[T]he DSA is far from a mass workers’ party: our membership is dominated by the professional-managerial stratum, academics, and college-educated millennials. In too many chapters, this skewed class composition has hardened into an impenetrable middle-class subculture that reproduces the pathology and dysfunction of campus activism. The result is an aesthetically radical liberal politics masquerading as socialism, where moralism displaces materialism, prefigurative politics displaces serious organizing, and an insular scene politics displaces class solidarity.

This must change. Socialism isn’t liberalism covered in red paint and roses. It isn’t a lifestyle, a subculture, a church, a social club, or a vehicle for career advancement. Socialism is about taking our wealth and power back from the capitalist class and giving it to those who created it. And to accomplish that, we need a true mass party where America’s diverse working class will feel at home....

Martha Nussbaum talks about sexual harassment, the #MeToo movement, and her recent book...

...at The New Yorker.

In Memoriam: Frithjof Bergmann (1930-2021)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--UPDATED

A longtime member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was emeritus, Professor Bergmann was a popular undergraduate lecturer in courses on existentialism and 19th-century German philosophy, and author of articles on Hegel and Nietzsche, as well as the book On Being Free (1977).  From the 1980s onwards, he became best-known as the proseltyzer for what he called "New Work" (see, e.g., this interview), which gained substantial attention in Germany in recent years.  There is an obituary in a German newspaper here. 

I will add links to other memorial notices as they appear.

ANOTHER:  A video memorial from one of those influenced by Bergmann's ideas about "new work" (in German, but with English subtitles).

UPDATE:  The Michigan memorial notice is here.

Attacking injured veterans of imperial wars of aggression...because they're white

This is appropriately scathing, and also amusingly written.  An excerpt:

I would not think that I would still have the capacity to be offended, after all these years of being desensitized, but Chris Lehmann has proven me wrong. Lehmann wrote something of such special cruelty that today I am moved to write in anger.

I was initially surprised that this piece had not kicked up a lot of outrage, but then I remembered that it was published in The New Republic and so no one has actually seen it. TNR, a legacy magazine if ever one deserved the name, has stumbled around like Mr. Magoo for two decades, trying to recapture past glories like shaming “welfare mothers” by re-strategizing and re-conceptualizing and re-branding and bringing in one talentless asshole after another to pilot the listless ship. TNR long ago achieved that status of being a publication that exists for no other reason than to keep Managing Editors and Senior Content Directors puttering along, a money pit from which new leadership can extract some expense-account lunches before passing it along to the next rube with a desire to be taken seriously by the worst people alive. At least there’s a kind of value in that, I guess; certainly no one is reading it. The last piece in The New Republic that mattered was, uh. Hmmm. Gawker gets more buzz than TNR and it was shut down five years ago. But Lehmann’s piece requires attention. True moral poverty of this type deserves to be recognized.

The offending piece is a review of a book called How White Men Won the Culture Wars by someone called Joseph Darda, a minor academic who I must congratulate for making such a naked stab for relevance with his book and its title. Its argument, according to Lehmann, is that the anguished fight for recognition, respect, medical treatment, and mental health care waged by veterans coming home from the war in Vietnam was, in fact, simply white male grievance politics. Legless 23 year olds who had been put through a meat grinder by a rapacious and indifferent military machine were, to Lehmann and Darda, no different from the angry white guys who own Ford dealerships that powered Donald Trump’s campaign. Their demands for recognition and access to basic social services can now be safely derided as the special pleading of the privileged; you know, the privilege of being crippled both literally and metaphorically. I urge you to read Lehmann’s piece to see how unbroken and shameless his contempt for these wounded and hopeless victims of empire really is. There is no “to be sure” paragraph here. Lehmann and Darda are committed to the bit.

Stanford University investigates student for parodying Federalist Society

Unbelievable.

UPDATE:  Stanford relents.

In Memoriam: Robert Ammerman (1927-2021)

Professor Ammerman was emeritus in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he spent his career.  Philosopher Mike Titelbaum at Wisconsin shared an obituary written by Professor Ammerman's son:

Robert R. Ammerman joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin in 1957. He was born in Buffalo, New York in 1927, and moved to West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1937. In 1945, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was assigned to the 88^th Infantry Division in Italy. In 1947, he participated in the first U.N. Peacekeeping Mission in Trieste. Discharged in 1948, he enrolled at Swarthmore College in 1949, graduating with highest honors in 1953. After a year pursuing graduate studies in philosophy at Princeton University, he transferred to Brown University. He received his doctorate in 1956, completing his dissertation under the guidance of Richard Taylor.  He joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin later that year, achieving the rank of professor. He focused his scholarly activities on the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was passionate about teaching and introduced new and popular courses in diverse topics in and related to philosophy. He was a close colleague of William Hay, Marcus Singer, and Claudia Card.  With Dr. Singer, he edited Introductory Readings in Philosophy in 1962, which was widely adopted as a textbook around the country. His Classics in Analytic Philosophy, first published in 1966, is still in print. He retired in 1989. After living in Italy for a year, he settled in Florida until 2001, moving then to Cincinnati, Ohio to be closer to his son and grandchildren. He died on May 28, 2021 and is greatly missed by family and friends.

Sign of the COVID times...

...Chicago reported only 62 new cases of COVID in the entire city yesterday--that's by far the lowest daily total since testing began more than 14 months ago.

SAT scores and socioeconomic class

MOVING TO FRONT (ORIGINALLY POSTED MAY 27)--AN INFORMATIVE DISCUSSION, BELOW

I do not know this literature, but this author claims that SAT together with GPA is a very good predictor of college performance, and that the impact of socioeconomic status on SAT scores is minimal.  Is he correct?  Is he correctly representing the literature?  I'd be interested to hear from readers more knowledgeable about these topics.

UPDATE:  There's a useful summary of the state of the discussion in comment #26, below, by philospoher Chandra Sripada (Michigan).

Summer blogging

With the arrival of June, I'll go onto my informal summer blogging schedule--I won't take a month off this summer, but I will blog a bit less than during the academic year.  Advertising rates are also reduced for summer--email me for details.  There are spots in July and August (although some top spots are already taken for August through next January 2022, but there are still many fall spots, including some top ones).

Thanks, as always, for reading.

The *other* Nuremberg trials...

...and the failure to prosecute most of the German business leaders who aided and profited from the Nazis.