Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

On mention of the N-word in a pedagogical context

Sensible analysis, as usual, from law professor Randall Kennedy (Harvard); an excerpt:

I am skeptical of some of the claims of hurt. I suspect that some of them are the product of learned strategic ripostes. It is now well known that in certain settings, particularly those that strive to be socially enlightened (like colleges and universities), you can effectively challenge speech to which you object by claiming not only that it is socially abhorrent (racist, sexist, transphobic, etc., etc., etc.) but that it makes you feel insulted, offended, or endangered.

"Against Effective Altruism"

Philosopher Alice Crary (New School/Oxford) comments. What Professor Crary calls "the institutional critique" is the really decisive one it seems to me; here is her useful summary of it:

This critique attacks effective altruists for operating with a damagingly narrow interpretation of the class of things that are assessable as right or wrong. It targets effective altruists’ tendency to focus on single actions and their proximate consequences and, more specifically, on simple interventions that reduce suffering in the short term. Advocates of the institutional critique are on the whole concerned to decry the neglect, on the part of EA, of coordinated sets of actions directed at changing social structures that reliably cause suffering. EA’s metrics are best suited to detect the short term impact of particular actions, so its tendency to discount the impact of coordinated actions can be seen as reflecting ‘measurability bias’. A leitmotif of the institutional critique of EA is that this bias is politically dangerous because it obscures the structural, political roots of global misery, thereby contributing to its reproduction by weakening existing political mechanisms for positive social change

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Toe Fat, "Bad Side of the Moon," 1970

Several members of this British band went on to greater fame and fortune with Uriah Heep (Ken Hensley, Lee Kerslake) and Jethro Tull (John Glascock); this is their version of an Elton John song:

 

9/11 Anniversary

It's 48 years since the events in Chile, and 20 years since the events in America.  I have vivid memories of the latter, none of the former.  I'll just post links to what I wrote on the 5th anniversary in 2006:  a personal recollection of that day which readers too young to remember the events may find interesting (I was teaching at the University of Texas at Austin on 9/11/2001); and some reflections on the catastrophic political and cultural fallout from the crimes of 9/11.  It's perhaps a good day to remember that George W. Bush was a far worse President than the otherwise appalling Donald Trump:  he inflicted death and suffering on millions and millions of people because of the criminal war of aggression against Iraq, which Bush's "bestiary of madmen" (as I used to call them) used 9/11 to justify.

Paul Pietroski (Rutgers) interviewed about his work in semantics and cognitive science...

...here.

(Thanks to Norbert Hornstein for the pointer.)

In what sense is academic freedom "white and male"?

This unusually sloppy CHE article concerns the relationship between tenure and "diversity."  Tenure, of course, impedes many objectives that administrators have, such as getting rid of highly paid faculty, getting rid of troublesome faculty, and making the faculty more "diverse."   But tenure is not supposed to serve any of those purposes:  first, it is a form of non-monetary compensation; and second, it is supposed to promote and protect academic freedom, which as many recent events would suggest, needs protecting in the modern academy in the United States.  And academic freedom, at least when disciplinary standards of expertise are honored, contributes to knowledge, which contributes (we hope) to the well-being of society.

Philosopher Peter Singer to donate all of $1 million prize to charities

This, of course, is what he should do, given his ideas and arguments, so kudos to him.  If he were not a proponent of "effective [i.e., measurable in the short-term] altruism," he might choose different beneficiaries for the money, but that's a separate debate.  

United States sues Texas, seeking an injunction of the anti-abortion legislation

A good move. 

2200 students enrolled in logic at the University of Sydney!

I learned of this "rock star" logic teacher at Sydney (Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson) via my former student Michael Sevel (a legal philosopher at Sydney) on Twitter.

Reflections on the Jan Boxill case at UNC...

...at CHE.  (Earlier coverage.)

Fantasy or reality in narrative?

Philosopher Noel Carroll (CUNY Grad Center) and others discuss at IAITV.

Best of the summer blog

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--LINK FIXED, BELOW

Here are some popular blog posts from the summer months you may have missed:

June

The Stone blog at the NY Times is dead

"Two Pessimisms in Mill"

The final nail in the coffin for the failed science of "implicit bias"?

July

Michigan Philosophy not accepting PhDs apps this fall, but will resume next year

Adoph Reed on Robin DiAngelo and the political economy of "race" politics (link fixed)

Percent of tenure-stream faculty who are female in PhD programs in philosophy increased about 40% since 2004

In Memoriam: Bob Moses (1935-2021)

August

Ranked philosophy departments that have no faculty specializing in the Continental traditions in philosophy after Kant

In Memoriam: Sarah (Waterlow) Broadie (1941-2021)

"Realism, Disagreement, and Explanation"

"The whole country is the Reichstag"

Philosophers Annual, ten top papers of 2020

The end of Oxford's dominance in jurisprudence:  Leslie Green to leave Oxford

In Memoriam: Alex Orenstein (1936-2018)

Philosopher David Rosenthal (CUNY) recently learned that Professor Orenstein (who had retired from CUNY a decade ago and moved away) had passed away in 2018, something others at CUNY and Oxford, where Professor Orenstein also spent time, had not known.  He shared this memorial notice:

Alex Orenstein, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York, died of cancer in June 2018 at the age of 82, while in the care of close family in Las Vegas, having lost contact with academic colleagues and friends the preceding year.

Alex Orenstein was born in New York City on March 5, 1936.  He earned an A.B. from Hunter College in 1956, and was a Lecturer in Philosophy there from 1957 to 1960.  He then worked for three years as a computer programmer and systems analyst, returning to philosophy in 1964 to pursue a Ph.D. at NYU, which he completed  in 1972.  In 1968 he began teaching at Queens College and in 1974 joined the philosophy faculty of the Graduate Center of CUNY, teaching at both places until his retirement in 2011.

Is radical political action like brain surgery or a landslide?

Robert Paul Wolff comments; an excerpt:

Let me begin with the distinction, which I am sure I have several times drawn before on this blog, between two very different images of progressive or transformative political action: brain surgery and a landslide. If you think that radical political action is like brain surgery, then you will suppose that it is a precise and delicate matter in which it is desperately important to perform the operation in precisely the correct manner – one wrong move can leave the patient paralyzed or, worse still, dead. For the past 200 years, a good deal of debate on the left seems to have been motivated by this image of political action. I saw this up close at the University of Massachusetts almost 50 years ago when five young Marxist economists were hired simultaneously into tenured positions in the economics department and almost immediately split into three factions.

Just when you thought the humanities were safe from postmodernism...

...along come the physicists to inform us there is no objective reality:

Nobel Prize-winner Eugene Wigner described a thought experiment in 1961 that highlighted an uncommon paradox of quantum mechanics. Specifically, it reveals the strangeness of the universe when two observers, like Wigner and his friend, observe two distinct realities....

In 2020, physicists realized that recent quantum technology advances had made it possible to create Wigner's Friend test in a real-world experiment. In essence, we can create different realities, and compare them in a lab to see if they can be reconciled, or cohere, in one system. And researcher Massimiliano Proietti of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, along with a handful of researchers, said they performed this long-awaited experiment for the first time: Creating distinct realities, compare-and-contrasting them, and discovering that they are, in fact, irreconcilable.

"I-reasoning" and "We-reasoning" during the COVID crisis

Philosopher Anne Schwenkenbecher (Murdoch U) comments.

What did authoritarian rulers study at university?

Philosopher Paul Raymont took a look; law and engineering were popular, but there were a few who studied philosophy.

Surgical masks in fact reduce the spread of the COVID virus

A large, randomized study done in Bangladesh offers strong evidence; surgical masks were also more effective than cloth masks.  An informative news account here; an excerpt:

Among the roughly 178,000 individuals who were encouraged to wear them, the scientists found that mask-wearing increased by almost 30 percent and that the change in behavior persisted for 10 weeks or more. After the program was instituted, the researchers reported an 11.9 percent decrease in symptomatic Covid symptoms and a 9.3 percent reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence, which indicates that the virus was detected in blood tests....

"A 30-percent increase in mask-wearing led to a 10 percent drop in Covid, so imagine if there was a 100-percent increase — if everybody wore a mask and we saw a 100-percent change," he said.

In Memoriam: Kenneth Kipnis (1943-2021)

A longtime member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he was emeritus, Professor Kipnis was well-known for his work in applied ethics, especially (but not only) with regard to medical issues.   There is an obituary here.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Blonde on Blonde, "Conversationally Making the Grade," 1969

Eclectic Welsh rock band, who took their name from the 1966 Bob Dylan album, they did not enjoy much success, but recorded some memorable tunes, including this one:

 

David Papineau (CUNY/KCL) talks about "The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience"...

...with Ricardo Lopes at The Dissenter.

A PGR for classical pianists?

That's sort of what this is:  they asked 100 current leading pianists to name "the greatest" of "all time" (really meaning the last century or so).  There were a couple I was not familiar with, but what also makes it worth visitnig is that they  include video clips of each of the pianists on their "top 20" list.

Richard Marshall interviews Douglas Stalker (Delaware) (Part 1)...

...at 3:16 AM.

The Texas assault on reproductive freedom, and the complicity of the super-legislature known as the Supreme Court

This is a good explanation by constitutional law expert Michael Dorf (Cornell) of how pernicious SCOTUS's latest move is.  This is a classic case of the super-legislature--in this case, five conservative Catholics--doing their best to undermine a right they do not support, a half-century of precedent be damned.  (The right was created by an earlier super-legislature, fortunately, a more progressive one, and also one that didn't need to eviscerate precedent to do so.)

On "cancel culture" and online mobs

A balanced assessment, related to a point we have made before:  the "sanctions" are often wildly disproportionate to the offenses.  An excerpt:

[T]he modern online public sphere, a place of rapid conclusions, rigid ideological prisms, and arguments of 280 characters, favors neither nuance nor ambiguity. Yet the values of that online sphere have come to dominate many American cultural institutions: universities, newspapers, foundations, museums. Heeding public demands for rapid retribution, they sometimes impose the equivalent of lifetime scarlet letters on people who have not been accused of anything remotely resembling a crime....

The torrential rains and flooding in NYC and surrounding areas

Simply wild video shots of what went on over the last 12-18 hours.

"When should you forgive?"

Philosopher Brandon Warmke (Bowling Green) discusses at Brain in a Vat.

Bertrand Russell's Nobel Prize acceptance speech: on four important human desires

I came across this recently (given how much of it resonates with Nietzsche, one marvels at Russell's infamous hostility towards Nietzsche).  An excerpt:

All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths....

[M]an differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this. When the Arabs, who had been used to living sparingly on a few dates, acquired the riches of the Eastern Roman Empire, and dwelt in palaces of almost unbelievable luxury, they did not, on that account, become inactive. Hunger could no longer be a motive, for Greek slaves supplied them with exquisite viands at the slightest nod. But other desires kept them active: four in particular, which we can label acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power....

More on COVID vaccines and the Delta variant

This article out of Michigan is nicely done:

In the last 30 days, vaccinated individuals in Michigan have represented 28.1% of hospitalizations, and nearly 15.4% of COVID-19 deaths, according to data from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. That’s 6,151 out of 26,272 total cases, 198 out of 704 total hospitalizations, and 10 out of 65 deaths.

But it’s important to look at those numbers in context: Age remains the biggest risk factor for COVID hospitalization and death, and 82.5% of Michigan residents age 65 and older are fully vaccinated. That means the people at biggest risk of death and hospitalization are also people most likely to be inoculated.

Hope for America? Younger people are abandoning religion

The key facts (you can skip the author's "analysis," which obviously reflects his bias):  

Since 1988, the General Social Survey has been asking Americans of different ages what they believe about God. For decades, the answer did not change much. Around 70 percent of members of the Silent Generation said that they “know God really exists” and “have no doubts about it.” That same sentiment was shared by about 63 percent of baby boomers and Generation Xers.