Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Ahmed, Bertram, Bird

Philosopher Arif Ahmed (Cambridge) complains in Unherd about ideological indoctrination at the universities.  Philosopher Chris Bertram (emeritus, Bristol), who keeps track of scholars who write for publications with "incorrect" views, tweets:

Alexander Bird, a Cambridge philosopher, replies:

Blast from the past: "My five favorite Americans of the 20th-century"

Back in 2018.  Many readers voted for MLK, unsurprisingly.

"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies."

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Riverside Church in Manhattan, April 4, 1967:

Unfortunately, there has been no "revolution in values," except perhaps a counter-revolution.  As a 19th-century German thinker might observe, there can be no revolution in values without a revolution in material circumstances.

The classics "boom" in China

That's the good news--the bad news is that there's also strong interest in Leo Strauss. 

(Thanks to Chris Morris for the pointer.)

An interview with the psychologist Richard Nisbett

Nisbett's work has been important for many philosophers. He talks about his recent memoir at The Brains Blog.

 

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Epitaph, "Changing World," 1971

German progressive rock band, this is the concluding track on their debut album:

 

Smarmy Jonathan Ichikawa still dissembling

Somehow Ichikawa (part of the miscreant team from Vancouver) thinks that the unfortunate disagreement (and, in part, misunderstanding) between the PGR editors, Professors Brogaard and Pynes, and Wiley-Blackwell, shows that I'm not honest (!).  (A reader sent me his tweet [we are mutually blocked on Twitter] stating, "Brian Leiter is not an honest person, and the PGR is intellectually bankrupt.")  Since I literally have nothing do with any of this (I appointed Brogaard as a co-editor in 2014, and then Pynes as another co-editor for 2017, at which point they were in charge, and I have only offered them advice about the PGR when asked, and that's it), this really is a stretch even by Ichihkawa's standards of dishonesty, which are, to be sure, peerless.  (Recall that when Ichikawa and Carrie Jenkins were challenged over their defamation of me, their own lawyer would not defend their statements as true [see #5], arguing only that they were "lawful.")

There are two other ironies here, beyond the "pot calling the kettle black."

Lottocracy...

...at Vox.  An excerpt:

Representatives selected by lot don’t have to campaign and don’t need campaign funds, goes the argument, limiting opportunities for corruption. As [Alex] Guerrero [Rutgers] puts it, “Lotteries excel at preventing corruption or undue influence in the selection of representatives.”

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

U.S. Free Speech Union calls out proposed Oklahoma legislation that would turn every parent into a state-appointed censor of school libraries

Really wild, even by the standards of the ass-backwards parts of America.

Galen Strawson on moral responsibility, free will, and other illusions...

...at IAITV.

Difficulty accessing the blog via Google Chrome?

I got several reports from earlier today from readers in different parts of the globe about being unable to access the blog using Google Chrome, but being able to access it with other browers.  A reader on Twitter now tells me he is able to access it via Google Chrome, so the problem may be over.   You can comment here if Google Chrome still does not work for you (it's 11:10 am in Chicago), but other browers do.  Thank you.  (You can also email me at bleiter-at-uchicago-dot-edu.)

Seven philosophers win NEH Fellowships (or equivalent) for "advanced research in humanities" (CORRECTED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--CORRECTED

They are:   Sara Bernstein (Notre Dame), Teresa Kouri Kissel (Old Dominion), Lisa Miracchi (Penn), James Reid (Metropolitan State U), Joseph Stenberg (San Jose State), Thomas Ward (Baylor), and Rachel Zuckert (Northwestern). 

(Note:  this year, for the first time I've seen, there are two categories of awards for 'advanced research in the humanities" (usually meaning writing a book):  the traditional Fellowships (that I've always noted) and "Awards for Faculty" which are essentially Fellowships, but reserved for faculty who teach at historically Black colleges, or primarily Hispanic-serving or Tribal-serving colleges.)

(Thanks to Bob Pasnau and Abe Roth for corrections.)

 

A note on Carolyn Dicey Jennings and her compilation of placement data

Professor Jennings (UC Merced) gets credit for being the only person to not simply grouse about the PGR rankings (although she does plenty of that), but to actually try to offer an alternative resource--kudos to her for that.   The job placement data she and her team collect are useful, but she chooses to present some of it in a tendentious and misleading way, as I (and others) have noted before:  she treats placement success as landing a tenure-track job your first year out on the market, thus failing to distinguish between getting a postoc (even a fabulous postdoc) and getting nothing.  As many have also noted ad nauseam, by now, job placement data is a backward-looking measure:  Southern California didn't have very good job placement when the PGR first recorded the department's rise, now it does (which is why PGR rank correlates pretty well with tenure-track placement a few years later). I would urge students to examine the raw data on placement, not the tendentious rating of placement success.  (Of course, the reason all departments post placement data is because I "cajoled" them into doing so twenty years ago.)

The "student reputation" data Jennings et al. collect, by contrast, is far more dubious. 

Students should be aware that Professor Jennings has a history of producing extremely misleading placement rankings; of trying to use data to attack her enemies; and of not having a good command of statistics (here and here).   The recent work, fortunately, looks better, subject to the reservations noted above.

Emory Law Journal's rejection of an invited symposium piece as "hurtful" and "divisive"

There's more at my law school blog.  Note that the Emory Law Journal is edited by students, not faculty; as often happens with student-edited law reviews, they have no idea what they are doing.

America is doomed, part 415: even the Canadians think so!

A sobering (but not surprising) read; an excerpt:

By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship....

I’m a scholar of violent conflict. For more than 40 years, I’ve studied and published on the causes of war, social breakdown, revolution, ethnic violence and genocide, and for nearly two decades I led a centre on peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto.

Today, as I watch the unfolding crisis in the United States, I see a political and social landscape flashing with warning signals.

 

Blast from the past: when English professor Jennifer Doyle (UC Riverside) actually came to the defense of Judith Butler's defense of Avital Ronell

Back in 2018.  I still puzzle about how people like this made it into universities, since it's all so crazy.

"What is happiness?"

Interesting CHE interview about a course taught by philosopher Bernard Reginster (Brown) and one of his colleagues in psychology.  As Professor Reginster aptly says:

On the one hand, the empirical investigation of a topic like happiness is only going to be as good as the initial conceptualization that frames the hypothesis guiding the inquiry. If you ask the wrong questions, the answers you get are not going to be very helpful. On the other hand, if the hypothesis your initial conceptualization supplied isn’t confirmed by empirical inquiries, then your initial conceptualization probably missed something.

Blast from the past: The "slave revolt" in philosophy, redux

Back in 2016 (with a new PGR, it is timely again).

Richard Marshall interviews Karl Marx (independent scholar and journalist)...

...at 3:16 AM.

University of Florida's motion to dismiss First Amendment lawsuit by professors denied permission to be expert witnesses...

...is denied by the federal court, as well it should be:  Download UF Motion To Dismiss DENIED (003)

Update on the 2021 PGR from Professor Pynes

Professor Christopher Pynes asked me to share the following, which I am happy to do:

I would like to thank Dr. Berit Brogaard for her essential work with the PGR in 2014 and 2017.

The Brogaard/Jennings joint statement omits the fact that this past summer and fall Dr. Brogaard informed me she would be unavailable during two major and extended periods. These two periods included the bulk of the PGR work: first, compiling and revising faculty lists, updating evaluator emails and category list, and the second period in which we ran the survey and generated the report. This put almost the entire burden of producing the 2021-2022 Report on me (with the assistance of the Advisory Board).

On September 27^th Professor Brogaard informed me of her APDA advisory board membership, which she equated with our PGR co-editorship.  The contract Brit and I signed with Wiley-Blackwell has always included a non-competition clause, and based on the contract language and Brit’s characterization of her work with the APDA, I believed this work violated that contract.  As such, I asked Wiley-Blackwell to review our contract and advise us on how to proceed. Wiley-Blackwell determined Professor Brogaard’s work on the APDA did violate the non-competition clause in our contract. My only concern was ensuring the integrity of the PGR and our work on it.

"Agency and Responsibility Research Group": Spring schedule of online events...

...is now available.

Four tenured faculty fired by College of Saint Rose prevail in a lawsuit to get their jobs back

A welcome bit of news, given the frequency now with which schools use financial reasons to fired tenured faculty (short of financial exigency).

"Migration Ethics": a new podcast...

....here, from political theorist Kieran Oberman (Edinburgh).

It's amusing when the critics of the philosophy rankings inadvertently reveal the need for them

A reader flagged for me the following gem from cyberspace by one David Hyder, who opined as follows:

While I will only comment here on one of my own subfields, Kant, quite a bit can be said.

1. Of the top-ranked programs, only one, Brown, actually has a leading Kant-scholar (Guyer) worth studying with. But he is close to retirement.
2. The other leading Kant scholar in US/UK has now returned to Paris.
3. Princeton has no Kant coverage. None. Princeton has been in the news recently only for linking Kant to critical race theory.
4. This is traceable to the evaluators. Most are associated with the “top ranked”programs themselves.

Princeton, in fact, has not one, but two, of the leading Kant scholars of their generation:  Andrew Chignell and Desmond Hogan.  (One could ask Paul Guyer, even.)   Among the other top-ranked programs for Kant studies that Professor Hyder deems unworthy are Stanford University (take that Lanier Anderson and Michael Friedman!), University of California at San Diego (what do you know, Clinton Tolley and Eric Watkins?), and the University of Pittsburgh (so much for Stephen Engstrom and Nandi Theunissen).    Professor Guyer, by the way, is 73; I'm sure if he is about to retire he will so inform prospective students. 

"The Epistemology of the Internet and the Regulation of Speech in America"

The final version of the paper (which will appear in a symposium issue of the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy) is now on SSRN.   I've been gratified by the interest this paper has already attracted, and how useful many legal scholars, especially, have found the notion of epistemic authority.  Here is the abstract:

The Internet is the epistemological crisis of the 21st-century: it has fundamentally altered the social epistemology of societies with relative freedom to access it. Most of what we think we know about the world is due to reliance on epistemic authorities, individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe about Newtonian mechanics, evolution by natural selection, climate change, resurrection from the dead, or the Holocaust. The most practically fruitful epistemic norm of modernity, empiricism, demands that knowledge be grounded in sensory experience, but almost no one who believes in evolution by natural selection or the reality of the Holocaust has any sensory evidence in support of those beliefs. Instead, we rely on epistemic authorities—biologists and historians, for example. Epistemic authority cannot be sustained by empiricist criteria, for obvious reasons: salient anecdotal evidence, the favorite tool of propagandists, appeals to ordinary faith in the senses, but is easily exploited given that most people understand neither the perils of induction nor the finer points of sampling and Bayesian inference. Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe about what. The traditional media were crucial, in the age of mass democracy, with promulgating and sustaining such norms. The Internet has obliterated the intermediaries who made that possible (and, in the process, undermined the epistemic standing of experts), while even the traditional media in the U.S., thanks to the demise of the “Fairness Doctrine,” has contributed to the same phenomenon. I argue that this crisis cries out for changes in the regulation of speech in cyberspace—including liability for certain kinds of false speech, incitement, and hate speech--but also a restoration of a version of the Fairness Doctrine for the traditional media.

In Memoriam: Kwasi Wiredu (1931-2022)

One of the leading figures of African philosophy, Professor Wiredu taught at the University of Ghana for more than two decades, before moving to the University of South Florida in the late 1980s, where he was emeritus.  The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an informative entry about his work.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

"Stop caring about consciousness"

Philosopher Peter Carruthers (Maryland) argues we should.

A new website for discussing philosophy pre-prints...

...courtesy of philosophers Filippo Contesi and Giulio Pietroiusti (both Barcelona); they write:

In some academic disciplines, publication and discussion of articles
before journal submission is generally much more widespread than in philosophy. Indeed, most journal publishing houses are publicly
committed to considering pre-archived papers for publication. You can double-check this for your journal of choice here:

https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

Philosophers already can make their pre-prints publicly available at
any point on at least one pre-print repository: PhilArchive.org.
However, currently existing web platforms for public discussion of
scientific pre-prints (e.g. PubPeer.org) cannot be used to discuss PhilArchive-d papers.

So, we have created a website that allows anyone to comment freely on
papers present on PhilArchive and/or PhilPapers:

https://freelosophy.github.io/

On Freelosophy, scholars can add comments to a paper (and read them) by using its PhilPapers/Archive ID, an identifier present on the page
of each paper on PhilArchive. Each paper on PhilPapers also has its
own PhilPaper/Archive ID (in the URL).

Everyone interested is most welcome to start using our service, which
is currently in public beta. Please do not hesitate to contact us at
[email protected] for any comments or feedback.

Professor Contesi tells me they will moderate the discussion forum to make sure it does not degenerate into a metablog!

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Blonde on Blonde, "All Day All Night," 1968

Another great tune from the Welsh band we featured last fall; very 1968, complete with sitar!

 

In Memoriam: Hugh S. Chandler (1930-2022)

Professor Chandler, who wrote on a wide range of philosophical issues (including in ethics, philosophy of religion, and metaphysics) taught for decades at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  The Illinois memorial notice is here.

(Thanks to Jeff McMahan for the pointer.)

Orwell on reviewing books

This is funny and apt:

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be “This book is worthless”, while the truth about the reviewer’s own reaction would probably be “This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to.”

Advertising update

The next top spot available is in April (there may be one also in March), but there is one second and/or third spot open over the next couple of months.   Because I won't be doing much blogging in May this year (busy teaching quarter in Spring), I won't be selling advertising exclusively for that month, but will offer, on a first-come, first-serve basis, those who book for April or June the opportunity to run their ad through May as well.  E-mail me for details.

On the meaning of statutes and the passage of time

An interview with legal philosopher Martin David Kelly (Edinburgh).

Blast from the past: the 2014 attempt to take down the Philosophical Gourmet Report

It failed obviously.

All the ranking data for the 2021-22 Philosophical Gourmet Report...

...is now available at the Wiley-Blackwell site.   Some of the other pages are still being updated, but all the ranking data is there.

Legal philosopher Leslie Green retires now from Queen's U in Canada

A nice write-up here.  We noted previously the significance of his retirement last fall from Oxford (a result borne out by the recent PGR surveys, where Oxford was no longer in a group by itself).

(Thanks to Gregoire Webber for the pointer.)

University in Calgary fires tenured professor...

...and it rather looks like they did so because of her political views and speech.  (This is espescially ironic in light of this.)  If anyone has seen details of allegations of misconduct against the fired professor, please share links in the comments.  Absent that, this seems an egregious violation of the free speech rights of the professor.

The FBI file on Foucault

Our tax dollars being put to work.

Richard Marshall interviews Ruth Boeker (University College Dublin)...

...at 3:16 AM.

PGR Update

Professor Pynes tells me all the main ranking data should be online before the week is out.  I'll post a link when it is available.

"How Doctors Die"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JANUARY 3--SOME INTERESTING COMMENTS AND  LINKS, MORE WELCOME

I recently came across this striking article from 2013; an excerpt:

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

Blast from the past: when philosophers and other academics spoke out in defense of Rebecca Tuvel and in condemnation of the former associate editors of Hypatia

Back in 2017.  The good news is there has been less of this bad behavior in philosophy since 2017 (alhough not none).

"Universal Basic Income," Alaska-style

And it works quite well:

In 1976, the voters of Alaska approved a Constitutional Amendment establishing the Alaska Permanent Fund. Powered by investments fueled by oil royalties, the Fund pays out dividends (the Permanent Fund Dividend) annually to Alaska residents. This year, the Permanent Fund Dividend will amount to $1,114.

This puts Alaska in the unique position of having run a UBI program for more than four decades. While the program isn’t nearly as generous as Yang’s proposed UBI ($1,000 monthly for adults) or the CTC ($3,600 annually for each kid under 6 and $3,000 annually for each kid ages 6 to 17), it does offer opportunities to study the impact of unconditional government cash transfers.

That’s what Washington State University sociologist Mariana Amorim decided to do. She analyzed dividend payments between 1996 and 2015, curious about how the payments changed parents’ spending calculus. The results were published at the end of October in the journal Social Forces.

In Memoriam: Michael (M.J.) Inwood (1944-2021)

A longtime member of the Oxford philosophy faculty, he was especially well-known for his work on Hegel and on Heidegger, at a time when few Oxford philosophers were interested in either.   There is a brief memorial notice from the Oxford philosophy faculty here.

(Thanks to Roger Crisp for the pointer.)

UPDATE:   Cambridge University Press has made available this article (on Hegel and Aristotle) by Professor Inwood.

The breathtaking repression of speech and political dissent in Hong Kong

Professor David Law--a well-known comparative constitutional law and empirical legal studies scholar at the University of Virginia, who taught previously at the University of Hong Kong--gave permission to share these observations he posted on Facebook, which uses this article as a reference point; they make tangible and clear how bad things are now in Hong Kong:

The political crackdown in Hong Kong is so comprehensive and severe that it’s hard even to list what’s happened since Christmas. So instead here’s a list of the ways in which a law professor like me has personally felt its effects, over just this past week. Nothing abstract about it.

 

— A criminal defense lawyer pulls out of the Zoom conference I’m organizing for UVA to talk about the situation in Hong Kong after the “National Security” Law, citing concerns that Hong Kong’s longstanding independent bar is now in the cross hairs (now that the opposition parties, labor unions, and media have been crushed).

 

The sad thing is, I can’t blame him.  Now criminal defense lawyers in Hong Kong fear consequences just for doing their jobs, if they take on clients who expressed the wrong political views. Just like in mainland China.

 

Amy Wax and "the Asians"

At my law school blog, I comment on the latest travesty from Professor Wax.  She is certainly pushing the envelope on her academic freedom rights.

"Bernard Williams: Philosopher"

The website, courtesy of philosopher Paul Russell (British Columbia/Lund).

"The Most Important Problem of Contemporary Legal Philosophy"

Papers from an international conference last May are now out in Annals:  Belgrade Law Review, with contributions by Pierluigi Chiassoni (Genoa), Tomasz Gizbert-Studnicki (Jaggellonian U, Krakow), Frederick Schauer (Virginia),Torben Spaak (Stockholm), and myself.  My paper, "Back to Hart," can be downloaded here; the abstract:

The essay addresses two different senses of important “problems” for contemporary legal philosophy. In the first case, the “problem” is having forgotten things we learned from H.L.A. Hart, and, partly as a result, encouraging pointless metaphysical inquiries in other directions that take us very far from questions about the nature of law and legal reasoning. In the second case, the “problem” is to attend more carefully to Hart’s views and his philosophical context to think about the problem of theoretical disagreement, and to understand the way in which later commentators have misunderstood his behaviorist (Rylean) analysis of “accepting a rule from an internal point of view.”

Probably the most important claim is the last one about Ryle's influence on Hart's characterization of the "internal point of view."  As I put it in the paper:

The mechanics of stealing a U.S. Presidential election in 2024

This succinct account comes in this profile of Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland):

These next three years will test our democracy in ways it hasn’t been tested since the 1860s, or maybe ever. The scenario is pretty straightforward. The Republicans retake the House in the midterms. Immediately, any chance of Biden passing meaningful legislation is dead, but that’s the least of it. The GOP will launch hearing after hearing, issue subpoena after subpoena; they will find some flimsy rationale on which to impeach Biden, and they will stretch it out as long as possible. Trump will run—as Raskin put it, “for psychological, political, and financial reasons”—and he will be the GOP nominee, Raskin has little doubt. Assuming Biden seeks reelection, the election will probably be close, because elections just are these days. If Biden wins by a matter of several thousand votes in a few states, as he did in 2020, the Trump machinery will kick into gear to steal the election. Republican election commissioners and state legislators and even some governors will put forward pro-Trump electors. The House of Representatives will not vote to certify Biden’s win in January 2025, which will toss the election to the House, which will make Trump president. (When a presidential election gets thrown to the House, under the Twelfth Amendment, the vote is by state delegation, so North Dakota has the same voting power as California; Republicans now control, and will likely in 2025 still control, a majority of state delegations, and Liz Cheney will probably be gone, meaning that Wyoming will go pro-Trump.) For the second time in the history of the United States, the other time being 1824, Congress will have installed as the president a candidate who did not win a plurality of votes in either the Electoral College or the popular vote.