Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Blast from the past: What counts as "service" at your university?

A discussion back in 2010.

Are your students "back to normal"?

The NYT recently ran an op-ed about college students "not being OK" two years into the pandemic.  A colleague elsewhere who sent it to me added this observation:  "In my large required class, teaching was pretty dismal this term: endless absurd excuses, academic integrity issues etc.  Maybe a good discussion topic, when you are blogging more regularly again."

What have readers noticed about their undergraduate students?  I teach almost exclusively graduate students, and have not noticed significant changes (although one third of both my classes this quarter were out with Covid  at one point or another!), but readers are free to comment on their graduate students as well.

 

Law professor Brian Soucek admits that the University of California system's use of diversity statements has been mostly unlawful...

...but can't quite acknowledge it.  I sent the following letter to CHE:

To the editor:

When Brian Soucek assures readers that diversity statements “are constitutional — at least if they are done the right way” and reveals that the University of California is changing its approach to their utilization accordingly, he effectively admits that the prior criticisms of the legality of diversity statements, including mine (Leiter, “The Legal Problem with Diversity Statements,” March 13, 2020), were in fact correct.   Rather than openly acknowledge that, Professor Soucek misrepresents my views and that of other critics.

After citing my Chronicle essay for the argument that Berkeley’s use of diversity statements constituted unconstitutional “viewpoint discrimination,” Soucek then attacks a strawman:  “Critics often say that public universities, bound as they are by the First Amendment, can’t discriminate against students and employees based on their viewpoint.”   I said nothing of the kind.  I said, correctly, that “Government cannot, excluding a few exceptions such as political appointments, base a hiring decision on the speaker’s political viewpoint.”  That faculty “engage[] in rampant viewpoint discrimination when…grad[ing]…student’s exams” (as Soucek puts it) is irrelevant:  as he admits, you cannot mark down a chemistry exam because the student opposes abortion. 

Training graduate students to actually teach philosophy

Georgia State actually does so in its MA program (the article is on page 4 of the linked newsletter).

More on the Joshua Katz case at Princeton

A robust defense from his wife; this bit was striking:

As was widely reported, Princeton’s department last year voted to eliminate its language requirement for undergraduates. Now it has eliminated its most legendary language instructor. The great irony is that the elimination of the language requirement was, in part, to encourage students to take ancient languages other than Latin and Greek . . . and Joshua was the only member of his department qualified to teach multiple such languages: Egyptian, Sanskrit, Tocharian, Syriac, Akkadian, Old Norse, Old Irish, etc. Indeed, Joshua’s earliest academic publications concerned Native American languages. His work was the least Eurocentric in the department.

An immodest proposal on guns

Blinn Combs, a philosopher-turned-lawyer in Texas, posted the following on Facebook and kindly gave permission to share it here:

Please, for the love of sanity, please stop saying conciliatory shit to people who'd just as soon see your children gunned down at school.

 

We ABSOLUTELY DO NOT HAVE two radical fringe extremes in what passes for the gun debate. We have one party dominated by absolute lunatics who've been pushing for years toward a lawless, dystopian, gun-infested, violence-saturated state.

 

And we have a feckless opposition party that demands ineffective, mindless half-measures. No matter what those feeble-minded fools in the democratic party say, they'll be painted by the lunatics on the other side as gun-banning anti-American radicals.

 

The problem is that we do absolutely need actual radicals. Actual living, breathing, and most of all THINKING people to demand actual, radical change, just to bring us into minimally civilized alignment with the rest of the world. We must stop endless, stupid debates about the meaning of the Second Amendment. The Heller decision should have signaled the end of polite debate, because it was and is a total farce.

 

But whatever Blackstone or Jefferson or Madison said, we need urgently to recognize that the 2nd Amendment was--and was understood to be at its drafting--a reactionary farce that died within a decade of its birth, and now lies rotten in its grave, hauting us as the ground of a right-wing death pact. There's a reason that only one other country in the benighted world has anything like it--Mexico. And they quite rightly read it as compatible with having all of one heavily-regulated state-owned gun story in the entire country. But we've long-since passed the point where such reasonable means are sufficient. We should, by all means, organize to repeal the 2nd Amendment. But here's what we should also do:

 

"Thought: A Journal of Philosophy" will go open access with a new publisher

Crispin Wright (NYU/Stirling), one of the editors of Thought, asked me to share the following announcement:

The Editors of Thought, hitherto a subscription journal published by John Wiley, Inc., are pleased to announce that new publication arrangements for the journal have at last been agreed. From volume 11 onwards Thought will be published online only on an open access basis by the Philosophy Documentation Center (https://www.pdcnet.org/wp/)

              As before, each annual volume will comprise four quarterly issues, each of a target length of 8 papers, and will retain an emphasis on short (c.4000) word contributions on any of the following areas of analytic philosophy: philosophy of maths, philosophy of logic, logic (where there is clear and explicit philosophical relevance), philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and value theory.  The submissions and refereeing systems will be unchanged.

              The Editors would like to express their gratitude for the patience shown by those authors the processing of whose submissions has been delayed in the negotiations that have preceded the conclusion of our new publishing arrangements. We now hope to move forward speedily.  Accepted papers submitted under the previous arrangements will be published without any charge.

              At this time, we ask that authors respect a moratorium on new submissions until we have cleared the present backlog. A further announcement will be made when we are ready to receive new submissions— prospectively, towards the end of the summer.

Crispin Wright, for the Editors of Thought.

Adam Gopnik on American's gun insanity, back in 2012

Still true, and I suspect will still be true ten years from now:

After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)

Richard Marshall interviews Paul Livingston (New Mexico)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Legal realism and the U.S. Supreme Court

I talk with Prof. Eric Segall (Georgia State) on his podcast "Supreme Myths" (also available on Spotify and other podcast platforms).

Fired Princeton classics professor Joshua Katz gives his side of the story in the Wall Street Journal

Here, but behind their paywall.  An excerpt:

I have been subjected to “cultural double jeopardy,” with the university relitigating a long-past offense—I had a consensual relationship with a 21-year-old student—for which I was already suspended for a year without pay well over a decade after my offense. This was, I emphasize, a violation of an internal university rule, not a Title IX matter or any other crime....

I didn’t yet know at the end of July 2020—and could scarcely have imagined—that two student reporters at the Daily Princetonian had begun digging into my past in an attempt to destroy me. The result of their investigations was published in early February 2021, whereupon the editor-in-chief wrote an email to her staff about the “stellar reporting,” which “has been in the works for seven months,” that is to say, since early July 2020, only days, if not hours, after I had criticized the faculty letter. This stellar reporting uncovered the illicit relationship, which was already known to the administration and for which I had already been punished. But that is not all: The reporters also made a series of false and outrageous claims about my behavior. As longtime New York Times legal reporter Stuart Taylor Jr. put it, the Daily Princetonian’s “unprecedented investigation and hit piece . . . threw away basic journalistic standards,” for “[n]o credible newspaper would . . . print an article with such a large number of unnamed sources, filled with conjecture and innuendo.”

But no matter. The point was to stir up the mob, which it did. It also stirred up the woman with whom I’d had the relationship so many years earlier. Having resolutely refused—of her own volition, I stress—to participate in the investigation that led to my suspension, she now provided the university with a selection of decontextualized emails. I then provided the context, in full detail, but the administrators didn’t care.

So it does sound like he was fired because of actiosn or events related to the original "consensual" affair for which he had been previously sanctioned.  He omits, however, that the 21-year-old student was his senior thesis advisee, so this was a rather serious breach of the rules, that surely compromised the academic relationship.    The other striking admission here is that newly revealed emails from Katz (to the student, I assume) played a major role in the latest punishment.  I assume in litigation these emails, and whatever relevant context there is, will come out.

A different perspective on the Katz case at Princeton

A propos this, a professor at Princeton writes:

I think you are wrong about what’s going on with Joshua Katz's firing.  It is not about his views, but rather about misconduct towards women students.  Here are three relevant points.

1 — As a member of the Princeton faculty, I know Chris Eisgruber well and have discussed academic freedom with him at some length.  His commitment to academic freedom is real.  At least as long as he is President, Princeton University is committed to respecting academic freedom.  For example, Eisgruber was very clear that Katz’s comments in the summer of 2020 are protected by academic freedom, saying that Katz “can be answered but not censored or sanctioned”:

https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/07/christopher-eisgruber-joshua-katz-free-speech-inclusivity-letter

2 — As I understand it, two important events occurred between the initial punishment of Katz (for a sexual relationship with a senior thesis advisee — not just a "student” but his direct advisee at the time of the sexual relationship) and the beginning of the second investigation.

First, the student newspaper reported the story publicly, with further allegations involving other students:

https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2021/02/alumni-allegations-princeton-joshua-katz

Diversity statements as "faith statements"

Philosopher Justin McBrayer (Fort Lewis College) comments on the similarities at IHE.

Ballantyne from Fordham to Arizona State

Nathan Ballantyne (epistemology), currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, has accepted a tenured appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy, Cognition & Culture at Arizona State University, to start this coming academic year.  This should help ASU crack the U.S. top 50, where it has been on the cusp.

The Australian federal election

The "Liberal" party (the party of the right, although as we 've noted before, they're basically Democrats in U.S. terms) was roundly defeated, while a Labor Prime Minister was elected, albeit without a majority in the legislature.   The Greens and the "Teal Independents" both showed an increased share of the vote, allegedly reflecting increasing anxiety about climate change.  (Of course, if Achen & Bartels are right, this explanation is too simple.)   At a time when some countries (the U.S., the U.K., Poland, Hungary) are veering to the right, it's nice to see another veering to something resembling the left.

Princeton moves to fire classics professor for what look to be pretextual reasons

Two years ago, Princeton classics professor Joshua Katz wrote an inflammatory essay in Quillette criticizing the idiotic letter from many of his colleagues proposing a massive violation of academic freedom for the sake of "anti-racism."  His essay offended many people at Princeton, resulting in serial denunciations, including by the President Christopher Eisgruber.  Now the University is moving to fire Katz, it claims for a previous relationship with a former student for which the university had already sanctioned him earlier (a one year suspension without pay).  (Note that the University itself agreed it was consensual and exonerated Katz from allegations of sexual harassment.)  

2022 Lakatos Prize goes to...

...Catarina Dutilh Novaes (VU Amsterdam) for her book The Dialogic Roots of Deduction.

 

On Raz's political philosophy

An essay by Steven Wall (Arizona).

The Trolley Problem's trolley ride, reviewed by a passenger...

...who didn't like it one bit!

(Thanks to Moti Gorin for the pointer.)

Publishers no longer providing hard copies of books for review?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM MAY 16--AN EYE-OPENING SET OF COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME

A philosopher elsewhere, who is also a book review editor at a journal, writes:

Over the last few years, publishers having been increasingly pushing a policy of only providing digital copies of books for review in journals. This is making the book reviews editor’s job more difficult, since it is now quite common to find that a potential reviewer refuses to review the book if only digital copy is made available, thus further reducing the already small pool of potential reviewers. The fact that people are refusing of course also indicates that it makes the reviewer’s job more onerous. It is difficult to think of a good faith rationale for this on behalf of the press other than a money-saving one, and it is the already unpaid reviewer who is paying a further price for doing an important job.

I was unaware of this development.  How common is this?   I would certainly decline to review any book for which there was no hard copy.  I'm not surprised to hear I'm not alone on that front.

Enemy of academic freedom watch: Old Dominion University President Brian Hemphill

That's the only conclusion one can draw from this CHE story.  A shameful failure of academic leadership.  (Note that President Hemphill's PhD is not in a real scholarly field, but in "higher education administration.")

In Memoriam: Bruno Celano (1961-2022)

I was very sorry to learn (via Prof. Mauricio Maldonado) that Professor Celano, who taught at the University of Palermo for many years, has died.  He was undoubtedly one of the most gifted legal philosophers in Europe, and we were very glad to publish one of his English-language papers in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law.  There is more about his work here.

Blog platform problems

Typepad, the blog platform service I use, has been having trouble periodically the last few days.  My apologies for the inconvenience.  Alas, I have no control over it.  Usually they fix these problems fairly quickly, and I hope that will be the case this time.  If you can't access the blog at a particular time, please wait a couple of hours, and then try again.  Thank you.

"Ethics in Action"

A philosophy podcast by Nir Eisikovits (U Mass/Boston).

Survey for academic philosophers regarding "exploitation"

I was asked to share information about this survey, which academic philosophy readers are invited to take:

We are conducting a survey about academic philosophers' (academic faculty, emerita, lecturers, post-docs and graduate students) views of what exploitation is, by judging how exploitative you feel various abstract scenarios are.

It takes roughly ten minutes to complete the questions, with the option to answer more if you like. If you complete the survey, we will send you a copy of the eventual working paper summarizing the results and we will enter you in our prize draw to receive one of ten $200 (or local currency equivalent) Amazon vouchers (unless you opt out).

Click here to take our survey:

https://esmt.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8xoBXMOuNd3w30W

Thank you for contributing your expertise!

We have been granted ethical approval by review committees at our institutions. We are Benjamin Ferguson (Warwick), Peter Matthews (Middlebury), David Ronayne (ESMT Berlin), and Roberto Veneziani (Queen Mary University London).

"Why should capitalism self-destruct? Marx's account reconsidered"

This paper will be presented at a conference at the University of Amsterdam in late June; some of this material will migrate into the book on Marx I'm co-authoring with Jaime Edwards.  Here is the abstract:

Marx, partly due to the malign influence of Hegel, often expressed the view that capitalism would necessarily collapse. One of his arguments for that conclusion, the supposed tendency of the rate of profit to fall, fails. I focus mainly on the more important argument: the incentive for all capitalists to promote and embrace technological innovations means that human labor power will become less and less necessary in capitalist societies. Since most people depend on the ability to sell their labor power, consumption will inevitable decline in capitalist societies. Since profit is only realized when commodities are consumed, capitalists will have less and less reason to utilize their productive power to generate what humans want and need. Although this state of affairs--which is gradually being realized in the era of global capital--will result in economic depression, it need not, contrary to Marx, result in capitalism's collapse.

A propos nothing...

...but the Internet threw this at me, and I must say it's very weird!  Bottom line:  do not forage for mushrooms, ever.

Adolph Reed on "antiracist" politics: neither left, nor egalitarian, nor democratic

His latest here; an excerpt:

The class character of antiracist clientelism is even more transparent than its fin-de–siècle progenitor’s. Its proponents can defend the assertion that racism is the fundamental determinant of life chances for black Americans only via a sleight-of-hand that divests slavery and Jim Crow of their historical specificity as discrete systems of economic and social relations and construes them as almost incidental extrusions of a transcendent racism or white supremacy or, even more tendentiously, in a devil theory positing that all human history has been driven by an ontological anti-blackness. Having transmogrified material social relations into attitudes, putative evidence that such attitudes persist supports assertions that “nothing” has changed since 1619 or 1919.18 It is telling that commitment to that argument subordinates providing concrete causal accounts of how current inequalities are thereby produced and reproduced to taxonomizing apparent racial disparities as instances of the workings of trans-historical racism or white supremacy. This perspective minimizes the significance of political-economic changes since 1965, including deindustrialization, the panoply of regressive policy developments associated with neoliberalization, and the significance of the marked increases in occupational, income, and wealth stratification among African Americans.19 The point of this politics is not to identify and pursue strategies to attack inequalities or injustices affecting black Americans but to make certain that they are understood as stemming from an evanescent racism. An implication is that only inequalities that can be attributed to specifically racial sources are a proper matter for concern. Combined with the central focus on addressing racial disparities within the existing capitalist class hierarchy, those characteristics of contemporary antiracism underscore the extent to which it is a class program.

REF 2021 results for philosophy

The periodic Research Excellence Framework in the UK is significant because it affects the allocation of funding to the universities.   While in its origins it focused exclusively on research output, it has since incorporated criteria like "public" impact, which does not mean the impact of one's scholarship on one's field, but rather, e.g., how often one gets media coverage.   The "top ten" in the UK overall are, perhaps unsurprisingly, somewhat bizarre: 

1.  University of Birmingham

2.  University of York

3.  University College London

3.  London School of Economics

5.  University of Kent

6.  University of Southampton

7.  University of Manchester

8.  University of Warwick

9.  University of Glasgow

10. Cambridge University

Oxford, in case you're wondering, was 19th.  Less bizarre (and more like the PGR results) was the top ten based on "research power":

Bertrand Russell and the "realist" revolt in metaphysics

Philosopher Fraser MacBride (Manchester) discusses.

Abortion, involuntary servitude, specific performance

Philosopher/lawyer Alec Walen (Rutgers) comments.

Philosopher Erin Kelly (Tufts) wins Pulitzer Prize...

...for a co-authored biography of an African-American artist who survived the Jim Crow South.

(Thanks to Afton Greco for the pointer.)

In Memoriam: Joseph Raz (1939-2022) (Updated)

MOVING TO FRONT--ORIGINALLY POSTED MAY 2, MANY NEW UPDATES

After H.L.A. Hart (his teacher), Raz was the most important figure in Anglophone legal philosophy, and also made significant contributions to political and moral philosophy.  During his long tenure at Oxford, he trained many other legal philosophers, including John Gardner, Leslie Green, Andrei Marmor, Denise Reaume, Julie Dickson, Brian Bix, and Scott Shapiro, among others.   I will write more and add links later today.  As it happens, I am teaching his seminal paper "Authority, Law, and Morality" in jurisprudence this very day.

SOME MORE:   Raz's three most important books were Practical Reason and Norms (1975), The Authority of Law (1979), and The Morality of Freedom (1986).  Many entries at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discuss Raz's views:  his argument for exclusive legal positivism; perfectionism (and generally); and obligations and reasons.  A concern with the nature and kinds of reasons runs throughout his work, and figures, for example, in the paper I mentioned I'm teaching today (authoritative directives give exclusionary reasons for acting, and since all law claims authority, law must satisfy certain non-normative prerequisites for claiming authority...which rules out the inclusive positivism that Hart endorsed in the "Postscript" to The Concept of Law.)   Although much indebted to Hart, Raz explicitly rejected both Hart's naturalism and his skepticism about the objectivity of evaluative judgments.  (I'm with Hart, not Raz on this issue!)  My former student Michael Sevel (Sydney) is finishing the first comprehensive treatment of Raz's entire philosophy for OUP, which shall shed new light on the deep connections between his work in moral, political, and legal philosophy.

I'll add some more personal recollections later.  Readers are welcome to do the same in the comments.  (Submit comments only once, they may take awhile to appear, given my schedule today.)

ANOTHER:  Despite some debilitating health problems the last few years, Raz continued doing philosophical work.  His most recent book just appeared this past February, edited by his former student, the moral philosopher Ulrike Heuer (UCL).

SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS:  I first met Joseph in the summer of 1995 at Oxford, at an informal conference organized by Oxford and University of Southern California.  I presented some of my work on American legal realism.  Having never met him before, and being a youngster, I was rather taken aback by the aggressive nature of his questioning (and I had gone to Michigan, the place where students would sometimes cry in seminar!).   There was no hostility in Raz's style of questions, but he also had no "bedside manner."  While surprised (having never engaged with him before), I didn't mind, and the questions helped me clarify and revise the paper.  I held my own well enough, I guess, that John Gardner, who was also there, asked me to review Neil Duxbury's philosophically feeble Patterns of American Jurisprudence for Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.

Abortion, religion and SCOTUS, redux

A propos this, Professor Rick Garnett (Law, Notre Dame) writes:

[I]t is not clear why the claim "human fetuses are moral subjects and this fact constrains what should be done with and to them" is any more "religious", or any less "moral", than the claim "all human beings are moral equals, regardless of race, and should be treated as such in law." 

The only people who are obsessed with protecting fertilized eggs and early stage fetuses are religious people, usually of a certain orthodox variety (mostly Christian in this country).  Professor Garnett is correct that his second claim about human equality also has a religious origin, which is why Nietzsche hoped that kind of moral egalitarianism would die along with God.  Unlike Nietzsche, I'm a moral egalitarian, despite being the least religious person in every other respect:   as Nietzsche also understood (in other contexts), moral attitudes are matters of deeply ingrained habits of feeling, that easily outlast their supposed justifications.   Fortunately, the egalitarian attitudes have, so far, survived the death of God:  in that sense, moral egalitarianism has become secularized.  But the pro-embryo movement has not become secularized in that way (where are its secular adherents?  why are 99.9% of its proponents religious?), and it really defies credulity for anyone to suggest that a conservative Catholic upbringing would not produce profound antipathy towards abortion that would influence, perhaps not consciously, how a judge approaches any case that presents an opportunity to restrict its legal availability.

ADDENDUM:  Here's what conservative Catholics would really like the super-legislature to do!  I trust even Professor Garnett would acknowledge the role of religious conviction in that position.

Joseph Raz's final wishes

Joseph's longtime partner, Penelope Bulloch, kindly gave permission to share this message she had sent to various friends (earlier memorial notice):

Joseph did not want a funeral. 

He left his body to the London Anatomy Office, for education or research, and it has been accepted. They know he was a Professor, and told me ‘now he can go on teaching’.

Plato makes Socrates, on trial for his life, tell the jury why he will not stop talking about philosophy: ‘it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living’ (Apology 37e-38a).

In Memoriam: T.K. Seung (1930-2022)

My friend and former colleague, the philosopher A.P. Martinich (Texas), called to my attention that Professor Seung, who taught at Texas for nearly fifty years, passed away in February.  There is a memorial notice (and other information) here.  

I knew "Tom" Seung, but not as well as some others.  He was sui generis, both in the breadth of his philosophical and literary interests and his personal style.  When animated in a philosophical discussion, he would often slap the leg or arm of the person he was talking to!  There was no hostility in the gesture, it was like a physical punctuation point.  Al Martinich's recollection gives a nice sense of the person Tom was.

Jennifer Ruth, enemy of academic freedom

And she's now continuing her war on academic freedom (under the guise of protecting it) with Michael Berube in a very bad book reviewed here:

It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom...is a maddening book. It raises many important questions but is so chock-full of unresolved contradictions; gross misrepresentations; and wild, unjustified claims that it ultimately makes you wonder how the manuscript made it into print.

It's a serious embarrassment for the AAUP that Ruth is allowed anywhere near its committee on academic freedom.

"Abortion and Women's Rights," a 1970 film

Via Rogers Smith (Penn) on Facebook, I came across this striking, short documentary, about a past that may yet become the future in large parts of the country.

If Roe is overruled, what's next?

Illuminating discussion from law professor Michael Dorf (Cornell).

2022 Newcombe Fellowships for PhD students

Just two philosophy graduate students, one at Boston College and one at University of Wisconsin, Madison.  Some background on the Newcombe Fellowships and why philosophers fare so poorly, even though at the start philosophy PhD students typically got five or six of the awards each year.

Ismael from Columbia to Johns Hopkins

Jenann Ismael (philosophy of physics, metaphysics, cognitive science), Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, where she will begin this fall.  That's a major appointment for Hopkins, which ought to push the program into the overall U.S. top 25, as well as making the program an attractive choice in philosophy of physics (Ismael and Sean Carroll join other Hopkins faculty in this area).

May blogging

As I mentioned awhile back, this is a very busy month--with the end of our Spring quarter looming, grading, and various other deadlines.  As a result, I will be doing less blogging this month, although I will still put things up.

On the now likely prospect that Roe v. Wade is overruled by SCOTUS, i.e., the super-legislature

The leaked opinion overruling Roe v. Wade (1973) (and also the later Casey opinion [1992], affirming the "core" holding of Roe) written by the right-wing Catholic justice Samuel Alito of the U.S. Supreme Court was most probably leaked by an abortion opponent worried that some of the other conservative Catholics who had joined the draft of Alito's opinion (Justices Coney Barrett, Gorsuch*, Kavanaugh, and Thomas) might defect (Thomas was certainly not a risk for defecting, the others possibly).  (see Joey Fishkin [UCLA] on Twitter for this hypothesis.)   As my colleague Geoffrey Stone observed regarding a badly reasoned 2007 anti-abortion decision by SCOTUS:

What, then, explains this decision? Here is a painfully awkward observation: All five justices in the majority in Gonzales are Catholic. The four justices who are either Protestant or Jewish all voted in accord with settled precedent. It is mortifying to have to point this out. But it is too obvious, and too telling, to ignore.

This time around one conservative Catholic (Chief Justice Roberts) was missing, but as recent years have shown, he is nervous about the  Supreme Court being treated as the super-legislature it is.  Stone's analysis generated an uproar, but it was correct then, as it would be correct now:  someone with a conservative Catholic upbringing will of course regard abortion as verboten, and will thus find attractive--even without recognizing their real motivations--any colorable legal arguments that return the question of its permissibility to the legislative process (knowing full well, of course, that its availability will be restricted as a result).  (To understand how reactionary Justice Alito is please note that as a young alumnus in his 20s of Princeton University he joined in the early 1970s the "Conservative Alumni of Princeton," a group formed in reaction to Princeton admitting women!)

More reasons to worry about nuclear war: Russia's system for detecting attack is not as good as the American's

From the Washington Monthly:

Russia and the United States are the most heavily armed of the nine nuclear powers....But only the U.S. has comprehensive surveillance of the globe, provided by three active geosynchronous satellites, with two in reserve, whose infrared receptors can spot missile plumes. That data is supplemented by radar, which gives the U.S. the capacity to double-check that a launch has actually occurred.

Specialists call this verification by both satellite and radar “dual phenomenology.” The Russians don’t have it, at least not reliably. They lack adequate space-based monitoring to supplement their radar.

What they have is a “terrible and dangerous technology shortfall,” according to Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology, and national security policy at MIT and a former scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations.

The universe is not a wave function

Philosopher Eddy Keming Chen (UC San Diego) comments.

UPDATE:  Philosopher David Wallace (Pittsburgh) writes:

I saw you flagged Eddy Chen’s recent paper on the blog. A quick observation in case you’re interested: the article is engaging and provocative but risks encouraging a regrettably-common confusion, in that it mostly conflates 'the wave-function is representational' with 'the wave-function is real'. Consider: there are c.10,000 students at Pitt, and they take four courses per semester, so the academic results of the undergraduate body each semester are represented by a single point in 40,000-dimensional 'grade space'. Is the grade-space point representational? Does it represent objective mind-independent features of the world? Yes, obviously; indeed, we know what those features are - I'm supposed to be determining some of them now instead of writing this note. Is it real? That depends on your philosophy of math, but at most it's real in the sense that numbers are real. Is there an *object* it represents? No. Do Pitt undergraduates, collectively, live in 40,000-dimensional space? Obviously not.

It probably is the majority view in physics that the wave-function is representational, indeed that it represents inter alia the ordinary macroscopic features of the world. But that doesn't entail that the wave-function is real, or that the universe is a wavefunction. You can motivate that as a further move - it's not silly in the way that reifying grade space is silly - but it doesn't in any way follow automatically. It's a very substantive (and in my view incorrect) additional metaphysical move, by no means a consensus view in philosophy of physics and very heterodox in physics proper, even among those who agree that the wave-function is representational. Many physicists of a cosmological bent might assent to 'the wave-function represents all the dynamical properties of the Universe'; few indeed would assent to 'the universe is a wave-function'.

Chen himself appreciates the distinction, I'm sure, and the article occasionally acknowledges it ("One dominant interpretation of the wave function is that it in fact represents physical reality – some even argue that the universe as a whole is just a quantum wave function") but they're often conflated in the text and even more so in the headings and provocative title, though I appreciate Chen might not have written these himself.