Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Blast from the past: Steve Pyke's "Philosophers" on philosophy

Back in 2011.

"The Folk Theory of Well-Being"

Here's the penultimate version of a paper forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, co-authored with two law colleagues (John Bronsteen at Loyola/Chicago and Jonathan Masur at UChicago) and one other philosopher in a law school (Kevin Tobia at Georgetown).  The project began years ago when I was arguing with John and Jonathan about the plausibility of hedonism as a theory of well-being.

Nietzsche on conscience

Philosopher Christopher Janaway (Southampton) comments.

Inflation and graduate student stipends

A soon-to-be PhD student writes:

I am an incoming philosophy PhD student at a university in a major U.S. city. While I have been fortunate enough to receive funding and a stipend for the duration of my program, I find myself increasingly worried about getting by with rising inflation and costs of living — especially considering that the stipend is the same for all five years.

Would you be willing to ask your readers how departments are thinking about this issue? Are any considering raising stipends to keep up to the cost of living? Would it be worth trying to transfer programs that provide better funding?

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Best wishes,

A concerned student

My general sense is that stipends do increase, and that the amount offered and guaranteed is, as it were, a minimum.  Students should raise these concerns with their departments.  Comments from others welcome; please submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.

Anti-harassment codes run amok on campus: American University edition

Religious conservative claims harassment for his beliefs because eight fellow law students excoriated the Supreme Court's leaked decision to overrule Roe v. Wade.  Take note:  this is the future that the attempt to police expression on campus has produced.

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

Bad journal practices: the case of rejection without reasons after R&R

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JUNE 24--COMMENTS ARE NOW OPEN, AT THE REQUEST OF READERS.  SUBMIT COMMENTS ONLY ONCE, THEY MAY TAKE AWHILE TO APPEAR.

A philosopher elsewhere shared this appalling story:

[A] paper I submitted on an r+r, for which I met every suggestion of the reader, was rejected because that same reader said "Reject" and gave no reason. The editors say that they cannot request the reader's reasons or go any further even though they liked the piece. It's just not supposed to work that way, is it?---we need to read the reasons in order to learn to improve; and in the absence of willingness to give reasons one worries about biases.

The journal editors here are incompetent:  they are responsible for final decisions, and they can of course demand reasons from referees, and should have done so.   I hope this is not a common occurrence, but I don't have the sense that it is.

Life in Kyiv during wartime

Philosopher Aaron Wendland reports on his impressions.

On Susan Stebbing and public philosophy

I just came across this interesting little essay from last year.

UPDATE:  The Stebbing book is available here for free.  (Thanks to Mike G. for the pointer.)

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Silverhead, "Rolling with My Baby," 1972

Short-lived British "glam" rock band of the early 1970s, this is one of their best numbers, and it's quite a catchy one:

 

A comment on the current pathology of the U.S. legal system

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JUNE 25, SINCE BOTH BITS OF MISCHIEF HAVE COME TO PASS--ON THE ROAD, RIGHT NOW, SO DON'T HAVE TIME TO WRITE MORE

Very soon, the super-legislature of the United States is likely to decide that there is no constitutional right to abortion, and may also loosen existing gun regulations even further.   When an earlier super-legislature, the Warren Court of the 1950s and 1960s, made decisions, they mostly made life better in the benighted states of America--and they were also more in sync with prevailing political opinion.   The current incarnation of the super-legislature, dominated as it is by religious reactionaries, is poised to make life much worse.

All of this results, in the U.S., from the doctrine of "judicial supremacy" in matters of constitutional law:  the Supreme Court gets to say what the Constitution means, and all other political branches must defer.  (This has no basis in the Constitution, it is purely a matter of convention.)  This is certainly one model, but it is not the only one:  in the UK,  Parliament is supreme and the Supreme Court gets to advise Parliament that laws seem to be unconstitutional, but the Court can not strike them down.

Blast from the past: Charles Taylor wins Templeton Prize, and a discussion of who should get a "Nobel Prize in Philosophy"

Back in 2007.

Meet Kelley Watt of Tulsa, Oklahoma...

...a damaged human being who now damages others.

UPDATE:  It  turns out Ms.Watt has done work with James Fetzer, a notorious conspiracy theorist who lost a defamation action brought by a parent of the one of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting.  (Thanks to Cora Diamond for the pointer.)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy temporarily offline at Stanford site

Edward Zalta, the editor of SEP, shared the following:

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is currently offline due to a power outage on campus at Stanford University. We expect to be back online shortly after power is restored.

Meanwhile, you are encouraged to make use of the SEP’s Amsterdam mirror site at: https://seop.illc.uva.nl and the Sydney mirror site at https://stanford.library.sydney.edu.au/, though the search engine at the Sydney mirror is currently offline due to a pending system upgrade.

Wolff on Geuss

Here and here.   Professor Wolff is generous as always.

Donald Trump is one of the worst human beings alive, but it's not simple to prosecute him for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election

This short essay by Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith gives a good explanation of why the decision to prosecute Trump is so fraught, contrary to various traditional and social media blowhards.

On "left" and "right" neoliberalism and the diversity industry

An interview with Walter Benn Michaels at Jacobin from 2011, but still timely; some excerpts:

The differentiation between left and right neoliberalism doesn’t really undermine the way it which it is deeply unified in its commitment to competitive markets and to the state’s role in maintaining competitive markets. For me the distinction is that “left neoliberals” are people who don’t understand themselves as neoliberals. They think that their commitments to anti-racism, to anti-sexism, to anti-homophobia constitute a critique of neoliberalism. But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things.

One of the first major works of neoliberal economics by an American is Becker’s [The] Economics of Discrimination, which is designed precisely to show that in competitive economies you can’t afford to discriminate....

Millenial narcissism, redux: "overly sensitive, overly fragile, and no sense of priorities" and "Democracy dies in dumbness"

Bill Maher's pretty funny (and typically off color) take on the Felicia Sonmez fiasco at the Washington Post:

 

Remembrances of Joseph Raz

A website at Oxford collects them.  (The original memorial notice here also includes some recollections.)

Philosophy's declining significance on the French Baccalaureate exams

Here; an excerpt:

Under a reform introduced by President Macron’s government, the philosophy paper counts for between 4 and 8 per cent of the overall Baccalauréat mark, compared with up to 18 per cent until 2020.

Marie Perret, chairwoman of the Association of Philosophy Teachers, said the discipline had been reduced to a “derisory” place in the French school curriculum.

“It’s been totally marginalised,” she said.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Duffy, "Running Away," 1973

British rock band, that enjoyed some success on the Continent, before fading into oblivion; this is a great tune from their debut album:

 

Two philosophers elected to the American Philosophical Society

They are:   Anita Allen (Penn)  and Peter Godfrey-Smith (Sydney).

Blast from the past: "How Trump Thinks"

Back in 2016.  Law professor David Noll (Rutgers) reminded me of it on Twitter, noting that it had (alas) "held up extremely well" as an analysis of the monster child.

Oberman from Edinburgh to LSE

Kieran Oberman (ethics, applied ethics), previously Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Edinburgh, has taken up a position as Associate Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics.

Richard Marshall interviews Cristina Lafont (Northwestern)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Katherine Hawley memorial conference at St Andrews, July 7

Details here.

"Some Realism about Political and Legal Philosophy"

A draft now on SSRN; the abstract below the fold:

Blast from the past: Citation networks in philosophy, 1993-2013

Back in 2013.

Double jeopardy, again

A propos this, SCOTUS has just held that:  "The Double Jeopardy Clause does not bar successive prosecutions of distinct offenses arising from a single act, even if a single sovereign prosecutes them."  And they're talking about the state, of course, not a private university!

Philosophy at Roehampton under threat

You can sign a petition in support of the program, and find other informamtion, here; an excerpt:

Managers at the University of Roehampton are threatening to close the BA Philosophy programme and the MA in Practical Philosophy, and reduce the number of philosophy staff from five to three. These plans are part of proposed redundancies and programme closures across the university.

Among the well-known philosophy faculty at Roehampton is Mark Sinclair, author of the very good Bergson volume in my Routledge Philosophers series.

"Identity politics" neoliberalism meets millenial narcissism

Many readers will have heard the story of the ex-Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez (age 39), who called out a colleague for retweeting a stupid sexist "joke" (it wasn't even funny)--the colleague Dave Weigel was then suspended for a month without pay even though he immediately deleted the tweet and apologized!--and then went on a Twitter jihad about her colleagues who didn't support her adequately and, of course, her feelings.  Glenn Greenwald, himself a world-class narcissist (who at least sometimes can focus on the issues), did peg this whole display correctly:

A memorial conference in honor of Amelie Oksenberg Rorty at Tufts University...

...this September!  (Professor Rorty was a visiting professor at Tufts for a number of years.)

Sentience isn't conversation

Here's one takedown of the latest artificial intelligence fantasy, and a more succinct one from Ned Block (NYU) on Twitter:

Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) talks about what feminist theory should be...

...at Radical Philosophy.  I thought this bit was particularly interesting:

[I]n a review of my book in The Raven, Sally Haslanger accused me of lacking a social theory – that is, a theory of how a society works and how it changes, especially in progressive ways. Indeed, she declares that, whatever it is that I am doing in the book, I am ‘not doing theory’....I think her reading of my book reveals a fundamentally limited understanding of what feminist theory is and can do, one that is too much in the grip of the analytic worldview and too detached from the actual history of feminist praxis. By ‘feminist theory’ Haslanger seems to have in a mind an overt and systematic account of how society works under conditions of patriarchal domination. It is true that I offer no such account in The Right to Sex – as Haslanger notes, that is not the point of the book, nor (this is not noted by Haslanger) the point of many canonical works of what is generally taken to be feminist theory. But anyone coming from the broad tradition of Marxist and socialist feminism would recognise the social theory that underpins my work. It is this theoretical tradition and orientation that explains my focus on biological and social reproduction as central to women’s oppression; my insistence on the primacy of class as an analytic category for feminism; my specifically anti-capitalist critique of carceral feminism; my understanding of the heteronormative nuclear family as a central mechanism of capitalist production; my interest in forms of radical coalition across axes of identity; my conviction that poor women, especially poor women of colour, are agents of historical change; my anxiety about state power and bourgeois moralism; my embrace of certain psychoanalytic framings of sexual domination; and, above all, my insistence on a utopian spirit that Haslanger disparages as ‘wishful thinking’. (For what it is worth, I find the dismissal as ‘wishful’ of demands – like socialised childcare and on-demand abortion – that feminists of the 1970s thought would be quickly met, nothing less than a capitulation to a neoliberal common-sense that opposes itself in every way to women’s liberation....)

Analytic/Continental divide in the journals: a comment on Schwitzgebel's latest study

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) has posted another of his interesting empirical studies, this time of references to major "Continental" figures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida in four leading Anglophone journals:  Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Mind, and Nous.   This chart is a useful representation of what he found:

See Schwitzbgebel's post for similar charts about Heidegger and other Continental figures.  A few thoughts below the fold.

Blast from the past: Non-confidential tenure letters?

Back in 2013.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: The Third Power, "Persecution," 1970

Detroit-based hard blues rock trio of the late 1960s, this great version of the Drew Abbott song comes from their one and only album:

 

Yet another take on the Katz case at Princeton...

...from a supporter and faculty colleague, Professor Robert George (Politics).  George lays great emphasis on the "double jeopardy" aspect of the proceedings, although I don't find that wholly compelling.  If I understand Professor George's account correctly, the second investigation concerned Katz's discouraging the woman with whom he had the affair from seeking mental health counseling lest the affair become known; he was previously sanctioned only for the affair itself.  That being said, I am hard pressed to see how this different misconduct could be grounds for termination, rather than some other sanction.  (Note that Professor George gives reasons for skepticism that this second bit of misconduct actually occurred.)  I suspect in court that Katz's attorneys will argue that the real explanation for this severe punishment for the other infraction is that the university was under pressure to find some pretext for punishing him for his lawful, but controversial, views on unrelated matters.

(Thanks to Zena Hitz for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Correspondence with a reader leads me to think I did not explain clearly why I was skeptical about the double jeopardy argument, so let me say a bit more.

Nietzsche's fatalism and existentialism

I discuss this and cognate topics with Charlie Taben as part of his series at the APA Blog.

In Memoriam: Arthur Bierman (1923-2022)

Professor Bierman started the philosophy department at San Francisco State, and was especially well-known for several widely used anthologies and textbooks.   Perhaps he is most interesting to those too young to remember him because of his colorful and energetic life!

(Thanks to Christopher Morris for the pointer.)

Richard Marshall interviews Justin Tiwald (San Francisco State, moving to Hong Kong)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Enemy of Academic Freedom Watch: Georgetown University repudiates the idea that faculty have any right to engage in lawful extramural speech

Many readers will be familiar with the case of Ilya Shapiro, a libertarian "kook" (that's a term of art!) formerly of the Cato Institute, who was supposed to assume a non-tenure-track position at Georgetown's law school, until he tweeted that the best liberal judge on the federal courts was Judge Srinivasan on the DC Circuit, and since Biden had promised to appoint only a Black woman to SCOTUS, therefore that meant the next Justice on the super-legislature would be a "lesser Black woman." 

This was a stupid tweet (but surely "stupid tweet" is by now redundant?):  it was stupid because people are not chosen for the Supreme Court because they are the best judges; indeed, that has probably not happened since 1932, when President Hoover appointed Cardozo.  People are appointed to SCOTUS for political and ideological reasons, since SCOTUS is a super-legislature. Biden followed in the tradition established by Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush again, Reagan...all the way back to at least FDR.   If I were choosing judges for ideological reasons, I probably would not choose Srinivasan or Brown Jackson, but that's neither here nor there.

Is Ilya Shapiro a racist?  I don't know, but his Tweet doesn't reflect racism but ideological zealotry, of a particularly clueless kind.  I can see the case for firing clueless faculty, but it would also violate academic freedom, in most (not all) cases, to do so.  (It would also deplete the ranks of U.S. law faculties, and even more so philosophy departments!)

Reading the whole Second Amendment, including the part about the "security of a Free State"

Law professor Thomas Crocker (South Carolina) comments.

Another two-week freebie in the Cambridge Elements series: "Mathematics and Metaphilosophy"...

...by Justin Clarke-Doane (Columbia).

Blast from the past: unethical philosophers who participated in the smear campaign against Rebecca Tuvel have now issued a "white paper" on publication ethics

Back in 2019, but these miscreants are still among us, unrepentant.

Northwestern's English department lacks faculty expertise to offer survey courses in English and American literature

This is bizarre:

Stern said the department’s two introductory survey courses in English and American literature did not make use of its faculty’s expertise, as few professors could teach these courses.

It is an English Department after all.  I think it is wonderful to study other literary traditions, since they are all  beautiful, and great fiction always exposes people--including self-deceived moral posturers--for what they are.  But an English Department that has "few professors who could teach" courses in English and American literature?  Really? 

APA announces Spring prizes...

...here.

"Disability is not an identity"...

...and other thoughts.

UPDATE:  This link without comment seems to have been more controversial than most.  I think the piece is interesting, but a mixed bag, but c'est la vie!   Here's a response via Twitter.

On the perpetrators of mass shootings in the U.S.

Some interesting points, including that media attention to mass shootings generates more of them; an excerpt:

POLITICO: Since you both spend much of your time studying mass shootings, I wonder if you had the same stunned and horrified reaction as the rest of us to the Uvalde elementary school shooting. Or were you somehow expecting this?

Jillian Peterson: On some level, we were waiting because mass shootings are socially contagious and when one really big one happens and gets a lot of media attention, we tend to see others follow....

POLITICO: Are you saying there’s a link between the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings?

Peterson: We don’t know for sure at this point, but our research would say that it’s likely. You had an 18-year-old commit a horrific mass shooting [in Buffalo]. His name is everywhere and we all spend days talking about “replacement theory.” That shooter was able to get our attention. So, if you have another 18-year-old who is on the edge and watching everything, that could be enough to embolden him to follow. We have seen this happen before.

Densley: Mass shooters study other mass shooters. They often find a way of relating to them, like, “There are other people out there who feel like me.”

Blast from the past: My most controversial statement ever, and the backlash to it

Back in 2017.

Gov. Viktor DeSantis's war on the universities in Florida

Here's what didn't make it into law, yet.

(Thanks to Thomas Nadelhoffer for the pointer.)