Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

A debate over nothing

A popular piece on the Heidegger/Carnap debate.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Humble Pie, "Down Home Again," 1969

Humble Pie, featuring Steve Marriott (from the Small Faces) and Peter Frampton, made it big in the early 1970s, but some of my favorite songs come from their early albums, that didn't even chart in the U.S.  This great number is from their second album, Town and Country, and reflects the somewhat harder blues rock sound that brought them success a couple of years later:

 

The new "cadre" of putative experts on "academic freedom" who are, in reality, its enemy

A propos this, a professor in a philosophy-adjacent field elsewhere writes:

I was very glad to see your response to Soucek on your blog and then in CHE. He is part of a growing cadre of people who profess commitment to – and expertise in – academic freedom, but are in fact deliberately chipping away at it with the aim of making it easier to establish and enforce DEI orthodoxy. (See too, eg, Anita Allen and, more obviously, Michael Berube & Jennifer Ruth.) What’s worrying about such people is that they can cite real credentials & experience to bolster their claim to care about and understand academic freedom. Even if philosophers and serious scholars of academic freedom can readily recognize their errors and see what they’re doing, the situation remains extremely troubling because their work offers exactly the cover senior administrators and DEI professionals need to double-down on their agenda while claiming to still uphold academic freedom.

No more vacations in South Carolina...

...after this.   Really, civilized people should just boycott states with inadequate gun control measures.  That's more than half the country, of course.

CLARIFICATION:  The boy who was killed was from New Hampshire, but he was shot (literally at random) while on vacation in South Carolina (Florence County).

The philosophy of Derek Parfit

A nice overview by Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami).

Richard Marshall interviews Michael Rosen (Harvard)...

...at 3:16 AM.

"Diversity statements" are still in (justified) legal peril...

...notwithstanding dissembling law professors.  CHE invited me to expand my letter to the editor, so I did.

A memorial website in honor of Hugh Mellor...

...here, created by his former student Tim Crane (CEU).

Free will and punishment

Philosophers Dana Nelkin (UC San Diego) and Derk Pereboom (Cornell) discuss.

The "universality" of classics

An interesting exchange between Prof. Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Classics, Princeton) and Solveig Gold, who was an undergraduate in classics at Princeton and now a graduate student at Cambridge University (she is also now the spouse of Joshua Katz).    Gold writes:

Classics is not about white people and Classics does not belong  to white people. The first is a question of how we read, the second, of who does the reading.

Classics is not about white people because the authors in our canon do not purport to be writing about white people. They and most of their characters may be white, but their stated goal is never to offer an account of the “white race,” an identity that would have meant nothing to them: it is to raise questions and tell stories that, they hope, grasp at truths transcending one place, period, or people.