Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Blast from the past: Fodor v. Sober on natural selection and laws

Back in 2010.  This is about as high quality as philosophy available on the Internet gets.

The political ads in the Kansas abortion referendum

They're good ads, and other states and politicians should learn from them.

In-class transmission of Covid rare at a large urban university with a mandatory vaccinations and masking...

...but not physical distancing:

[T]here were over 850 cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection identified through weekly surveillance testing of all students and faculty on campus during the fall 2021 semester. The rolling mean average of positive tests ranged between 4 and 27 daily cases. Of more than 140 000 in-person class events and a total student population of 33 000 between graduate and undergraduate students, only 9 instances of potential in-class transmission were identified, accounting for 0.0045% of all classroom meetings.

Lauener Prizes in Analytical Philosophy

Two prizes:  for an outstanding ouevre in analytical philosophy, the winner is Susan Wolf (emerita, North Carolina); and for an up-and-coming philosopher, Matthieu Queloz (currently Oxford).

Past winners of the ouevre prize include Bas van Fraassen, Ruth Barcan Marcus, T.M. Scanlon, Hilary Putnam, Michael Dummett, Fred Dretske, Dagfinn Follesdal, and Patrick Suppes.

(Thanks to Paul Russell for the pointer.)

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Duffy, "Changing My Ways," 1973

Another tune from the debut album of this British band, not as good as the opening number, but would have been great at about 3 1/2 minutes!

 

Two conferences in fall 2023 in honor of Joseph Raz

One at Columbia, one at King's College, London. 

On Orban and his apologists, and Hungary's history

Exactly right.

Specialist journals that publish the best articles in moral and/or political philosophy: the results

So with 329 votes, here are the results to our latest poll.  I'll note that a late surge by Economics & Philosophy and Politics, Philosophy & Economics made me wonder whether the PPE folks didn't rally their troops, but perhaps this is just indicative of the increasing popularity of PPE work.  In any case, look at the vote tallies, not just the ordinal rank (e.g., #6-8 are essentially tied).  (The results here, I should note, were not that different than the results of the pairwise comparison poll from last week.)  You can see the 2018 poll results here.

1. Ethics  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

2. Philosophy & Public Affairs  loses to Ethics by 209–65

3. Journal of Political Philosophy  loses to Ethics by 245–23, loses to Philosophy & Public Affairs by 220–51

4. Journal of Moral Philosophy  loses to Ethics by 267–9, loses to Journal of Political Philosophy by 129–126

5. Utilitas  loses to Ethics by 251–13, loses to Journal of Moral Philosophy by 135–128

6. Economics & Philosophy  loses to Ethics by 227–12, loses to Utilitas by 116–111

7. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy  loses to Ethics by 249–20, loses to Economics & Philosophy by 119–118

8. Politics, Philosophy & Economics  loses to Ethics by 235–12, loses to Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy by 121–120

9. Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics  loses to Ethics by 245–6, loses to Politics, Philosophy & Economics by 144–79

10. Oxford Studies in Metaethics  loses to Ethics by 228–7, loses to Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics by 124–81

11. Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy  loses to Ethics by 225–11, loses to Oxford Studies in Metaethics by 122–80

12. The Journal of Ethics  loses to Ethics by 217–6, loses to Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy by 146–46

13. Ethical Theory & Moral Practice  loses to Ethics by 263–8, loses to The Journal of Ethics by 102–100

14. Social Theory & Practice  loses to Ethics by 211–9, loses to Ethical Theory & Moral Practice by 114–97

15. Journal of Applied Philosophy  loses to Ethics by 255–6, loses to Social Theory & Practice by 110–101

16. Social Philosophy & Policy  loses to Ethics by 170–9, loses to Journal of Applied Philosophy by 89–78

17. Journal of Social Philosophy  loses to Ethics by 180–6, loses to Social Philosophy & Policy by 70–66

18. Political Theory  loses to Ethics by 162–8, loses to Journal of Social Philosophy by 88–57

19. Journal of Value Inquiry  loses to Ethics by 208–6, loses to Political Theory by 73–68

20. European Journal of Political Theory  loses to Ethics by 146–8, loses to Journal of Value Inquiry by 67–64

Res Publica and Public Affairs Quarterly were runners-up for the top 20.  Constructive reader comments welcome.  If you're going to criticize any particular journal, you'll have to do so with your full name and a valid email address (the latter will not appear).

UNC-Chapel Hill adopts UChicago's "Kalven Report" principles

This is very good news for faculty there (especially given recent academic freedom violations), and I hope it signals broader adoptions of the Kalven Report.

Harry Kalven, the author of the report, was a preeminent First Amendment scholar, who had a deep understanding of academic freedom (see an earlier discussion at my law school blog).  Twenty years ago, long before I was at Chicago or even knew of the Kalven Report, I recall writing to the chemist Larry Faulkner, then the President of the University of Texas at Austin, criticizing him for his public critique of a UT Austin professor's remarks about 9/11.  President Faulkner responded courteously, although he disagreed.  His political judgment may have been sound--in an ass-backwards state like Texas with an excellent university dependent on public support, the President may have needed to say something.  But from an academic freedom standpoint, this was a failure:  Presidents, Provosts, Deans, and Chairs are to be "seen and not heard," unless they are speaking about university business.   I have written before about this at CHE, but the basic rule when complaints come in about "Professor X said Y" should be:  "Individual faculty have the right to express their views on matters of public interest, and they speak for themselves not the institution." Period.  That's it. No apologies or explanations. 

Blast from the past: what to look for in a book contract with an academic publisher

Back in 2018, with a discussion by readers.

Two observations about yesterday's "midterm" elections in the U.S.

Abortion will be a winning issue for Democrats in the fall, thanks to the super-legislature's annihilation of the right.  Kansas, an extremely "conservative" (read:  religious reactionary) state, nonetheless voted by a lopdsided margin in favor of abortion rights. 

Meanwhile, Arizona Republicans nominated a fascist in-all-but-name for the Senate contest against the incumbent Democrat.   This little fascist is a protege of the oligarch Peter Thiel, whose contempt for democratic and liberal values is quite open.

Modern mysteries: "Why" would a tech billionaire (Larry Ellison) become a leading donor to the Republican Party?

Utterly mysterious that someone fabulously rich would align themselves with the imprudent wing of the ruling class party.   What a puzzle.   Maybe Marcuse could help?

Herbert Marcuse interviewed by Bryan Magee in 1978

Via Robert Paul Wolff's blog, I came across this interesting interview with Marcuse not long before his death.  His criticisms of the "New Left" are particularly striking (and apt).

A new Condorcet poll: journals that publish the best articles in moral and/or political philosophy

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--THIS POLL WILL RUN FOR ABOUT ANOTHER 24 HOURS

The new poll is here.  I've made a few changes from last week:  I've added some more journals in political theory and/or the Continental European traditions of moral/political philosophy. I've also dropped the area-specific applied ethics journals (e.g. in bioethics, business ethics), since they have always fared poorly against the more generalist journals in value theory, including those generalist journals that publish on applied topics. I'll let this run until Wednesday, and we'll see what the results look like.

Note that you can choose "no opinion" for journals you don't know anything about.  And note also that for your vote to have an impact you need to rank many journals:  just ranking your favorite journal #1 won't do much!

Academic freedom in the natural sciences

A chemist at University of Southern California discusses (although she doesn't have a good handle on what distinctively "academic freedom" is, but the interview is still interesting); an excerpt:

In chemistry, which is my field, research as such is generally not controlled; we do have freedom to pursue different research topics, subject to ability to secure funding. In other domains, particularly biology, things are different. For example, research relating to populations, genetics, heredity, human biology, or sexual reproduction became extremely politicized. Academic freedom in this field is very much affected by the current climate.

But even though chemistry research is not ideologically controlled, I see censorship and other forms of suppression creeping into our institutions, professional societies, and even publishing. For instance, attempts to censor language, in a truly Orwellian fashion, are rather common. There are calls to stop referring to certain physical laws and equations by the names of the people who discovered them because of the real or made-up flaws in their characters. Some even want to replace certain technical terms. For example, the central concept in the field of quantum computing is “quantum supremacy”. This technical term simply means that the technology, once it is fully developed, will be superior to the existing computing technology. But some people dislike the English word “supremacy”, because the same word is used in the expression “white supremacy”. They argue that the term should be changed to “quantum advantage” or something equally silly. Professional societies and universities are issuing language guides with long lists of forbidden words. So there are a lot of small instances of censorship that you can laugh at since at the first glance they don’t seem to seriously affect science. But the danger is, once you start introducing this ideological censorship into your profession, it spreads. Today, they rewrite our technical language, tomorrow they remove the names from equations, and the day after that they will stop teaching the actual physics contained in these equations. If you think this is unlikely, recall that in Soviet Russia entire scientific disciplines were forbidden for ideological reasons. So I think it’s a very dangerous trend, and we need to resist it.

A "Long Covid" saga

Philosopher Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) has been living with long Covid since early 2021, and has kept a detailed and evocative account of the ordeal on his blog (the most recent installment is here, which includes links to all the earlier posts).  For those who have not had any experience with long Covid, this is extremely eye-opening, not to mention sobering.