Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

In Memoriam: David H. Sanford (1937-2022)

A longtime member of the Duke faculty, where he was emeritus, Professor Sanford wrote widely in metaphysics, as well as epistemology and logic.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Sanford.

(Thanks to Alex Rosenberg for the information.)

Wittgenstein, metaphysician

A.W. Moore (Oxford) comments.

Blast from the past: Could Mencken write for a newspaper today?

Back in 2006.

Advertising update

All the top spots are booked through the end of the calendar year, but there remains one top spot (only one) available each month through June in 2023.  For the rest of the fall, there is at least one second or third spot still open each month.  Email me at bleiter-at-uchicago-dot-edu for more information.  

How faculty changes since last year's PGR surveys are likely to affect the overall rankings in the U.S.

How are all the faculty changes since last year's PGR surveys likely to affect the rankings?  I don't think changes in the top 11 are likely (although there were some movements in and out), but after that, I'd estimate the "top 25" would look something like this given senior moves/retirements in the interim:

University of Florida's academic freedom crisis

CHE has done a detailed investigative report, and the problem runs deep!  From the start of the article:

Last September, a professor at the University of Florida wanted to sign a scientific consensus letter about kratom, a tropical tree with pain-relieving properties. The faculty member’s proposal was forwarded to Gary Wimsett Jr., the university’s assistant vice president for conflicts of interest, who had a question: What did Ron DeSantis, the state’s Republican governor, think about kratom?

Kratom has been the subject of controversy, as scientists and policy makers weigh its potential benefits against the possibility of addiction and abuse. Oliver Grundmann, the UF professor, had concluded that kratom, at least for the time being, should not be reviewed for global classification as a controlled substance; he sought approval to sign a letter in his role as a faculty member stating as much. But Wimsett wasn’t sure it was a good idea.

"Contemporary race theory" and the question of class versus race

Another interesting piece from Nonsite.org, where Professor Reed frequently publishes as well.  An excerpt:

Because all of these theories take for granted that racism is not only permanent but also the fundamental contradiction of American life, they all proceed from the assumption that racial groups are coherent and discrete entities with easily definable and shared interests. In other words, they conflate racial categories with racial groups and racial groups with political constituencies. Bonilla-Silva’s “structural interpretation” of racism posits that racial groups are “social collectivities” with shared “life chances” that form the basis for their collective “racial interests” (RR 471). One of the foundational concepts in Critical Race Theory, developed by Derrick Bell, is “interest convergence,” which maintains that “the interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will only be accommodated when it converges with the interest of whites.”6

"The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives" by Adolph L. Reed, Jr.

Verso kindly sent me Professor Reed's latest book, which is a very good read and illuminating.  (He discusses some of its themes in this podcast with his son, an historian.)  Reed, born in 1947, grew up in New Orleans during the final years of the Jim Crow era.  One of his aims is to record for posterity the lived experience of that time for one black person, but another is to demonstrate both the class politics of Jim Crow and how class differences among African-Americans affected their experience of the racism of the era.  Here's how Reed sums it up near the end of the book (these excerpts are from pp. 139-140):

The Jim Crow racial order has been vanquished.  That is clearest at the level that defines daily life and aspirations.  Removal of the strictures of official apartheid has radically altered opportunity structures and patterns of work, quality of life, and social relations in small and large ways that aren't readily apparent to those who didn't know the old order.  Working together as equals encourages socializing together, which is also enabled by elimination of the petty apartheid of Jim Crow in public accomodations.  Occasionally, when I notice an interracial group of co-workers or friends out in a restaurant, bar, or the like, I recall how utterly impossible that would have been as late as 1960....

But passage of the old order's segregationist trappings throws into relief the deeper reality that what appeared and was experienced as racial hierarchy was also class hierarchy.  Now blacks occupy positions in the socioeconomic order previously available only to whites, and whites occupy those previously identified with blacks.  And the dynamics of superordination and subordination, patterns of appropriation and distribution, and dominant understandings of which material interests should drive policy remain much as they were.

This underscores the point that the core of the Jim Crow order was a class system rooted in employment and production relations that were imposed, stabilized, regulated, and naturalized through a regime of white supremacist law, practice, custom, rhetoric, and ideology.  Defeating the white supremacist regime was a tremendous victory for social justice and egalitarian interests.  At the same time, that victory left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms affirmed it....

Do those confronting a terminal illness have insights that will help those who are not?

Philosopher Jesse Summer (Duke) is skeptical; an excerpt:

One lesson that the dying are supposed to teach is to live every day like you’re dying. But I’ve tried it: I’ve ordered coffee like I’m dying, gone for a walk like I’m dying, had conversations like I’m dying. Carpe diem, sure, but this attitude is hard to maintain. If I seriously tried to live today as my last, it would make tomorrow awful. I would have messes to clean up, a hangover, and concerned voicemails to respond to. Even if I approached it somberly, would I assemble my family for some last words, final reflections, and my passwords? And then, what? Make everyone show up again tomorrow?...

Prioritizing with death in mind is like working under a deadline, where all but the most important things fall away. That’s good when you’re dying, but it’s non-transferable. A full life has less important priorities in it, too: friends who are good to see but who wouldn’t be at one’s deathbed, casual hobbies, work projects and home projects and books to read and meals to eat and movies to watch, none of which individually would grow in that shadow of death, but all of which, together, make a life good.

Is moral responsibility an illusion?

Philosophers Galen Strawson (Texas), Massimo Pigliucci (City College of New York) and others discuss. (Link now fixed.)

Blast from the past: John Martin Fischer on "where the action is [was]" on Free Will and Moral Responsibility...

...back in 2006, with reader discussion.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Incredible Hog, "Going Down," 1973

Another number from the British hard rock trio, this is their distinctive cover of the Freddie King classic:

 

Chomsky (?) on postmodernism (and Derrida in particular)

This is plausibly Chomsky, although the source is a bit peculiar; comments are open for correction or confirmation.  It certainly sounds like him, and the remarks about Derrida are exactly right.   An excerpt:

There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out....

Take, say, Derrida. Let me begin by saying that I dislike making the kind of comments that follow without providing evidence, but I doubt that participants want a close analysis of de Saussure, say, in this forum, and I know that I'm not going to undertake it. I wouldn't say this if I hadn't been explicitly asked for my opinion --- and if asked to back it up, I'm going to respond that I don't think it merits the time to do so.

So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted. Again, sorry to make unsupported comments, but I was asked, and therefore am answering.

Blast from the past: "From the bowels of cyberspace..."

Back in 2010 (before I mellowed!).

"Semifascism" and Trump

I don't know anything about this Hamid character being attacked (although he sounds "too stupid to warrant a response," to borrow Gore Vidal's famous putdown), but this is exactly right:

Shadi speaks of fascism as an ideology like Communism or liberalism, but as the highly-respected scholar Robert Paxton points out fascism is less a coherent ideology than a set of “mobilizing passions:”

• a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;

• the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual

• the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;

• dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

• the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

• the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny;

• the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;

• the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;

• the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

Now obviously some of these features apply more to Trumpism than others, so “semi-fascism” seems to be right on the money.

More signs of the times: life expectancy falls dramatically in U.S....

...largely because the U.S. was right up there with Brazil and Peru in mishandling the pandemic disaster, aided and abetted of course by one of its two main political parties, the Repugs.  From the NYT report:

The average life expectancy of Americans fell precipitously in 2020 and 2021, the sharpest two-year decline in nearly 100 years and a stark reminder of the toll exacted on the nation by the continuing coronavirus pandemic.

In 2021, the average American could expect to live until the age of 76, federal health researchers reported on Wednesday. The figure represents a loss of almost three years since 2019, when Americans could expect to live, on average, nearly 79 years....

While the pandemic has driven most of the decline in life expectancy, a rise in accidental deaths and drug overdoses also contributed, as did deaths from heart disease, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, the new report found....