Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Typepad, the blog service provider, had another meltdown over the weekend...

...so if you had trouble accessing the blog on Saturday evening or on Sunday, that would be why.  If readers have suggestions for better blog platforms, please make them here!  Thanks.

Brazil's election

As most readers will know, the civilized candidate Lula beat the fascist Bolsonoaro, although just barely.  This is remarkable, when one consider that Bolsonaro makes Trump look urbane and moderate by comparison--not to mention his complete mishandling of the pandemic, with horrible consequences for hundreds of thousands of people.  Lula will also face majorities aligned with Bolsonaro in the National Congress.  At least Bolsonaro's allies do not seem inclined to entertain Bolsonaro's delusional claims about electoral fraud, one sign that Brazilian political culture may still be healthier than America's (a very low bar, admittedly).

Comments from readers from Brazil (or those knowledgeable about Brazilian politics) about the continued appeal of Bolsonaro and the prospects for Lula’s presidency are welcome.

(spelling fixed)

 

The brief arguing that the super-legislature should overrule Grutter (2003) and outlaw "diversity" in university admissions

The brief contains an interesting history of "holistic" admissions practices, among other things.  This also was striking (pp. 59-60):

Shortly after Grutter was decided, the defendant in that case confessed that he had pressed “the ‘diversity’ rationale” as a litigation strategy. Bollinger, A Comment on Grutter and Gratz v. Bollinger, 103 Colum. L. Rev. 1589, 1590-91 (2003). Bollinger bemoaned that he could not defend racial preferences as “a ‘remedy’ for past societal discrimination”—what everyone in higher education “really believed.” Id. Bollinger is hardly alone. Shortly before Grutter was decided, Harvard’s Randall Kennedy said, “Let’s be honest: Many who defend affirmative action for the sake of ‘diversity’ are actually motivated by … social justice.” Kennedy, Affirmative Reaction, Am. Prospect (Feb. 19, 2003), bit.ly/3EJc5To. They would defend racial preferences “even if social science demonstrated uncontrovertibly that diversity (or its absence) has no effect (or even a negative effect) on the learning environment.” Id. NYU’s Samuel Issacharoff likewise knows “‘[t]he commitment to diversity is not real,’” and Columbia’s Kent Greenawalt has “‘yet to find a professional academic who believes the primary motivation for preferential admission has been to promote diversity.’” Fitzpatrick, The Diversity Lie, 27 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 385, 395-96 (2003). The list goes on. See id.; Schuck, Affirmative Action: Past, Present, and Future, 20 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. 1, 34-36 (2002); Levinson, Diversity, 2 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 573, 601 (2000).

I've also argued previously that "diversity" is a weak and implausible rationale for affirmative action.

Competitive debate and philosophy

Philosopher Ben Holguin (Johns Hopkins) discusses this and related topics at Dialexicon.  (The related article is here.)

"The Philosopher's Day"

Nathan Ballantyne shares on Twitter Anthony Kenny's account of "The Philospher's Day."

Blast from the past: Is aesthetics underrepresented in leading departments?

Back in 2014.  I think it's fair to say it's still underrepresented, just like 19th-century German philosophy and several other areas.

"Thumos," the Platonic rock band

Philosopher Aaron Preston writes:

A curiosity, possibly of interest to readers of Leiter Reports:

I’ve just discovered that there is a “progressive doom/post-metal” band called Thumos, whose music is inspired by the works of Plato.  Among other things, they have a full-length album of instrumentals based on the Republic (available on YouTube). I can’t speak to the quality of the music (not really my genre), but the concept is intriguing.

Typepad has been a bit messed up today with respect to comments

I just approved a couple of comments, but have heard from others they have had difficulty submitting comments.  Apologies.

Blast from the past: 2011 in review

The Synthese scandal, Linda Alcoff's fake "Climate for Women" report, and more.

A new "Creative Commons" license with some odd features

A philosopher in Australia writes:

I've just become aware of an issue that strikes me as worthy of discussion among professional philosophers. I'm not aware of any such discussion so I thought it might be something you may wish to broach on your blog?

The issue is about the particular licence that many (not all) journals and funding organisations seem to be specifying now for open access publication: CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>

This licence allows readers to share freely (of course) -- but also to "Adapt: remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially" as long as attribution is given ("You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.").

It's not the commercial use part that worries me here: it's the whole idea of adaptation/remix/transformation. This seems to me to be a very radical departure from academic norms. According to long established norms, we quote work by others, paraphrase it in the context of criticism (or endorsement), explain how it feeds into our own work and how we take ourselves to be extending it, etc. -- but we never take another's words (not in quotation marks), and add some words of our own, and then disseminate that (even with an acknowledgement of the author whose work we are adapting or remixing).

McDowell talks to Davidson about subjectivity...

...in 1997:

(Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)

RyanAir

I've now flown it twice while in Europe in the last few months, and have a couple of observations that may be of use to U.S. travellers in Europe.  Both times, the flight left and arrived on time.  Baggage arrived on time as well.  As long as you pay in advance for things like a seat and "priority" boarding, you can be sure of a fairly peaceful boarding process and of having room to store your carry-ons and a pleasant-enough seat (the absence of anywhere to stuff a newspaper or magazine in a seat pocket is a bit annoying, however).  The one thing that I find really irritating is that the entire flight is an ongoing advertisement for products:  duty-free stuff, liquor, fragrances, cigarettes and on and on.  And anything you want to eat or drink that you didn't bring on board has to be purchased, but the prices are not particularly extravagant by airline standards.  RyanAir's biggest advantage is a lot of direct flights in Europe, and from airports that most other major airlines don't utilize (e.g., East Midlands in the UK).

Curious if European readers, who probably have more experience with RyanAir, have different experiences.

Articles in top 5 journals like Phil Review and Nous are cited a lot more than articles...

...in less prominent journals (which still get cited, but not as much on average).  That's at least what struck me from Professor Schwitzgebel's analysis, but he draws other conclusions.

Blast from the past: How "professional" is the data analysis of Carolyn Dicey Jennings?

Back in 2016.

G.A. Cohen talks about The German Ideology...

...in 2009:

(Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)

Videos of philosophers edited to make them sound funny

We noted one of these little montages awhile back, and there are lots more!  As one commenter on one video remarked, "This is the most niche YouTube channel ever."

Rice University waives all applications fees for applicants with at least a 3.0 GPA

That will include the philosophy PhD program as well, of course.   Are other schools also using fee waivers in this round?  Please add links in the comments, or post (with a full name) about policies of particular philosophy programs.

(Thanks to Gwen Bradford for the pointer.)

30 "progressive" Democrats call on Biden to seek a "negotiated settlement" with Russia (UPDATED)

Here.  Without U.S. and European military support, the war in Ukraine is over, which means a "negotiated settlement" is also going to include pressure in Ukraine to make concessions it will not want to make, although the letter doesn't mention that.  Hopefully this letter will give some impetus to Biden to take steps to avoid killing us all.

UPDATE:  Philosopher Joel Pust points out to me on Twitter that they're already backtracking!  Disappointing.

Sleepwalking into Armageddon, Part 2

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 17, SINCE THE DISCUSSION IN THE COMMENTS CONTINUES--MORE COMMENTS WELCOME

Reader Boris Dagaev calls my attention to this chilling interview at the Financial Times with Alexander Gabuev, who "before he left Russia...was a member of the country’s foreign policy elite as one of Russia’s leading experts on China," and now works for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC (previously in Moscow).  An excerpt:

I think that if [Putin] believes that he’s losing this war and this war is existential for his understanding of his role in Russian history, we will see real-time preparations [for the use of nuclear weapons]. So he will try not to hide this. And it’s gonna be nuclear warhead-driven direction missile or whatever or artillery shells being unloaded. He will make it visible to give the west time to call him and start negotiation and avoid the nuclear escalation scenario, the way Cuban missile crisis was resolved....

Blast from the past: Wright on McDowell...and the nature of "analytic philosophy"

Back in 2007, with discussion by readers.

Physics--the "queen of the sciences"--dethroned

Philosopher Nancy Cartwright (Durham/UC San Diego) comments (drawing on themes form her well-known work).  An excerpt:

Instead of supposing that physics must be queen of all we survey, I recommend we construct our image of what an ultimate science might be like on the basis of what current science is like when it is most successful, from putting people on the moon to devising and carrying out a plan for the complete evacuation of the Royal Marsden Hospital (which took just 28 minutes when called into play by a gigantic fire, 2 January 2008). Physics does not act as queen in these cases. Rather, she does her bit as part of a motley assembly of scientific – and this means natural, biomedical and social science -- and engineering disciplines along with practical knowledge, all working together. This is the way science works in actual practice when it works so surprisingly well and there is little evidence indeed that practice will be any different in the future. This, I urge, should be our model for what science at its very best will look like.

Memorial collection of (open access) scholarship by and about Saul Kripke

Eric Piper, an editor at Wiley, writes:  "The collection includes early journal articles published by Kripke in the Mathematical Logic Quarterly as well as more recent papers; articles from a 2022 Theoria special issue looking back at Naming and Necessity; and book chapters discussing his place in the field."

Rubin from Notre Dame to Missouri

Hannah Rubin (philosophy of biology, philosophy of science), Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, will take up a tenured appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri, Columbia, effective January 2023.

(Thanks to Andre Ariew for the information.)

Pascal's wager reversed

Philosopher Saul Smilansky (Haifa) explains.

Blast from the past: Best introductory books in philosophy of science and/or philosophy of particular sciences

Back in 2019, with reader suggestions.

There is an actual "census" of law faculty on Twitter by university...

...here.  If anyone knows of a breakdown of philosophy faculty on Twitter listed by university, shoot me an email.  I remarked awhile back that there seemed to be a higher percentage of law professors than philosophy professors using Twitter, and I imagine that is still true, but maybe someone has compiled the figures.

Moratorium on new submissions at JESP effective November 1

Announcement here.

The protests in Iran

One account from NYRB; readers can supply links to others in the comments.  An excerpt:

Are the protests that were prompted by the death in police custody of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, on September 16 comparable to the strikes and demonstrations that led to the Shah’s downfall in 1979, or has Amini become a figure in the tragic mold of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street-seller whose self-immolation in 2010 touched off the Arab Spring, a region-wide upheaval that, in the end, failed to fulfill its early promise?...

The protests that followed Amini’s death after she was arrested in Tehran by the morality police, apparently for an infraction of the Islamic dress code, started in earnest in her home province of Kurdistan, in the far northwest, and spread across the country. All the agencies of the state mobilized to meet the threat and began a nationwide campaign against the protesters, including beatings, arrests, deaths in custody, propaganda, and judicial indictments. After four weeks and an estimated two hundred deaths—casualty figures must be treated with immense caution—the protests don’t appear to be letting up. By some measures, and making allowance for our reliance on reports that protesters have managed to send out of the country despite the government’s efforts to block the Internet, they are growing....

A review of Hitler's Mein Kampf in the NY Times in 1933

The review is by one James Gerard, a New York lawyer and judge, who had been an Ambassador to Germany under President Wilson.  A few striking excerpts:

Now what manner of man, as disclosed by his book, is this Hitler, who has forced such a unification of Germany as Bismarck never dreamed of and who has arrayed a whole people from children to elders in a military formation which can only mean a war of revenge and who has revived the persecutions of the Middle Ages against an intellectual and harmless race? In the first place, do not think of this man Hitler as without brains and do not listen to the gossip which proclaims him morally unsound....

"Young Plato"

Following up on yesterday's post about "Bronx Socrates," reader Mike G. calls to my attention "Young Plato," about a teacher sharing philosophy with his young pupils in a tough working class area of Belfast:

 

Attack of the robots (on human labor), an ongoing saga

The latest, as Marx expected.

Wolff on Pogge on Rawls, and a response from Rawls

A curious saga, from many years ago.

Blast from the past: Advice on "personal statements" for PhD admissions

Back in 2007, with reader comments as well.

The coming clash between the universities and the society at large over "diversity"

This captures it pretty well:

A 2022 Pew Research Center poll found that 74% of Americans oppose the use of race in college admissions. Even more surprising, 68% of Hispanics, 63% of Asians and 59% of blacks also opposed it. The same applied to both political parties, with 87% of Republicans and 62% of Democrats objecting.

But as the public attempted to slam the door shut on racial preferences, the universities were busy trying to open it wide. The stealthy end-runs around the law gave way to support for “equity”: the desire for racial proportionality in all things—never mind that the Supreme Court has held that quotas in college admissions are unlawful. Accordingly, many colleges have begun to abandon the use of test scores in applications.

This will come to a head next year when the super-legislature (i.e., the Supreme Court) declares that "diversity" is no longer a governmental interest than can justify any kind of racial preferences.

"Bronx Socrates"

The trailer for a new documentary about an extroardinarily popular undergraduate philosophy teacher at NYU (and also West Point), Bob Gurland.

The monster-child, projection, and narcissistic collapse

On his private Twitter-like platform, one of the monster-child's latest outbursts has been attracting attention on Twitter:

The racist attack on Gauleiter McConnell's wife attracted a lot of the commentary, but it seems to me far more revealing is the absurd attribution of a "DEATH WISH" to McConnell.   

Blast from the past: Nietzsche and Ayn Rand: a brief comment

Originally posted in 2009, and it still gets a fair bit of traffic all these years later.

CFP for the conferences in honor of Joseph Raz

Information here.

AFA statement on the firing of the NYU chemistry professor who was a tough grader

I think this is a judicious assessment (I was not involved in drafting it, just to be clear).  Earlier coverage.

"How Are Ideologies False?"

This is a draft of a paper for an upcoming Social Philosophy & Policy conference; the abstract:

For Marx, ideological forms of consciousness are false, but how and in what respects? Ideologies must include some *beliefs* in order to be false, even if not all the beliefs that are inferentially related in the ideology are false, and even if there are (causally) related attitudes in the ideology that are neither true nor false. “Ideological” beliefs, however, are not simply false: their falsity has the specific property of not being in the interests of the agents who accept the ideology. One can make two kinds of mistakes about interests: one can mistake what is in one’s intrinsic interest, or one can mistake what is in one’s extrinsic interest (i.e., the means required to realize one’s intrinsic interests). Marx is mostly, but not exclusively, focused on mistakes about extrinsic interests; this is important in understanding how “morality” (which is not a matter of beliefs, but attitudes) can be ideological for Marx. Other topics discussed in this essay include: Geuss’s well-known typology of ideological mistakes and its poor fit with Marx; Marx’s paradigmatic examples of ideological mistakes (following an account developed with Prof. Jaime Edwards); Marx’s conception of interests (contrasting subjectivist and objectivist views, and attributing to the mature Marx a “thin” version of the objectivist view); and why Marx’s own moral judgments are not ideological.

Khalifa from Middlebury to UCLA

Kareem Khalifa (philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, epistemology, philosophy of race), Professor of Philosophy at Middlebury College, has accepted appointment as Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles.  (His appointment was effective July 1 of this year.)

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Masters Apprentices, "It's Because I Love You," 1971

ORIGINALLY POSTED APRIL 1, 2017

Another one from the great Australian band that is, sadly, little known elsewhere:

 

The pernicious influence of fossil fuel money on climate research (and a question about outside money and philosophy)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 13--MORE COMMENTS WELCOME

Philosopher Craig Callender (UC San Diego) comments in CHE; an excerpt:

Money follows research but research also follows money. By pouring millions of dollars into carbon-capture technology — unproven technology that would remove carbon dioxide from the air, but which does not demand emissions reductions — fossil-fuel companies are bending research in their favor. The skewed landscape helped justify putting more money into carbon capture than renewables in the recent 2022 Inflation Reduction Act....

Right now, research funding is mostly hidden. We owe it to the public to open the curtain. Universities should require researchers to disclose publicly all funding sources from the past five years for all their research products. They should name both the funder and amount; nothing more, nothing less. Research products include articles, government comments, publications, presentations, newspaper op-eds, white papers, news releases, courtroom testimony, and more — wherever a researcher can be reasonably understood to be speaking as an expert.

This straightforward approach sidesteps the dreaded slippery-slope reaction: Why target fossil fuels? What about other misbehaving industries — and who decides what counts as misbehaving anyway?

The worry that "research also follows money" arose in connection with the substnatial financial support the Templeton Foundation (with its pro-capitalism, and pro-religino agendas) has offered philosophers. We discussed this issue not quite a decade ago, and it seemed to me at the time it wasn't an issue.   I wonder what informed readers think now about this question, and whether anything has changed in the intervening years.  (Please look at the earlier thread before weighing in.)

"We are on a path to nuclear war"

Reader Howard Berman calls this brief essay to my attention.  An excerpt:

What began as a criminal Russian aggression against Ukraine has become a proxy war between Washington and Moscow. The two sides are locked in an escalatory cycle that, along current trends, will eventually bring them into direct conflict and then go nuclear, killing millions of people and destroying much of the world. This is obviously a bold prediction and certainly an unwise one to make — in part because if I’m right, I’m unlikely to be around take credit for it....

Endicott on Raz

Via Michael Sevel (Sydney) (who is finishing a book on the moral, political and legal philosophy of Raz for OUP), I came across this very nice, synoptic account of Raz's life and work by his former student Timothy Endicott (now the Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford) (it starts at page 148).  The following paragraph was particularly perspicuous I thought and sums up nicely how Raz went very wrong in his legal philosophy:

Joseph never expressed in his work any doubt as to the objectivity of moral rights and duties. And he thought that if you have a legal right or duty, that means that the law purports to confer or to impose a moral right or duty, which the law enforces through its systematic, institutionalised techniques. This approach made the theory of law a part of the general theory of practical reason, so that the question of whether the law ought to be obeyed lies at the centre of jurisprudence (whereas to Hart, it was a peripheral question, detached from his account of the concept of law). In common with natural law theory, Joseph believed that the normativity of law and morality are one (since the law claims to impose moral duties), and that ‘There are inherent connections between legal concepts and moral concepts, and between law and morality.’

I touched on aspects of this misguided turn in the positivist tradition in my essay on "Legal Positivism as a Realist Theory of Law" for the Cambridge Companion to Legal Positivism.

CFP for the International Society of Nietzsche Studies #6 in Atlanta

The CFP is here.   ISNS is the premier forum for Nietzsche scholarship in North America and Europe.  Please submit!

Are any universities or colleges implementing mid-year cost-of-living increases in light of inflation?

We discussed awhile back the issue of inflation's effect on graduate student stipends, but I've had similar inquiries more recently from faculty colleagues elsewhere, and I know there are faculty here who share this concern.   The compound effect of salary freezes due to Covid and now rates of inflation that far outstrip ordinary raises has made this issue salient for many.  So readers:  are any universities doing anything (e.g., mid-year increases) for faculty salaries or graduate student stipends in light of the continuing high rate of inflation?

Schmidtz from Arizona to West Virginia

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 6--UPDATED

David Schmidtz (political philosophy), a longtime member of the philosophy faculty at the University of Arizona, where he also founded the Freedom Center and helped establish a Department of Political Economy and Moral Sciences, will take up the Presidential Chair of Moral Science at West Virginia University’s Chambers College of Business and Economics, effective January 1, 2023.  That's a big loss for Arizona, and big catch for WVU.

ADDENDUM:  The untimely death of Jerry Gaus a couple of years ago, and now the loss of David Schmidtz, mean Arizona will no longer dominate Anglophone political philosophy PhD programs, as it once did, but it's worth emphasizing that the department still remains quite strong in this area with Thomas Christiano, Steven Wall, and, part-time, Allen Buchanan, among others.

UPDATE:   Professor Schmidtz may remain quarter-time, and spend summers, at the University of Arizona, possibly teaching and also supervising PhD students. 

In Memoriam: Kenneth Sayre (1928-2022)

Professor Sayre, who taught philosophy at the University of Notre Dame for a remarkable 56 years, was well-known for his work on Plato, environmental and applied ethics topics, and artifical intelligence.  The Notre Dame memorial notice is here.

Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Sayre.

(Thanks to Sam Newlands for the pointer.)

Pathological liar Alex Jones faces $1 billion dollar judgment for his defamation of parents of Sandy Hook victims

That sounds about right, although he's also trying to conceal his assets in bankruptcy.   This is a case where one wished that the U.S., like many European countries, had criminal defamation statutes, so that this venal and disturbed individual could at least be sent to prison.