Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

2022 in review, 3rd quarter: July, August, September

MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 28, FOR THOSE WHO MISSED IT DURING THE BREAK

July

Travels abroad, and some observations about philosophy

When you can't tell what's a parody and what isn't

Reed on Black Lives Matter

August

Specialist journals that published the best articles in moral and/or political philosophy, 2022

Korsgaard's Dewey Lecture

Have things really changed in philosophy since the 1990s when it comes to publication pressures and narrowness of specialization?

Best "general" journals of philosophy, 2022, by two different polling methods

Doubts about Amazon Mechanical Turk, which means trouble for Experimental Philosophy

Folks interested in XPhil should read this, if they have not already.  Comments welcome from those knowledgeable about the issues.

"Passed away" vs. "died"

A longtime reader, noting my not infrequent use of "passed away" to note the death of some philosopher, writes:

“Passed away” is a religious euphemism, mostly used by sanctimonious and smarmy people who are trying to say that someone's immortal soul has passed away from our contemptible fallen realm and into the bright realm of harp-strumming above. 

It’s sort of Expiration Lite, or exiting from life without actually going through the messy process of death. It’s a way of denying reality. And that’s why it surprised me so much to see it on your blog, where reality-deniers usually get no mercy.

This was honestly a surprise to me (those who pass away, pass away into oblivion and nothingness!), but it would not be the first time I was tuned out of connotations of ordinary usage.  What do readers think?

"Analytic" philosophy and the McCarthy era

Every few years this same story gets recycled (the latest iteration, complete with the non-sequitur that "because" [sic] analytic philosophy benefitted from McCarthyism it is not apolitical).  This story confronts an obvious problem:  "analytic" philosophy triumphed elsewhere (Britain, Australia) without McCarthyism.  Even in America, many of those fired were proto-analytic philosophers working in logic and philosophy of science. 

A more plausible story is the one suggested by Carl Schorske about the rise of the "new rigorism" across all disciplines after WWII, itself a continuation of the specialization that Weber had identified as the hallmark of the modern research university at the start of the 20th-century.  In addition, of course, there was the influx of logical positivists fleeing Hitler, many of them Marxists or Marxist sympathizers, who were no doubt more congenial to the loosely Deweyan naturalism that dominated American philosophy than NeoHegelians like Marcuse.  And then, of course, there was pure chance.   Harvard dominated American philosophy in the 20th-century, and Quine had joined that department in the 1930s.  He exerted increasing influence as the older generation retired (although, amusingly, he wanted to appoint Walter Kaufmann from Princeton in the 1950s--he could be catholic that way!).   As Harvard became solidly analytic it was inevitable, given the professional networks at the time, that other schools would move in that direction as well.  (John Wild, an enthusiast for phenomenology and existentialism, left Harvard for Northwestern in the early 1960s, probably a fateful mistake with respect to influencing the composition of the profession.)

ADDENDUM:  Comments now open, sorry about that.

2022 in review, 2nd quarter: April, May, June

MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 27, FOR THOSE WHO MAY HAVE MISSED IT DURING THE BREAK

April

On Russia and Ukraine, the perspective of a Putin advisor

Now the "open letters" attacking OUP begin

Talking about Nietzsche with Dylan Aames

An open letter about calling attention to the open letter to OUP about an unread and unreleased book

Justice Ginsburg is a philosopher, and other great moments in the Dunning-Kruger effect

"Mob review" rather than "peer review"?

Where untenured tenure-track faculty at the U.S. "top 20" earned their Ph.D., 2022

Per student value of endowments of American universities and colleges, 2021

May

Joseph Raz's final wishes

Former director of Human Rights Watch denied Fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School for having "incorrect" views about Israel

The Nation reports.  If there is one arena in which attacks occur systematically on academic freedom and free speech in the U.S., it is for those--from Finkelstein to Salaita--who do not tow the party line on Israel.  What a disgrace.

"Diversity" and "tolerance" turned on their head

Apt remarks by The Guardian's Kenan Malik regarding the academic freedom fiasco at Hamline University:

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of Hamline’s action is the use of the language of diversity to eviscerate the very meaning of diversity. This is an issue not confined to Hamline. Too many people today demand that we respect the diversity of society, but fail to see the diversity of minority communities in those societies. As a result, progressive voices often get dismissed as not being authentic, while the most conservative figures become celebrated as the true embodiment of their communities.

Here, liberal “anti-racism” meets rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry. For bigots, all Muslims are reactionary and their values incompatible with those of liberal societies. For too many liberals, opposing bigotry means accepting reactionary ideas as authentically Muslim; that to be Muslim is to find the Danish cartoons offensive and the depiction of Muhammed “harmful”. Both bigots and liberals erase the richness and variety of Muslim communities.

The Hamline controversy shows how the concepts of diversity and tolerance have become turned on their head. Diversity used to mean the creation of a space for dissent and disagreement and tolerance the willingness to live with things that one might find offensive or distasteful. Now, diversity too often describes a space in which dissent and disagreement have to be expunged in the name of “respect” and tolerance requires one to refrain from saying or doing things that might be deemed offensive. It is time we re-grasped both diversity and tolerance in their original sense.

AFA statement opposing legislation banning discussion/teaching of "divisive concepts"

This effort, by right-wing legislatures and Governors (like Florida's Viktor DeSantis), has been the biggest threat to academic freedom and First Amendment rights on campus in recent memory.

2022 in review, 1st quarter: January, February, March

MOVING TO FROM FROM DECEMBER 26--FOR THOSE WHO MAY HAVE MISSED IT DURING THE HOLIDAY BREAK

January

"How Doctors Die"

A new website for discussing philosophy pre-prints

It's amusing when critics of the PGR ranking inadvertently reveal the need for them

A note on Carolyn Dicey Jennings and her compilation of placement data

Most cited Anglophone books on Hegel and on Nietzsche

February

How "soft fascism" will come to America if the Republicans control the federal government in January 2025

Richard Marshall interviews Sir Isaac Newton (Cambridge)...

...at 3:16 AM.  An excerpt:

3:16: What made you become a philosopher? 

Isaac Newton: Philosophy is such an impertinently litigious lady, that a man had as good be engaged in law-suits as have to do with her. I found it so formerly, and now I can no sooner come near her again, but she gives me warning. Plato said that philosophy is the imitating God so far forth as man is able. Yet we may know God more and more until we behold him face to face in the kingdom of heaven; so that the scope is to glorify God in his wonderful works, to teach a man how to live well, and to be charitably affected helping our neighbours. This philosophy both speculative and active is not only to be found in the volume of nature but also in the sacred scriptures, as in Genesis, Job, Psalms, Isaiah and others.  In the knowledge of this philosophy God made Solomon the greatest philosopher in the world while the Queen of Sheba was allured to take a long journey to make an experiment of that wisdom — whereof she had heard so great a fame, and found it in effects far greater. Anaxagoras was a noble gentleman but more noble in wisdom and virtue; Socrates with many others condemned the pleasures of this world and gave ears to the study of natural philosophy. 

3:16: So for you philosophy is of the highest value?

IN: Philosophy has brought more profit to the world than Ceres did who invented the increase of corn and grain, or than Bacchus did that found out the use of wine, or Hercules who rid the world of monsters. For these things belong to the maintenance of the body by life and pleasure but philosophy nourishes the soul itself. 

The new front in Viktor DeSantis's war on higher education in Florida

Longtime reader Larry Franz calls my attention to this alarming (but not surprising) development:

Gov. Ron DeSantis began the process Friday of transforming Sarasota's New College of Florida into a more conservative institution, appointing six new board members, including conservative activist Christopher Rufo [see], a dean at conservative Hillsdale College and a senior fellow at The Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank.

"It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida's classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the south," Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz said in a statement....

Rufo said in a series of Twitter posts Friday that public universities have "been corrupted by woke nihilism" and he is "ready to transform higher education from within." He said he plans to recruit new faculty to New College to "create an institution where academics can thrive, without self-censorship."

“My ambition is to help the new board majority transform New College into a classical liberal arts institution. We are recapturing higher education.” Rufo said.

New College is already a classic liberal arts institution ("classical" here is just code for "conservative" and nothing else).  The only "hopeful" sign here is that Mr. Rufo (who has zero qualifications, of course, to sit on a college board) speaks of recruiting new faculty, rather than violating the contractual or academic freedom rights of existing faculty.

Any readers who have more details about what is afoot may shared them in the comments.  

Facebook just reminded me I was getting tired of doing the philosophy rankings back in January 2013

Facebook prompted me with this the other day:

One of my FB friends had a funny rejoinder:  "No one is bulletproof like BL. Sure, there are philosophers who are insensitive -- they don't notice the bullets. But Brian catches them in his teeth and fires them back...."

Great moments in (somewhat) obscure rock 'n' roll: Foghat, "She's Gone," 1973

As I noted at the end of last year, it's gotten harder to find genuinely obscure fare worth sharing, so I'm going to loosen up the criteria a bit, and share some songs (in some cases, like this week, by well-known bands) that are still lesser known but are among my personal favorites.  This number comes from Foghat's second album (generally called "Rock and Roll" because of the cover), and is still my favorite number by the band, which later hit super-stardom in 1975 with the album Fool for the City, both the title song of that album and "Slow Ride."

 

 

 

Jennifer and Christopher Frey from South Carolina to Tulsa

Jennifer Frey (ethics) and Christopher Frey (ancient philosophy), both Associate Professors of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina, have accepted appointments at the University of Tulsa:  she as Dean of the New Honors College and Professor of Philosophy, and he as holder of a Chair in the philosophy department.  Senior, lateral appointments are certainly a good sign that Tulsa's new President is, indeed, serious about philosophy and the humanities.

(Thanks to Professor J. Frey for the information.)

ADDENDUM:  Via Joel Pust on Twitter, I saw this excellent statement about philosophy's role in the university from President Carson at Tulsa.

"Politics by Other Means: The Jurisprudence of 'Common Good Constitutionalism'"

This forthcoming essay may interest some readers; the abstract:

Adrian Vermeule proposes an alternative to the two dominant schools of constitutional interpretation in the United States: originalism and “progressivism” (i.e., “living constitutionalism”). Against these approaches, he argues courts (and other institutional actors) should explicitly interpret the text of the Constitution, statutes, and administrative decrees with an eye to promoting the “common good” as understood in what he calls the classical tradition, meaning that it should be understood in distinctly non-utilitarian and non-individualist terms. Officials should do so using something like Dworkin’s method of “constructive interpretation” (hereafter CI), in which the aim is to reach the decision that would follow from legal principles that enjoy some degree of explanatory “fit” with prior official acts (court decisions, legislation, etc.), but in which the inevitable explanatory gap is filled by reliance on those principles that provide the best moral justification for the institutional history of the legal system. For Vermeule, those moral principles are ones that embody the natural law’s idea of the “common good” rather than (as he puts it) Dworkin’s “moral commitments and priorities…which [are] of a conventionally left-liberal and individualist bent.”

I argue that: (1) Vermeule’s conception of the “common good” is neither plausible, nor even defended, except by misleading appeal to a supposed “natural law”; unfortunately (2) there is no reason to think a “natural law” exists, and, in any case, the “natural law” tradition does not speak univocally on what constitutes “principles of objective natural morality (ius naturale)” contrary to the misleading impression Vermeule gives; and (3) Dworkin’s CI is not so easily severed from his moral commitments, and in any case, Vermeule never gives a reason to think it provides (even on Vermeule’s preferred version) a more plausible account of what courts and agencies have been doing than the legal positivist view of law, which he mostly misunderstands and consistently maligns. In the absence of any serious jurisprudential foundations, Vermuele’s so-called “common good constitutionalism” is just “politics by other means,” or, as Judge Pryor put it, “Living Common Goodism.”

Lorenzini from Warwick to Penn

Daniele Lorenzini (20th-century Continental philosophy, social & political philosophy), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, has accepted appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is currently visiting.  Prospective students interested in Foucault, in particular, will want to be looking at Penn going forward.

Wittgenstein and Darwin

Philosopher of biology Michael Ruse writes:

I was fascinated to read the stuff on Wittgenstein [via the "Year in Review"] – but what did surprise me was that no one picked up on the evolution question – I think undoubtedly the most important discovery of the past centuries was the realization that we are not the end-product of a Good God on a creative spree but of a slow process of evolution fueled by the meaningless process of natural selection

How someone thinks this is not going to have profound philosophical implications – epistemology and ethics – beats me    -- what we believe is what works not divinely written on tablets of stone – same for ethics – I feel morally I ought to care for children for those of my would-be ancestors who denied this are only “would be,” whereas those who agreed we have moral obligations to kids do have descendants, namely us

Then I read in the Tractatus that “Darwin’s theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science” (Wittgenstein 1922, 4.1122).  he followed this up some years later by telling his groupies that Darwin’s theory doesn’t have the “required multiplicity” whatever the hell that means.

“I have always thought that Darwin was wrong: his theory doesn’t account for all this variety of species. It hasn’t the necessary multiplicity. Nowadays some people are fond of saying that at last evolution has produced a species that is able to understand the whole process which gave it birth. … you can’t say [that today].”Rhees, R. (ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, p. 174, 1981.

As always in these cases there is no evidence of serious study of the scientific literature

I am afraid that at this point, I closed the book on Wittgenstein and have never regretted it – he has led, I think, to some dreadful consequences for philosophy – as people like Kitcher are now pointing out, analytic philosophy has become so technical and inturned it is practically worthless.

Yet more triumphs of AI!

Philosopher Ned Hall (Harvard) writes:  "I just thought you’d get a kick out of the attached transcription of a 'chat' I had with GPT3 (a propos of this). I’d say it’s pretty far from passing the Turing test…."  See for yourself:  Download Ned Hall ChatGPT attempting to solve a logic puzzle

Blast from the past: Does academia, including philosophy, exclude people based on class?

Back in 2009, with discussion.  (My original correspondent gave permission to be identified:  he is philosopher Joshua Preiss, who directs the PPE program at Minnesota State University in Mankato.)

In Memoriam: Philip Stratton-Lake (1959-2022)

Professor David Oderberg, Head of the Department at the University of Reading, shared the following:

The Philosophy Department at the University of Reading is devastated to announce the death of Philip Stratton-Lake in December 2022, following a period of serious illness.

Philip was a much loved and respected colleague in the Department since he joined in 1998. He was an internationally reputed moral philosopher with expertise in a wide range of areas including meta-ethics, moral epistemology, Kantian ethics, contractualism, intuitionism, and Ross-style pluralism. 

He was one of the world’s leading figures in the revival and defence of ethical intuitionism, writing the article on the topic for the Stanford Encyclopedia and editing a seminal volume (Ethical Intuitionism: Re-evaluations). He also edited the now standard edition of W.D. Ross’ The Right and the Good. Other work includes an important monograph on Kant (Kant, Duty and Moral Worth) along with many articles and chapters in collections.

The Department will miss Philip in so many ways: his jovial personality; his support for colleagues and students; the many teaching and managerial roles he took on with such success over the years; his fearsome philosophical skills, always tempered with fairness and open-mindedness; and his all-round collegiality, good sense, and down-to-earth nature. 

A memorial notice will be available online in due course.

ADDENDUM:  Comments are now open for those who want to share remembrances of Professor Stratton-Lake or comment on his work.

UPDATE:  There is a longer memorial notice here. (Thanks to Professor Oderberg for the pointer.)

 

Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy receives $2 million euros from Spanish government...

...for a four-year project on "the nature and role of evidence."  Professor Teresa Marques (Barcelona) writes:

The project is collaborative as it involves researchers from the three universities that integrate BIAP: The University of Barcelona, the University Pompeu Fabra, and the University of Girona.

The research programme is organized around 7 work packages: evidence in epistemology (led by Sven Rosenkranz), evidence and the law (led by Jordi Ferrer), evidence in science (led by José Díez and Carl Hoefer), evidence in philosophy of mind (led by Josefa Toribio), evidence and philosophical method (led by Manuel García-Carpintero), evidence, politics, and the public sphere (led by José Juan Moreso and Serena Olsaretti), and a dedicated work package for outreach and transfer of knowledge (led by Teresa Marques)

The prize includes PhD fellowships, and the call for two PhD positions will open shortly.

In the legal philosophy world, Professors Ferrer and Moreso are well-known contributors.

Carl Schurz against American imperialism, 1899...

...in a convocation address at the University of Chicago (which John Finnis could benefit from reading); an excerpt:

If we [adopt a colonial system], we shall transform the government of the people, for the people, and by the people, for which Abraham Lincoln lived, into a government of one part of the people, the strong, over another part, the weak. Such an abandonment of a fundamental principle as a permanent policy may at first seem to bear only upon more or less distant dependencies, but it can hardly fail in its ultimate effects to disturb the rule of the same principle in the conduct of democratic government at home. And I warn the American people that a democracy cannot so deny its faith as to the vital conditions of its being--it cannot long play the king over subject populations without creating within itself ways of thinking and habits of action most dangerous to its own vitality. . . .

[W]e are told that our industries are gasping for breath; that we are suffering from over production; that our products must have new outlets, and that we need colonies and dependencies the world over to give us more markets. More markets? Certainly. But do we, civilized beings, indulge in the absurd and barbarous notion that we must own the countries with which we wish to trade? . . .

"But we must civilize those poor people!" Are we not ingenious and charitable enough to do much for their civilization without subjugating and ruling them by criminal aggression?

(For more on Schurz's remarkable life and career, the Wikipedia entry is not bad.)

(Thanks to Sameer Khan for the pointer.)

Fantasies about AI

This seems a good antidote to the silly fantasies (or nightmares) about AI that animate some benighted folks in Oxford--and it comes from a leading AI researcher (who is, alas, a bit of a philosophical muddle on other topics).  An excerpt:

When you work so close to A.I., you see a lot of limitations. That’s the problem. From a distance, it looks like, oh, my God! Up close, I see all the flaws. Whenever there’s a lot of patterns, a lot of data, A.I. is very good at processing that — certain things like the game of Go or chess. But humans have this tendency to believe that if A.I. can do something smart like translation or chess, then it must be really good at all the easy stuff too. The truth is, what’s easy for machines can be hard for humans and vice versa. You’d be surprised how A.I. struggles with basic common sense. It’s crazy....

I’m a big fan of GPT-3, but at the same time I feel that some people make it bigger than it is. Some people say that maybe the Turing test² has already been passed. I disagree because, yeah, maybe it looks as though it may have been passed based on one best performance of GPT-3. But if you look at the average performance, it’s so far from robust human intelligence. We should look at the average case. Because when you pick one best performance, that’s actually human intelligence doing the hard work of selection. The other thing is, although the advancements are exciting in many ways, there are so many things it cannot do well. But people do make that hasty generalization: Because it can do something sometimes really well, then maybe A.G.I.³  is around the corner. There’s no reason to believe so.

3 Artificial general intelligence, which is like the kind of flexible intelligence we humans have, and which a machine would need to be able to learn intellectual tasks at the level of human beings.

"Belief, Desire, and Rational Choice"

Everything you wanted to know about decision theory, courtesy of philosopher Wolfgang Schwarz (Edinburgh).   

"Wilderness therapy"?

A dear and old friend of my wife's is seeking information about this kind of "therapy" (for teens), about which I know nothing (indeed, I'd never heard of it), but I imagine the varied and intelligent readers of this blog may know something.  Any insights welcome.   You can post comments here anonymously or also email me at bleiter-at-uchicago-dot-edu, and I can forward your comments, anonymized or not as you prefer.  All confidential.  (Here's an example of one well-known program, but I gather there are many others out there!)  Thanks for any insight readers can share!

Hamline University's disgracefully stupid violation of academic freedom

This is really breathtaking in its stupidity:

On October 6, during a class on Islamic art that was part of a global survey course in art history, a professor at Hamline University offered students an optional exercise: Analyze and discuss a 14th-century Islamic painting that depicts the Archangel Gabriel delivering to the Prophet Muhammad his first Quranic revelation.

Before showing a slide of the painting, the instructor issued a content warning and spent over two minutes providing context about the controversies surrounding depictions of Muhammad. “I am showing you this image for a reason,” the professor explained. “There is this common thinking that Islam completely forbids, outright, any figurative depictions or any depictions of holy personages. While many Islamic cultures do strongly frown on this practice, I would like to remind you there is no one, monothetic Islamic culture.”

A senior in the class, who is also president of the Muslim Student Association at Hamline, later complained that pictorial depictions of Muhammad offended her Muslim sensibilities....

[T]he complaint set in motion the DEI bureaucracy on campus, and on November 7, David Everett, associate vice president for inclusive excellence, called the classroom exercise “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful, and Islamophobic.” Just days later, on November 11, Everett told the student newspaper in an interview that because of the incident, “it was decided it was best that this faculty member was no longer part of the Hamline community"....

An amusing review of MacAskill's longtermism

Here; this bit made me laugh:

Though I fully recognize that this is not an argument, I confess to a strong aversion to this weird band of “effective altruists,” who devote their lives to “doing good,” while largely confining their human relationships to fellow members of the cult and thanking God “that they are not as other men are” (Luke 18:11, KJV). Let us leave them as they anxiously compute their “carbon footprints,” and seek the foundations of ethics in a more human way.

Blast from the past: Tips on teaching a graduate seminar for the first time?

Back in 2012.

Richard Marshall interviews Bishop Berkeley...

...at 3:16 AM.

Reasons you didn't get the job that have nothing to do with you or the quality of your application

Apt remarks by philosopher Paul Schofield (Bates) on Twitter; a couple of highlights:

The ad is written with a specific candidate in mind, who the department intends to hire. That candidate is not you.

The department thinks you're too much like, or not enough like, the other members of the department (somehow, both of these are reasons for throwing out a candidate and you never know which it is when you send an application off).

There's another candidate on the market exactly like you and departments are picking between you and that person, perhaps arbitrarily or perhaps on the basis of some leg up that that person has. You are otherwise perfect, but this person's existence ruins your year/career.

In Memoriam: Gerald Press (1945-2022)

A longtime member of the philosophy faculty at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Professor Press was a scholar of ancient philosophy and also served as editor for several years of the Journal of the History of Philosophy.  He passed away on December 26, 2022.  There is a brief obituary from Hunter College here and you can learn more about his work here.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Press or wish to comment on his work.

(Thanks to Steven Nadler for alerting me to Professor Press's death.)

What better way to start the New Year than with the news that...

...the Thomist legal and moral philosopher John Finnis has been made a Commander of the British Empire.  Being Finnis, he uses the opportunity to opine:  "It is good that this award bears the name of a great and essentially beneficent institution which was conceived and pursued in a spirit of service..."  Although his bigoted views about homosexuality are well-known, it seems to me this whitewash of two centuries of imperial rape, exploitation and bloody murder is far more appalling, admitting of no rationalization in terms of Catholic dogma.  What an embarrassment for Oxford.