Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Richard Marshall interviews Macchiavelli...

...at 3:16 AM.

Austria awards nearly 9 million Euros for an "excellence cluster" project on "Knowledge in Crisis"

The project is led by philosopher Tim Crane (CEU), with participants from the Universities of Vienna, Graz, and Salzburg.  On twitter, Professor Crane reports that with matching funds, they will have about 15 million Euros over the next five years for the project.

"What good is philosophy?"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 23--NOW UPDATED WITH THE SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

An online conference to "raise the funds required to establish a Centre for Civic Engagement at Kyiv Mohyla Academy."

(Thanks to Aaron Wendland for the pointer.)

The proposed "constitutional putsch" in Israel

Philosopher and legal scholar Alon Harel (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) comments:  Download Harel 2023 Proposed Constitutional Revolution12. 

More on intuitions and reality...

...a rejoinder to Machery, from Nevin Climenhaga, also at IAITV.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: In memory of David Lindley (1944-2023)

The multi-instrumentalist (best-known for mastery of dozens of string instruments) died on March 3.  He was well-known within the rock world for the work he did with Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and Rod Stewart, among others, in the 1970s (it's his slide guitar on, for example, Browne's hit "Running on Empty").  But his most interesting work, in my book, was in the 1960s with Kaleidescope, which I've featured periodically over the years.  So here's a retrospective:

Kaleidescope, "Egyptian Garden," the lead number from their debut album in 1967:

The Stanford Law School "heckler's veto" incident involving a conservative judge

For those interested, there is more at my law school blog.

In Memoriam: John G. Slater (1930-2022)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 17--UPDATED

Professor Slater, a well-known expert on the life and work of Bertrand Russell, died in November from Covid.  He taught philosophy at the University of Toronto for more than 30 years, where he was emeritus since 1995.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Slater or who would like to comment on the significance of his work.

(Thanks to Mohan Matthen for the information.)

UPDATE:  The Toronto memorial notices is here.

Pope Benedict's engagement with Nietzsche

This is curious.  His rejoinders to Nietzsche are remarkably feeble, and suggest his engagement did not run very deep--perhaps unsurprisingly!

(Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)

Blast from the past: On the pursuit of "novelty" in jurisprudence and normative philosophy

Back in 2015, and as true today as then.

What the mindless "diversity blather" misses about serious pedagogy

I've received many appreciate messages about my response to the confused CHE piece on diversity and academic freedom.  This part of one message is worth sharing, since it captures, I suspect, what many find so offensive about the requirement of "diversity statements":

My entire career, my student body has been extraordinarily diverse.  In fact, I would estimate that north of 80% of my students have been Hispanic and/or black.  I am a middle-aged, white male.  While the ideologues might find it shocking, reviews from my students consistently tell of my genuine care for them, my accessibility, the respect that I show them, the sometimes life-changing experience that they had in their time with me.  Need I catalog in a "diversity statement" my commitment to those students or to those I might teach elsewhere?  What I do has nothing to do with such a concept.  It stems entirely from the fact that they are my students, from the fact that I am invested in their goals, their dreams, their success, regardless of their age, sex, race, sexual activities, politics, or ideologies.

More on the brazen attack on tenure and academic freedom in Florida...

...from the United Faculty of Florida.

In Memoriam: J.N. Mohanty (1928-2023)

Professor Mohanty, who was emeritus at Temple University, wrote widely on Kant and Husserl, as well as on classical Indian philosophy.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Mohanty or who wish to comment on the significance of his work.

(Thanks to Matt Kramer for the information.)

UPDATE:   Professor Wolfsdorf, Chair of the Temple Department, kindly shared the memorial notice, which is below the fold

QAnon continues to thrive in the heart of the Republican Party

This is just bizarre; here's a small taste:

ReAwaken America is sort of - it's a very popular pro-Trump road show, essentially, that travels the country. And it's all of these conspiracy theorists under the banner, as you said, of Michael Flynn and a guy named Clay Clark, who's a Tulsa radio host, who's sort of a - slash sort of entrepreneurship guru. And so it's stocked with a lot of - it's a lot of kind of COVID quacks, a lot of people, you know, pushing ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and a lot of leading QAnon figures. I went to its first event for the book in Tulsa in 2021. And I, you know, I kind of slipped past security. They said they were going to have a lot of security to keep out media and antifa because they were convinced that, you know, antifa would travel to suburban Tulsa to wreak havoc.

On the use of "fascism" in America

The historian Bruce Kuklick doesn't have very good intellectual judgment (as those who've read his work on the history of philosophy in America will know), but he has compiled some interesting stuff in his latest book on "fascism" in American political discourse; an excerpt:

[E]ven at this early stage in its history, fascism functioned as more than a neutral descriptor; it instead acted as a “foul noun of preference” that Americans “deployed … against anyone with whom they disagreed politically.” The most popular targets of opprobrium were President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal. At various points in the 1930s, a number of notable figures derided FDR or the New Deal as “fascist,” including liberal philosopher John Dewey (who worried FDR was creating a “police state”), socialist politician Norman Thomas (who worried FDR was beginning to resemble Mussolini), former Republican President Herbert Hoover (who likewise worried FDR was too similar to European dictators), and populist Senator Huey Long (who worried FDR was too close to the business class). But the president was hardly the only one ridiculed in this fashion. As Kuklick highlights, until the U.S. entry into World War II, “everyone called anyone a fascist.”

Agnes Callard profiled in The New Yorker

Here, complete with all the details of her complicated personal life!  But they missed the opportunity to include a photo of her office!

Tim Maudlin talks about laws of nature, absolute space, free will, and more...

...at Robinson's Podcast.

In Memoriam: Charles H. Kahn (1928-2023)

A leading scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, Professor Kahn spent most of his career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was emeritus.  Professor Michael Weisberg, the Chair of the Penn Department, kindly shared a memorial notice, which is below the fold. Comments are also open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Kahn or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his philosophical and scholarly contributions.

When the yahoos take over the community college

This is a warning about what may start to happen elsewhere.

(Thanks to Gregory Mayer for the pointer.)

Here's what the authoritarian future of Republican America looks like

A Repug legislator in Viktor DeSantis's Florida wants bloggers who write about the Governor, or the Attorney General, or the legislature to register with the state, or face fines.  This is obviously meant to chill speech, and will be struck down by the federal courts.  Of course, this is conjoined with an effort to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 Supreme Court case that raised the bar for public figures to prevail in defamation suits.  Sullivan adopted a sensible rule on the facts of its case, and if the rule had stayed limited to political actors, it would still be defensible today, but the concept of "public figure" has expanded wildly, which does make the rule highly vulnerable to attack.  But DeSantis wants to cut to its core, and make it easier for politicians like him to prevail in defamation actions.  And, of course, it will be easier to bring those actions even against bloggers once they are all registered with the state.  (I do not intend to register, if the law passes, and I intend to continue writing about Florida's brand of soft fascism under Viktor DeSantis.)

"The Sobby Logician"

Many readers will know Hannes Leitgeb for his work in logic and formal philosophy more generally, but he's also a composer and performer of songs!

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Small Faces, "Red Balloon," 1969

ORIGINALLY POSTED DECEMBER 16, 2017

Before Humble Pie, Steve Marriott rode to fame, especially in Britain (less so in the U.S.), with the Small Faces, though by 1969 their star was fading even in the U.K.  This great cover of the Tim Hardin tune comes from their last album (released after the band's official dissolution):

The Birkbeck catastrophe, the case of the philosophy department

We noted earlier the financial crisis at Birkbeck, produced by an incompetent administration.  Now the consequences are in for philosophy.  Six of 14 faculty are retiring or leaving according to an email sent out by the Head of the Department, philosopher Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij:

Prof Ken Gemes and Prof Susan James will be retiring. Dr Stacie Friend will be moving to Edinburgh, Dr Michael Garnett to KCL, and Dr Tim Stoll to Warwick. Dr Cristian Constantinescu will also be leaving the department. All of these will be effective in July.

The following colleagues will remain in the department: Prof Hallvard Lillehammer, Prof Robert Northcott, Dr Sarah Patterson, Dr Florian Steinberger, Dr Alex Grzankowski, Dr Keith Hossack, Dr Sophia Connell, and myself.

A more substantial response to "Diversity Sometimes Trumps Academic Freedom"...

UPDATE:  The published letter is here.

...which I noted yesterday.  Here's the letter to the editor I sent to CHE:

To the Editor

Rutgers law professor Stacy Hawkins writes that, “The First Amendment, and the principle of academic freedom which emanates from it, is not exempt from the rule that no right is absolute.”   The First Amendment protection for academic freedom, however, only applies to faculty at public universities; faculty at private universities typically enjoy a contractual commitment from their university to protect academic freedom pursuant to the AAUP definition.  Employers can not violate contractual rights because they want to pursue other objectives incompatible with them:  it is thus false that “academic freedom may sometimes…need to cede to the responsibility academic administrators have to effective the institutional commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.”  Academic administrators who take that approach are breaching a contract with their employees.  (Many public university faculty, it should be noted, also enjoy contractual protection for academic freedom.) 

Even in cases where the First Amendment does apply, there are, as Professor Hawkins presumably knows, hardly any exceptions to its protection when it comes to punishing speech based on its content (e.g., because it offends against diversity values).  There is certainly no “diversity” exception to the First Amendment, just as there is no “hate speech” exception.   So the whole “balancing interests” framing of this essay is completely beside the point.

A computational linguist on "large language models" as "bullshitters"

Here; an excerpt:

How should we interpret the natural-sounding (i.e., humanlike) words that come out of LLMs? The models are built on statistics. They work by looking for patterns in huge troves of text and then using those patterns to guess what the next word in a string of words should be. They’re great at mimicry and bad at facts. Why? LLMs...have no access to real-world, embodied referents. This makes LLMs beguiling, amoral, and the Platonic ideal of the bullshitter, as philosopher Harry Frankfurt, author of On Bullshit, defined the term. Bullshitters, Frankfurt argued, are worse than liars. They don’t care whether something is true or false....

Christopher Bobonich (Stanford) discusses whether ancient ethics are relevant today...

...at Robinson's Podcast.

Triumphs of psychological science

"Small Penises and Fast Cars:  Evidence for a Psychological Link."

When does DEI ("diversity, equity, inclusion" for the un-indoctrinated) trump academic freedom?

I'll have more to say about this pathetically bad (and factually inaccurate) CHE essay tomorrow, but my colleague Jerry Coyne covers it at his blog (including with some observations I made on a local listserve about the legal incomeptence of the essay).

Israel, judicial independence and democracy

In light of recent attacks on judicial independence in Israel, philosophers Cora Diamond and Harold Langsam both called my attention to this hard-hitting opinion piece in the NYT, whose key argument is that:

On the surface, the battle between Mr. Netanyahu and his critics does indeed look familiar. In recent years, from Brazil to Hungary to India to the United States, anti-government protesters have accused authoritarian-minded populists of threatening liberal democracy. But look closer at Israel’s political drama and you notice something striking: The people most threatened by Mr. Netanyahu’s authoritarianism aren’t part of the movement against it.

The demonstrations include very few Palestinians. In fact, Palestinian politicians have criticized them for having, in the words of former Knesset member Sami Abu Shehadeh, “nothing to do with the main problem in the region — justice and equality for all the people living here.”

The reason is that the movement against Mr. Netanyahu is not like the pro-democracy opposition movements in Turkey, India or Brazil — or the movement against Trumpism in the United States. It’s not a movement for equal rights. It’s a movement to preserve the political system that existed before Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition took power, which was not, for Palestinians, a genuine liberal democracy in the first place. It’s a movement to save liberal democracy for Jews.

This is mostly true, but also a non-sequitur:  even in an apartheid state, the loss of judicial independence can make the place worse, and especially when the courts are the only branch of government which sometimes defend the rights of the victims of apartheid-like policies.  All Israeli Jews and Arabs will be worse off if judicial independence is destroyed; the situation of the Palestinians in the occupied territories will be mostly unchanged (although I can't see how they would not eventually be worse off if the judiciary is fully subordinated to the right-wing coalition).

Gabriel Greenberg (UCLA) talks about semiotics, representation, and film...

...at Robinson's Podcast.

Richard Marshall interviews de La Mettrie...

...at 3:16 AM.  Now this is an interview that's hard to come by!