Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll covers: The Stealers, "Parachute Woman," 2021

The Stealers are a British band from Brighton, with not even 50 regular "listeners" on Spotify! But they have a great cover of this Rolling Stones number from 1967 off the classic Beggars Banquet:

 

 

Blast from the past: Good career paths for undergraduate philosophy majors? (LINK NOW FIXED)

Back in 2011, with reader discussion.

"Marx" in the Routledge Philosophers series

Jaime Edwards and I delivered the penultimate draft of our manuscript on "Marx" to the press yesterday.  I'm sure we'll be making revisions after getting referee reports and feedback at a conference on the manuscript in early January, but with luck the book will appear in fall 2024 or at the latest by spring 2025.  Thanks to those who have written over the years inquiring about the book.  Here's the tentative table of contents, for those who might be interested:  Download Toc edwards leiter marx

 

In Memoriam: Paul Woodruff (1943-2023)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 25--SOME VERY NICE REMEMBRANCES OF PAUL IN THE COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME

A longtime faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was only recently emeritus, Professor Woodruff was best-known for his work on Greek philosophy (especially Socrates, the Sophists and Thucydides), and the philosophy of theater.  There is an informative obituary here, and you can read about his final, forthcoming book here. (Thanks to Curtis Sparrer for the pointers.)

Professor Woodruff wrote about his illness, and about life, here.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Woodruff or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.

Blast from the past: Crispin Wright on becoming a philosopher

Back in 2009.

Anthropology conference will not permit a panel on "biological sex"

What an embarrassment for a field which already has a terrible reputation for political bias interfering with scholarship.   Let's hope philosophy doesn't go the same way, but I must note that the tenured philosopher who sent this to me said, "If you post about this please don't say I sent it to you, for obvious reasons."

For an actual biologist's take on biological sex, see this (and the other embedded links).

Why numbers are not objects, and other topics in philosophy of mathematics

An interview with philosopher Alexander Paseau (Oxford).

Panpsychism makes it to "Scientific American"

Yikes!

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

Blast from the past: Dick Cavett on Paul Weiss

Back in 2016.  (See also.)

Mindless jurisprudence-bashing on Twitter (updated)

Speaking of "impotent rage" and the Dunning-Kruger Effect, there was an amazing display of both on Twitter last week, all prompted by Stephen Sachs, a constitutional law scholar at Harvard, sharing on Twitter his syllabus for his "reading group" in jurisprudence, whose stated aim was to address "the nature of law and legal obligation, the relationship between law and morals, and the role that philosophical issues can or should play in the actual practice of law."   His syllabus was completely reasonable (as any expert could tell you), although it certainly included texts I would not assign, and omitted some I usually do assign:  but that is hardly surprising.  The point is the syllabus was perfectly appropriate for the topics and the level of instruction (i.e., this was not meant to be an advanced course in jurisprudence).

The syllabus, however, provoked an orgy of online stupidity and anti-intellectualism because most of the authors were (guess what?) "white men."  Most of the authors, of course, were actually Jews, many of whom lived through the period in academia when no one considered them "white men," but we put this little irony to one side.   Alex Green, an international lawyer on the law faculty at the University of York, got things started with this remarkable outburst:

 

As I observed on Twitter:

The giveaway is that Green actually has the audacity to say that the topics Professor Sachs is covering do not constitute "real jurisprudence," which is tantamount to confirming he knows nothing about the subject.  I take it what he really means to say is he's not interested in the core topics in general jurisprudence, but in something else that he thinks of as jurisprudential.  That's fine, and not notable, but then he should avoid smearing those who are interested in general jurisprudence

Lederman on the tasks for Chinese philosophy scholarship

Philosopher Jeremy Goodman calls to my attention this essay by philosopher Harvey Lederman (who does formal work, but also works on Chinese philosophy) on the tasks confronting Chinese philosopy, and suggested it might make a good topic for discussion; an excerpt:

The meat that scholars of Chinese philosophy have in our mouths are these curious, beautiful,
and inspiring texts. As I see it, our job as scholars is to tell the story of these texts: to understand the people who wrote them as well as the people who read them; to bring to life their ideas, regardless of whether they seem familiar or unapproachably strange; and to determine as best we can which of these ideas are plausible and which are not. Our job is to teach students to read these texts with care, with reverence 敬, but also with a critical, skeptical eye. In both our writing and in our teaching, our job, like the impersonator 尸 of the dead at a ritual, is to bring these ideas to life in a very literal sense, to make it possible for others to have a real conversation with them, in the hope that all of us can better understand their authors’ beliefs and the challenges they faced as they sought to live virtuous lives in often quite challenging political circumstances.

I am afraid that this job is not glamorous or easy. It requires humility, patience, and an exacting
discipline. The texts often do not speak to the most exciting recent trends. But our job is still to impersonate them, even when they don’t talk about what we most wish they did. This job can be a lonely one. We wake up in the morning and wonder if we really need to re-read hundreds of pages of challenging, confusing passages again, and the only person who says we need to isourselves. The job is also slow. We watch our colleagues (or perhaps another half of ourselves) produce dozens of papers or books in other areas. But our jobs cannot be done quickly—we cannot write those dozens of books—since we must respect, reread, and rethink, our texts. Our work has only the slow glory that belongs to the miniaturist, a glory realized in details, which appears in long-labored works only to those who are willing to look closely themselves.

This is well-said, and not at all specific to the study of Chinese philosophy it seems to me.  Comments are open for reader reactions.

Ibram Kendi's "Antiracist Center" at BU implodes

The student newspaper at Boston University reports:

Three years [since its founding], after at least $43 million in grants and gifts and what sources say has been an underwhelming output of research, the Center for Antiracist Research laid off almost all of its staff last week.

Multiple former staff members allege that a mismanagement of funds, high turnover rate and general disorganization have plagued the Center since its inception.

The $43 million, according to 2021 budget records obtained by The Daily Free Press, includes general support, such as the $10 million from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, as well as donations for specific projects.

The document, which is not an all-inclusive list of donors, also lists TJ Maxx’s foundation, Stop & Shop and Peloton as donating over a million dollars....

A week after the layoffs, BU announced Wednesday that they received complaints “focused on the center’s culture and its grant management practices"....

The Compliance Services Office received an anonymous complaint in 2021 about the Center from Saida Grundy, an associate professor of sociology at BU and former CAR employee.

The complaint detailed multiple high-level employees leaving suddenly and allegations of a workplace culture that included fear of retaliation and discrimination.

An apt takedown of the awful Rupert Murdoch, the man who helped wreck America...

...by Michelle Goldberg, one of the two NYT opinion writers I actually read on occasion (the other is Jamelle Bouie); an excerpt from the end:

Murdoch’s legacy is decided. We are hurtling toward another government shutdown, egged on by Hannity. The electorate that Fox helped shape, and the politicians it indulges, have made this country ungovernable. An unbound Trump may well become president again, bringing liberal democracy in America to a grotesque end. If so, it will be in large part Murdoch’s fault. “The Murdochs feel bad, about Tucker, about Trump, about themselves,” writes Wolff. Just not bad enough.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Sweetwater, "Why Oh Why," 1968

This Los Angeles-based band (active in the late 1960s and early 1970s) was supposed to be the opening act at Woodstock, but got stuck in traffic, so they performed after Richie Havens (whose performance made the movie).  This was the closing number of their debut album, and a nice one:

Comments are open for those who want to share links to other Sweetwater favorites.

New "Technology Ethics" podcast

Philosopher Sven Nyholm (LMU Munich) writes:

John Danaher (Senior Lecturer, University of Galway's Law School) and I--Sven Nyholm (Professor of the Ethics of AI, LMU Munich) - have just started a new podcast series on the ethics of technology, which will run for one season consisting of nine episodes: the "technology ethics podcast". The podcast follows the structure of my recent book This is Technology Ethics: An introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023). The intended audience for the podcast: professors teaching courses on technology ethics, students taking courses in the subject, or anybody who might be interested in the ethics of technology. The podcast is as of today available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, etc, and it also has its own website: https://technologyethicspod.wordpress.com

Where junior tenure-track faculty at the "top 20" PhD programs got their PhD, 2023-24 (corrected)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 12--CORRECTED

Here is where the current untenured tenure-track faculty in philosophy at the top twenty U.S. programs got their Ph.D. (or D.Phil.):

1.  Harvard University (10)

2.  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (7)

2.  New York University (7)

4. Yale University (5)

5.  Princeton University (4)

5.  Rutgers University, New Brunswick (4)

5.  University of California, Berkeley (4)

8.  Columbia University (3)

9.  Oxford University (2) (both at Southern California)

9.  University of Chicago (2) (both Columbia/Barnard)

9.  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2)

9.  University of Southern California (2) (both at Michigan)

These programs each had one graduate on tenure-track at the top twenty programs:  CUNY, U Mass/Amherst, UC Irvine, Buffalo, British Columbia, Indiana, DePaul, UC Riverside, Harvard Government Dept., Toronto, Potsdam, Cambridge, UC San Diego, Texas, Brown, Stanford, Cornell, Pittsburgh, Penn.

The 2022-23 list is here, and the 2019-20 list is here.

I list the Ph.D. by the school at which they are teaching below the fold:

What does "tenure" really mean in Australia?

With the bloodbath at ACU, and the dubious reasons given for it, one has to wonder whether having a "tenured appointment" at an Australian university means much or creates any meaningful legal rights or entitlements?  Consider what happened at ACU:   starting in 2019, philosophers were recruited, often from tenured positions around the world, to a new research Institute devoted to "core" analytic philosophy; they were offered the Australian equivalent of tenure; in 2021, a new Vice-Chancellor came on board, the "unreconstructed Hegelian," and two years later their jobs were gone.   Is this what tenure means in Australia:  you have it as long as the Vice-Chancellor appreciates your research?

One ACU philosopher noted on Twitter that the provost of the Australian Catholic University, Meg Stuart, told him "that being sacked from a continuing contract less than a year after moving to the country is normal for universities in Australia, which must remain 'agile.'"  Is this "normal"?  If so, then tenure does not exist in Australia.

Comments from readers knowledgeable about Australian employment law and tenure practices welcome.

 

ACU's rationalization for killing the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy and cutting back the other research Institutes

Since a lot of folks in Australia have been visiting the blog lately because of the coverage of the ACU disaster, I've been hearing from a lot of academics in fields other than philosophy.  One sent me the "Thematic Review"--basically the hatchet document meant to justify dismantling the research Institutes:  Download ACU Thematic Review of Research and Research Training - Final report -_.   The Directors of all the Institutes wrote a response (which was sent to all faculty in all the Institutes):  Download ACU Research Institute Directors Response to 2023 Thematic Review of Research and Research Training.

In Memoriam: Gianni Vattimo (1936-2023)

A longtime professor at the University of Turin, where he was emeritus, Professor Vattimo was a leading exponent and defender of "postmodern" philosophy in Italy and in Europe, although somewhat less-known in the Anglosphere.  There is an obituary in Italian here.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Vattimo, or from those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.

(Thanks to Mattia Riccardi for the pointer.)

Blast from the past: Some observations about twitter, esp. philosophy-related twitter

Back in 2020, and still apt, alas.  The only good news is Elon Musk seems to be destroying Twitter, so maybe it will go away?

In Memoriam: Michael Scriven (1928-2023)

Professor Scriven had an eclectic career that ranged widely in both topics and institutions.  He wrote well-known papers on the philosophy of scientific explanation (including famous counter-examples to Hempel's covering law model of explanation), and later became a prominent figure in philosophy of education with his work on "evaluation."   He taught during his long career at Berkeley, Indiana/Bloomington, Western Michigan University, Western Australia, and finally at the Claremont Graduate School, where he was emeritus.  The CGS memorial notice is here and from the American Educational Research Association here.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Scriven, or for those who would like to comment on the significance of his work.

ADDENDUM:  There's a charming anecdote about meeting Scriven from Bas van Fraassen here.

Hermann Helmholtz talks to Richard Marshall...

...at 3:16 AM.

Fragments by Maimonides discovered in Cambridge University library

Story here.

(Thanks to David Livingstone Smith for the pointer.)

Statement by Dianoia Institute of Philosophy on Proposed ACU Change Plan

The following statement from the Dianoia Institute at the Australian Catholic University was shared with me:

The Australian Catholic University has recently proposed a change plan that includes the disestablishment of the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy. After the creation of the Dianoia Institute in 2019, ACU’s PhD programme in Philosophy became the second highest ranked amongst Catholic institutions in the English-speaking world (after the University of Notre Dame). With its disestablishment, scholars who were convinced to join ACU in building a centre for world-class philosophy research (often leaving permanent positions at more stable universities and uprooting their families in the process) will be made redundant.

This change plan targets for redundancies 13 philosophers as well as 35 academic positions in history, political science, and theology and religious studies. The rationale offered for these draconian cuts is financial. But spending on academic staff at ACU has remained flat from 2017 to 2023, during most of which the university was enjoying surpluses. It is only in 2022, after a change in administration, that the university began running deficits. The academics in positions marked for redundancy did not cause these budgetary problems, but will bear the brunt of cuts whilst the university administration that turned a streak of surpluses into deficits retain their jobs.

According to ACU’s mission and identity statement, “Within the Catholic intellectual tradition and acting in Truth and Love, Australian Catholic University is committed to the pursuit of knowledge, the dignity of the human person and the common good.” The Catholic Church has repeatedly emphasized – from Aeterni Patris in 1879 through to Fides et Ratio in 1998 – the centrality of philosophy to the Catholic intellectual tradition, and to the mission of Catholic colleges and universities. This change plan would vitiate philosophy and other humanities at ACU, do lasting damage to its reputation, and run counter to the moral ideals the university holds itself to in its commitment to human dignity and the common good.

We ask you to oppose this change plan by signing the petition to Save the Humanities at ACU and the National Tertiary Education Union’s petition; and by emailing Vice-Chancellor Zlatko Skrbis ([email protected]), the DVC-Research Abid Khan ([email protected]), Acting Provost Chris Lonsdale ([email protected]), the email address set up for consultation on the change plan ([email protected]), and members of the University Senate ([email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]).  Please also cc: the Minister of Education Jason Clare ([email protected]).

Cc'ing the Minister seems particularly important:  this whole fiasco sends the message to the world that tenure means nothing in Australia, even for distinguished academics!  If ACU is permitted to follow through on this treachery, it will hurt all Australian universities in their efforts to recruit academics from overseas.

"Save the Humanities at Australian Catholic University"

Professor Finlay calls to my attention a new petition on behalf of all the programs and faculty targeted by the "restructuring" plan.

How to support the philosophers at the Dianoia Institute at ACU

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM THIS MORNING--MULTIPLE UPDATES (COMMENTS ARE ALSO NOW OPEN FOR MORE INFORMATION)

See the comments by Stephanie Collins and Stephen Finlay on the earlier thread (and scroll down) for information about how to voice your support for the Institute and the philosophers whose livelihood is being threatened.  The faculty union has also launched a petition here, which readers should sign.

As the petition makes clear, the villain in this story is ACU Vice-Chancellor Zlatko Skrbis, who came to ACU in 2021 (so after the creation of Dianoia) and seems to have a robust commitment to mediocrity.  His PhD is in sociology from Flinders University, and his scholarly profile suggests he thinks of himself as a philosopher, albeit not in the Dianoia mode.  I suspect his "leadership" [sic] lies behind the particular animus towards philosophy in the restructuring plan.

ADDENDUM:  An administrative contact at ACU, who had handled their previous blog advertising, asked yesterday that the ad for PhD applications for Dianoia be removed from the blog, for understandable reasons.  ACU had paid for the ad, but given the recent developments, it does not make sense to be recruiting PhD students to an Institute that is about to be "disestablished."

The downsides of virtual reality

Philosopher of science James Ladyman (Bristol) discusses these and other issues in connection with David Chalmers's recent book:

(Professor Laydman flags for me two errors: Erik M Conway is the co-author of Merchants of Doubt. Also the term ‘digital enclosures’ comes from sociology, specifically Mark Andrejevic:  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10714420701715365?journalCode=gcrv20.)

Blast from the past: SEP's coverage of Marxism and feminism, a revealing study in contrasts

Back in 2019, and still relevant, although there has been some improvement (there is now an entry on Gramsci, for example).

Two senior hires for Oxford University: Chadha from Monash, Fletcher from Minnesota

Monima Chadha, currently at Monash University, will become Professor of Indian Philosophy at Lady Margaret Hall (effective April 1, 2024); and Samuel Fletcher, currently at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul, will become Professor of Philosophy of Physics at Merton College (effective September 1, 2024).

AI means professors need to raise their grading standards

English professor Michael Clune comments.

Australian Catholic University proposes to "disestablish" its Dianoia Institute of philosophy... (UPDATED)

...and eliminate 11 faculty lines, although these faculty can compete for just four positions that will now be located in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry (another research institute that is surviving this process).  (The draft plan--which I've been unable to upload--was sent to me by someone not in philosophy or even at the ACU.)  ACU's budgetary problems have been apparent for awhile, but these proposals are pretty dramatic.  In the last PGR, ACU, thanks to Dianoia, emerged as the third best philosophy program in Australasia, and tied for 32nd best in the Anglophone world.   If the plan, which must still go before the faculty senate, is approved, I would expect ACU to drop off the map.

The situation in Israel: "what's all the fuss about?"

Philosopher David Enoch explains in this video:

 

Peter Ludlow asked ChatGPT to rank philosophers and departments...

...and the results are entertaining (and not wholly ridiculous, either, although some answers are bizarre):  Download ChatGPT philosophy rankings

Interview with Bob Goodin, former editor of JPP, in a Swedish philosophy journal, who discusses the disaster that "Open Access" has been for quality journals

Professor Goodin discusses the JPP fiasco, noted previously, although legal liability constrains what he can say:

I can’t say much about that episode, or dealings with Wiley around the journal more generally, without rendering myself liable to lawsuits for breach of ‘commercial-in-confidence’. Not, I hasten to add (to avoid other lawsuits), that they have made any specific threats in that direction. But the very fact that the possibility occurs to me tells you something about the nature of the ending, I suppose.

Wiley was not contractually required to give any explanation of why they fired me as jpp editor, and they gave me none. So I can only guess as to their reasons. Thinking that there may have been commercial imperatives at work, I asked around among other publisherfriends about those in a general way. I’ll summarize those conversations below. As I say, I have no idea whether any of that was actually what was behind Wiley’s behaviour vis-a-vis jpp. (Lawyers: note well that litigation-proofing disclaimer!)

Still, the general is probably of more interest than the particular, anyway.  Based on what I have gleaned from sitting on editorial boards of other journals and from those conversations with other publishers, here is what I think has been going on in the larger world of journal publishing. Up to (and in some cases through) the end of the last century, publishers sold subscriptions separately for each journal.  Librarians subscribed or not to any given journal on the basis of their (or their local advisers’) perceptions of journal quality. Hence, back in those days, the publisher’s commercial interest in maximizing subscription income aligned perfectly with the editors’ interest in publishing an academically high-quality product. 

In the years since, publishers began selling their journals to libraries packaged in a ‘bundle’. In that world, the quality of any given journal matters less, and the sheer volume of what was in the bundle comes to matter much more. Often those bundled products are sold to purchasing consortia of many libraries, further reducing the power of any given librarian to exercise quality control via purchasing decisions. The Open Access beat-up has, inadvertently, been the death knell of quality academic publishing, driving a fatal wedge between the incentives of publishers and those of journal editors.

Mistranslation of Newton's First Law discovered after nearly 300 years...

...by philosopher Daniel Hoek at Virginia Tech!

Plato's Cave raising the rent

Sign of the times.

(Thanks to Ethan Seidenberg for the pointer.)

Philosopher's Annual, ten top papers from 2022

From Patrick Grim:

The Philosopher’s Annual volume 42

from the literature of 2022

James Allen (Toronto), “Radicalism and Moderation in the New Academy,” from Phronesis

Elizabeth Barnes (Virginia), “Gender without Gender Identity: The Case of Cognitive Disability,” from Mind

Richard Bradley (LSE), “Impartial Evaluation under Ambiguity,” from Ethics

Sarah Buss (Michigan), “Personal ideals and the ideal of rational agency,” from Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Eddy Keming Chen (UC San Diego), “Fundamental Nomic Vagueness,” from the Philosophical Review

Karolina Hübner (Cornell), “Representation and Mind-Body Identity in Spinoza’s Philosophy,” from the Journal of the History of Philosophy

Yoaav Isaacs (Baylor), John Hawthorne (Southern California & Australian Catholic U), and Jeffrey Sanford Russell (Southern California), “Multiple Universes and Self-Locating Evidence,” from the Philosophical Review

Chunghyoung Lee (Pohang University), “I Am Not the Zygote I Came from because a Different Singleton Could Have Come from It,” from the Philosophical Review

Jake Quilty-Dunn (Rutgers), Nicolas Porot (Mohammed VI Polytechnic U), and Eric Mandelbaum (CUNY), “The Best Game in Town: The Re-Emergence of the Language of Thought Hypothesis Across the Cognitive Sciences,” from Behavioral and Brain Sciences

 Francesca Zaffora Blando (Carnegie-Mellon), “Bayesian Merging of Opinions and Algorithmic Randomness,” from The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

 

"Realist Jurisprudence: Selected Essays"

A Spanish translation by Dr. Francisco M. Mora-Sifuentes of eight of my essays on realist jurisprudence and related themes (with a new preface by me and an introduction by Dr. Natalia Scavuzzo from the University of Genoa) is now available from Zela, the leading South American publisher of legal philosophy.

God bless England...

...it may be a dying country, but its academics still know how to speak plainly.   Here is the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity's own accounting of the holders of the "Ely Professorship:"

John Martin Creed was born on 14 October 1889 in Leicester, the son of a local Vicar. He was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School, Leicester, and went up to Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, in 1908. He proved a brilliant student, taking a first in Classics in Part 1 and in a first in Theology in Part 2 of the Tripos. Ordained to a curacy in Bradford in 1913, the following year he returned to Cambridge as a Fellow of his college and chaplain from 1915. He spent two years as a chaplain to the Forces 1917-19 and on his return was elected to a Fellowship at St John’s College, where he became Dean. In 1926, he was elected Ely Professor. This was on the basis of his scholarly endeavours, as he was not considered particularly effective with students or in teaching.

(Thanks to FB friend Gary Chartier who shared this.)

Highlights from the summer blog: August

For those who missed them, some blog highlights from August:

I seem to be catching on in Asia

The "bloodbath" at West Virginia University [sic]

First "the heckler's veto," not the "lone wolf's veto"

Steven Salaita is now back in academia

The "Elephant in the Room" in the debate over judicial review in Israel

Suspicious job search in philosophy at the University of Genoa

Nathan Osserof-Spicer still defaming philosophers:  this time he falsely accuses a philosopher of plagiarism!

Does font affect writing?

Nathan Ballantyne talks to Daniel Stoljar at The Workbench.

Highlights from the summer blog: July

Some more highlights from the summer, for those who may have missed them:

A serious blow for faculty speech in the 4th Circuit in the U.S.

In Memoriam:  Harry G. Frankfurt (1929-2023)

Philosophers and political theorists elected as Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy

The canary in the coal mine for academic freedom at Texas A&M University

Reader experiences with peer review?

A reader writes:

How do people feel about peer review? Does it really help? Has it made papers better in authors’ experience? There is an overwhelming amount of commentary about how peer review is no longer in any sense the guarantee of quality that it is often assumed to be. The publishers have not wanted to take this message on board – much like they didn’t want to take open access seriously – but within the academy, I’m seeing critiques from all disciplines, and particularly from the sciences, which drove the uptake of peer review for the social sciences and humanities.

In my view, the fundamental problem is the way that the modern university fetishizes “output” in terms of journal publication (and books depending on the discipline), which creates enough perverse incentives that lead to mediocre writing, plagiarism and outright fraudulence, which to be fair, can’t be detected in most cases by peer reviewers.

Here is a good and representative summary of the various discontents.

 https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review

The main pernicious effect of peer review in philosophy (but probably in other disciplines) is to encourage conformity and conservativism.  That may be unavoidable, and built into the idea of a Wissenschaft.

Thoughts from readers on peer review?   Submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.

Nagel on J.L. Austin and his role in WWII...

...at the London Review of Books.  A side of Austin most won't have known!

(Thanks to Christopher Morris and David Zimmerman for pointers.)

Highlights from the summer blog: June

Now that my summer blogging quasi-hiatus is ending (see here for the new schedule), here are some summer highlights, for those who may have missed them, starting with June:

In Memoriam:  Henry E. Allison (1937-2023)

In Memoriam:  Richard W. Miller (1945-2023)

Williamson to continue teaching at Oxford through 2026

The Supreme Court's affirmative action in admissions decision

More on the film about Spinoza's ex-communication

From an Israeli newspaper.  (Earlier coverage:  here and here.)

(Thanks to David Livingstone Smith for the pointer.)

More on the Harvard Business School professor accused of fraud who is now suing

We noted the case here and here, and now Professor Gino's law school colleaige Larry Lessig has written in her defense:

Data Colada [a blog] offers compelling evidence that the data in four papers were manipulated. But as they plainly admit, they have no way of knowing if the anomalies they identified reflect fraud and, if so, who did the manipulation. And while anyone would presume that the beneficiary of a fraud is the most likely to have perpetrated the fraud — cui bono — it was HBS that was obligated to investigate whether that presumption is, in fact, true. The business school — like every school at Harvard — has procedures for investigating allegations of academic fraud. Those procedures were not followed in Gino’s case. Gino has filed a lawsuit against Harvard, charging them with failing to follow their own contractual procedures, while asserting absolutely that she did not manipulate any data whatsoever.

Keep that point clear: Gino is not arguing, “Mistakes were made, times were tough, I’ve got lots of work going on, etc.” Gino is claiming that she did not manipulate any data at all.

I'm glad to see that the proprietors of the blog that sparked all this are receiving financial support for their legal defense; they deserve legal representation.  (It's too bad that Professor Gino presumably has to self-fund her lawsuit.)  But the GoFundMe pitch clearly misdescribes what is going on:  "Data Colada Are Being Sued for Raising Scientific Concerns about Published Research."  No they're not:  they're being sued for accusing Professor Gino of "fraud," i.e., of intentionally altering her data in order to get the results she wanted.  Their data does not support that, as Professor Lessig notes; they could have avoided being sued if they had simply reported the data anomalies, and said nothing more.  But that's not what they did, and now we will find out whether the allegations of fraud were reckless or not.  I'd put more stock in the findings in court than in a blog or Professor Lessig's assessment.  We shall see.

UPDATE:   Some readers point out that the blog authors, while alleging fraud, did not specifically allege that Professor Gino was responsible.  I imagine that will be part of their defense.  I also expect they will argue that Professor Gino is a "public figure" (she gave a TED talk after all!), and will move to dismiss on the grounds that the complaint does not allege facts sufficient for finding that the blog defendants acted with "actual malice" (meaning that they either knew what they were saying was false or acted with "reckless indifference" to the truth or falsity of what they were saying).  The latter will probably be their strongest defense.   This won't get Harvard Business School off the hook.

Article on whether U.S. legal system is ready for the "challenge of A.I. to human values" includes citations that seem to have been made up by Chat GPT!

Legal philosopher Matthew Kramer (Cambridge) called this article to my attention; Professor Kramer explains:

[T]here is a citation to the book LEGAL POSITIVISM: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION by Matthew H. Kramer and published by the Edinburgh University Press. The problem is that no such book exists. I have not published a book with the specified title and subtitle, nor has anyone else done so. None of my books has been published with the Edinburgh University Press.

 

I proceeded to look up the non-existent volume on the Web, and I discovered that a request to a chatbot had been made a few months before the dissemination of the paper in which that imaginary book is cited. The request asked the chatbot for references to works on legal positivism and natural-law theories. The chatbot provided three references, including the one to the non-existent book by Matthew Kramer. The researchers at the University of Washington apparently made no effort to verify the actuality of that book, and they obviously made no effort to read it. Instead, they simply cited it for the edification of their readers.

 

Legal philosopher Matt Lister (Bond University) then pointed out to me that the article also cites the make-believe book, "Brian Leiter, Jurisprudence: Realism in theory and practice. Oxford University Press, 2007."  My Naturalizing Jurisprudence was published by OUP in 2007, and Karl Llewellyn, whose work is discussed in my book, did write a book in 1962 called Jurisprudence:  Realism in Theory and Practice.  Chat GPT, as readers by now probably know, simply predicts the next word likely to follow based on its analysis of its database.  (Professor Kramer, too, has written books on legal positivism, but not the make-believe book!)  This is why it makes up citations, as a lawyer in New York learned the hard way.  The faculty, all at the University of Washington, responsible for this should be embarrassed by their carelessness.  I trust they and others will do better in the future.

MacIntyre on the moral philosophy of the 20th-century...

...and a synoptic account of the evolution of his own views.  I found his explanation of the relevance of Marxism to his intellectual evolution particularly interesting:

Marx and Engels had argued that every morality is the morality of some particular social and economic order and that every moral philosophy articulates and makes explicit the judgments, arguments, and presuppositions of some particular morality, either in such a way as to defend both that morality and the social and economic order of which it is the expression, or in such a way as to undermine them. And my acknowledgment of the truth of this thesis was reinforced by my encounters with social anthropology, especially first with the work of Franz Steiner and later with that of Rodney Needham. I therefore asked: What is the distinctive morality of this social and economic order that I inhabit, and how does contemporary moral philosophy stand to that morality? And in pursuing an answer to this question I was guided not only by Marx and Engels but also by John Anderson, who had urged that, if we were to understand social institutions and relationships, we should ask not what function or purpose they serve but to what conflicts they give expression. This suggested that both the morality and the moral philosophy of the present age are best understood as milieus of conflict, sites of disagreement. But those disagreements find significantly different expression in the arenas of philosophical debate on the one hand and in those of everyday moral and political practice on the other.

In Memoriam: Stephen Gaukroger (1950-2023)

Emeritus at the University of Sydney, Professor Gaukgroger was a leading scholar of early modern philosophy and science.  His Google Scholar page gives a good sense of the range of his work and erudition.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Gaukroger or for those who would like to comment on the significance of his work.  Please submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.