Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Some more Israel-related links

This video contains no graphic images, but it does contain graphic descriptions of what the Hamas terrorists did; it's quite clear now this was not a military operation but a kind of barbaric "pillage and murder" raid, in which there was indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, destruction and the seizing of hostages. (Update:  see also this account.)

This interview with a liberal Israeli journalist trapped with his family in their "safe room" in a Kibbutz near the border makes for gripping reading; an excerpt:

[I]t’s Saturday, six in the morning, and we hear a very familiar sound: the sound of a mortar about to explode. It’s like a whistle.

My wife, Miri, immediately pushes me. We run from our bedroom to what we call the safe room. In every house in our community and other communities along the border with Gaza, there is a room that is built of very strong concrete that can withstand a direct hit from a mortar or a rocket. And in most families, that’s where they put the kids to sleep every night. So we run to the safe room where our two daughters are: Galia is three and a half years old; Carmel is one and a half years old.

They don’t know that anything is happening. We shut the door, and we wait.. I mean, this is something we’re accustomed to....

But this time, as we were packing, I heard the most chilling noise I’ve heard in my life. Automatic gunfire in the distance. First I’m hearing this gunfire from the fields. But then I hear it from the road, then I hear it from the neighborhood, and then I hear it outside my window. I’m in the room with my wife, and I hear the gunfire directly outside my window, as well as shouting. I understand Arabic. I understood exactly what was happening: that Hamas has infiltrated our kibbutz, that there are terrorists outside my window, and that I’m locked in my house and inside my safe room with two young girls, and I don’t know if anyone is going to come to save us....

Has Twitter hit the "tipping" point towards its demise?

The latest indicator:   Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, with hundreds of thousands of followers, is abandoning the ship.  Other big accounts are bleeding hundreds of followers each day, mostly due, one suspects, to folks giving up on Twitter.   I've set up an account at Bluesky, which seems to have the best chance of growth, at least for academic readers.  I'll soon begin sharing of blog post links there, as well as on Twitter.

The philosophically-minded economist Amartya Sen is *not* dead

Social media and even some blogs have been awash with this rumor, but it isn't so.

Placement from MA programs into PhD programs

Philosopher Gil Hersch at Virginia Tech has put together a metric for evaluating the quality of placement into PhD programs from MA programs in philosophy.  It covers the period 2019-2023, and the programs with the most success in placing graduates in quality programs tracks pretty exactly the programs listed in the PGR.   Professor Hersch uses the overall PGR rank as the measure of program quality, but of course sometimes a student is much better served by a program that is very strong in a specialty than overall, as Professor Hersch  recognizes.  Virginia Tech's own placement record is very strong, although it's worth noting it placed far fewer students in total than other strong MA programs like Northern Illinois, Georgia State, and Wisconsin/Milwaukee.

Professor Hersh asked that I invite discussion of his effort to quantify placement, so comments are open.  Signed comments will be preferred, but all comments must include a valid email address, which will not appear.

Another entry for the "Black Book of Capitalism"?

I'm with Marx:  capitalism is indispensable for productive plenty, so people can live decently and freely.  I'm also with Marx in believing that at some point capitalist relations of productions (i.e, the way capitalism organizes control of productive power) is a catastrophe for the well-being of the majority.  A case in point?

[T]he America of those without college degrees has been scarred by death and staggeringly shorter life spans.

Almost two-thirds of American adults do not have college degrees, and they have become increasingly excluded from good jobs, political power and social esteem. As their lives and livelihoods are threatened, their longevity declines.

In the 1970s, American life expectancy grew by about four months each year. By the 1980s, it was similar to life expectancy in other rich countries. Since then, other countries have continued to progress, with life spans increasing by more than two and a half months a year.

But the United States has slowly, gradually and then precipitously fallen behind....

A hodgepodge of commentary and perspective about the war in Israel

I don't agree with the opinon pieces, below, although they are each revealing in different ways.

A solidly pro-Israel (and Palestinian-indifferent) opinion writer in the New York Times.  Israel's interests are the only interests.

A solidly anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian opinion writer in Al Jazeera.  He does articulate what are the likely rationales for the attack, even if his vicarious pleasure in killing is creepy.

Meanwhile the relatives of some of the victims of Saturday's attack speak.

The "elephant in the room," Gaza and its history.

Philosopher wants his family to eat him when he dies

I'm not sure whether this is serious, or a joke. If it's the latter, it is amusing, in a kind of grotesque way; if the former, it is yet another indication that "public philosophy" is a sham, except when it involves sharing serious philosophy for a popular audience.

A brief comment on the war in Israel

I am flabbergasted at the massive intelligence and military failure that made it possible for Hamas soldiers to literally take over multiple towns and commit atrocities against Israeli civilizans with almost nothing standing in their way.  Netanhayu, who earned most of his political capital as a supposed guarantor of Israeli security, has failed spectacularly in this case.  His response, as a result, will surely be brutal.

Many people, including huge numbers of civilians, who were alive 24 hours ago are now dead or maimed.  Many more will be dead or maimed over the next 24, then 48, then 72 hours etc.  What a horror. 

I haven't anything useful to say, so I'll just stop with that.

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

It's now in print at University of Chicago Law Review.   Some readers may have heard of Adrian Vermeule, a prominent public law conservative (really, reactionary) at Harvard Law School.  His little manifesto is not an intellectually substantial piece of work.  For the details, read my review essay.

America is not a civilized country, a continuing saga

The two culprits are religious fundamentalism and, of course, guns:

[A]cording to an analysis published on Thursday, the rate of firearm fatalities among children under 18 increased by 87 percent from 2011 through 2021 in the United States. The death rate attributable to car accidents fell by almost half, leaving firearm injuries the top cause of accidental death in children.

The finding underscores additional data showing that firearm injuries are now the leading cause of death among Americans under 20, after excluding deaths of infants born prematurely or with congenital abnormalities.

Some 2,590 children and teenagers under the age of 18 died of firearm injuries in 2021, up from 1,311 in 2011, according to the study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics. In other industrialized countries, guns are not even among the top three causes of death for children.

"When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to be bluffing"

An interview with philosopher Alex Byrne about his book The Trouble with Gender and related topics at The Free Thinker. 

(I, for one, was not surprised by the herd-like behavior of academic philosophers, that Professor Byrne discusses, since they are a timid and conservative lot, easily frightened, even when they have tenure!)

Two more tenured hires for Johns Hopkins: Goodman from USC, Green from MIT

They are:   Jeremy Goodman (metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic), previously Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California; and E.J. Green (philosophy of mind & cognitive science), previously Associate Professor of Philosophy at MIT.   Green will also have an appointment in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences (effective January 2024).

(There is at third hire with tenure pending, that I hope to be able to announce some time this fall.)

Hannah Arendt, "white supremacist"?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 2--SOME INTERESTING COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME

Why not, everyone is these days apparently?  Some of the essay is just "guilt by association," but some of the quotes from her writing do not redound to her credit, but I don't know the texts to know whether this is cherry-picking.  Curious what readers more knowledgeable about Arendt make of this hit piece?

In Memoriam: David Burrell, C.S.C. (1933-2023)

A longtime member of the faculties of philosophy and theology at the University of Notre Dame, where he was emeritus, Professor Burrell was a leading expert on medieval philosophical theology in the Catholic, Jewish, and Islamic traditions.  There is an obituary here.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Burrell, or for those who want to comment on the significance of his work.

The spam filter caught some comments on various threads...

...which I've only now just discovered and have approved them.  Apologies.  Not sure why the system does this--very long comments are sometimes caught by the spam filter, it seems, but that doesn't apply to all of those held up in the system.

The ACU disaster and the "neoliberalization" of Australian universities...

...an analysis by an ACU PhD student at Jacobin.

An amusingly clueless review of Dennett's memoirs

This review has generated a lot of (mostly well-deserved) ridicule on Twitter, especially for this:

The 1970s was the decade in which nutty professors such as Dennett regularly dreamed up thought experiments to explore the limits of what it is to be human. Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper What Is It Like to Be a Bat? mused on whether we could still be human if we had bat-like features such as the ability to echolocate. 

Reader email, from a Continental European philosopher now in North America

From a philosopher (whose politics would no doubt put him to the left of the Democratic Party in America) who moved to this side of the pond for an academic position:

I would like to tell you that the longer I am in North America, the more I appreciate the reporting of your blog, especially about political topics within academia. As long as I taught in Europe, I thought that people are exaggerating when they were telling me about how debates about gender and race are going here. But after some experiences, especially on hiring committees, I have started to see how problematic left-wing identity politics has become.

"Wittgenstein vs Wittgenstein"

Philosopher Lee Braver comments.

Professor Gino, the embattled Harvard psychologist, creates a webpage defending her academic integrity

Here.  (Earlier coverage, and also here.)  This is a risky, and aggressive, strategy:  everything posted there will be dissected by the lawyers for the defendants.  I will say that between this, and the lawsuit, she is acting as one would expect an innocent person to act; that doesn't mean she's innocent, of course.

"On the Relevance of Etiology to Justification (with reference to Marx and Nietzsche)"

A new paper, slated for an issue of Midwest Studies in Philosophy on the topic of "Genealogy," edited by Yuval Avnur; the abstract:

Some philosophers associated with the post-Kantian Continental traditions in philosophy (for example, Marx and Nietzsche) think that the etiology of a belief can impugn the epistemic status of that belief, leading us, correctly, to be “suspicious” of it; let us call them “Etiological Critics. Many analytic philosophers, responding to these and related etiological critiques within Anglophone philosophy are unimpressed (White 2010; Srinivasan 2015). These analytic philosophers agree that facts about the etiology of belief might bring to one’s attention epistemically relevant considerations—for example, the fact that other possible epistemic peers disagree with one’s beliefs (White 2010: 576-577, 605-608)—but they deny that the etiology itself has any direct bearing on the epistemic status of belief (in particular, whether it is doxastically justified). I argue that etiology is directly relevant to the epistemic status of belief, arguing against White and Srinivasan, using examples from Marx and Nietzsche.