Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

"Authoritarians...are only too aware that universities are primary sites of critique and dissent"

Certainly true in recent decades, although at other times universities have been complicit in tyranny, rather than sites of resistance.  If Trump wins (which is still a very live possibility), he has various tools at his disposal to undermine even the wealthy private universities, ranging from withholding federal aid on (fake) grounds that universities are discriminating against Jews, to taxing university endowments, to conditioning federal aid on maintaining artifically low tuition.  

Final Draft of faculty lists for U.S. Departments for the 2024 PGR

Professors Christopher Pynes and Rob Kar, co-editors of the PGR, have shared with me a second draft of the U.S. faculty lists for the 2024 PGR, on which they welcome feedback (their contact information is on the draft, and please direct all questions and comments to them):  Download US Facultly List Sep 9 Version_

This is the final draft that will be made public for comments and corrections.  (Important addendum:  Professor Kar reminds me that some programs that have asked for inclusion in the survey are still under consideration by the editors, who will soon consult with the Advisory Board.  Those programs are not reflected here, but may yet be added to the final survey.)

To recap from last time:  

Only faculty in the departments should email about changes that need to be made.   The faculty lists aim to include those with a tenure home in the philosophy department, with all others involved in training graduate students listed as "cognate" faculty.  "Part-time" faculty are half time, unless otherwise noted.

Note that some programs have been added to the faculty lists for purposes of the 2024 survey (and some that have fallen well outside the top 50 in past iterations have been removed).  A reminder that the editors decided in 2021 to only note with an asterisk faculty over the age of 75 in the fall following the report (so fall 2025).  There has been a clear change in retirement patterns over the last decade, so that faculty who are still teaching at 70 are mostly still teaching at 75, but those still teaching at 75 are rarely teaching at 80.  So being 75 is far more relevant now than merely being 70,which seems to me right.

 

Richard Hofstadter's commencement address at Columbia in June 1968

Lots of it is still relevant to our own time, unsurprisingly.  His conception of the university is also essentially that of the Kalven Report, which despite the current fad of lying about it or misrepresenting it, is still the only viable conception for a research university.

(Thanks to Chris Haufe for the pointer.)

New members of the Advisory Board of the Philosophical Gourmet Report

Professors Kar and Pyne, the editors of the forthcoming PGR, have shared with me a list of new Advisory Board members, and it is a wonderful group and I'm delighted they will contribute and no doubt improve the resource:

Jeffrey Barrett (University of California, Irvine)

Gwen Bradford (University of Toronto)

Stephan Hartmann (LMU Munich)

Jenann Ismael (Johns Hopkins University)

Niko Kolodny (University of California, Berkeley)

Mark Murphy (Georgetown University)

Ian Phillips (Johns Hopkins University)

Hanna Pickard (Johns Hopkins University)

Christopher Shields (University of California, San Diego)

Jessica Wilson (University of Toronto)

(You can see the existing members of the Advisory Board here.)

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Jo Jo Gunne, "Broken Down Man," 1973

We haven't featured this California band (started by ex-Spirit members) since 2018.  This rollicking number comes from their second album:

Feel free to add links to favorite Jo Jo Gunne songs/performances.

Hitler's 1932 campaign

In his most successful campaign, Hitler didn't run on Jew hatred, or Lebensraum, he ran on a promise to heal the economic despair of the Great Depression (which he actually did, but that's another matter):

("Our last hope:  Hitler.")

Trump is no Hitler, despite certain affinities:  unlike Hitler, for example, Trump has no core ideology.  And the significant inflation of the last few years (which is dramatic and visible to every voter every time they go to the supermarket) falls far short of the crisis of global capitalism that was the Great Depression.  Yet our election is still a toss-up, although at least the Democrats have a chance now.  But throwing gold-plated bones to the ruling class is not the path to Democratic victory.  Sherrod Brown, an actual pro-worker Democrat, is going to win re-election to the Senate in "deep red" Ohio, a state Trump is forecast to win by 5-10 points.  What a shame Brown isn't heading the national ticket.

More bad press for Wiley

Wiley's reputation among philosophers (and other academics) has been in free-fall with the various journal disasters that we have noted here, and this latest development won't help: "Academic publisher Wiley has revealed it is set to make $44 million (£33 million) from Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnerships that it is not giving authors the opportunity to opt-out from." 

"Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy," updated again at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Here.  A lot of (mostly) stylistic revisions to the text, some small substantive ones, plus a whole new subsection, on "Nietzsche's Sentimentalism," and an updated bibliography (and updated references in the text).

I want to thank Ed Zalta, the editor, for the splendid job he has done with SEP over the last quarter-century (and then some).  What a wonderful resource!

Meanwhile, in America, it's plutocracy as usual...

...as the Democratic nominee Kamala Harris adjusts her policy proposals to reflect the interest of the prudent, but still greedy, wing of the ruling class:  "Stepping up her efforts to win over the business community, Ms. Harris announced that she would increase the capital gains tax at a far lower rate than what Mr. Biden had proposed — a move that came after pressure from her campaign’s biggest donors to back off some of its most aggressive tax proposals."   Please note that the "business community" consists of a small number of fellow citizens, who can vote just like the rest of us.  Unlike the rest of us, they can buy off candidates. 

Obviously there is still no choice at all between Harris and the monster child.  It's just "business as usual" in the American plutocracy.

"Universality over diversity"

Philosopher David Lobina discusses.

2nd Draft: faculty lists for Anglophone departments outside the U.S. (Australasia, Canada, U.K.)

Here is the 2nd draft of the faculty lists for Anglophone departments outside the U.S.:  Download PGR faculty lists non-USA 5September2024.   

The goal is to rank the top 15 in the UK, and the top 5 in Canada and Australasia.  All corrections should go to Professors Pynes and Kar (their contact information is on the draft).  Please recall:

Only faculty in the departments or faculty affected should email about changes that need to be made.   The faculty lists aim to include those with a tenure home in the philosophy department, with all others involved in training graduate students listed as "cognate" faculty.  "Part-time" faculty are half time, unless otherwise noted.

Note that some programs have been added to the faculty lists for purposes of the 2024 survey (and some that have fallen well outside the top rankgs in past iterations have been removed).  A reminder that the editors decided in 2021 to only note with an asterisk faculty over the age of 75 in the fall following the report (so fall 2025).  There has been a clear change in retirement patterns over the last decade, so that faculty who are still teaching at 70 are mostly still teaching at 75, but those still teaching at 75 are rarely teaching at 80.  So being 75 is far more relevant now than merely being 70,which seems to me right.

"The Future of Free Speech"

A special issue of Daedalus:  Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, with contributions by leading First Amendment scholars (e.g., Vincent Blasi, Robert Post), constitutional law scholars (e.g., Keith Whittington), philosophers (Robert Mark Simpson, yours truly), and non-academics from various professions (e.g., Nick Clegg).

Is it a "problem" that there are so few political "conservatives" in the American academy?

Most contributors to the interesting CHE symposium seem to agree it is, which by my lights is tantamount to admitting that they don't think their academic fields are Wissenschaften.  My essay takes a rather different approach:

That someone is a “conservative” is as relevant to a faculty appointment as the fact that they prefer the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, or rock climbing to chess. Political tastes deserve as much consideration as other personal characteristics when it comes to hiring scholars, which is to say, they deserve none. (Indeed, to consider political tastes at all is illegal at public universities, one of the problems with “diversity” statements.) I’ll return, below, to the possible exceptions to the preceding, but the rule is clear enough.

The Humboldtian ideal of the university, to which we in the U.S. are self-consciously heirs, is one in which the only subjects taught are those that are “scientific” (wissenschaftlich), in the German sense of that term. Scientific fields involve rigorous and teachable methods for investigating and acquiring knowledge about their subject matters. In the Humboldtian university of the 19th century — when Germany was the world leader in almost every academic discipline — Wissenschaft included not only the natural sciences, but history, classics, and many other “human” (or social) sciences. Max Weber’s plea for “value neutrality” in the human sciences was made against this background: A scientific method, Weber argued, is not a politically partisan method.

These days there is a tendency, especially in the feebler parts of the academy, to scoff at the Weber/Humboldt ideal, which draws a bright line between science and politics. This is a mistake, even if the relationship between partisan political values and Wissenschaft is more complex than Weber allowed. Political and moral values, for example, can influence the choice of what to study with scientific methods: Should a scholar investigate the role of the capitalist class in Hitler’s seizure of power, or the relationship between race and intelligence? Political and moral values may also affect tolerance for the weakness of supposedly scientific methods (think of the methodological intransigence of neoclassical macroeconomics despite decades of predictive failures)....

Reforming those defective scientific disciplines is difficult, given academic freedom, but it should not be done in terms of parochial and highly context-sensitive "conservative" and "liberal" categories.  As Mark Lilla, a humanities professor at Columbia, candidly admits:

Today genuine conservatives who fit within the long tradition of thought that includes Edmund Burke, David Hume, and Michael Oakeshott are increasingly rare birds. Conservatism, in the old sense, has not changed. Rather, Republican politicians, many think tanks, and right-leaning young people who live online have abandoned the tradition and embraced instead Trumpian populism and far-right reactionary influencers who recycle many old fascist ideas.

It's true that fascists are underrepresented in the academy.  Is that a problem to be fixed?

"Philosophy Teaching Library"

Philosopher Wes Siscoe (Bowling Green) writes:

I wanted to reach out about a newly created philosophy teaching resource - The Philosophy Teaching Library. It is a peer-reviewed, open educational resource that introduces students to primary texts. It is a creation of Paul Blaschko and I, and we hope to grow the library through an open submission process moving forward (more on that process here).

Blast from the past: The five most common objections to the PGR

Back in 2012, but they still circulate, remarkably--no doubt because the critics aren't really concerned with methodological or epistemic reliability.

"Women, Peace and Security Index"

This report is interesting.  The metrics include years of education for women, employment, cellphone use, parliamentary representation, absence of legal discrimination, access to justice, maternal mortality ratio, community safety, and political violence targeting women.  Only one Asian country makes the top 20 (Singapore), although Japan is in the top 25, and the U.S. ranks 37!

 

Top 50 U.S. universities by membership in the National Academy of Sciences, 2024

We last did this for membership through 2021.  The National Academy of Sciences is the even more selective "science only" cousin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. While it does elect faculty in the social sciences (especially economics, psychology, and anthropology), its focus is on the natural sciences, engineering and other applied sciences, and the biological sciences, including those in and around medicine; any university with a good medical school tends to do better, all else being equal, in NAS representation (indeed, some universities with top medical schools, like UC San Francisco and Texas Southwestern in Dallas make the list, despite not being full service research universities; and other major research universities, like Johns Hopkins and Wash U/St. Louis owe half their NAS membership to medical school faculty). As a result I mark with an asterisk (*) universities without medical schools, and I mark with a # universities with medical schools with very high research profiles (Some schools, like UT Austin, UC Riverside and Illinois/Urbana have only recently added medical schools.) As with the AAAS, there is a certain amount of "the rich get richer" at the NAS, though the schools with the most members are indeed very strong in the sciences.

1.  #Harvard University (170)

2.  #Stanford University (167)

3.  *University of California, Berkeley (135)

4.  *Massachusetts Institute of Technology (117)

5.  *Princeton University (84)

6.  *California Institute of Technology (69)

7.  Columbia University (68)

8.  Yale University (64)

9.  University of Chicago (57)

10. University of California, San Diego (50)

11. New York University (48)

12. #University of Washington, Seattle (46)

13. University of California, Los Angeles (44)

14. #University of California, San Francisco (41)

14. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (41)

14. #University of Pennsylvania (41)

17. Cornell University (40)

18. Duke University (34)

19. *Rockefeller University (33)

20. #Johns Hopkins University (32)

21. Northwestern University (31)

21. *University of California, Santa Barbara (31)

21. #Washington University, St. Louis (31)

24. University of Wisconsin, Madison (30)

25. University of California, Davis (28)

25. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (28)

In Memoriam: Frederick Schauer (1946-2024)

Although a law professor throughout his academic career, Professor Schauer's jurisprudential and philosophical work will be known to many philosophers.  There is a memorial notice at my law school blog.  (Link fixed.)

Richard Wollheim, his life and philosophical work (including the influence of psychoanalysis)

A short film, marking the centennary of his birth.  (Wollheim’s Freud book is excellent in my opinion.)

The unusual case of Barrington Jones: from elite philosophy to plumbing

A scholar of ancient philosophy, Jones taught at Princeton in the 1970s, then at Oxford, and then according to various sources (for example), quit philosophy to become a plumber.   This seems a bit like the famous story about Tolstoy, who when asked what work he was most proud of, displayed a pair of shoes he had made himself.  Is the Jones story true?  Does anyone know?

In Memoriam: Robert J. McKim (1952-2024)

A longtime member of the Departments of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he was emeritus, Professor McKim wrote widely in philosophy of religion, applied ethics, and also in the history of modern philosophy.  The Illinois memorial notice is here.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor McKim or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.

(Thanks to Jeff McMahan for the pointer.)

Killing hostages is *also* a war crime

Worth remembering that Israel does not have a complete monopoly on them in Gaza.  Hostage families are, correctly, also pointing the finger at Netanyahu, the worst leader in the history of Israel, who deserves to spend the rest of his life in a jail cell.