Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

"Law and Historical Materialism"

An interesting law blog symposium on a recent essay by a legal historian, that may interest some philosophical readers.

An interesting perspective on the polls

Philosopher Neil Sinhababu (who is, as his real and virtual friends will know, a well-informed political junkie!) kindly gave permission to share his FB analysis of the polls and the reason for thinking they are over-stating Trump's support (this is the best explanation I've seen):

Though polling has always guided my political predictions and strategies, I have less confidence in polls from 2024 than from any previous year in my life. Polling as we once knew it, with genuinely representative samples from calling random people, no longer exists because they don’t pick up the phone. What we now call polls are essentially models tested on a little bit of data. This approach resulted in unprecedented errors in the 2024 Republican primary, which should lower our confidence that poll averages will predict the upcoming election.

A Politico article summarizes the most severe polling failures: “In Michigan, Trump’s margin over Haley was 15.3 points smaller in the actual results than in the final polling average. Pollsters also had double-digit whiffs in Massachusetts (a 14.3-point difference), Tennessee (11.3 points) and Virginia (20.8 points).” These races weren’t heavily polled around the voting, which may explain the errors.

 

There is no similar excuse in New Hampshire, which was heavily polled right before its election. The poll aggregators’ average had Trump winning by 19.2%, and he actually won by 11.1%. South Carolina was also heavily polled, and the aggregators had Trump winning by 26% where he actually won by 20.3%. (For NH and SC, the aggregator average is 538, 270towin, and RCP averaged together.)

 

People didn’t complain because the polls said Trump would win and he won. But missing the margin by 6-8% in a well-polled race is severe. Moreover, all these errors were overestimates of Trump, and underestimates of Haley.

 

The polls underestimated Trump in 2016 and 2020, and got things about right in 2022. Why would they suddenly overestimate Trump in the 2024 primaries? And what does this mean for the general election?

Conference announcements

As longtime readers know, I do not generally post conference announcements.  I make three exceptions:  (1) for conferences I'm participating in (sometimes); (2) memorial conferences; and (3) retirement conferences, especially when there are opportunities for philosophers to participate remotely.

Blast from the past: applying to graduate school with an uneven academic record

Back in 2015, with reader discussion.

Is America "too big for fascism"?

That's the thesis of this essay, which is worth a look.   I've noted before that American federalism--the traditional control of state Governors over health and safety in their jurisdiciton--was a bulwark against Trump's incompetence the first time around.   The author of the preceding essay may be right that academics and journalists "barely seem to understand how their country functions," but I am not reassured by the author's own understanding:

Consider public education, from kindergarten through grade twelve. Any American fascist worth his bright red tie would be able to subdue the schools and begin to teach MAGAdemics, or at least get all those pesky liberal books banned—all of them, because fascism doesn’t demand anything less. In the United States, there are nearly 14,000 separate public school districts with more than 94,000 elected board members. Some of the larger counties, like the battleground of Loudoun in Virginia, have a single board. Others are carved up into so many exhausting and segregated duchies that consensus can never be achieved. On Long Island, among two counties, there are 125 public school districts. A child in Hempstead and a child in Garden City, growing up a short drive from one another, will have radically different educational experiences; they will effectively live, racially and sociologically, in different countries. Either way, whether the school board is wealthy and white or poor and Black, it is designed, for better and often for worse, to resist the encroachment of any federal power. There is no such thing as a centralized education system in America. Beyond doling out cash [bold added], the Department of Education does little in this country. Our educational sprawl is Hapsburgian, with no single monarch able to dictate its direction for very long. Moms for Liberty or anything Trump-adjacent can no better cow a Democrat-dominated school board than a liberal politician can suddenly get a district in Mississippi or Alabama to stop banning Gender Queer.

"Philosophy Admissions Spreadheet" for 24-25

Linds Whittaker, a graduate student at the University of Washington, shares this year's spreadsheet.  He writes:"This year the TOEFL/English Language requirements have been added along with writing sample requirements when possible. It sounds like several universities may not be accepting applicants this year (Columbia, Wash University in St. Louis, maybe Bowling Green) and I will be adding additional information about any admissions pauses I find over the next few weeks."

Suspended admissions were more common during the pandemic; I wonder whether anyone knows why Columbia (usually a top 10-15 program) and Wash U/St. Louis (usually a top 25-30 program) are suspending admissions this year?

Advertising update

November is fully booked, but there is still one top spot and one second from the top spot left in December, and also in January.  Later months have more openings.

"Meaning, Reference, and Modality," a conference on the work of Nathan Salmon...

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--UPDATED

...marking his retirement from UC Santa Barbara, and featuring Scott Soames, David Braun and others.  Zoom access will be possible!  Details for Zoom participation will be supplied at the website closer to the date of the conference (which starts November 9).

UPDATE:  Here is the Zoom link:   https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/86290086789

PGR surveys scheduled to end this Friday, November 1

More than 200 philosophers have already participated, so the 2024 PGR is on track to have even more evaluators than 2021, especially since there is usually a flurry of submissions in the final days--all this is good news for prospective students.  In past years, there have also been extensions of the deadline, and I will post here again if the editors decide to extend the deadline this year (if they do, they will also send out an automated notice to nominated evaluators).

Fascists already burning ballots in Oregon and Washington

Fortunately, fascists are stupid, so they are burning ballots in states that won't vote for the fascist anyway.  But this is certainly an ominous development.  

(I do want to acknowledge what a longtime reader said to me recently, which was very true, namely, that fascism would represent an intellectual improvement for Trump, who is a man strictly of resentments.   But Trump's psychological disturbance--his narcissisim, his lack of empathy, his need for adulation--makes him an instinctive fascist, as it were.)

(Thanks to Charles Bakker for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Reader Alan Aronson writes: "The corner of Washington where the arson took place was in a Democratic area of a Republican-majority congressional district that a Democrat won last cycle in an upset" (see, e.g.).  Alas, these fascists may have been more targetted in their goal.

 

"Computers plainly can't think"

Philosopher Alva Noe comments; an excerpt:

[T]here is another origin of our impulse to concede mind to devices of our own invention, and this is what I focus on here: the tendency of some scientists to take for granted what can only be described as a wildly simplistic picture of human and animal cognitive life. They rely unchecked on one-sided, indeed, milquetoast conceptions of human activity, skill and cognitive accomplishment. The surreptitious substitution (to use a phrase of Edmund Husserl’s) of this thin gruel version of the mind at work – a substitution that I hope to convince you traces back to Alan Turing and the very origins of AI – is the decisive move in the conjuring trick.

What scientists seem to have forgotten is that the human animal is a creature of disturbance. Or as the mid-20th-century philosopher of biology Hans Jonas wrote: ‘Irritability is the germ, and as it were the atom, of having a world…’ With us there is always, so to speak, a pebble in the shoe. And this is what moves us, turns us, orients us to reorient ourselves, to do things differently, so that we might carry on. It is irritation and disorientation that is the source of our concern. In the absence of disturbance, there is nothing: no language, no games, no goals, no tasks, no world, no care, and so, yes, no consciousness....

Reasons for pessimism, reasons for optimism

On the pessimism side, the familiar confusion of correlation with causation:

For many Donald Trump supporters, it is a simple matter of dollars and cents.

Late this summer, I left my home in New York City to talk to dozens of working-class people in the South, the Midwest and the West. I had no agenda except to hear what they were saying and try to understand the world from their point of view. I interviewed hairdressers and retired sawmill workers, bakers, truck drivers, laundromat managers, pit barbecue cooks, casino card dealers and even a former professional rodeo rider.

The most common term people used to describe the economy was “horrible.” A close second was, “It sucks"....

Everyone wanted better material conditions for themselves and their families, and everyone was struggling to obtain them. Some didn’t want to talk about politics. Others felt so ignored by politicians that they have disengaged from the process altogether. Everyone who offered an opinion was for Mr. Trump....

The worst inflation and the fastest rise in interest rates since the early 1980s — to well-off people, these are headlines. To working people, they are fundamental challenges to their daily lives. Working people worry much more about payday than they do Jan. 6.

Fair enough: But why turn to a lying, abusive billionaire to help them solve their economic problems? Their explanation is simple. Times were good when Trump was president. Now eggs cost nearly three times what they did four years ago, the rate on a car loan is more than 50 percent higher, and some companies are cutting hours. Mr. Trump, they think, is the candidate to turn things around.

NYT columnist David French confirms the Achen & Bartels theory of democracy

French, an evangelical Christian and a "Never Trump" Republican, writes:

Community is more powerful than ideology. If you came of age politically during the Reagan Revolution, you thought of the Republican Party as fundamentally and essentially ideological. We were the party of limited government, social conservatism and a strong national defense, and these ideological lines were ruthlessly enforced. Even after Reagan left office, ideological heresy against Reaganism was punished with the dreaded label “RINO” — Republican in name only....The story we told ourselves behind closed doors was the story we told in public — the Republican Party was a party of ideas and those ideas defined the party....

Trump has changed the equation entirely. He’s a big-government, isolationist libertine who — despite nominating half the justices who helped overturn Roe — has made the G.O.P. platform more pro-choice than it’s been in almost 50 years. Not only has he not been punished for this ideological transformation, but devotion to him is the new Republican loyalty test.

 

Don’t think for a moment this is because he won an intelligent ideological argument. When he gained a critical mass of support, millions of Republicans faced a stark choice: ideology or community?

 

....I thought ideology defined the community, but the community existed regardless of the ideology, and breaking with the community was the far graver sin.

 

And so Republicans could cling to their ideas and face the wrath of their neighbors, or they could conform, keep their friends and comfort themselves with the notion that no matter what Trump did or said, at least he wasn’t a Democrat.

Lori Gruen named SWIP Distinguished Philosopher of the Year for 2024

Philosopher Louise Antony kindly shared the following announcement:

The Steering Committee of Eastern SWIP is delighted to announce that the SWIP Distinguished Philosopher of the Year for 2024 is Lori Gruen!  Please feel free to share this news. 

Lori will be honored at a session at the Eastern Division APA Convention: Session G 10 B, on Friday, Jan. 10, from 9 - 10:50 AM. 

Here's how philosophers can make a difference beyond voting: work a phone bank!

Philosopher Colin Marshall has some interesting anecdotes and great advice.

Others with phone bank experience are welcome to add their own suggestions.

Political ads this season--where to find them

If, like me, you're not in a swing state, you are missing all the political ads for Harris and Trump.  You can find them here (scroll down to "latest political ads").  They don't make for pleasant viewing, but you can satisfy your morbid curiosity if you want!

"Arizona Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Progressive Democrats and Community Leaders Statement on Presidential Election"

This is worth reading, especially by those benighted folks who think that the atrocities in Gaza are a reason to let Trump win; an excerpt:

In our view, it is crystal clear that allowing the fascist Donald Trump to become President again would be the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. A Trump win would be an extreme danger to Muslims in our country, all immigrants, and the American pro-Palestine movement. It would be an existential threat to our democracy and our whole planet.

When we think of Trump in power again, we recall that even a genocide can get much worse. Trump just said that Netanhahu must “go further” in Gaza while criticizing Biden for “trying to hold him back.” His biggest donor, Miriam Adelson, who demanded in 2016 that Trump move the US embassy to Jerusalem if elected –– which he then did –– is now telling Trump to allow Israel to annex the entire West Bank. Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and the entire far right in Israel want Trump to win and grant Israel total free reign. We cannot give them what they want.

Trump must be defeated. The only way to defeat him is to elect Kamala Harris.

Voting for Harris is not a personal endorsement of her or of the policy decisions of the administration in which she served. It’s an assessment of the best possible option to continue fighting for an end to the genocide, a free Palestine, and all else that we hold dear.

In Memoriam: Christopher Hookway (1949-2024)

Emeritus at the University of Sheffield, Professor Hookway, who was afflicted with early onset dementia, has died.  He wrote widely and influentialy on pragmatism, epistemology, Peirce, and Quine, among other figures and topics.  (I can attest that his Quine book is terrific.)  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Hookway or for those who would like to comment on the significance of his work.

(Thanks to David Gordon for the pointer.)

Measuring pain "objectively"?

Interesting work, curious to hear what those better-informed about these issues make of this approach.

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

Writing philosophy under adverse conditions

At The Workbench, Nathan Ballantyne interviews two philosophers who know what it's like.

On being cancelled in philosophy

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY:  SEE INTERESTING COMMENTS FROM DAVID WALLACE AND JOHN BOGART

Colin McGinn comments.  As I have noted in the past, tihs exclusion of a philosopher from participation in all aspects of the life of the profession is not defensible.   If I may quote from a related CHE essay awhile back:

Liberals who no doubt believe that convicted felons "deserve a second chance" sometimes sound like they think that accused or university-convicted sexual harassers should never be heard from again. But how could that be right?

Punishments should be proportional to the offense; that is a widely accepted principle of punitive justice. No one thinks that a sexual harasser should be castrated or hung. One also hopes no one thinks a sexual harasser should be prohibited from earning a living ever again. (Even convicted murderers, released from prison, are allowed to work.)

ADDENDUM:  Philosopher David Wallace writes:

Graduate school writing samples

Some very good advice from philosopher Bernhard Nickel at Harvard.  My only small caveat is this:  while I agree with Professor Nickel that the writing sample need not be in one's primary area, if it is too far afield of anything the department does, that will not work out well (e.g., don't submit a paper on Heidegger when applying to MIT).  Comments are open if others have thoughts about Professor Nickel's advice.   Signed comments (full name and full email address, the latter of which will not appear) will be preferred.

Blast from the past: Most significant moral philosophers of the 20th-century

A poll from 2010, with reader discussion.  The poll was limited only to philosophers no longer living at that time.

More reasons to fear a second Trump term

Authoritarian political parties get better at undermining democratic institutions the second time around.

College tuition is actually declining in the U.S.

This is striking:

While sticker prices have continued to balloon to as large as $100,000 at some private, nonprofit universities, the average net price — the remaining cost of tuition after institutional and grant aid is deducted — for undergraduate students entering their freshman year at these institutions clocked in at $16,510 for the 2024-25 academic year, down from $19,330 in 2006-07 (adjusted for inflation to 2024 dollars). Net prices at public institutions followed similar trend lines: $2,480 was the average amount charged in 2024-25 at in-state, four-year institutions, down from $4,340 in 2012-13 (inflation adjusted); and, according to the College Board, freshmen attending two-year colleges continue to receive on average enough grant aid to cover tuition and fees, a trend that dates back to 2009-10.

Cailin O'Connor on game theory and misinformation (with particular reference to Covid)...

...at The Dissenter.

In Memoriam: Ted Honderich (1933-2024)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SATURDAY (10/19/24)

Emeritus Grote Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London, where he spent most of his career, Professor Honderich wrote widely on consciousness, free will and determinism, punishment, and other topics, and achieved particular notoriety late in life with his work on the justification of terrorism.   Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Honderich or for those who would like to comment on the significance of his work.

(Thanks to Miroslav Imbrisevic for the information about his death.)

"On becoming an historian of philosophy"

Reflections from Margaret Atherton in her APA "Dewey Lecture" (this is from 2017, but still interesting!).

Trump and the rhetoric of fascists

Some useful examples (although Stalin was a tyrant, he was not a fascist, but the author has a bee in her bonnett on that subject).

Another state flagship faces a budget crisis, and philosophy is on the "chopping block"

CHE has details; an excerpt:

Christopher Vials, an English professor at UConn’s flagship campus in Storrs and president of its American Association of University Professors chapter, said 70 majors were identified as having failed to meet a threshold of 100 student completions over the last five years....

“It is anticipated that the end result for the review of low-completion programs will result in the closure of some programs,” Anne D’alleva, the provost, and Gladis Kersaint, the vice provost for academic affairs, wrote in a memo to all academic deans.

Majors like philosophy, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and animal science are on the chopping block. With the exception of Spanish, every program within the university’s literatures, cultures, and languages department is under review....

Last fall, UConn unveiled a plan to reduce the operating budget of all of its units — colleges, schools, administration, and institutional support — by 15 percent over the next five years to combat what was then a $70-million budget deficit.

A one-time infusion of state funding has eased the pain for this year, but the university’s expected funding gap for the 2026 fiscal year is about $72.8 million, according to Reitz.

Unlike West Virginia University, UConn has a PhD program in philosophy (and in other of these fields I expect); if the major goes, how long can the PhD program survive?

Great moments in rock 'n' roll (and blues) covers of traditional American folk songs: "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad"

From the pre-rock era, here's Woody Guthrie's rendition of something more like the "traditional" folk version:

Of course, the song was also a favorite of blues guitarists and singers; here's my favorite, the instrumental version by the great Piedmont blues guitarist Etta Baker, in which you can hear inklings of the later blues rock versions:

 

When even Mitch McConnell thinks you're "despicable"...

...you probably are.

AI is "dumber than a cat"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 16--LOTS OF COMMENTS WORTH READING!  VERY INSTRUCTIVE!

So says this "AI pioneer," Yann LeCun:  "LeCun thinks that today’s AI models, while useful, are far from rivaling the intelligence of our pets, let alone us. When I ask whether we should be afraid that AIs will soon grow so powerful that they pose a hazard to us, he quips: 'You’re going to have to pardon my French, but that’s complete B.S.'"

What say you informed readers?  (Post a comment with a full name and valid email address. And don't post unless you know something about these issues:  I'd like to be educated!)

David Lewis on his approach to philosophy, on his education, and other topics (link fixed now)

A very entertaining lecture from 1991 [click on the PDF button] (which I learned about via Phillip Bricker's recent review of materials from Lewis's Nachlass).  The lecture contains a crisp statement of Lewis's "conservativism" in philosophy, which is characteristic of most of the Anglophone discipline:

I am a conservative philosopher. Fear not, I don’t mean that I make it my business to glorify the marvellous market and the Republican Party!—What would that have to do with resisting innovation? One thing I do mean is this. I think philosophy has no business challenging the positive convictions of common sense, and no business challenging established results of the natural sciences and mathematics. What should a philosopher do if he discovers a proof that he is the pope?  Boldly follow where argument leads?—No, or not unless he’s the philosopher Karol Wojtyła. Instead he should find the flaw in his proof. If he fails, he should conclude that the proof has a flaw he cannot find. The same goes, say I, if a philosopher discovers a proof that some truths are also false; or that motion or time or value or consciousness or freedom is unreal; or that it is unthinkable that anything exists outside the mind, or outside the text; or that there are no people, and no swizzle-sticks either; or that it is a wide-open scientific question whether anyone has ever believed anything; or that Cantor’s diagonal argument was fallacious; or that we make worlds with words. We should know a reductio ad absurdum when we see it! It is ever so much more likely that a philosophical argument has gone astray than that any of these things is true.

Gramsci's view of "common sense," and his reasons for skepticism about it, seems to me more plausible.

The "marketability" of philosophy, once again

The Cardiff approach. 

One of the ironies is that the UK, with an almost entirely "public" university sector has adopted far more than the U.S. a market-based approach to higher education.  

(Thanks to Panos Paris for the pointer.)

Bentham in defense of sexual pleasure

A nice video from UCL (Bentham's ideas inspired its establishment):

a

ADDENDUM:  A reader points out the amusing, but unintended, implication of the parenthetical, above, so let me make clear that it was not Bentham's ideas about sexual pleasure in particular that inspired the establishment of UCL!

If the monster child wins....

...this will be why.  From economic historian Adam Tooze:  "If we focus only on food and energy, the price shock of 2021-2 was worse than that in 1973. It is second only to the Iran-crisis shock of 1979, the crisis that put paid to what little chance Jimmy Carter had of reelection in 1980."  The only hope is that it was 2021-22, and not 2023-24.  But still...

Another PGR update

Professor Pynes tells me some more invitations will be going out for the surveys--this includes "bounced emails" from the first round, and some others that for various reasons weren't part of the invitations sent out last week.

Blast from the past: Most significant philosophers of science of the 20th-century?

A poll from 2010, with reader discussion.  And the top Anglophone philosophers of science since 1945 (from 2016).

FIRE responds to AAUP's very bad statement on "diversity" statements in faculty hiring

Here, a propos this.

In Memoriam: Anand Vaidya (1976-2024)

Professor Vaidya, who spent his career at San Jose State University, was well-known for his work on the epistemology of modality, and for using contemporary analytic philosophy to explore and develop ideas from ancient Indian philosophy.    There is a very nice memorial notice from the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy.  He also wrote about his experience confronting a terminal illness here.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Vaidya or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.

(Thanks to Malcolm Keating and Tim Williamson for the pointers.)

Idealism and realism about philosophy and its role

Philosopher Jimmy Lenman kindly gave permission to share this amusing and striking comment he made on FB:

I have moments of idealism. In my moments of idealism I think philosophy should be to bullshit what the medical profession is to disease. And I have moments of realism. In my moments of realism I fear how all too often philosophy is to bullshit what the munitions industry is to warfare.

So which are you, an idealist or realist?  Explain why.  (Comments require a valid email address, which will not appear.  If you wish to criticize specific philosophers or journals, you will need to do so with your full name.)

Here's a good reason to ignore the polls...

...from Ezra Klein at the NYT:

Back in 2016, Harry Enten, then at FiveThirtyEight, calculated the final polling error in every presidential election between 1968 and 2012. On average, the polls missed by two percentage points. In 2016, an American Association for Public Opinion Research postmortem found that the average error of the national polls was 2.2 points, but the polls of individual states were off by 5.1 points. In 2020, the national polls were off by 4.5 points and the state-level polls missed, again, by 5.1 points....

As of Oct. 10, The New York Times’s polling average had Kamala Harris leading Trump by three points nationally. That’s tight, but the seven swing states are tighter: Neither candidate is leading by more than two points in any of them.

Imagine the polls perform better in 2024 than they did in either 2016 or 2020: They’re off, remarkably, by merely two points in the swing states. Huzzah! That would be consistent with Harris winning every swing state. It would also be consistent with Trump winning every swing state. This is not some outlandish scenario. According to Nate Silver’s election model, the most likely electoral outcome “is Harris sweeping all seven swing states. And the next most likely is Trump sweeping all seven.”

Which is all to say: The polls can’t tell you the way in which they’re going to be wrong, nor by how much. But that’s what matters now.

Given what's at stake, this is quite insane, but that's where we are in this benighted country.

Pickard to stay at Johns Hopkins

This rumor has been making the rounds for several weeks now, and since some readers, including students, have been asking, I thought it would be worth noting "officially" that Hanna Pickard (philosophy of psychology [esp. addiction], moral psychology, medical ethics) at Johns Hopkins University has turned down the DeCamp Professorship at Princeton's University Center for Human Values, the Chair previously held by Peter Singer, who retired.   She (and her husband, the philosopher Ian Phillips) are both remaining at Hopkins, a department they have played a major role in building over the last few years.  That's a significant retention for Hopkins.  

Robert Paul Wolff is back...

...after a real health ordeal, but how nice to know he will resume blogging again!

Richard Marshall interviews J.D. Trout...

...at 3:16 AM.

The impending Trump disaster

As things stand now, Trump may legitimately win the election next month; he will definitely win if the polls are again under-estimating his support as they did in 2016 and 2020.*  If he does, it will be because every visit to the supermarket is a reminder about inflation, which, combined with the "correlation is causation" principle of the ignorant, will lead to Republican votes.  

A second Trump term will be a disaster in many ways.  We have already noted the threat to the universities, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.  Public health, already weak (recall the Covid fiasco in this benighted country), will likely be destroyed: expect the return of measles, whooping cough, maybe even polio.  His tariff obsession, if enacted, would wreck the economy.   The endless corruption we have already seen will return with a vengeance (literally!). And then there is the endless vicious craziness he riles up, from the ugly attacks on Haitians in Ohio, to conspiracy theories involving metereologists!  A country can't function with this nuttines being regularly inflamed by the unhinged President.  Of course, he isn't just unhinged, he's a "fascist to the core" in the words of the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley.  That may make itself felt when he begins rounding up "immigrants" in concentration camps, which will be costly, inhumane, and have very bad spillover economic effects.  Or when he sends the military into New York and Chicago to "control" crime and illegal immigration.

In Memoriam: Keith Campbell (1938-2024)

Professor Campbell was a longtime member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, where he was emeritus and where he had served as Challis Professor.  He wrote widely and influentially on topics in metaphysics.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Campbell or for those who would like to comment on the significance of his work.

Great moments in rock 'n' roll covers: Joe Cocker & friends, "Honky Tonk Women," 1970

Joe Cocker, one of the great (maybe the greatest) British blues and soul singer to emerge in the 1960s, does what is probably my favorite cover of any Rolling Stones song with a cast of friends, including Leon Russell on guitar, Carl Radle on bass, Bobby Keyes on saxophone, and Rita Coolidge on backing vocals, among others.  And, of course, it includes Cocker's famous spasmodic movements:

Post links to your favorite covers of Rolling Stones songs in the comments (or your favorite Joe Cocker numbers, esp. covers).

PGR survey invitations went out on October 10...

...to several hundred evaluators.  The survey is set to close November 1.  I hope I'll be able to post some results starting a week or two later.