Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Philosopher Michael Huemer vs. Internet blowhard Ben Shapiro on voting for Trump

This is pretty funny, especially the final bit:

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro is still planning on voting Trump, even though he knows that Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. Shapiro explained that there is no cause for concern because “the guard rails held”, and Trump can’t do the same thing again since he’s not eligible to run again after his second term.

Let me tell you how I view this. Say you’re on a bus ride on a winding mountain road. You see the driver suddenly swing the wheel to the right, trying to send the bus over the cliff. Fortunately, the guard rail on the side of the road holds, and the bus bounces back onto the road. The bus driver does this repeatedly during the drive, but every time, the guard rail holds the bus back.

When you finally get off the bus, one of your fellow passengers declares that this was an excellent bus driver. He proposes hiring this driver to drive the same group to another city.

“What are you, out of your f—ing mind?” you reply. “He tried to drive us off a cliff!”

“Oh that,” says the other passenger. “The guard rail held, so what’s the big deal? Don’t worry, this next drive won’t go by a cliff. Since the rest of his driving performance was fine, we should hire him.”

That guy is Ben Shapiro.

Beall from Notre Dame to National University of Singapore (NUS)

Jc Beall (philosophical logic; philosophy of logic, mathematics & language; metaphysics), currently O'Neill Family Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame, has accepted a senior appointment as Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore, to start in the academic year 25-26.   That's a big catch for NUS, which was already ranked (in 2021) in the specialty areas for philosophical logic and philosophy of mathematics; Beall's addition should push NUS into the top groupings in these specialties.   More generally, the addition of Beall, along with Peter Millican part-time, seems likely to move NUS into the top five programs in Australasia (it just missed the top five in 2021, before these additions).

Jason Brennan (Georgetown) to be the new editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs

Professor Brennan shared the new mission statement; I've bolded a particularly important part:

Philosophy & Public Affairs publishes the best philosophical work that engages with matters of public concern. Since 1972, Philosophy & Public Affairs has published pathbreaking scholarship that has reshaped philosophical debates for decades to come. Continuing this tradition, the journal seeks papers that are bold, daring, and risk-taking.  Philosophy & Public Affairs prizes papers that seek to change paradigms over papers that make minor moves in long debates. It seeks to avoid esoteric and scholastic papers in favor of accessible and engaging papers about topics that matter to non-specialists. 

The journal welcomes submissions from philosophers, legal scholars, political scientists, economists, and sociologists. It welcomes papers on problems requiring empirical or legal analysis, provided those papers also rigorously defend a normative position. 


All papers submitted to Philosophy & Public Affairs are blinded to editors. Papers that pass initial inspection undergo triple-blind review. The journal values viewpoint and ideological diversity; no preference will be given to papers that affirm editors’ political or moral commitments. The journal aims to provide a forum in which researchers with different perspectives can bring their distinctive methods to bear on problems that concern everyone.


The editorial staff retains complete autonomy from Wiley in determining which and how many papers to publish. Commercial considerations have no bearing on the decisions of the editorial staff. This editorial autonomy is protected by contract.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Fat, "Country Girl," 1970

ORIGINALLY POSED JULY 6, 2019--ONE OF MY FAVORITE DISCOVERIES IN THIS SERIES

Western Massachussetts band that never made it nationally; this is from their debut album:

10/5/24 UPDATE:  Ahmet Ertegun reportedly thought Fat would be the American answer to The Rolling Stones.  It didn't work out that way for them, alas.  Feel free to add links to favorite Fat songs.

"The Law and Philosophy of Academic Freedom"

I gave this public lecture earlier this week at Providence College, and the College kindly has made a recording available:

I thought the Q&A was productive as well.  My thanks to Professor Chris Arroyo and his colleagues for a warm welcome and good discussion.

UPDATE:  At the request of some readers, here is the handout the audience had:  Download Law and Phil Academic Freedom Leiter

Do your undergraduates have trouble reading whole books?

From The Atlantic:

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Curious to hear from undergraduate teachers what their experience has been and whether this article rings true.

(Thanks to Chris Williams for the pointer.)

 

 

Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law, volume 5...

...is here.   OUP is making one chapter, John Horty on "Precedent and Open Texture," available for free:

This chapter presents a semantic account of open-textured predicates, particularly in the law, but also in language more broadly. The central idea is that judgments involving open-textured predicates are evaluated against a background set of previous authoritative decisions involving these predicates, which then constrain later applications in just the way that precedent cases constrain later decisions in the common law. In developing this idea, the paper relies on the “reason model” of precedential constraint, derived directly from recent research in artificial intelligence and law as well as previous work by Grant Lamond. According to the reason model, what matters about a precedent case is the court’s assessment of importance among the competing reasons presented by that case, which is represented as a priority ordering among these reasons. Later courts are then constrained simply to respect the priority ordering on reasons established by earlier decisions.

(Among many other things, the paper references very fine work on formal models of precedential constraint by Gabriel Broughton, a graduate of the Law School here who recently defended his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton.)

Philosopher's Magazine, redux: it is, indeed, reborn as an online magazine

A propos an earlier post, Daniel Kodsi, a philosophy lecturer at Oxford and the new editor, writes:

The Philosophers’ Magazine is now accepting submissions for publication in its redesigned online magazine. We are interested in everything and anything philosophical: essays, book reviews, interviews, Platonic dialogues, … . Since the bounds of the philosophical are no simple matter to delimit, that may be to say that we are interested in everything and anything—so long as it takes seriously the power of philosophical enquiry to make new discoveries and makes no sacrifices on normal philosophical standards of clarity and informal rigor. Is there a problem you think deserves to be better known, a book you feel compelled to criticize, or a disagreement you want to air? Contact us at [email protected].

 

We are also expanding our editorial team. Editorial staff would be expected to be able to engage as intellectual peers with some of the world’s leading philosophers and thinkers: past contributors to The Philosophers’ Magazine include Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ronald Dworkin, Martha Nussbaum, Timothy Williamson, Kit Fine, Elliott Sober, Frank Jackson, Patricia Churchland, David Chalmers, Christine Korsgaard and Simon Blackburn. Although editing for The Philosphers’ Magazine is demanding, it represents a unique opportunity—especially for early career researchers—to shape public conversations in philosophy and beyond. Applicants should email a CV and a brief proposal for a special issue they would be interested in helping to organise to [email protected].

Department of Education's OCR creates massive exception for faculty's contractual right to academic freedom

We mentioned not long ago the firing of an anti-Zionist tenured professor at Muehlenberg College, and now the Office of Civil Rights report on the case is public.  It contains two pieces of information of significance. 

First, OCR says there were "repeated reports in a single semester regarding a professor’s classroom statements and social media posts that created a potential hostile environment for Jewish students."  Faculty have no right under AAUP standards to utilize classroom time for political statements unrelated to their subject-matter.  If, as CHE reports and the OCR implies, Professor Finkelstein did that, she could be sanctioned for it.  The OCR report also says that "the college received...allegations, which the college confirmed, that the professor had entered the Hillel space on campus, photographed a student fundraising display for 'the various war efforts in Israel' and posted denigrating comments on Instagram regarding the students."   This also seems to me unprotected behavior:  students have a reasonable expectation that their lawful political speech on campus will not be photographed by faculty for purposes of extramural denigration of them.

Much more alarming, however, is that the OCR has now put its imprint on the proposition that there is a "Title VI obligation to take steps reasonably calculated to redress any hostile environment related to shared ancestry affecting the education program or activity, if one exists, even if the conduct occurs on private social media and involves political speech. Students had reported significant anxiety and fear resulting from the professor’s comments in class and on social media that impacted their access to education" (emphasis added).  The idea that the lawful extramural speech in private about political topics can form the basis for sanctioning a faculty member is a massive infringement on the existing contractual rights of academic freedom under AAUP standards.  The fact that students reporting "anxiety and fear" based on "comments...on social media" can be a factor a college may consider in imposing sanctions is not just a "weaponizing" of Title VI, it turns Title VI into a nuclear warhead directed at otherwise lawful political speech by faculty.

Philosophy actually does teach some intellectual skills!

Philosopher Michael Prinzing tweeted this interesting looking study at me the other day.  I have only read a bit of it, but would be curious to hear from readers who take the time to examine it more carefully.

Kelsey from Notre Dame to Chicago

Sean Kelsey (ancient Greek philosophy), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has accepted a senior offer from  the Department of Philosophy at the Uiversity of Chicago, where he will start in fall 2025.  He joins a large group of faculty working in and around ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, including Agnes Callard, Gabriel Richardson Lear, Jonathan Lear, Martha Nussbaum, and John Proios.

Einstein vs. Bergson on the nature of time

A nice account by philosopher Evan Thompson of a debate most readers are probably unfamiliar with.  Curious to hear informed reader reactions from those of you who know your Einstein, or know your Bergson (or both)!

"Careerism is ruining college"

This essay by a recent Penn graduate is an example of "confusing cause and effect" that is very common, especially in the media.

When I pictured myself in college, I envisioned potluck picnics and late nights listening to Taylor Swift, overanalyzing class crushes. Maybe even joining a Quidditch team.

I never daydreamed about hiding in the library bathroom, crying because I had just been rejected from an undergraduate law journal.

The recently publicized tensions on college campuses, particularly those in the heavily scrutinized Ivy League, are among many forces at play for students today. But there’s another that has not yet captivated the news cycle.

It’s called pre-professional pressure: a prevailing culture that convinces many of us that only careers in fields such as computer programming, finance and consulting, preferably at blue-chip firms like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey or big tech companies, can secure us worthwhile futures. It is an inescapable part of the current college experience, like tailgating or surviving on stale dining hall food. It not only steers our life choices; it also permeates daily life and negatively affects our mental health.

Royal Society (UK) releases referee reports of papers by famous scientists...

...including Crick and Watson on DNA, and Alan Turing.  It would be fun to see the referee reports on David Lewis's Convention or Donald Davidson's "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" or other famous philosophers before they became famous.  Are readres familiar with any examples that are out there?

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

Major Australian university abandons in-person classes!

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 16--SEE COMMENT #6 BELOW, THIS ISN'T AS BAD AS IT INITIALLY SOUNDED

This is a shocking development.  The University of Adelaide, while not at the level of the Universities of Melbourne or Sydney, is a major, research-intensive university in Australia, part of the elite "Group of 8."  I assume cost-cutting is driving this crazy decision, but one would think after everyone's experience during Covid with teaching on Zoom that the inferiority of that approach would have been apparent.  What is going on in Australia?

Tenured professor in Wisconsin stripped of tenure for making pornographic videos with his wife in his spare time

A bizarre case, and Professor Gow should sue.  The University was within rights to strip him of his administrative role in light of his "hobby," which arguably would affect his ability to discharge university business.  But he has a First Amendment right to make pornography, and I can't see how a public university can fire him from his tenured position for exercising that right.

(Thanks to Gregory Mayer for the pointer.)

"I'll have a Ryle of beer please"

Philosopher David Lobina writes:

Apropos of a debate in the UK regarding whether to keep the pint as a measure of beer or go metric instead (for health reasons, or otherwise), Gilbert Ryle makes an appearance in the Letters section of the Guardian (link here):

May I suggest that the new measure be called the Ryle? This after the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle who, as Charlotte Vrijen tells us in her PhD dissertation: “… gave his name to a measure of beer, roughly three‑quarters of a pint. Christ Church had special glasses made for these ‘Ryles of beer’. He used to say that sometimes half a pint was too small a measure and a pint too large. Once he stated that he would prefer to be remembered for having invented a measure of beer than for having written The Concept of Mind.”
Alec McHoul
Mundijong, Western Australia

Blast from the past: Geuss on Rorty (and on Geuss)

Back in 2008, with some reader comments.  A great broadside against Gadamer thrown in as well.

UPDATE:  Here's the full Geuss essay. (Thanks to Peter Aronoff for the pointer.)