Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

This benighted Columbia student doesn't need discipline, he needs education

He doesn't understand the term "white" (he might start by reading this) and he is plainly ignorant about the history of science and civilization.  What an embarrassment.

The implications of "self-identification" (as a woman, as a race) for traditional civil rights

Philosopher Dan Kaufman (Missouri State) comments.

Reactions to "The Twitter Cesspool"

Two funny reactions to last week's post.

First, from a philosopher in the UK:  "The dumb outbursts you quoted in your post establish that not all imbalances of power are injustices. Some people really should be powerless!"

Second, a somewhat longer response from a political theorist in the US:

Although I ended up in Political Science, I used your Gourmet when looking at grad schools back in 2001.  I've been a regular reader of your blog since 2003.  We are very much on different sides of many issues (I am a rather traditional Catholic, trained as a Straussian, etc.)  Nonetheless, I have always found you to be an enlightening voice of sanity and have been very grateful for your many contributions.  (When I teach Nietzsche, I always refer my students to your book. And I agree with you about Lampert's reading of Nietzsche.)

I say all this because I read your post about the attacks on you in Twitter and I was just shocked, though not surprised.  What a bunch of idiotic condescending assholes!

So, even though I am not in your field, and even though we probably disagree about more than we agree about, I wanted to thank you for the many years of service that you've given to academia, not only as a scholar but as public voice of reason (though not a voice of "public reason!").  I know you are more than capable of holding your own against these canailles (as Nietzsche would probably have called them), but damn it it's time for those of us who have profited from your labors to at least thank you for it.  So thank you!

Columbia students embarrass themselves, shutting down comic for "offensive" jokes

Pathetic.  If his jokes aren't funny, don't clap and move on.  But this is what happens when "inclusivity," which is profoundly subjective, is treated as an institutional objective.

Sex is not a social construct

Another excellent essay by philosopher Alex Byrne (MIT); particularly delicious and amusing is the analysis of Judith Butler's "argument."  This is the kind of writing that makes one remember what can be so good about analytic philosophy's intellectual hygiene.

Aaron Troodler of the National Council of Young Israel is a fascist...

...because fascists always want those who express verboten views harmed and sanctioned.  Will Temple University cave in to the fascists?  We'll have to see.  In the interim, the  senior administrators might read this and learn how professionals respond to these mobs.

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

ADDENDUM: Is this the same Aaron Troodler?

Diary of capitalist decline: Paris edition December 2018

Their President isn't a monster-child, but the underlying facts are the same.

Former U.S. President George H.W. Bush

As readers will no doubt be aware, he passed away yesterday, age 94.  I haven't much to say about him.  He was the last of the "Wall Street Republicans" to be President; he came of age in a Republican Party that had not yet completely ceded to the Democrats the role of "prudent wing of the ruling class."  Obviously compared to the current monster-child in the White House he appears almost saintly.  One very good thing he did was sign the American with Disabilities Act, which makes America much better than many generally more social-democratic Western democracies in terms of requiring accomodations for those with disabilities, physical and mental.

Philosophy grad school dropout becomes YouTube sensation taking on the weird and reactionary corners of cyberspace

That's Natalie Wynn, recently profiled in The New Yorker.  She had previously been a PhD student in philosophy at Northwestern, clearly in the "Continental" side of that department judging from some of the things she says about philosophy in her videos.  She is genuinely quite funny at times (her humor is very clearly not "politcally correct"), and puts a lot of work into researching her topics (and producing her videos):  see, e.g., her explanation of "Incel" culture on the Internet, or her takedown of Jordan Peterson.

On the possible need for pseudonymous publication given self-censorship in academia

A different view of the issue du jour.

(Thanks to Mohan Matthen for the pointer.)

Campaign of harassment and defamation of philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) continues...

...now because of this e-mail.

Diversity blather watch

Law professor Noah Feldman (Harvard) makes several of the points I've made previously.

(Thanks to Jake Fraser for the pointer.)

Democrats, Trump and white working-class voters

Law professor Joan Williams (UC Hastings) takes another stab at the topic, this time in The Atlantic.  An excerpt:

An important, largely overlooked 2017 study by the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group identified five distinct types of Trump voters. Two of them—Staunch Conservatives and Free Marketeers, who together account for more than half of Trump voters—are unlikely to ever go for Democrats in substantial numbers. (Free Marketeers may not like Trump’s trade wars, but many cheer his gutting of regulations.) The other two big blocs, American Preservationists and Anti-elites, each include about a fifth of Trump voters, and believe that the economy is rigged in favor of the wealthiest Americans. (The final bloc, the Disengaged, accounted for 5 percent of Trump voters.) 

American Preservationists and Anti-elites are often conflated, but they differ in important ways. Preservationists were actively enthusiastic about Trump: Nearly half supported him in the primaries and 87 percent said they voted for him more than they voted against Hillary Clinton. They were also heavily invested in nativism: 86 percent said being born in the U.S. was an important part of being an American, and 77 percent said the same about being Christian. Two-thirds considered race important to their identity; only about half reported warm feelings toward racial minorities. This is not a group Democrats can attract in substantial numbers.

Anti-elites—the Trump voters most likely to have bipartisan voting habits—are another story. Only a quarter of them voted for Trump in the primaries, and nearly half said they voted more against Clinton than for Trump. Compared with Preservationists, smaller percentages said that being born in the U.S. is important to being American (58 percent) and that being Christian is (49 percent). About two-thirds of Anti-elites expressed warm feelings toward racial minorities (though far fewer of them expressed warm feelings toward Muslims). Crucially, only 13 percent of them believed their children would achieve a standard of living better than their own. This is the group Democrats should target. But there’s one sure way to guarantee failure: smug condescension that lumps all Trump voters together as uninformed racists.

"Transgender: a dialogue" between two philosophers...

...Sophie-Grace Chappell (Open U) and Holly Lawford-Smith (Melbourne).  A serious, substantive discussion.  (Recall Professor Chappell's earlier essay.)

"Salt of the Earth," a blacklisted 1954 movie, makes perfect Thanksgiving day entertainment...

...for those observing the American holiday today:

Based on an actual strike by Mexican-American workers against a zinc mining company, it is set in New Mexico, and uses actual mineworkers and their families in most of the main roles (including the male lead, Juan Chacon--his wife was played by a professional actress, however).   The movie is strongly pro-union, unsurprisingly, but much more  surprisingly, it has a strong pro-feminist twist, that wouldn't have been surprising in 1975, say, but is remarkable for 1954 (I won't spoil that part, you'll have to watch it).  The main writers and directors were blacklisted for refusing to cooperate with the fascist McCarthy Committee, but like other communist sympathizers at the time, they were, in ethical sensibility, well ahead of their time.  (At the end, the movie reveals which actors were "professionals" and which locals--there are several surprises.)

UPDATE:  Readers who enjoy the film may also find this website interesting.

Who said Donald Trump was a Mafia Don?

Not me, obviously.  But reports like this might make one think twice.   When will Secretary Mattis save us from this nightmare?  The leadership of the U.S. military has more regard for the rule of law and the Constitution than the monster-child in the White House.  Even Carlo Gambino had more regard.

Abolish billionaires

This is amusing.

(Thanks to Aaron Baker for the pointer.)

The Zuckerberg hustle

Yup.  The state should confiscate his fortune and use it to meet human needs.  As noted before, I'm generous:  leave him ten million dollars.  And pay him an hourly wage, or even a salary, for whatever work he actually does at Facebook.

University of Reading, in accordance with a foolish U.K. law, "warns" students about an essay by politics professor

When last seen around here, the late Norman Geras was shilling for the criminal war of aggression against Iraq.  Prior to disgracing himself, he had been a politics professor at the University of Manchester and author of some decent articles on Marx and other topics in political theory.  But one of them has now garnered a "warning" to students at the University of Reading, who might be led down the road to terrorism by reading an article justifying political violence in some circumstances.

(Thanks to several readers for sending this along.)

The ruling class vs. the rest

No surprises here, but good to have it set out plainly:

Most of the wealthiest US billionaires – who are much less visible and less reported on – more closely resemble Charles Koch. They are extremely conservative on economic issues. Obsessed with cutting taxes, especially estate taxes – which apply only to the wealthiest Americans. Opposed to government regulation of the environment or big banks. Unenthusiastic about government programs to help with jobs, incomes, healthcare, or retirement pensions – programs supported by large majorities of Americans. Tempted to cut deficits and shrink government by cutting or privatizing guaranteed social security benefits.

The obvious solution to this problem is massive state confiscation of wealth from these pernicious characters (I'm a nice guy, let them each keep $10 million).

 

Here we go again: prominent BBC host set to speak at Oxford until her verboten thoughts are revealed

What is going on in the UK?  It comes complete with this typical, melodramatic falsehood:

A statement said: "The decision to offer her a platform is not apolitical or neutral, especially when her views cause tangible harm to vulnerable members of our society."

The thing about "tangible harms" is that they're tangible:  so let someone identify a single one of them.   But of course no one can, because this is nonsense.  I hereby quote myself:

[T]he pressure to violate academic freedom [also] comes from within the universities too.   Indeed, some humanists have concocted a whole new metaphysics of “silencing” and “marginalizing” and “violence” to describe the expression of ideas that are offensive and insulting to certain minority groups.  For these academic insiders, Marcusian “indiscriminate” toleration in academic discourse is not acceptable, since the expression of ideas that might be hurtful to individuals based on group membership—in particular, membership in groups that have been victims of historical practices of subordination (e.g., African-Americans in the United States, though more recently, transgender individuals)—is alleged to “silence” members of that group and do “violence” to them.    

Marcuse himself wanted to suppress speech advocating for actual violence against and silencing of human beings:  murdering their political leaders, dropping chemical bombs on their country, destroying their society and livelihood through military violence.    But neoliberalism—the idea that the preferences of the consumers of products, including education, determine the value of what is offered—now rules in the capitalist universities too, with the result that some self-styled “progressive” faculty and students--even in institutions of higher education that protect expressive rights quite resolutely--believe that denigrating and offensive ideas “silence,” “marginalize” and “do violence” to them.   (Ironically, one need only watch videos, easily available on-line, of minority students challenging and ridiculing the pathetic NeoNazi Richard Spencer on various campuses to realize that no one was “silenced” and no one suffered actual “violence.”)  In both research and teaching in the human sciences, such metaphysical flights of fancy deserve no consideration at any university committed to academic freedom.

An interview with Chomsky in Scientific American

Here; some excerpts, one from the start of the interview, the others a bit later on:

Do you ever chill out?

Would rather skip personal matters....

Do you take seriously the Singularity, the idea that artificial intelligence and other fields will soon radically transform humanity?

One can certainly imagine how, in principle, systems that can detect patterns with massive data processing might find hitherto unknown ways of constructing theories that surpass those within the reach of human intelligence.  And that could have all sorts of effects.  But among the concerns we face, this doesn’t seem to me to rank high.  Even tasks mastered almost reflexively by infants are far beyond the capacities of contemporary AI....

"Scott Walker was a national disgrace"

Now that's to the point!

Republicans voters are in the minority in the U.S.

Example 1:  "Voters cast 44.7 million votes for Democratic Senate candidates and 32.9 million votes for Republican Senate candidates — in other words 57 percent of Senate votes went for Democrats. But given how states and cities and stuff work, and which of the former happened to be up for election this year, this gap translated into at least a two-seat gain for Republicans."

Example 2:  "Democrats apparently won the House 'popular vote' by 7%."

Your idiosyncratic 2018 midterm election post-mortem

The Democrats took control of the House of Representatives, despite the Republican gerrymandering advantage:  good.  The Repugs increased their margin in the Senate, by picking up Democratic seats in Florida (bad), North Dakota (not surprising), Indiana (disappointing), and Missouri (bad, that state has moved further to the right in the last twenty years), but they did forfeit Nevada (yeah!) to a rather lackluster Democrat, but a Democrat nonetheless.  (Her Republican opponent was Trump-endorsed.)  Many Governorships flipped to Democrats (7 in total), which will help with the 2020 round of gerrymandering.

Although RealClearPolitics is a right-leaning site (boo!), I like their way of listing election results since they highlight "pickups" very clearly.

Let's start with the state Governor races.  First, two bits of happy news:  that reactionary, union-busting moron Scott Walker lost to the Democratic challenger in Wisconsin--that means hope for labor and for universities in Wisconsin; and the Trump-endorsed immigrant-bashing lunatic Kris Kobach lost to a Democrat in the deep red state of Kansas.  (Illinois sent Repug Bruce Rauner back to his country club, as expected, and replaced him with a Democratic billionaire, which is better, but still indicative of the depths of pathology in these benighted states of America.)  Second, one very bad bit of news:   Andrew Gillum, an African-American who led in all the polls in Florida, lost to the Republican.  Since Florida is a big state, with lots of house seats, this is bad news vis-a-vis redistricting in 2020.  Third, bad news but with a silver lining:  an African-American woman in Georgia--a state rife with voter suppression efforts--performed consistently with the polls and appears to have lost by only 2 percentage points to the Republican--and this in the heart of the deep South! 

Moving now to the Senate, it was mostly bad news, as already noted, and not unexpected given the seats in play.  The 2020 map will favor the Democrats in the Senate, this one did not. Given the composition of the new Senate, impeaching Trump in the House will be particularly pointless, since there is no chance as things stand now of getting 2/3rds of the Senate to convict.  One notable fact:   the loathsome Ted Cruz beat his Democratic opponents by only 2.5 percentage points in the still-benighted-but-less-so state of Texas.  He is vulnerable.

Against the use of police informants

Philosopher Luke Hunt (Radford) comments.  (Interestingly, Professor Hunt is also a former FBI agent.)

Watching the midterm election results in America

I found this useful.  If the Repugs keep the House of Representatives that will be as shocking as Trump winning in 2016--and maybe even more frightening. 

Vote Antonio Delgado in New York Congressional District 19

It's not just that he's the Democrat, he also studied philosophy at Colgate University and did fabulously well, earning a Rhodes Scholarship.

Is sex binary?

Philosopher Alex Byrne (MIT) comments.

As the liberal order declines, what's next?

Some provocative prognostications from the Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University in India; some excerpts:

Here are some elements of the new constellation that will characterise the politics of more countries.

First, greater polarisation between Left and Right. The only object of consensus in global politics seems to be that relatively status-quoist centrist politics is anathema....

Second, the rise of majoritarianism. One of the challenging trends in world politics is the anxieties of dominant cultural majorities in most countries about their ability to maintain their hegemony. This issue is manifested in the debate over immigration. But this anxiety is more subtler and far reaching than that. It is borne of the thought that while multiculturalism recognised the rights of cultural minorities to maintain their culture, the majority culture is now either demographically under threat, or simply derided as hegemonic and oppressive....

Third, expect more attacks on intellectual and cultural life. Though politically not significant, culturally the assault on universities will grow. Universities across the world will be constructed as purveyors of ideas that above all are contemptuous of the ordinary sensibilities of the majority. They will be accused of a double sin: Conflation of reason with identity, and then privileging some identities at the expense of others. As a description, this charge may be exaggerated. But the expectation that universities return to becoming flagbearers for cultural nationalism against multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism will grow.

Fourth, there will be a rise in militarism. As the international environment moves to a more zero sum game, the pressures to modernise militaries will, of course, increase, possibly unleashing a new arms race. But there will be a subtle rehabilitation of militarism as an ideology — the idea that military style tactics might be needed to keep assorted real and imaginary internal threats to nations at bay will become more acceptable. Jair Bolsanaro in Brazil is the starkest example of this. But this temptation is lurking under the surface in many other countries....

There's several others in the full essay.

The only worrisome form of vote fraud in the United States is the suppression of minority voters by Republicans

Full stop.   The rest is fantasy.   The only hope for this benighted country is that the young, racial and ethnic minorities, the non-religious, and women either won't vote for Republicans or hate them.  Those demographics might save America.

Want to write a computer science paper?

Now you can!  (Maybe computer science isn't a Wissenschaft?)

(Thanks to Joe Hatfield for the pointer.)

The invisible migrant caravans

A useful bit of humane reporting about migrants.

Should scholars avoid citing the work of bad people (e.g., sexual harassers, anti-semites)?

My latest Academic Ethics column at the Chronicle of Higher Education takes up the topic. Some examples, unsurprisingly, are drawn from philosophy, but the issue is arising in many fields.

The real dangers of a reactionary U.S. Supreme Court

This is a well-informed explanation of what's at stake from a colleague of mine who is far to my right, but also very far from being a reactionary maniac!

On living with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Read this essay.  Very honest and illuminating.  (I knew the author when he was a PhD student in philosophy at UT Austin.  He was a smart young man, facing a lot of challenges that he describes briefly in this essay.)

A (mostly) substantive response by three philosophers to arguments put forward by philosopher Kathleen Stock and other gender critical feminists

Here.   I do not ultimately find it persuasive (see this comment by philosopher Sophie Allen [Keele] which identifies a key weakness of the response), but it is mostly serious and substantive (unlike most of the responses to Professor Stock from Nathan Oseroff & the Twitter Red Guard, I. Pohl, Talia Mae Bettcher, L. Mollica, Asia Ferrin et al.) and worth reading for anyone who has been following this debate.  (It goes off the rails towards the end, however, in trying to rationalize the idiotic rhetoric of those who would silence debate--speaking of which, this reaction is representative of the totalitarian mindset in parts of academic philosophy.)

ADDENDUM:  The last link no longer works, but Professor Stock caught a screen shot of this disgraceful performance by philosopher Rebecca Kukla (Georgetown).

Disciplines are the foundation of a university: against the interdisciplinary fad

Jonathan Kramnick, a philosophically-informed English professor at Yale, has a long and generally plausible takedown of the "interdisciplinarity" blather that has now overrun the universities; it is unfortunately behind a paywall, but here's an excerpt:

A discipline is an academic unit. It is neither a naturally occurring category nor an arbitrary relic of the history of higher learning. Rather, a discipline is an evolving body of skills, methods, and norms designed to explain parts of the world worth knowing something about. To recognize the importance of disciplines — to fight for their survival — is therefore to advocate for a picture of the world, an ontology. It is to insist that the world does not have a single order that is adequately captured by, for example, biology or physics or computation.

A pluralistic array of disciplines matches up with a pluralistic vision of the world: endocrine cells for the biologists, tectonic plates for the geologists, librettos for the musicologists, and so on. Pluralism of this variety should put limits on the way disciplines are coordinated. It should insist that no one discipline is reducible to another. It should also provide the foundations for an interdisciplinarity that is interactive, not reductive, one that takes as its premise that each discipline has something to contribute to matters of shared concern in virtue of its own methods and objects. This is an interdisciplinarity worth having....

A cliché sprung from the tech industry and business schools in the mid-’90s to describe how companies can appeal to neglected sectors of the market, "innovation" is now so ubiquitous in academic culture as almost to pass without notice. [Steven] Pinker pairs it however with a sibling piece of corporate jargon — "silo" — that is worth our attention. "If anything is naïve and simplistic," he writes, "it is the conviction that the legacy silos of academia should be fortified and that we should be forever content with current ways of making sense of the world." Surely many readers of this essay have at some point heard a dean or outside consulting agency decry faculty lodged in silos, or departments siloed in tepid irrelevance, each split off from the other. The history of this pejorative and its migration into the lexicon of university administration tells a fascinating story.

Poseur du jour: Moira Weigel edition

When I came across Weigel's sneering review of The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, I thought it a bit thin on substance and a bit thick on rhetorical tricks:  here was another standard-issue comp lit PhD invested in identity politics and pissing all over the enemy.  (I confess to having little patience for Haidt, who did some clever psychology experiments early in his career--although he consistently misinterpreted their philosophical import--before becoming a public pontificator who apparently believes the main issue in academia these days is not enough Republican faculty:  go figure?)  Now someone has gone to the trouble to eviscerate the review, rather amusingly so.  But let's not knock ad hominem attacks, at least when not strictly fallacious.  Dr. Weigel's father, it turns out, is a retired tax partner at a "white shoe" New York law firm; I'd bet she even has a trust fund.  Any reader of Adolph Reed would hardly be surprised that an elite female child of ruling class privilege would turn out to be deeply invested in identity politics, to the point that its opponents are unintelligible to her.

Robot teaching introduction to ethics at West Point

Given the dreary state of moral philosophy, this doesn't seem that far-fetched, does it?  Next up:  robot teaches armchair metaphysics.

'The Hard Problem,' the play

Of all the hard problems in the world, this one is way down the list, but still!

'Self-identification, sex, and gender' and the law in the UK

Sensible and balanced analysis of some of the issues by philosopher Leslie Green (Oxford).  Because it is sensible and balanced, he will surely be vilified by the usual brainless automatons in cyberspace!

Non-neutral 'neutrality' and the case of assisted dying

Philosopher Jerry Dworkin comments.  It's quite an interesting essay, I commend it to anyone interested in the topic of assisted "suicide" or "dying."

My five favorite Americans of the 20th-century

1.  Eugene Debs.  Stalwart if unsuccessful socialist agitator for an alternative to devotion to the market.

2.  H.L. Mencken.  Merciless critic of religious, patriotic and other bullshit, with his own parochial prejudices to be sure, but a great writer who punched up, down, and sideways without apology.

3.  A. Philip Randolph. The most important labor and civil rights leader of the century, who made MLK possible, and who always championed, from the beginning, the interdependence of racial and economic progress.

4.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  He betrayed his class and saved America from fascism and probably saved the world from the Nazis.  The Reagan reaction of the last forty years was against his vision for social democracy.

5.  Bayard Rustin.  He organized the 1963 March on Washington, and worked with A. Philip Randolph on behalf of the same goals:  Randolph and Rustin were a team.  He did all this as a gay African-American, and in the face of enormous bigotry both within and outside the movement.  A person of enormous dignity and courage, whom I had the privilege to interview in the early 1980s.  I will never forget it.  

Your favorites?  Comments may take awhile to appear, so post only once!  But I'm curious to hear from readers and I will require you to post with your full name and valid e-mail address

Everyone in NYC real estate knew Donald Trump was a crook...

...and the NYT now documents some of the thievery and fraud.  If the Democrats capture the House of Representatives, this will make a useful hunting ground for some of their investigations.

Against inheritance

Philosopher Adam Swift (Warwick) discusses.  It's tricky, however, to design a successful confiscatory estate tax, but one leading wills & estates scholar (my former Texas Law colleague, Mark Ascher) took a stab at it some thirty years ago.  (By the way, Ascher votes Republican, but his impetus in writing the paper was the same egalitarian thoughts expressed by Swift:  Ascher always referred to himself [truly] as "a farmboy from Kansas":  the idea of inherited fortunes rubbed him the wrong way.)

About the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics

One notable aspect, already much-remarked upon, is that one of the recipients, Donna Strickland (Waterloo), is the first woman to get a Nobel Physics Prize in more than a half century!  Less-remarked upon, but also striking, is that she is only an "Associate Professor" in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo.  Two questions:  has someone not at the full professor rank ever gotten a Nobel Prize (at least where such a rank was relevant)?  And why is she not a full professor?  From her Google Scholar page, she seems to have had a steady stream of publications, though her most-cited piece, from 1985, was co-authored with her teacher, Gerard Mourou, who also shared in the Prize.  Any readers with insights on either point?

ADDENDUM:  I note that her last article to get a significant number of citations was in 1994, although she has published many articles since then.  Is that an indicator of anything in physics?

Brett Kavanaugh, psychoanalyzed

This is brilliant, from Robert Paul Wolff.

This essay makes a strong case that Judge Kavanaugh lied or dissembled about a lot in his testimony

There's too much lead-in blather, but when it gets into the meat of the testimony it makes clear that Judge Kavanaugh was not honest with the Judiciary Committee on a lot of points.   His dishonesty about the stuff in his high school yearbook is particularly egregious and will come back to haunt him in subsequent impeachment hearings when the Democrats are in control--assuming he doesn't withdraw in the next week and resign from the D.C. Circuit thereafter.  Since his alcohol consumption and relations with females in high school was absolutely central to the circumstantial evidence, including in his defense, lies about these matters would be perjury.

Rachel Maddow dissects the testimony by Judge Kavanaugh

Useful if you didn't have the time or the stomach to watch the whole ordeal; the judge does not come off well: