Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Videos of the keynotes from the Bernard Williams conference at Lund this summer

The keynotes from the Lund conference organized by Paul Russell are now available here.  Unfortunately, I missed Professor Heuer's talk (but look forward to watching it now), but I can highly recommend those by Miranda Fricker, Stephen Darwall, and Gideon Rosen.  

Rawlsian liberalism in context

An excerpt from Katrina Forrester's new book In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy, which is already giving philosophers indigestion, as it should.   As Forrester succinctly puts it on p. ix of her book:  in the wake of Rawls, "liberal political philosophers pass ethical judgments on the world by appealing to general moral principles designed to help us make sense of what justice requires of our politics and institutions."  The problem, of course, is that only other liberal political philosophers in the academy pay these judgments any mind, and thus political philosophy has been consigned to irrelevance.   Some embrace that (recall Tim Scanlon's comment here long ago [contra Richard Posner's claim that moral philosophers don't change behavior]:  "My aims in engaging in moral philosophy are (1) to get a clearer understanding of what kind of quesiont I am thinking about in thinking about right and wrong and (2) to make up my mind what to think about it (both how to understand certain crucial terms such as rights, blame, responsibility, and so on, and which moral claims to accept.)").   But there are other approaches to theorizing.

Stockholm's Helen Frowe wins 2019 Sanders Prize in Political Philosophy

Details here.

Memories of John Gardner

When it became clear that John's cancer had recurred and was terminal earlier this year, John's wife, Jenny, reached out to friends asking them to share with John our memories of him.   Jenny, after seeking permission, has now made these available here.   Those who knew John will appreciate them, and those who didn't, will get a fine sense of the person from them.  What a tragic loss.

What is Yale hiding in the "Napping while Black" scandal it created?

I think this lawyer's assessment is correct:   "Yale is fighting a war of attrition, using [Sarah] Braasch’s financial hardship against her, delaying the disclosure as long as possible so that interest will wane...."  In this case, they postponed a hearing on releasing police video of events on the night of the alleged incident but only after Ms. Braasch had expended money to be there.  This is descipable conduct, and the fact that they are trying not to release the video makes it look even more likely than it already did that Ms. Braasch was the actual victim here.  I hope one of the journalists who read this blog will look into this!  If the press would shine a light on Yale's slimy behavior, Ms. Braasch might get a fair hearing on the actual facts.

Richard Marshall interviews Ross Cameron (Virginia)...

...at 3:16 AM.   Marshall is now asking subjects to answer questions along the lines of the PhilPapers Surveys.  Professor Cameron is a hardcore ethical realist and (unsurprisingly) a non-naturalist, among other positions he affirms.

Lawford-Smith on philosophers behaving badly, and what's really driving the campaign against Gender Critical feminists

Philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith (Melbourne) makes a number of good points in this essay.  I'll provide a few excerpts, but I encourage readers to look at the whole essay.

Regarding the Dembroff/Kukla/Stryker tantrum about being featured on the same page with Stock, Lawford-Smith et al. at IAITV:

In their statement, the three claimed to have been the victims of “non-consensual co-platforming”—which meant being put on the same internet page as us. Yet as philosopher Dan Kaufman pointed out in a recent blog post, “there is no such standard in our discipline, according to which when asked to contribute to something, one’s consent to appear alongside all the other contributors must be solicited.”

Dembroff, Kukla and Stryker also claimed that our views constituted “acts of violence,” and suggested that entering into debate with us might be analogized to engaging with the question of “whether the Holocaust actually happened, or whether corrective rape should be used to cure lesbianism, or whether or not the white race is superior to all others.”

The extravagance of this rhetorical gambit should be shocking to philosophers and laypeople alike—especially insofar as it grotesquely co-opts such apocalyptic horrors as the extermination of Europe’s Jews and the African slave trade as a means to discredit a philosophical and political position on the nature of sex and gender. It is hard to imagine that the authors’ use of “corrective rape” being “used to cure lesbianism” was anything other than a grotesque barb hurled at me, Stock, Bindel—all three of us being lesbians.

The Institute’s staff were decent enough to let me respond. My main points were that debate over gender is a reasonable—as opposed to unreasonable—disagreement, no matter how badly the trans-activist side behaves, and that those on that side should “at least leave the rape talk out of it.”

....

The appropriateness of treating interlocutors as though they are doing harm with their assertions depends on the persuasiveness of the argument that they are in fact doing harm. And there are reasonable grounds for disagreement here, even setting aside difficult philosophical questions about the distinction between psychological and physical modes of harm. But in the past, philosophical disagreements over what is and isn’t a form of harm haven’t generally resulted in abusive behaviour, deplatforming and gatekeeping. British philosopher John Broome thinks that almost all the greenhouse gas emissions associated with our actions do harm to the world. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong of Duke University disagrees. It’s a very serious subject. Yet you don’t see Broome calling Sinnott-Armstrong a “cunt” on social media (as Rebecca Kukla has done to me).

Kukla, of course, thought it was appropriate for Georgetown PhD student Keyvan Shafiei to call Lawford-Smith a "vile fucking human" and "a piece of shit," so her abusive rhetoric is hardly surprising.  That Kukla has not been widely condemned for her harassment of Lawford-Smith is itself indicative of the pathological state of affairs in the "profession" at the moment.  (At least we now know that the APA's absurd "Code of Conduct" is indeed irrelevant.)

But Professor Lawford-Smith also offers a very interesting diagnosis of what's really gong on here:

More on the illegal firing of tenured faculty at St. Cloud State

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 20:  UPDATED

A good article in a local newspaper, giving the perspective of philosopher Michael Shaffer, one of those affected.  If the union grievance process does not get the decision reversed, I'm optimistic he would prevail in a lawsuit.

UPDATE:  As philosopher Joel Pust (Delaware) points out to me, St. Cloud is already advertising for adjuncts in philosophy.  And Dean Rowan (Berkeley) calls my attention to this essay about the "invisible" labor of librarians, who are also targets of the St. Cloud administration.  The St. Cloud administrators need to be fried in litigation, as a warning to others who would destroy careers and lives.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Fat, "Duck Sweat," 1970

Another good number from this Massachussetts band that we first featured this summer:

 

All fascists think alike: Hungary comes to America

Hungary shut down gender studies, now the federal government here would like to control the content of Middle East Studies.  The good news is that the federal government has little direct control over higher education, which is either private or in the hands of the state; they targeted this particular program because of its dependence on federal funding, and probably as a "test run" for their agenda.

Blast from the past: Linda Alcoff and the "Climate for Women" fraud

Still amazing after all these years.

Cross-cultural normative philosophy...

...at the Pea Soup blog.  It looks like it will be mostly about Chinese philosophy to start.  As I've learned  more about Chinese philosophy, I've been struck by how much of it makes the same kinds of mistakes as the mainstream of the Western tradition and has a tendency to be "ideological" in roughly the Marxist sense.   I'll be interested to see if this series changes my impression.

(Thanks to Brad Cokelet for the pointer.)

Gill from Arizona to Edinburgh

Michael Gill (ethics, history of ethics), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where he will start in the 2020-21 academic year.

Blast from the past: Kathleen Stock called out Nathan Oseroff for his bad behavior one year ago

Time flies....

Walton's theory of fiction as "make-believe"

Animated!  This is pretty well done:

 

Evolution does not select for veridical perception

Nietzsche knew this, and Stephen Stich made the point decades ago; now here's an evolutionary game theoretic explanation, which is nicely done.

UPDATE:  Philosopher Jonathan Cohen (UC San Diego) writes:

just saw that you posted a link to Hoffman's latest repackaging of the no-selection-for-veridical-perception thing he has been circulating for years. I would have left a curmudgeonly comment but you (sensibly) left comments off the post.

but just to say: Hoffman's piece is seriously confused about some basic philosophical issues concerning the nature of representation and veridicality, and his confusions completely undermine his arguments -- including the evolutionary game theoretic argument, which just build them in. 

so, for example, his attack on representation depends on construing that notion in an implausibly strong way (for A to represent B, it must be true that A=B) that, as far as I can tell, isn't defended by any serious proponent of a representational construal of perception.

St. Cloud State is moving forward with firing tenured faculty, including in philosophy

I've been assisting one faculty member in finding legal counsel, and may soon be raising funds to help with this tenured faculty member's legal remedies.   (The faculty are unionized, and the union will be filing its own grievances regarding these terminations.)  I'll post more when I can, probably later in the week.  This is appalling behavior by the St. Cloud administration.

Robert Paul Wolff on Trump's firing of John Bolton

This is funny:  "Bolton is a genuinely dangerous man, and I am delighted to see him gone. His summary dismissal highlights the odd but welcome fact that Trump is a dove. A belligerent dove, a bullying dove, a bombastic dove, an ignorant dove, a feckless dictator-loving suck up of a dove, but a dove nonetheless. This is a dangerous world. We must take our comfort where we can find it."

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Grannie, "Leaving," 1971

This is one of the very first obscure numbers I posted several years ago, but it's such a great tune by a forgotten British band that I'm putting it up front again (a mix of Blind Faith and Traffic, as it were):

 

Unintentional haikus of the philosophers

Eliran Haziza, a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Toronto, has written a program to strip occurrences of "unintentional haiku" from corpuses of text. When run on the philosophers of our time, the program locates various gems,which Mr. Haziza kindly gave permission to share:

> Snow falls, and is white;
> the falling is a process,
> the whiteness is not.
> (Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind)
> 
> The game, one would like
> to say, has not only rules
> but also a point.
> (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations)
> 
> No Grandfather, no
> Father; no Father, no Tim;
> no Tim, no killing.
> (David Lewis, “The Paradoxes of Time Travel”)
> 
> Suppose that I cling
> to some rock as a mere means
> of escaping death.
> (Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons)
> 
> We sometimes say: in
> later life I will be a
> different person.
> (David Lewis, "Survival and Identity")
> 
> You have an auto
> accident one winter night
> on a lonely road.
> (Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere)
> 
> When I turn my eye
> inward, I find nothing but
> doubt and ignorance.
> (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature)

Richard Marshall interviews Anthony Booth (Sussex)...

...at 3:16 AM.

America is crazy, Florida edition

Jesus Fucking Christ.  Next up:  arm the children.  

St. Cloud State University may fire some tenured faculty early next week

Appalling, and it looks to violate the university's own policies and procedures.  (Earlier coverage.)

Why does "evil" fascinate?

Literary critic Terry Eagleton, philosopher Susan Neiman, and others discuss.

More on the free expression debate at Williams "Comfort" College

This account from the student newspaper last Spring is informative.

More on the rise of the "comfort college"...

...from philosopher Steven Gerrard (Williams) (part one); an excerpt:

Suppose I ask someone for the reason he or she believes something — anything. Without further context, the word “reason” is strictly ambiguous. Am I asking for the motive, the cause or the justification? If the question is “What is the reason a person believes in God?” the answer could be a motive (to find comfort at 3 a.m.) or a cause (his parents raised him that way). A justification would take the form of a rational argument.

Notice, though, that while motive and cause are subjective — that is, they only hold depending on the individual — justification is objective; if it holds for one, it holds for all. Only justification is directly tied to the truth. As the ending of “1984” brutally demonstrates, one can be motivated and caused to believe 2 plus 2 equals 5. For all the techniques of Big Brother, however, it still equals 4.

Thrasymachus, a post-modernist a couple of millennia ahead of his time, denies there is such a thing as justification — there is only motive and cause. There’s only one answer to the question Why should I be just? Swords and spears.

It took 2,400 years, but Thrasymachus has won in the comfort college. When objectivity is scorned, when justification is considered only subjective, when reason and logic are taken to be only the tools of oppression and the province of the oppressor, then all that is left is power.

To ask the reason for something can only mean to ask for the motive or cause. The study of logic has a name for what happens when we confuse the origin of a belief with its truth, or the origin of an argument with its validity. It’s called the genetic fallacy.

The comfort college’s acolytes make the figurative fallacy literal. It is the arguer’s genes that determine truth and validity, not facts or reason. That is why, in the comfort college, testimony has come to substitute for rational argument. When students (and more and more faculty) demand a new policy, their arguments often begin as (and rarely go beyond) accounts of victimization; the account is justification enough.

This ritual institutionalizes the denial of rational justification. It corrupts the healthy multicultural idea, built on Enlightenment universalism and cosmopolitanism, that different perspectives matter, and that what one sees often depends on where one stands — and that we are all better off from listening to those who stand in different places, who see the part of the truth that is blocked from our particular vision. The liberal ideal of the pursuit of knowledge is that by cooperating we all can see and understand better. But identity politicians reject the Enlightenment’s hope of mutual understanding and reason’s path to get us there. In the fragmented comfort college, the only tool is power — the power to enforce the dogma.

Do see the appalling account of the institutionalized hiring advice committees at Williams get as well!

 

News of world-shattering importance

Hyde Park, where the University of Chicago is located, now has a really good Italian restaurant--please go there!  Nella Pizzeria is also excellent, but not as ambitious in its dishes.   For the local bourgeoisie, these are very good developments.

Best of the summer blog, 2019

For those returning to more regular blog reading, here are some highlights from the blog this summer:

June

What I actually think about trans gender issues

"'Philosophical Discussion of Trans Identity:  A Guide for the Perplexed'"

Raymond Geuss wishes Habermas a "Happy 90th"

Reflections on the Searle case from one of his victims

July

I've been keeping some of the lesser minds in philosophy busy "for decades"

In Memoriam:  John Gardner (1965-2019)

Statement in defense of the academic freedom of philosophers to discuss sex and gender

Twitter is not the real world, an on-going saga (link fixed)

Tuvel-style mobbing comes to sociology

Libet's "readiness potential" and free will

Several readers kindly sent along this article about some new research purporting to undermine Libet's results; of course, objections to Libet's interpretation of his original results are well-known (the article doesn't really convey that accurately it seemed to me).  But I'd be curious to hear from readers familiar with this new research and the philosophical issues what they make of all this.  Feel free to include links to other relevant material.

Another elite liberal arts college with a freedom of expression problem

Philosopher Steven Gerrard recounts recent events at Williams College and introduces the concept of the "comfort college":

At Williams College’s bicentennial in 1993, Frederick Rudolph, a beloved and esteemed professor of history at the school, gave a speech in which he defined the three eras of his and other elite colleges: the Christian college, the gentlemen’s college and the consumer’s college. Rudolph predicted that the consumer Williams “will be moving on, making way for the as yet undefined next era in the college’s history.”

Elite private education in America is on the cusp of this new era. The controversies over free speech, safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions and the like are symptoms of this shift. They are currently considered controversies because the colleges are in transition, and many do not realize that the old standards no longer hold. Once the transition is complete, the “correct” side of the controversies will become central to a school’s identity — just as faith was to the Christian college, self-confidence was to the gentlemen’s college, and alumni devotion and achievement were to the consumer’s college.

Some have suggested naming this new college “the therapeutic university” or “the woke college.” I prefer “the comfort college,” because it combines the emotional component of the first with the political elements of the second. Our students are comfortable in their opinions but uncomfortable with their lives, finding their world and the Williams campus a threatening place. Once Williams’ transition to comfort college is complete, the students will expect to find their college truly comfortable in all respects.

Honest academic job ads

Many of these are very funny!

Advertising update

October is sold out and there is one spot remaining in November (2nd from the top).   The next open top spot is in December (one left).  There is at least one top spot still open every month thereafter.  E-mail me for more information.

This week in actual "fake news" making the rounds on social media

Pretty ridiculous.  (I say "actual 'fake news'" to distinguish it from the Trump "fake news" category which consists of "accurate news coverage unfavorable to me.")

Philosophy's aspiring "tin-pot dictators"

Philosopher Daniel Kaufman (Missouri State) comments on their latest shenanigans.

Avital Ronell is back teaching at NYU...

...but is facing calls from students and some faculty that she be fired.  I see no reason for that, based on what we know at this point.  She was investigated, found guilty of certain offenses, and lost a year's salary and faces other administrative supervision now that she is back.  Those are significant punishments, not to mention that she has to defend against a civil lawsuit.

"Napping while Black" at Yale--what really happened?

This thorough account puts last year's incident in a different light, and while hardly uncritical of the philosophy graduate student involved, also makes clear she was badly treated by the media, both actual and social. It's particularly notable that Yale, upon investigation, did not find that there had been any racial harassment.

Ms. Braasch, the student at the center of the controversy, is seeking funding for legal redress; certainly some of the media accounts were defamatory or portrayed her in a "false light."  The statute of limitations may run soon on some of these damaging accounts, so I hope she is able to secure legal counsel.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Warpig, "Rock Star," 1970

Canadian hard rock band of the early 1970s, that enjoyed some local success in Ontario, but not really elsewhere.  This is from their one and only album (with echoes of Deep Purple):

UPDATE:  As reader David Frydrych points out, the "echo" may be going the other way!

Survey of philosophy job seekers

Philosopher Charles Lassiter (Gonzaga) asked me to share this with readers (there are more details about the survey at the linked site):

If you are planning to apply for academic jobs this year, we hope you'll consider participating in our study "The Philosophy Job Market: Applicant Profiles and CV Review." Our aim in this first phase is to get a picture of job market applicants: what journals are they publishing in (if at all)? for how many classes are they the instructor of record (if at all)? There has been, as far as we know, no systematic attempt to collect information about people going into the job market. In the second phase of this study, we will the collected information to randomly generate CVs and investigate the behavior of potential search committee members in reviewing them.

In consultation with the Gonzaga University IRB, it was determined that IRB approval was not needed for this phase project. IRB approval will be obtained for the second phase. Nonetheless, all responses will be kept private and information secured on the hard drives of the investigators. Results will be made available at leiterreports.typepad.com, dailynous.com, philosopherscocoon.typepad.com, and philarchive.org

The survey should take about 10 minutes to complete. Participants will be entered into a drawing for two $25 Amazon gift cards. If you are willing to participate, you can find the survey here. Please email Charles Lassiter at lassiter@gonzaga.edu if you have any questions.

The link (in case it shouldn't carry over with a simple copy and paste job) is: https://gonzaga.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_b8dXHKBn1pRWR3n

The funniest Brexit melodrama tweet...

...from philosopher Mary Leng (York), a propos this: 

Bro Jo says “no, no” in low blow to BoJo.

Philosopher Sophie Allen (Keele) replies to a Twitter critic

This makes for a delightful read, and not only because Dr. Allen is so much more dialectically acute than her sanctimonious critic (who appears to be Prof. Kay Kirkpatrick, a mathematics professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).

Blast from the past: a classic metablog moment

It seems so long ago now.

Correlation, causation, and the "dumbness" of data

Illuminating review essay of Judea Pearl's new book by philosopher Tim Maudlin (NYU), which includes this amusingly apt observation:

The physicist Richard Feynman is widely reported as saying “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” It always surprises me that no one points out that ornithology would indeed be a great use to birds—if they could ask the ornithologists for advice, and if they could understand it.

Physics, Physicalism, and What There Is

A discussion with Nancy Cartwright (Durham/UC San Diego), John Dupre (Exeter) and physicist Subir Sarkar (Oxford).

The NYT 1619 Project and the true story of America

Robert Paul Wolff comments.

Reaction formation watch: conversion therapy edition

Founder of a major program aimed at "converting" gay people to being "straight" has now come out as gay.   Another notch in Dr. Freud's belt.

San Francisco Board declares National Rifle Association a "domestic terrorist organization"

Good for them, although it's fair to say they are more an aider and abettor of domestic terrorism than a terrorist organization proper--but it's the thought that counts!

Quantum physics and "common sense"

Interesting popular essay by philosopher Tim Maudlin (NYU).

How Thatcher's model of universities as "businesses" and students as "customers" destroyed British universities

A damning, and no doubt accurate, assessment; an excerpt:

Over the past 30 years, successive governments, from Thatcher to Blair, to Cameron and May, have imposed a set of perverse incentives on universities. Their effect has been to degrade and devalue the quality of British degrees. Academic standards have collapsed. In many institutions, it is the students who now educate the universities, in what grades they will tolerate and how much work they are willing to do. “We have got to protect ourselves from complaints,” says Natalie Fenton, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. “It’s an endless process of dealing with students who haven’t been able to buy the grade they wanted"....

The proportion of students getting “good honours” – a First or 2:1 – has leapt from 47 to 79 per cent: at 13 universities, more than 90 per cent of students were given at least a 2:1 last year. And Oxbridge is leading the charge: 96 to 99 per cent of its English, history and languages students get “good honours”...

For Thatcher..., universities were run as archaically as the public utilities. The academy needed to be governed by the market and measured by its metrics. “Before Thatcher, universities were… run for the benefit of staff with government money,” said Terence Kealey, a professor of biochemistry and former adviser to Thatcher, upon news of her death in 2013. “She was determined to introduce a much higher level of accountability for public funding and greater accountability for students as customers,” he recalled.

"Could philosophy save Ireland?"

I didn't now Ireland needed saving but teaching philosophy in the schools sounds like a good idea!

Philosophy books for "tweens"?

A lawyer I know (who studied philosophy before law school) poses a good question:

Do you have any ideas for beginning philosophy books for tweens?  I should probably say books that exemplify a philosophical way of thinking. My son is 11 and I’d like to develop that ability in him.  And my 9-year-old daughter just the other day figured out there is no Santa Claus and no God so she might be ready, too.  I’m not sure I know of anything that might fit the bill, though. 

I did not.  Suggestions from readers?