Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Finding academic mentor(s)

A junior philosopher on tenure-track writes:

I wonder if you could put a question -anonymously- to your readers, which might interest other (early career) scholars as well. How would you go about finding an academic mentor, specifically to discuss and strategize about scholarly and career-related questions at the tenure-track level? I’d be interested to learn what people in a position to be a mentor think about this: do you consider it something worth your while? Under what conditions? Of course, relationships could develop through research-related activities. But I reckon that there could be mentor-mentee relationships outside of primarily research-related interactions, too. Have some of your readers established such relationships, and have they been fruitful for both parties?

The indictment of Trump Org CFO is not about "fringe benefits," but criminal "fraud"

An illuminating breakdown of how serious the allegations are by tax expert Daniel Shaviro (NYU).

Blast from the past: publishing while in graduate school

Back in 2016, with comments from readers.

Happy July 4th to my American readers!

Celebrate freedom, burn the flag.

Great moments in live (in the studio) rock 'n' roll: Albert King & Stevie Ray Vaughn, "Born Under a Bad Sign," 1983

I'd never seen this clip before, a recording of a live studio session with two great blues guitarists:

(Thanks to Frank Saunders for the pointer.)

 

The U.S. is a "young," not an "old," democracy

Apartheid was only dismantled in the U.S. a half-century ago, after all:

We sometimes brag that we are the world’s oldest democracy, and that is true enough in a technical sense. But if you use a more modern definition of democracy, one that includes voting rights for women and minorities as a prerequisite, then we are one of the world’s younger democracies.

“For me, as a democracy scholar, it’s ridiculous to say America is the oldest democracy in the world,” Lindberg said. “The U.S. did not become a democracy until at least after the civil rights movement in the ’60s. In that sense, it’s kind of a new democracy, like Portugal or Spain"....

"Harm" and academic freedom in Australia

Three philosophers--Luara Ferracioli (Sydney), Matthew Lister (Deakin), and Sam Shpall (Sydney)--comment.

Blast from the past: hot topics in epistemology?

Back in 2007.

UPDATE:  The comments on the 2007 thread may take a half minute or more to load, please be patient.

UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees votes 9-4 to approve tenure recommendation by journalism school...

...for Nikole Hannah-Jones, following weeks of controversy.   Note that 4 trustees still voted against!  The message here is clear:  Republican-appointed Boards of Trustees will continue to pose a threat to the academic freedom of departments to hire based on their own disciplinary standards.

Kierkegaard as the father of existentialism

Philosopher Alastair Hannay (Oslo) comments.

Dotson from Michigan State to Michigan

Kristie Dotson (epistemology, feminist philosophy, philosophy of race), Professor of Philosophy and African American and African Studies at Michigan State University, has accepted a senior offer from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she will have a joint appointment beginning this fall with the Departments of Philosophy and Afroamerican and African Studies

Yesterday's montage maker has a whole YouTube channel...

...devoted to funny video montages of philosophers (as several readers pointed out after yesterday's post).

Amartya Sen on India and the British Empire...

...in The Guardian.

Proof from the capitalist marketplace that art beats philosophy

Painting of "A Philosopher Reading" sold for $9 million; actual philosopher reading never earned so much.

(Thanks to Mark Couch for the pointer.)

Blast from the past: the strange saga of the white feminist vs. her African-American colleague at Northwestern

Back in 2016 (and also here and here, with a cameo by philosopher Sally Haslanger.)  Both the protagonists remain at Northwestern.

Allais from UC San Diego to Johns Hopkins

Lucy Allais (Kant, moral psychology), holder of the Henry Allison Chair in philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, where she will be roughly half-time (as she was at UCSD).  She will continue to be part of the year at the University of Witwatersrand in her native South Africa.

Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Nietzsche

Someone actually went to the trouble to produce this funny montage (based on this lecture at Lund):

There's a lot of time to burn on the Internet!

Mari Mikkola (Amsterdam) talks about hate speech and pornography...

...at the Brain in a Vat podcast.

"Gender is not a spectrum"

Philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper (Warwick) comments.

"Vain, lazy, and pompous"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JUNE 24, COMMENTS ARE OPEN NOW, DISCUSSION OF THE IMPORT OF THIS RESEARCH WELCOME

That's our guy John Locke, according to an account of a contemporary.

(Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)

The final nail in the coffin for the failed science of "implicit bias"?

Philosopher Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh), a leading contributor to philosophy of cognitive science, shared with me his latest analysis of the empirical literature.  (Professor Machery also was kind of enough to allow me to post the penultimate draft of the typescript:   Download Machery Anomalies in Implicit Attitudes Research copy.)

As Professor Machery summarizes the research:

Great moments in live (folk) rock 'n' roll: Joni Mitchell, "Urge for Going," 1966

This is a remarkable early clip from a somewhat corny Canadian music show (Mitchell's performance starts at about the one minute mark):

(Thanks to Dan Jacobson for calling this to my attention.)

Blast from the past: Some students is not writing good

Back in 2015.

Female law student in Scotland "investigated" by her university but then cleared...

...for (you probably guessed) expressing views about women.

(Thanks to Cora Diamond for the pointer.)

Egalitarianism, the mongoose way

Parents don't know which offspring are theirs.

(Thanks to Joshua Selby for the pointer.)

Philosopher Marc Lange's (North Carolina) letter to the UNC Board of Trustees...

...regarding their failure to approve a recommendation of tenure.  He's of course right about the damage this has and will do.

Richard Marshall interviews Peter Finocchiaro (Wuhan)...

...at 3:16 AM.

"Naturalism in Legal Philosophy," updated again

The latest updated version by Max Etchemendy and myself is now available at SEP.

Blast from the past: In defense of English Departments!

Back in 2014, including a discussion.

Australasian programs in the PGR

Several students have written regarding possible "updates" for Australasian progarms in the 2017 PGR; I apologize that I haven't put together an update similar to others I've done for other regions (with the generous help of Mitchell Barrington).  The top five in 2017 were ANU and Sydney at 1 and 2, and then a drop-off in scores before Monash, Melbourne, and Auckland.  I would expect that order to hold in 2021, but the big change in Australsia is the arrival of the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University.  ACU could come out as #1 in Australasia, given the strong faculty in M&E broadly speaking that they've put together, but ANU and Sydney will still be stronger for students interested in, e.g., philosophy of the sciences or many parts of value theory.  In any case, I would expect ACU, ANU and Sydney to be the dominant programs in Australasia in the next PGR.   (Readers will recall that Professors Brogaard and Pynes postponed the 2020 PGR due to the pandemic; I have not chatted with them recently about this, but the plan was to try to do a new set of surveys this fall.)

"Two Pessimisms in Mill"

I commend this important paper in Utilitas by one of our PhD students, Joshua Fox, who is defending his splendid dissertation on pessimism in Mill, Schopenhauer and  Nietzsche next month.  The paper, which draws on dissertation material, sheds fascinating and new light on an aspects of Mill's ethics that I've not seen addressed before.  (A different part of the project, related to Nietzsche, is found in this paper, which Nietzsche scholars will want to read.)

Anti-"Anti-Racism"

Some interesting material in this article; an excerpt:

Nesrine Malik, a columnist for the Guardian, calls much of the anti-racist movement “a kind of group narcissism … that promotes this notion that identity politics is about easing the passage of people of color in elite spaces. … It also promotes a view that reform is via individual guilt and correction, and distracts from the systemic ways that identity politics is being nurtured by the media and politicians.” The Columbia scholar John McWhorter, a linguist well-positioned to make sense of what is largely a rhetorical movement, calls anti-racism a “religion,” complete with the power to excommunicate those who fail to speak in canonical ways. But anti-racism is more than a religion; it has had real and dispiriting political consequences. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has noted, it arguably helped defeat the Bernie Sanders brand of social-democratic populism in the battle to define the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Arts, humanities and AI ethics

Philosopher John Tasioulas (Oxford) comments.

Blast from the past: Going to law school? Thinking about law school? What should you read?

Back in 2016.

Will Ethel Rosenberg finally be exonerated?

An interesting essay about a new book about a horrible miscarriage of justice.  ("Miscarriage of justice" may be too tepid a description, given the involvement of the criminal Roy Cohn.)

"Moral Accounting" and good governance

Robert J. Bloomfield--an accounting professor at Cornell, who has written a number of papers tying accounting to philosophical issues, including limits to speech, and pragmatics of language--is seeking feedback from philosophers about his current project on "moral accounting" and governance.  Professor Bloomfield discusses the philosophical issues here, and some practical implications here.   These blog posts also include his email address, for those who would like to offer Professor Bloomfield comments.

"Nietzsche Against Marx on the Causes of Suffering"

An early and rough draft of a project I'm still thinking about.  Here's the abstract:

Marx and Nietzsche, the two lodestars of modern philosophical anthropology, differ most interestingly not in their moral outlooks--which are indeed contradictory--but in their explanatory methods. Marx has, as it were, no psychology, only an anthropology and economics, while Nietzsche relies almost exclusively on explanation in terms of individual psychology, appearing at times willfully blind to social and economic causes. This difference is most apparent in their contrasting approaches to human suffering. Marx understands suffering to be primarily a consequence of socio-economic circumstances, while Nietzsche traces it primarily to defects in individual psychology and physiology (the latter manifesting themselves at the psychological level). To put it crudely, for Nietzsche, most people are by nature “sick” and thus disposed to suffer, regardless of socio-economic circumstances, while for Marx, people’s suffering is an artifact of their socio-economic circumstances, and thus amenable to amelioration.

Great moments in live rock 'n' roll: Foghat, "Slow Ride," 1976

Foghat emerged from the British Savoy Brown Blues & Boogie Band, and really made it big in America in the mid-1970s, when they were a staple of stadium rock concerts (and, allegedly, one of the inspirations for the rock satire This is Spinal Tap).   Here's a terrific live performance of one of their signature songs, complete with the long Rod Price slide guitar intro (the video quality is uneven, alas):

 

Blast from the past: philosophy of journalism?

Or:  "Why is Brian Leiter so mean to me," asks Carlin Romano back in 2009.

Melbourne V-C Duncan Maskell announces plan to violate academic freedom rights of faculty

This guy is a disgrace; if the University of Melbourne doesn't want to be the laughing stock of academia worldwide, they'd better rethink this:

Melbourne University vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell has warned staff that their right to academic freedom does not give them license to write or say things that cause harm to transgender people.

In the draft of a new “gender affirmation policy”, the university is considering prohibiting public speeches or events that it deems an attack on gender diversity. If enacted, the draft would also alter the university’s free speech policy to prevent its academics engaging in public discourse that the university believes has the potential to harm transgender and gender-diverse members of the university community....

The draft policy says that: “Where the university determines that an activity or event poses an unacceptable risk of harm to [transgender and gender-diverse] members of the university community, it may determine not to conduct or host the activity or event on those grounds (in accordance with the provisions of the Freedom of Speech Policy).”

What are the standards for making such a "determination"?  What degree of "risk of harm" is "acceptable"?  What constitutes a harm?   It's quite clear from the context that the university is not contemplating an answer to these questions compatible with academic freedom.  Today, of course, the threat is only to annihilate the academic freedom rights of faculty doing teaching and research on issues related to transgender identity and sex-based rights; but surely it won't stop there.  After all, the massive inflation of the concept of "harm" =--to encompass hurt feelings, irrational fears, and basically the expression of any ideas some group really doesn't like--lends itself to obliterating the academic freedom of those who work on many other topics where there is a mobilized interest group who would rather those topics not be discussed.

I guess we can strike the University of Melbourne from the list of serious universities.

In Memoriam: Aryeh (L.A.) Kosman (1935-2021)

A longtime member of the philosophy faculty at Haverford College, Professor Kosman also taught as a visiting professor at several leading PhD programs.  He was well-known for his contributions to scholarship on ancient philosophy, especially Aristotle.  The Haverford memorial notice is here.

QAnon and survey responses

A props the QAnon craziness, a couple of readers point out that some number of survey respondents (maybe 4% on average?) are either inattentive to the questions being asked or simply mischievous.  That's worth remembering, but hardly reassuring given that the survey found one in four Republicans believed in a batshit crazy conspiracy theory:  if we discount the clueless and the pranksters, that still gets us 1 in 5 believing a batshit crazy conspiracy theory!  So America is still doomed!

Richard Marshall interviews Jessica Wilson (Toronto)...

...at 3:16 AM.  An excerpt:

[T]he original motivation for Grounding would be obviously enthymematic to anyone familiar with work in the metaphysics of science and mind, where it has been recognized since the 1970s that modal and conceptual/representational approaches to metaphysical dependence were unsatisfactory. In the ensuing decades, philosophers working in those areas (and others) generated a large literature exploring what I call small-‘g’ grounding relations, including type and token identity, functional and other forms of realization (including subset-of-powers realization), the determinable-determinate relation, the part-whole relation, constitutive mechanisms, and so on, which against backdrop assumptions about what is fundamental (typically, in these contexts, the physical goings-on), serve as properly metaphysical dependence relations. It’s hard not to conclude that the original proponents of Grounding were simply unfamiliar with all this work. That doesn’t make any less tiresome the ensuing literature on Grounding, which mainly consists in rehearsing counterexamples to the supposed formal features, pondering spandrel questions (What Grounds Grounding? What Grounds that the Grounds Ground Grounding?) generated by the failure of this stipulated primitive to actually close explanatory gaps, and offering Grounding-based ‘formulations’ of views (naturalism, physicalism) which are generic variations on the traditional schematic starting points of more substantive formulations.

To protect academic freedom, create an institutional role responsible for its protection and promotion

I strongly agree with this piece by a colleague in the law school here.  We recently made a proposal like this to the incoming President of the University.

Editors of pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong arrested under new "security [sic] law"

You know that you're not just creeping towards authoritarianism, but have arrived, when the journalists who don't toe the party line are taken away in handcuffs.

Blast from the past: when it turned out the primary test of implicit bias was worthless

Back in 2017 (and also).

"Choosing the self we want to be"

Philosopher Laurie (L.A.) Paul (Yale) discusses.

America is doomed, part 357: QAnon now rivaling major religions for adherents

There are many ways civilized countries can disintegrate, the Weimar-to-Nazism case is only one, even if it looms very large for understandable reasons.    Consider now the ramifications of this:

15 percent of Americans say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, a core belief of QAnon supporters. The same share said it was true that “American patriots may have to resort to violence” to depose the pedophiles and restore the country’s rightful order.

And fully 20 percent of respondents said that they thought a biblical-scale storm would soon sweep away these evil elites and “restore the rightful leaders"....

14 percent of Americans fall into the category of “QAnon believers,” composed of those who agreed with the statements in all three questions. Among Republicans only, that rises to roughly one in four. (Twelve percent of independents and 7 percent of Democrats were categorized as QAnon believers.)

When philosophers cozy up to authoritarian rulers...

...they get their own line of coffee shops!

(Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)

The history of political meddling at UNC-Chapel Hill

A useful catalogue, some of which we've noted previously.