Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

In Memoriam: Agnes Heller (1929-2019)

Professor Heller, a philosopher and student of Lukács, has passed away.  She lost her academic position after the 1956 uprising in Hungary and eventually taught for many years at the New School in New York City.  In recent years, she was an admirably vocal critic of the fascist Orban.

(Thanks to Igor Shoikhedbrod for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  There's a more informative obituary (in German) at Die Zeit. (Thanks to Charles Parsons for the pointer.)

Richard Marshall interviews Alec Walen (Rutgers)...

...at 3.16 AM.

Three philosophers elected Fellows of the British Academy

They are:  Gregory Currie (York), Susan James (Birkbeck/London), and Robert Stern (Sheffield).

The memorial notice for John Gardner from July 11 now has several updates

Here.

The McMaster summer school on capitalism, democratic solidarity, and institutional design

Even if you couldn't be there, you can now watch the videos!   Here's the nice interdisciplinary line-up of speakers:  Mark Blyth (Poli Sci, Brown); William Edmundson (Law & Philosophy, Georgia State); Robert Hockett (Law, Cornell), Stephanie Mudge (Sociology, UC Davis), Stefan Sciaraffa (Philosophy, McMaster), and Alan Thomas (Philosophy, York).

Attitudes towards "socialism" by undergraduate major

This is a curious study that several readers have sent along.  Philosophy majors lean more left than finance majors (who would have guessed?), but it's unclear whether this shows anything about "socialism" per se since it's unclear whether respondents all shared the same understanding.  One suspects that many respondents were thinking of what Europeans would call "social democracy"--regulated market economy with strong protections for workers and trade unions, together with extensive social insurance programs--since the best known "socialist" in America, Senator Sanders, is really just a social democrat, much like FDR. 

New open access "Journal of Modern Philosophy" will now accept submissions...

...on figures in 19th-century philosophy as well.  Good news for Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche scholars (among others) out there!

(Thanks to Paul Katsafanas for the information.)

*

The philosophy of Bernard Williams

Links to articles, interviews, videos and more (courtesy of philosopher Paul Russell [British Columbia/Lund]).

In Memoriam: John Gardner (1965-2019)

It's particularly painful for me to have to report the untimely death (due to cancer) this morning of the legal and moral philosopher John Gardner, Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and before that the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford.  I'm traveling, but will add more thoughts and links in the coming days.  This is a huge loss for legal philosophy at Oxford, and a great loss for the international community of legal philosophers, of which John was a beloved member.   My deepest condolences to his family.

ADDENDUM:  John has a wonderful personal page, with links to papers and talks, as well as photos and more.

A BIT MORE:  When John took over the Professorship of Jurisprudence, it had been held for nearly thirty years by Ronald Dworkin, who was part-time only, although that overstates his involvement.  Dworkin supervised hardly any students, and did almost nothing to organize events for the benefit of jurisprudence students.  John was the opposite, by several orders of magnitude.  John was tireless on the administrative and pedagogical fronts, doing what the Professor of Jurisprudence was supposed to do.   Quite apart from his commitment to the program, he was "very clever" as the Brits like to say, analytically acute, both in writing and in conversation.   He was an especially brilliant and amusing critic, as in his argument that a "constructive interpretation" of Dworkin shows him to be a legal positivist, or his critique (with his frequent collaborator Tim Macklem) of Scott Shapiro's book.

ANOTHER:   A memorial notice from the Oxford Law faculty, which includes several nice photos, including one of John overlooking the Texas Hill country during his and Les Green's joint visit to UT Austin back in 2004.  (Thanks to Les Green for sending this along.)

AND ANOTHER lovely memorial written by Annalise Acorn (Alberta).   (Thanks to Jake Woljtowicz for the pointer.)

ON A MORE PERSONAL NOTE John was always a source of sage advice and perspective on, shall we say, the peculiarities of the philosophy profession in the Internet era.   For posterity, I should now credit him as the author of two sets of sage and amusing remarks, here and the first comment here.  I shall miss his counsel.

 

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

This is Robin James (PhD, DePaul), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, writing about me:

I did a search, and couldn't find any of the papers on the connection between my rankings, capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarcy.  I guess these fine scholars are still work-shopping them.  Exciting!

 

On justifications for inequalities in salaries

Sensible comments, as usual, from Robert Paul Wolff.

More on the Wollongong Red Guard and the AAP

Philosopher Stuart Brock (Victoria U/Wellington), CEO of the Australasian Association of Philosophy, writes:

I am writing about your post, and to let you know that the AAP has not endorsed this event.  Nor has the AAP permitted the use of its logo by the Wollongong Undergraduates.  Subsequently, their post has been removed.  

Game theory, Marx, and more...

...at the blog of the "Nice Nihilist."

More on the AAP's non-response to the abuse of Prof. Lawford-Smith

I characterized the AAP response as "tepid," but philosopher John Schwenkler (Florida State) wrote me with a more critical take, which he kindly gave permission to share:

It is not "tepid" -- rather it's effectively a slander of our colleague. The first paragraph begins by indicating that she wasn't important enough to have been invited by the society, and ends by implying that her positions "conflict with [the AAP's] commitment to support diversity in philosophy". And then in the second paragraph there's a clear suggestion that allowing someone like Holly to speak freely "conflict[s] with the aim of creating a space where everyone is able to participate". Both of the latter claims are ludicrous.

In Memoriam: Randall R. Dipert (1951-2019)

At the time of his death, Professor Dipert was the emeritus holder of the C.S. Peirce Chair in  American Philosophy at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.  You can learn more about his work here.  The Buffalo memorial notice is here.

Fascist Orban takes over Hungarian Academy of Sciences

A detailed account here.  A Hungarian academic who wrote me about this says the Institute for Philosophy has been mentioned by the Minister leading the takeover as a target for elimination.

As usual, one can expect the European Union to do nothing.

2018 Lebowitz Prize from the APA awarded to Michael Bratman (Stanford) and Margaret Gilbert (UC Irvine)

The APA announcement is here.  As the announcement explains: "Lebowitz Prize winners must be two philosophers who hold contrasting views on a chosen topic of current interest in philosophy. They present their views and engage in a dialogue at an annual Lebowitz symposium, held during an APA divisional meeting."

 

APA survey of philosophers: you do not need to be an APA member to participate

An APA member forwarded the message below the fold to me; I completed the survey and I would encourage the philosophers among my readership to take the 10-15 minutes needed to fill this out.  I'm glad the APA is soliciting this feedback.

Much ado about nothing

This piece purports to be responding to this, but it isn't.  The Stonewall guidelines do indeed implicate academic freedom (for the reasons stated in the letter, which are ignored in the "response"), and the letter doesn't claim that academic freedom protects mistreatment of students--quite the contrary, as one of the signatories to the letter wrote previously.  The non-response does contain one accurate factual statement, when it refers to the attention given to these issues by "the leading blog in philosophy."  A shame Professor Bertram did not link to any examples from that "leading blog," for example, this.

Reflections on the Searle case from one of his victims...

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--UPDATED

...who spoke out long ago about his behavior.  An excerpt:

What’s relevant to me is the question of what made it so that the rest of the faculty at Berkeley – themselves, not slimy creepers and generally nice, decent people — were passive in the face of the full knowledge of Searle’s behavior. How many young women were lost to philosophy or had their self-confidence or sense of intellectual belonging undermined as a result? It’s absolutely unacceptable. Obviously there are many different possible explanations for people doing nothing in this kind of situation – shyness, naivete, indifference, obliviousness, complicity, being stymied by administrative indifference, reputational considerations, fear of repercussions, etc. But a strong departmental culture and relevant array of institutions and policies can overcome most of those things.

UPDATE:  A philosopher who spent time at Berkeley in the 1980s writes regarding a "research assistant" Searle was involved with then:

Their relationship was pretty open.   Why didn’t I or anyone else report him?  Because it seemed totally consensual and at the time at Berkeley relationships between faculty and younger members of the profession were pretty common.  Many people who would have described themselves as feminists were well aware of this particular relationship.  Had I gone to a dean and complained they would have laughed in my face and everyone would have thought I was crazy.  I believe that Searle started in the 1960s with consensual relationships with students and employees and they gradually morphed into the creepy horrifying cringe-worthy things that we know about now, but no-one I knew had a glimpse of that back then.  Kristina Gehrman may condemn those of us who did not report him in the 1980s but that is 20/20 hindsight. 

Plainly the norms have changed, and Searle's misbehavior may also have changed over time.

ANOTHER:  Philosopher Cheyney Ryan (Oxford) writes:

I think people in the field were fully aware Searle was a sexual predator as far back as the mid-1970s. He came to Oregon when I first started there, 1975. He asked a woman grad student for a ride back to his motel after his mid-day talk, he said he needed to use the bathroom, and after a few minutes emerged full naked and started groping her until she could get out of the room. 

Raymond Geuss wishes Habermas a "Happy 90th"

Well, not exactly; an excerpt:

When, at the beginning of his Minima Moralia, Adorno expressed grave reservations about the “liberal fiction which holds that any and every thought must be universally communicable to anyone whatever,” he was criticizing both political liberalism and the use of “communication” as a fundamental organizing principle in philosophy. This hostility toward both liberalism and the fetish of universal communication, on the other, was not maintained by the members of the so-called Frankfurt School and was abandoned even before the next generation had fully come on the scene. Even as early as the beginning of the 1970s, the unofficial successor of Adorno as head of the school, Jürgen Habermas, who turns ninety this week, began his project of rehabilitating a neo-Kantian version of liberalism. He proposed to do this by having recourse to a normatively highly charged concept of “discourse.” What exactly discourse meant was to be explained in what he called a “theory of communicative action.”

His program is “neo-Kantian” in three senses: First of all, it is dominated by the idea that the central philosophical issue is one of “legitimacy” (just as for Kant, the central philosophical question was “quid juris?”, not “quid facti?”). Second, Habermas is fixated, as Kant was, on the idea that there are historically invariant structures that are capable of generating normativity endogenously. In Kant’s case these are structures of “reason”; in Habermas’s structures of communication. Finally, Kant was obsessed with clear, strong dichotomies, and deeply anxious about possible violations of the boundaries between what he took to be radically different domains (such as morality and prudence or the a priori and the a posteriori). This Kantian preoccupation is mirrored in the sharp opposition between the central concepts of discourse and of instrumental action one finds in Habermas’s position. Adorno took the liberal fiction of universal communicability to be a clear pathology. Habermas, on the contrary, makes no attempt to distance himself from this fiction; he actively embraces it, takes it seriously and even promotes it to be a criterion for legitimacy: “legitimacy” is to be defined by a certain kind of universal communicability. His liberalism is supposed to have foundations, and to find them in a transcendental theory of communication.

As longtime readers know, I'm basically sympathetic with this line of criticism, although the Kantian rot in the Frankfurt School starts as early as Horkheimer's attack on instrumental reason in the 1930s, but it culminates with the complete abandonment of Marx's conception of philosophy and theory in Habermas's mature work.  Habermas remains, however, a vitally important public intellectual in Germany, one of the few who can always be counted on to criticize the closet Nazis and apologists for the Reich.

Richard Marshall interviews Carolina Sartorio (Arizona)...

...at 3.16 AM.

John Searle found to have violated Berkeley's sexual harassment rules, stripped of his emeritus status

A Berkeley graduate alerted me to this statement from the Department Chair:  "I am writing to let you know that, as of June 19th 2019, John Searle is no longer affiliated with UC Berkeley. Following a determination that he violated university policies against sexual harassment, President Napolitano has ended his emeritus status. This means, among other things, that he is no longer eligible to teach or advise students, nor will he have access to the campus beyond what is afforded to any member of the general public."

(Earlier related coverage.  Note that it is unclear whether the finding against Searle was related to this case, or some other complaint(s) [e.g.].)

Why humans are the most irrational animals

Philosopher Bence Nanay (Antwerp) comments.

150 million GBP (about U.S. two hundred million) gift for humanities at Oxford University...

...from U.S. hedge fund manager Stephen Schwarzman (who could have afforded to give a lot more!).  It will also include a new institute for the study of the ethics of artificial intelligence.  Philosopher Alan Thomas (York) summed it up well on FB (he gave me permission to quote):  "The 'ethics of AI' is about as complex as the ethics of pencils. ('Don’t stab people with your pencil!') But, you know, follow the money."

ADDENDUM:  It's a bit unclear where all the money is going--it sounds like most of it is going to a new building which will finally permit Timothy Williamson to interact easily with his colleagues in literary studies and religion!

ANOTHER:  This article tells you everything you need to know about Mr. Money Bags.

In Memoriam: Francisco Miró Quesada Cantuarias (1918-2019)

Professor Cantuarias was a Peruvian philosopher, well-known throughout Latin America (and discussed in Hilary Putnam's Realism with a Human Face, where philosophers who do not read Spanish may have encountered him).  There is a clumsily (alas) translated obituary here.

(Thanks to Sergio Gallegos Ordorica for the pointer.)

"Philosophical Discussion of Trans Identity: A guide for the perplexed"

A philosopher elsewhere sent this to me, and asked not to be credited; I wish I had written this, but I did not.

===============================================

Philosophical Discussion of Trans Identity: A guide for the perplexed.

Members of the profession have doubtless seen the recent letter from MAP, objecting to the participation of Kathleen Stock at a recent meeting of the Aristotelian Society. As the letter writers thoughtfully advised: “scepticism about the rights of marginalised groups and individuals, where issues of life and death are at stake, are not up for debate. The existence and validity of transgender and non-binary people, and the right of trans and non-binary people to identify their own genders and sexualities, fall within the range of such indisputable topics”.

Junior members of the profession may be wondering what sorts ideas may be discussed and debated by philosophers, and which may not. Which may be subject to skeptical inquiry and which may not.  Which may be discussed at the Aristotelian Society and which may not. Following is a helpful guide.

You MAY question whether race exists and whether gender exists, you may question whether social kinds exist.  For that matter, you may question whether any kinds at all exist, and for the measure, whether abstract objects or even whether the external world exists.  You may NOT, however question whether people can identify their own genders.

You MAY question whether other minds exist, or whether anything at all exists except for yourself.  You may even question whether time exists and space exists.  You may ask whether all change is illusion.  You may NOT, however, question whether people can identify their own genders.

You MAY also question whether you yourself exist or are a social construct.  You may question the existence of the Cartesian ego and you may even wonder if there are such things as Cartesian egos.  You may reject them or endorse them.  However, you may NOT question whether people can identify their own genders.

Plato's case for "political correctness"

Political theorist Johnny Thakkar (Swarthmore) comments.

Justin Weinberg Passive-Aggressive Blogging Watch, part 932

Last week (as noted the other day) Weinberg wrote another ponderously long response to this.  I skimmed a bit of it, but I find him tedious and uninteresting, so I didn't read it with any care.   Philosopher John Schwenkler (Florida State) posted some criticisms on Facebook and also in the comments at the "safe space" blog.  But someone on the FB post summed things up perfectly:

the DN post is a great example of philosophers thinking the great intellectual challenge of our times is developing a sort of theory of the modern corporate human resources department while mimicking the style of an elementary-school classroom.

Philosopher Jason Brennan (Georgetown) tried to post a comment at the "safe space" blog noting Weinberg's typical passive-aggressive and fraudulent jab at me; predictably it wasn't approved, and Prof. Brennan kindly gave me permission to post it here; it begins with a quote from Weinberg:

"...'a well-known philosophy-blogger's obsession with belittling graduate students who use Twitter to discuss trans issues...'"

Come on, Justin.

This is a good example of how sometimes using more generic and abstract descriptions can obscure the issue to the point of seeming to change the moral valence of the situation. Suppose you, Justin, say, "Hey, Jason Brennan, I hope you die and rot in hell for eternity." Then I respond, "Whoa, dude, you shouldn't say things like that to me." You respond, "Oh, so you're saying I'm not allowed to have opinions? You're saying there's no right to free speech? You think you have the right to police what I say?" In this case, you'd be making an obvious error. No one is saying you have no right to express opinions; they are saying this specific action is wrong. (Similarly, if I say you shouldn't hit people, I'm not thereby saying you have no rights over your own body.) In this case, abstraction cuts out the issue.

In the same vein, describing Leiter's behavior as "belittling grad students...for discuss[ing] trans issues" is abstracting to the point of being misleading. Brian isn't going around belittling any grad student he finds discussing trans issues on Twitter. Rather, he was critical of a specific grad student who called another philosopher a "vile fucking human" because she...wait for it...has principled and reasonable--though perhaps mistaken--philosophical objections to a particular view of the metaphysics of gender, a view grounded in hundreds of years of feminist thought arguing that to be woman is not about mere belief that one is a woman and is not simply a matter of performing and conforming to certain stereotypes of femininity. Brian wasn't complaining about the grad student in question "discuss[ing] trans issues"; he was complaining about the graduate student unloading unjustifiable verbal abuse onto another person who didn't deserve it.

Clark Glymour did not like Rani Lill Anjum and Stephen Mumford's book

For our ongoing series of wicked book reviews; an excerpt:

Rani Lill Anjum and Stephen Mumford...continue the tradition in recent philosophy of science of avoiding the real scientific problems, or even reporting on new frameworks -- once radical -- to solve them. In their view, the contribution of philosophy is to provide and justify norms for science. The justification is supposed to be metaphysical. But there actually aren't many norms to justify in this book, and so, not much justification.

It would seem that the broad norms of scientific method are pretty clear: follow procedures that have an empirically or mathematically warranted good chance -- and preferably the best chance among available procedures -- of finding the true and avoiding the false. It's means-end. The justification on that scale of abstraction is elementary decision theory. The hard part is finding such methods suitable for the kinds of data we now collect and showing that any particular method or class of methods satisfy those criteria. The authors avoid all of the hard parts. Even their discussion of randomized clinical trials -- one of the few methods that they actually come close to engaging -- adds nothing to the known limitations of such trials or contributes anything to how to improve their reproducibility.

 

"Information pollution"

Philosopher Michael Lynch (Connecticut) comments.

"Peak woke philosophy"

This is quite funny.

Philosopher Sarah Broadie (St Andrews) awarded an OBE by the British Queen...

...as part of her annual birthday honours for 2019.

UPDATE:  Eric Sheng points out to me that the legal philosopher John Finnis (Oxford) was also honored.

What I actually think about trans gender issues

More than a year ago, philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) contacted me about the silence from philosophers surrounding a dramatic proposed change to UK law concerning a person's legal gender.   I posted a link to one of Professor Stock's essays, others began to weigh in, and one year later, it seems like philosophers can discuss nothing else, albeit "discuss" may be too generous a characterization for the vitriol and abuse directed at Professor Stock and other Gender Critical ("GC") feminists, and periodically, at me. 

As even some of the GC feminists have noted, I am not a GC feminist, as would be obvious to anyone who read some of my earlier posts.  Although not a GC feminist, I've found much of their writing eye-opening and worth taking seriously.*   I think they are plainly right that gender self-ID is ripe for abuse and has consequences for sex-based rights that are important--especially, but not only, to lesbians.  (It is astonishing the unwillingness of so many allegedly "progressive" people to take the concerns of lesbians seriously.)  

I still think, however, that the piece I agree with most is that by philosopher Sophie-Grace Chappell (Open U) on the analogy between adoptive parents and trans women; I did not find the criticisms of her view by some GC feminist philosophers persuasive.

Another MAP member responds to the MAP UK statement

I can confirm that this person is who they claim to be; some excerpts:

I am a graduate student in Philosophy, and have served as a member of my local MAP chapter more than once and in more than one capacity. I am also non-binary, and a member of other minorities, such as a person of colour and from the global South. From this standpoint I want to say, loud and clear, that this MAP statement does NOT speak for me.

In fact, this statement does not even speak for MAP, as there was no acceptable procedure by which anything like consensus was obtained to publish such a statement using MAP’s name. As a result of this procedural injustice, the head of a MAP chapter in the UK has resigned from her post....

If the group of individuals who wrote and signed the MAP statement had simply made a statement of solidarity with trans students, I would have supported and appreciated it. However, the MAP statement uses purported solidarity with trans students as a pretext for a dangerous authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism, as well as of subtle homophobia. The statement seeks to impose a narrow, problematic ideology upon the entire academic philosophical world, and does so in a way that is particularly dangerous due to weaponizing safety and compassion discourse, which have particular emotional resonance in social justice circles. I urge everyone reading it to resist thinking that supporting trans people in any way implies supporting this MAP statement.

In fact, it is neither compassionate nor just to silence the voices of LGBT philosophers, or indeed any philosophers, when they dissent from an ideology that is neither intellectually nor ethically respectable. This is the philosophically weak and ethically harmful ideology that is evident in the MAP statement, as well as unfortunately increasingly prevalent and dominant in social justice circles. Some elements of this ideology will become clear over the course of my statement....

Morality as "social technology"

Philosopher Jason McKenzie Alexander (LSE) comments.

First MAP chapter representative resigns in protest over the statement attacking academic freedom

A woman at a North England campus writes:

I saw your recent post about MAP's statement. This is just an email to you to inform you that, as chapter representative of Minorities and Philosophy in [Yorkshire], UK, I have resigned with immediate effect following their recent statement about Prof. Stock. Their rhetoric is shamefully poor, and I do not wish to be associated with it. 

This is a great shame since I think that MAP does some good stuff, and our department has benefited from engagement with the organisation, overall. 

MAP does good stuff, and other chapters should protest a handful of zealots sullying the organization's name.

"It was only a joke!"

Philosopher Noel Carroll (CUNY Graduate Center) comments.

"Minorities and Philosophy UK" calls for incorrect philosophical views to be punished

I don't want to make more of this disgraceful statement than it deserves; many MAP chapters are doing constructive work, and they would do well to repudiate this embarrassment from the UK chapter.  One can support equal opportunity for and dignified treatment of trans philosophers, as Professor Stock explictly does, and still disagree with how some trans philosophers understand gender.

Note that this statement is the work of a handful of individuals, including the already notorious Keyvan Shafiei and Puck Spicer,* the equally benighted spouse of Nathan Oseroff, among others.  It was apparently prompted by the fact that the Aristotelian Society, much to its credit, permitted a professional philosopher, Kathleen Stock, to present a philosophical paper on sex and gender, and even defended her right to do so.  For the Red Guard wannabes at MAP UK that was too much to bear, hence the statement, complete with the usual make-believe allegations of "harm" (that someone finds someone else's philosophical views offensive and upsetting isn't a harm:  please read John Gardner's earlier comments on this subject).

I'll conclude with the apt comments of a philosophy graduate student in Canada who sent this statement to me (I bold a couple of quite important bits):

I was hoping you'd say something about it on your blog. The statement, and the usual suspects on Twitter, often try to frame things as if most people in the discipline secretly agree with them, but for some reason aren't willing to "speak up and protect its most vulnerable members." Of course, the actual reason people aren't "willing" to speak up is that they don't think that we should ban people from talking at conferences if they have the wrong views on philosophical issues. The statement tries to frame things to sound like any philosophical discussion of issues around sex, gender, and sexual orientation that doesn't toe the party line is an attack on trans people, and that discussing these issues without saying the right things means excluding and marginalizing "vulnerable persons." But that kind of over-exaggerated language is just a transparent attempt to shut down debate -- notice that the statement doesn't include any engagement with the actual content of the talk.

I appreciate you generally drawing attention to these people's silly behavior; most other grad students I talk to think these people mostly embarrass themselves with the things they do online. I think it's important to have a voice in favor of actual academic freedom, as opposed to censoring views that don't fit with the political views of the day.

UPDATE:  Ophelia Benson dissects what she aptly describes as the "lying" statement with its "hyperbolic bullshit."

*I have been informed that Mr. Oseroff's spouse wanted to be mentioned by name; I had thought I was doing them a favor by omitting their name, which has never been noted here before, but apparently not!

"Philosophers for future"

Martin Kusch (Vienna) asked me to share this, which I'm happy to do.

Professor Stock schools the smarmy Jonathan Ichikawa

Very amusing.  (Link fixed:  click on the "3 replies" to get Stock's full response to Ichikawa's typical stupidity.)

(Thanks to Alex Parrish for the pointer.)

Twitter bans yet another gender critical feminist

This is unbelievable, especially when one remembers that serially abusive people like Rachel McKinnon still have a platform on there.   Will some journalist out there please do an expose of what's going on with Twitter and its campaign against feminists and lesbians?  Professor Lawford-Smith is one of many who have been shut down.

A brief response from Kathleen Stock to yesterday's nonsense

Here.

Yet another anonymous attack on Kathleen Stock (Sussex)...

...by someone claiming to be a philosophy graduate student.  Maybe she is, and maybe she is leaving because she can't abide people having verboten thoughts and beliefs, and expressing them.  But we don't know, do we?  (If she's really a grad student leaving the profession for the reasons stated--and not for other reasons--why not sign her name to this?  It hardly matters what philosophers think of her going forward, after all.)  But it's certainly a dramatic way to encourage others to impose social and professional sanctions on Kathleen Stock (and me and even Justin Weinberg!), which the author explicitly calls for.    Will it work?  That's up to the academic community; I would hope that academics committed to academic freedom will now go out of their way to invite Professor Stock to speak.  I will note that the tweets she quotes from Professor Stock--literally the only evidence of "transphobia" adduced (she adduces none from me, since she can't)--ignore the fact that Professor Stock always uses "male" to mean a biological male, and female to mean a biological female.  (Trans women are biological males, that's why they're trans women after all.  This isn't hard.  And that's compatible with thinking they should be treated as women in most or all contexts.)  Readers can decide for themselves whether any of this is evidence of "transphobia.

UPDATE:  A number of philosophers have written me about this noxious, and I suspect fraudulent, display, and I apologize that I can't respond to everyone as I'm participating in an intellectual event, and so trying to avoid engaging with the usual social media grandstanding and narcissism as much as possible. But I will share one set of comments from a philosopher elsewhere, since it makes clear the absurdity of this essay:

In what amounts to an AI-driven performative contradiction of its thesis, I've seen numerous philosophers on my Facebook feed share the article as something with immense moral import, with exactly zero of my hundreds of philosopher Fb friends offering even the mildest criticism. (One friend of a friend tried to do so, and was promptly told to take it elsewhere.) All this praise is for an article that,

(i) Frames as a "hateful" and "phobic" practice of "debating my existence" any philosophical discussion of gender which "does not proceed from [the] initial assumption ... that trans people are the gender they say they are" (though NB many gender-critical types insist that they are concerned with sex, not gender, and are happy to let people be what they say in the latter respect as long as this doesn't mean that they can share prisons and rape shelters with people of the opposite sex) -- including under this umbrella not only the infamous Kathleen Stock (and Becky Tuvel I think??), but also yourself and Justin Weinberg, i.e. he of "moral resisters" fame; and further

(ii) Calls for a total no-platforming of gender-critical philosophers and philosophical arguments in journals, at conferences, and on blogs and social media.

How to cite Hobbes: the debate continues

Round 1 (from S.A. Lloyd [USC]and A.P. Martinich [Texas]); round 2 (responses to Lloyd and Martinich, including from Noel Malcolm, editor of the new OUP edition); and now round 3:  a response from Professor Lloyd, which she asked me to share:  Download Lloyd reply re Hobbes edition.  I'm an outsider to Hobbes studies, but I am inclined to agree with Professor Lloyd.

Philosopher elected to the European Parliament

Several readers have pointed out that a philosopher, Catherine Rowett (East Anglia) was among those elected to the European Parliament in the recent elections--she ran as a Green MP.  As classicist Benjamin Harriman (Edinburgh) wrote:  "She is a specialist in the Presocratics and in Plato, particularly the Republic, making her election to the cave even more interesting."  Indeed!

The quest for "relevance" by some analytic philosophers, and their ignorance of the post-Kantian traditions in European philosophy

Apt observations from a very good philosopher expert in the post-Kantian traditions in European philosophy:

We all recall the times when presenters of papers in philosophy expected an onslaught in the Q&A. It was never appealing prospect or sight, and the notion that it was stirred only by the pursuit of truth was obviously a contrivance. It did, however, have one advantage: it ensured that philosophers spoke about only what they honestly thought they had some expertise in. It was expertise gained through intensive thought and study.

We now have a kinder environment, and those, particularly from analytic backgrounds, are feeling the freedom to take off some of their armour, move from specialist areas, and to try their luck with issues of political and social concern. These efforts are met, generally, with good will. The problem, however, is that they are, with a few celebrated exceptions, mostly rubbish. The topics studied are taken from wikipedia and / or newspapers (in fact, there’s better work in those newspapers much of the time). The insights of the broader European tradition are largely unknown to them. It’s probably a lack of education or maybe an unwillingness to be slowed down in the quest for ‘relevance’, i.e. attention, that keeps them from complex texts.

(As an aside: the trendy move away from classic Anglo-American philosophical concerns hasn’t involved much reconsideration of the marginaliztion of European philosophy in Anglo-American philosophy departments. In the UK, at least, a Brexit mentality is reproduced at the higher level of philosophical prejudices.)

Receptive audiences are often emancipated analytic philosophers, and between them all they really know very little. They cheer on their own new ‘significance’ or ‘impact’. Ignorance isn’t ignorance, it seems, when the majority are ignorant. And when the majority contains senior academics ignorance wins.

What is it like to be a philosopher? Saba Fatima edition

Here.

Speaking of irrational political beliefs...

...the philosopher Michael Huemer (Colorado) does not cover himself in glory with this sophomoric attack on Marxism.   I'll keep this brief, as I'm super busy with grading currently!

1.  Huemer says, "Without the labor theory of value, there’s no theory of surplus value, no theory of exploitation, and thus the central critique of capitalism fails."  Marx's version of the theory of exploitation has to be abandoned if one abandons the labor theory of value (as one should), but there are other theories of exploitation as a wrong available, and his "central critique of capitalism" in any case was not that it involved exploitation:  it was that at a certain point in its development, it ceases to be in the interest of the vast majority, because it harnesses enormous productive power to the production of more profit (or capital), at the expense of the well-being of the vast majority.

2.   Huemer says, "Marxism was tried many times."  It has never been tried; state ownership of the means of production has been tried in economically underdeveloped countries, with bad consequences, and I think we can agree that is a bad idea.  But that was never any part of Marx's views, indeed, was explicitly something he warned against; here's a typical remark from The German Ideology:  for communism to be possible, "[I]t [capitalism] must necessarily have...produced...a great increase in productive power, a high degree of development....[T]his development of productive forces...is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced."

3.  Huemer says, "The...most obvious objection to communism is that people are not going to selflessly work for the good of society."  Marx never proposed that people should or would work "selflessly...for the good of society."  He was quite explicit that he was making no appeal to people's altruism, but to their self-interest:  it was not in the self-interest of the vast majority to continue to live under capitalist relations of production.

I think one way to avoid public displays of "irrational" beliefs is to actually know something about the subject you're discussing, in this case, Marx's views.  Professor Huemer plainly doesn't, which is why these comments fall so far below his normal argumentative standards. But they do illustrate irrationality in politics well!

HiPhi Nation episode on civil (and uncivil) disobedience by animal rights activists in Australia

Here.  I actually talked with philosopher David Killoren (Australian Catholic U) about these issues, a bit more in the abstract, quite some time ago (and not with reference to providing help for victims of malaria!). (This episode is mainly hosted by Killoren and his philosophy colleague Richard Rowland at ACU.)  Philosophers featured include Peter Singer, Kimberly Brownlee, Jeff Sebo, and Candice Delmas, among others.  One nice thing that comes out in the interview is that Singer thinks there's no alternative to capitalism!  There are also, alas, unexplored assumptions about "harm" that play a role in Killoren's arguments towards the end.