Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Scholars of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy rally to the side of Viktor DeSantis in Florida

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 1--USEFUL LINKS IN COMMENTS, AND MORE INFORMATION WELCOME

Not really, but there may be a silver lining for them in the latest rain cloud:

DeSantis’s proposals include requiring that students at the colleges take certain core courses “grounded in actual history, the actual philosophy that has shaped Western civilization"....

Last year, the state passed a bill that allowed Florida’s Board of Governors to require professors to go through post-tenure review every five years. On Tuesday, DeSantis proposed giving college presidents more power over faculty hiring and allowing presidents and boards of trustees to call for a post-tenure review of a faculty member “at any time with cause.”

The governor said he would recommend the legislature set aside $100 million for the state universities to hire and retain faculty members. He recommended $15 million for recruiting students and faculty members to the New College of Florida, a small, public liberal-arts college whose governing board DeSantis recently overhauled with the appointment of six new members. One of the new trustees then wrote that he intended to see if it would be legally possible to fire everyone at the college and rehire only “those faculty, staff, and administration who fit in the new financial and business model.”

“We are also going to eliminate all DEI and CRT bureaucracies in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said without specifying what “DEI and CRT bureaucracies” were. “No funding, and that will wither on the vine.”

DeSantis presented eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion projects as a way of saving wasted money, although a previous Chronicle analysis found that such projects make up 1 percent or less of the state universities’ budgets.

In Memoriam: Benjamin Ross Tilghman (1927-2023)

Professor Tilghman spent much of his career at Kansas State University, where he also served as Chair for thirteen years and is credited with developing KSU's strong research reputation.   He wrote widely on Wittgenstein and aesthetics, among other topics.  The KSU memorial notice is here.

(Thanks to James Hamilton for the pointer.)

One philosopher is not worried about ChatGBT

Philosopher Larry Shapiro (Wisconsin) writes in the Washington Post:

Here’s what I plan to do about chatbots in my classes: pretty much nothing. Let me say first that as much as I value the substance of what I teach, realistically my students will not spend more than a semester thinking about it. It’s unlikely that Goldman Sachs or Leakey’s Plumbing or wherever my students end up will expect their employees to have a solid background in philosophy of mind. Far more likely is that the employees will be required to write a letter or an analysis or a white paper, and to do this they will need to know how to write effectively in the first place. This is the skill that I most hope to cultivate in my students, and I spend a lot of time reading their essays and providing them with comments that really do lead to improvements on subsequent assignments. In-class exams — the ChatGPT-induced alternative to writing assignments — are worthless when it comes to learning how to write, because no professor expects to see polished prose in such time-limited contexts....

But what about the cheaters, the students who let a chatbot do their writing for them? I say, who cares? In my normal class of about 28 students, I encounter one every few semesters whom I suspect of plagiarism. Let’s now say that the temptation to use chatbots for nefarious ends increases the number of cheaters to an (unrealistic) 20 percent. It makes no sense to me that I should deprive 22 students who can richly benefit from having to write papers only to prevent the other six from cheating (some of whom might have cheated even without the help of a chatbot).

Professor Shapiro makes an important point.  It's of course galling to grade "fake papers" produced by AI, but most of our students still need our feedback on their writing.  I imagine lots of readers would benefit from hearing how other faculty are thinking about this. 

JHP article prize for 2022

Philosopher Deborah Boyle, editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, writes:

The Journal of the History of Philosophy has awarded the prize for the best article published in the journal in 2022 to Karolina Hübner’s “Representation and Mind-Body Identity in Spinoza’s Philosophy” (JHP 60.1 [January 2022]: 47–77). The prize comes with an award of $1500. The article can be read here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/846364

"Western philosophy" and "Eastern philosophy"

A philosopher at a liberal arts college writes:

I’m writing to suggest a topic for a possible blog discussion that may be of potential interest to your readers. 

At my college I have proposed the creation of a new 100-level course entitled Ancient Wisdom: East & West, whose course description reads:

"An introductory exploration of ancient classics of Western and Eastern Philosophy. Topics to be explored include accounts of personhood and the self, definitions of happiness, the nature of right and wrong, and the place of humanity within the larger universe. Readings will be drawn from Greek sources such as Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, and the Stoics; Indian sources such as the Upanishads, Vedanta, and the Buddha; and Chinese sources such as Confucianism, Daoism, and Mohism."

My proposal got rejected in its current form by my school’s Curriculum Committee. In describing their objections, they wrote,

Kripke memorial conference at CUNY Graduate Center in May

Details and information here.

Raz memorial service at Balliol, Oxford...

...is now available online.

"Endings," professional and personal

Philosopher Daniel Kaufman comments, and it's a very interesting read.

A documentary about "free will"

The trailer:

Among those I recognized were the philosophers Daniel Dennett, Robert Kane,and Gregg Caruso, as well as the physicist Sean Carroll and biologist Jerry Coyne.  Oddly, the trailer features Dennett saying, incorrectly, that we have had the problem of free will since the Prescoratics.  But our concept of free will comes much later, and dates from the Stoics, not the Presocratics, as Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede have shown (although they have some disagreements about which Stoics).

 

Richard Marshall interviews Ludwig Büchner...

...at 3:16 AM.  Büchner was something like the Richard Dawkins of his day, a proseltyzer, not for Darwin, but for physiology and materialism.  His Kraft und Stoff was the best-selling book in Europe in the second half of the 19th-century after the Bible.  A young Einstein reportedly read it and was inspired by it.  Büchner is also the "old doctor" Nietzsche derides in Beyond Good and Evil, although as usual with Nietzsche it was a matter of the narcissism of small differences:   Nietzsche was deeply influenced by the German materialists, but rejected wholly their eliminativism about psychological phenomena.

Charlie Kirk "solves" the Euthyphro dilemma

It's not fair to idiots to observe that Mr. Kirk is one, but this video certainly drives it home:

(Thanks to David Livingstone Smith for the pointer.)

A nice write-up about philosophy at Wake Forest University...

...where the major is thriving!

In Memoriam: Kent Greenawalt (1936-2023)

Philosophers who work in moral, political and legal philosophy will no doubt be familiar with Professor Greenawalt's work; there is a notice and links at my law school blog for those interested.

Did you know you have a "right" to "revelatory autonomy"?

Me neither, but if you make up such a right, The Guardian will write about it.  It does seem a bit odd to think friends and family act wrongfully by offering advice about major decisions in life, but the ever-evolving etiquette manual of academic philosophers is full of surprises!

UPDATE:  Philosopher Farbod Akhlaghi, whose work was being discussed in The Guardian, kindly shared a clarification about his views:

In Memoriam: Edward Erwin (1937-2022)

This seems to be the year for belated death announcements, but Michael Tooley just alerted me to the fact that Professor Erwin, a longtime member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Miami, died last spring.  He was particularly well-known for his philosophical investigations of the foundations of psychotherapy, especially Freudian psychoanalysis.  He also had the misfortune to be wrongly named a defendant in a lawsuit (dismissed with prejudice by the court as against Erwin) growing out of the controversy surrounding sexual misconduct allegations against Colin McGinn, of whom Professor Erwin was the lone defender in the department.  I was surprised that the Miami Department did not post a memorial notice, although was told one was circulated locally.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Erwin or who would like to comment on the significance of his work.

Lanier Anderson to be new Chair of the APA Board

It is with genuine sadness that I must report that philosopher Lanier Anderson, an exceptionally nice guy and serious scholar, will have to be the next Chair of the American Philosophical Association Board.   My condolences to Lanier and his loved ones.

Karl Jaspers and the origins of existentialism

A short popular account here of the now little-read Jaspers.  The last time I read Jaspers it was his book on Nietzsche, which is uneven, but better than Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche!

Why did Bostrom's "apology" for the racist email mention eugenics?

This author offers an hypothesis. (Earlier coverage, including a link to the strange apology.)  I don't agree with all of this analysis, but it's worth a look.

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

Richard Marshall interviews Friedrich Lange...

...at 3:16 AM.  Lange was an immensely important figure in German philosophy in the second half of the 19th-century.  His major work on materialism became so well-known that Bertrand Russell wrote an introduction to an English edition in the 1920s.  The "interview" is both amusing and quite informative.

In Memoriam: Joseph Agassi (1927-2023)

A student of Karl Popper, Professor Agassi was a prolific writer in philosophy of science and social science, among other areas.  He taught for many years at Boston University, and then at York University, Toronto and Tel-Aviv University (concurrently for a long time at both).  You can learn more about his career and work here.   I will add links to memorial notices when they appear.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Agassi, or who would like to comment on the significance of his work.

(Thanks to David Gordon for alerting me to Professor Agassi's death.)

A petition in support of philosophy at Utica University

They are, alas, the latest philosophy major under threat.  

(Thanks to Christian Miller on Twitter for calling this to my attention.)

In Memoriam: David Harrah (1927-2022)

Another belated memorial notice, this one for Professor Harrah, who was emeritus in philosophy at UC Riverside, and who died last year.  In the 1960s and 1970s, he was especially well-known for his work on the logic of communication and questions.  He was also an accomplihsed alpinist, which is a focus of this obituary in The Seattle Times.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Harrah or wish to comment on his philosophical work.

(Thanks to Graeme Forbes for the pointer.)

Philosophers at Leibniz University Hannover receive four million euros from the German Research Foundation....

...for "a new Centre for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences...The group SOCRATES based at the Institute of Philosophy of LUH will focus on the credibility of science. SOCRATES stands for 'Social Credibility and Trustworthiness of Expert Knowledge and Science-Based Information'. The project is in receipt of funding amounting to approximately four million euros provided over an initial period of four years (2023-2027). SOCRATES is led by Prof. Dr. Mathias Frisch (spokesperson) and Prof. Dr. Torsten Wilholt."

(Thanks to Professor Wilholt for the information.)

Five philosophers win NEH Fellowships for book projects

They are:   Jacob Beck (York University, Toronto); Jeffrey Brower (Purdue); Stephen Darwall (Yale); Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern), and Emily McRae (New Mexico).

"Artificial Intelligence [sic] forever inanimate and dumb"

This is funny and probably right (and timely, given yesterday's thread):

The cognitive scientist Gary Marcus has been the most active when it comes to showing that, contrary to some of the claims referenced above, LLMs [Large Language Models] are inherently unreliable and don’t actually exhibit many of the most common features of language and thought, such as systematicity and compositionality, let alone common sense, the understanding of context in conversation, or any of the many other unremarkable “cognitive things” we do on a daily basis. In a recent post with Ernest Davis, Marcus includes an LLM Errors Tracker and outlines some of the more egregious mistakes, including the manifestation of sexist and racist biases, simple errors when carrying out basic logical reasoning or indeed basic maths, in counting up to 4 (good luck claiming that LLMs pass the Turing Test; see here), and of course the fact that LLMs constantly make things up.

Spring virtual dissertation groups

Sign ups for Spring are now open.

In Memoriam: Simo Knuuttila (1946-2022)

This is a belated notice about the death last June of Professor Knuuttila, a leading scholar of medieval philosophy and longtime faculty member at the University of Helsinki.  There is a brief memorial notice here, a longer and more personal one here, and you can get a sense of his work from his PhilPeople page.  Comments are open for remembrances of Professor Knuuttila from those who knew him or for comments on the significance of his work.

(Thanks to Stephen Menn for alerting me to this and for some of the pointers.)

Richard Marshall interviews Crispin Wright (Stirling/NYU)...

...at 3:16 AM.  An excerpt:

As to why anyone should “heed the philosophers”, I guess in the main they probably shouldn’t. Surely not many of the ideas that currently grab the lion’s share of contemporary philosophical debate are of any public significance. One possible exception are the discussions of epistemic injustice, and especially testimonial injustice. Acquaintance with these might encourage more circumspection about online “echo chambers”. And maybe also “post-truthers” —if indeed that moniker captions any ideas that are held in intellectual integrity — could learn from the debates about alethic pluralism. Generally though I am inclined with J. L Austin to wonder whether “importance” is philosophically important.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom (Oxford) is a creepy person (UPDATED)

That's the only conclusion to be drawn about the racist views he expressed in his mid-20s.   People who aren't creepy racists (or mentally ill) don't express such views in their 20s.  Maybe some folks who aren't really creepy racists say stuff like this in their early teens.   A few observations:

1.  He should not be fired or sanctioned for this speech.

2.  The views he defends, like longtermism, are not false because he is a creepy person.

3.  The creepiness is yet a further reason to be suspicious of longtermism and the arguments for it, since they reveal a severe poverty of empathy and human emotions on the part of one its main proponents--attributes which would seem likely to spill over into "philosophical" reflections about what human beings matter and what has value.  There are plenty of objections to longtermism (see for example), but it is perfectly reasonable for someone who does not have the time to work through all the arguments to view the creepiness of one of longtermism's leading proponents as grounds for serious skepticism.  (Vide.)

 

Plato, Mill and inequality

Political theorist David Lay Williams comments.

Doubts about Amazon Mechanical Turk, which means trouble for Experimental Philosophy

Folks interested in XPhil should read this, if they have not already.  Comments welcome from those knowledgeable about the issues.

"Analytic" philosophy and the McCarthy era

Every few years this same story gets recycled (the latest iteration, complete with the non-sequitur that "because" [sic] analytic philosophy benefitted from McCarthyism it is not apolitical).  This story confronts an obvious problem:  "analytic" philosophy triumphed elsewhere (Britain, Australia) without McCarthyism.  Even in America, many of those fired were proto-analytic philosophers working in logic and philosophy of science. 

A more plausible story is the one suggested by Carl Schorske about the rise of the "new rigorism" across all disciplines after WWII, itself a continuation of the specialization that Weber had identified as the hallmark of the modern research university at the start of the 20th-century.  In addition, of course, there was the influx of logical positivists fleeing Hitler, many of them Marxists or Marxist sympathizers, who were no doubt more congenial to the loosely Deweyan naturalism that dominated American philosophy than NeoHegelians like Marcuse.  And then, of course, there was pure chance.   Harvard dominated American philosophy in the 20th-century, and Quine had joined that department in the 1930s.  He exerted increasing influence as the older generation retired (although, amusingly, he wanted to appoint Walter Kaufmann from Princeton in the 1950s--he could be catholic that way!).   As Harvard became solidly analytic it was inevitable, given the professional networks at the time, that other schools would move in that direction as well.  (John Wild, an enthusiast for phenomenology and existentialism, left Harvard for Northwestern in the early 1960s, probably a fateful mistake with respect to influencing the composition of the profession.)

ADDENDUM:  Comments now open, sorry about that.

Lorenzini from Warwick to Penn

Daniele Lorenzini (20th-century Continental philosophy, social & political philosophy), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, has accepted appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is currently visiting.  Prospective students interested in Foucault, in particular, will want to be looking at Penn going forward.

Wittgenstein and Darwin

Philosopher of biology Michael Ruse writes:

I was fascinated to read the stuff on Wittgenstein [via the "Year in Review"] – but what did surprise me was that no one picked up on the evolution question – I think undoubtedly the most important discovery of the past centuries was the realization that we are not the end-product of a Good God on a creative spree but of a slow process of evolution fueled by the meaningless process of natural selection

How someone thinks this is not going to have profound philosophical implications – epistemology and ethics – beats me    -- what we believe is what works not divinely written on tablets of stone – same for ethics – I feel morally I ought to care for children for those of my would-be ancestors who denied this are only “would be,” whereas those who agreed we have moral obligations to kids do have descendants, namely us

Then I read in the Tractatus that “Darwin’s theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science” (Wittgenstein 1922, 4.1122).  he followed this up some years later by telling his groupies that Darwin’s theory doesn’t have the “required multiplicity” whatever the hell that means.

“I have always thought that Darwin was wrong: his theory doesn’t account for all this variety of species. It hasn’t the necessary multiplicity. Nowadays some people are fond of saying that at last evolution has produced a species that is able to understand the whole process which gave it birth. … you can’t say [that today].”Rhees, R. (ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, p. 174, 1981.

As always in these cases there is no evidence of serious study of the scientific literature

I am afraid that at this point, I closed the book on Wittgenstein and have never regretted it – he has led, I think, to some dreadful consequences for philosophy – as people like Kitcher are now pointing out, analytic philosophy has become so technical and inturned it is practically worthless.

Yet more triumphs of AI!

Philosopher Ned Hall (Harvard) writes:  "I just thought you’d get a kick out of the attached transcription of a 'chat' I had with GPT3 (a propos of this). I’d say it’s pretty far from passing the Turing test…."  See for yourself:  Download Ned Hall ChatGPT attempting to solve a logic puzzle

In Memoriam: Philip Stratton-Lake (1959-2022)

Professor David Oderberg, Head of the Department at the University of Reading, shared the following:

The Philosophy Department at the University of Reading is devastated to announce the death of Philip Stratton-Lake in December 2022, following a period of serious illness.

Philip was a much loved and respected colleague in the Department since he joined in 1998. He was an internationally reputed moral philosopher with expertise in a wide range of areas including meta-ethics, moral epistemology, Kantian ethics, contractualism, intuitionism, and Ross-style pluralism. 

He was one of the world’s leading figures in the revival and defence of ethical intuitionism, writing the article on the topic for the Stanford Encyclopedia and editing a seminal volume (Ethical Intuitionism: Re-evaluations). He also edited the now standard edition of W.D. Ross’ The Right and the Good. Other work includes an important monograph on Kant (Kant, Duty and Moral Worth) along with many articles and chapters in collections.

The Department will miss Philip in so many ways: his jovial personality; his support for colleagues and students; the many teaching and managerial roles he took on with such success over the years; his fearsome philosophical skills, always tempered with fairness and open-mindedness; and his all-round collegiality, good sense, and down-to-earth nature. 

A memorial notice will be available online in due course.

ADDENDUM:  Comments are now open for those who want to share remembrances of Professor Stratton-Lake or comment on his work.

UPDATE:  There is a longer memorial notice here. (Thanks to Professor Oderberg for the pointer.)

 

Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy receives $2 million euros from Spanish government...

...for a four-year project on "the nature and role of evidence."  Professor Teresa Marques (Barcelona) writes:

The project is collaborative as it involves researchers from the three universities that integrate BIAP: The University of Barcelona, the University Pompeu Fabra, and the University of Girona.

The research programme is organized around 7 work packages: evidence in epistemology (led by Sven Rosenkranz), evidence and the law (led by Jordi Ferrer), evidence in science (led by José Díez and Carl Hoefer), evidence in philosophy of mind (led by Josefa Toribio), evidence and philosophical method (led by Manuel García-Carpintero), evidence, politics, and the public sphere (led by José Juan Moreso and Serena Olsaretti), and a dedicated work package for outreach and transfer of knowledge (led by Teresa Marques)

The prize includes PhD fellowships, and the call for two PhD positions will open shortly.

In the legal philosophy world, Professors Ferrer and Moreso are well-known contributors.

"Belief, Desire, and Rational Choice"

Everything you wanted to know about decision theory, courtesy of philosopher Wolfgang Schwarz (Edinburgh).   

An amusing review of MacAskill's longtermism

Here; this bit made me laugh:

Though I fully recognize that this is not an argument, I confess to a strong aversion to this weird band of “effective altruists,” who devote their lives to “doing good,” while largely confining their human relationships to fellow members of the cult and thanking God “that they are not as other men are” (Luke 18:11, KJV). Let us leave them as they anxiously compute their “carbon footprints,” and seek the foundations of ethics in a more human way.

Richard Marshall interviews Bishop Berkeley...

...at 3:16 AM.

In Memoriam: Gerald Press (1945-2022)

A longtime member of the philosophy faculty at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Professor Press was a scholar of ancient philosophy and also served as editor for several years of the Journal of the History of Philosophy.  He passed away on December 26, 2022.  There is a brief obituary from Hunter College here and you can learn more about his work here.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Press or wish to comment on his work.

(Thanks to Steven Nadler for alerting me to Professor Press's death.)

What better way to start the New Year than with the news that...

...the Thomist legal and moral philosopher John Finnis has been made a Commander of the British Empire.  Being Finnis, he uses the opportunity to opine:  "It is good that this award bears the name of a great and essentially beneficent institution which was conceived and pursued in a spirit of service..."  Although his bigoted views about homosexuality are well-known, it seems to me this whitewash of two centuries of imperial rape, exploitation and bloody murder is far more appalling, admitting of no rationalization in terms of Catholic dogma.  What an embarrassment for Oxford.

In Memoriam: Penelope Mackie (1953-2022)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 15-UPDATED WITH BIRTH YEAR 

A well-known contributor to metaphysics, Professor Mackie spent most of her career at the University of Nottingham, where she was Associate Professor/Reader in Philosophy.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear. 

(My thanks to David Mackie for supplying the birth year.)

JHP Book Prize for 2022

Professor Jean-Luc Solère, book review editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, has shared the following:

The winner of the 2022 Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize for the best book written in history of philosophy in 2021 is: Arthur Ripstein (University of Toronto) for his Kant and the Law of War (Oxford University Press, 2021).

An Honorable Mention goes to Mara van der Lugt (University of St Andrews) for her Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering (Princeton University Press, 2021).

 

Philosophy is a low-citation field

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel looks at citation patterns across various disciplines, which confirms what casual observation would suggest:   philosophy is not a high-citation field.   As Professor Schwitzgebel notes:

Philosophy ranks 126th of the 131 subfields [by one measure of citations].  The 25th-most-cited researcher in philosophy, Alva Noe, has 3,600 citations in the Scopus database.  In the top field, developmental biology, the 25th-most-cited researcher has 142,418 citations -- a ratio of almost 40:1.  Even the 100th-most-cited researcher in developmental biology has more than five times as many citations as the single most cited philosopher in the database.

Beauty is essential to the good life

Philosopher Nick Riggle comments.

In Memoriam: Herbert Morris (1928-2022)

A longtime member of the UCLA faculty, Professor Morris made major contributions to philosophy of criminal law and moral psychology.  The UCLA memorial notice is here.   Comments are open for remembrances from colleagues and readers of his work.

(Thanks to David Gordon for the pointer.)

In Memoriam: Dieter Henrich (1927-2022)

Professor Henrich, a preeminent German scholar of Kant and German Idealism, has died.  Even in the Anglophone world, his work was influential.  There is a brief notice in German here.  I will add links to other memorial notices that will no doubt appear.

(Thanks to David Gordon for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  A longer memorial notice, also in German.  I'm also opening comments for remembrances from those who knew Professor Henrich or who would like to comment on his philosophical contributions.

In Memoriam: Gary Iseminger (1937-2022)

Professor Iseminger, a longtime faculty member at Carleton College (where he taught from 1962 until 2004, when he became emeritus), was best-known for his contributions to aesthetics.  The Carleton memorial notice is here.

(Thanks to Daniel Groll for the pointer.)

2023 Colorado summer school in philosophy

Philosopher David Boonin (Colorado/Boulder) writes:

Over the last several years, you’ve helped me publicize the Colorado Summer Seminar in Philosophy by posting a notice about it on your blog when I’m ready to start receiving applications. I’ve now finalized the topic for this coming summer: “Norms and Values." And I’m ready to start accepting applications. The link to the site containing all the information is here:

https://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/events/summer-seminar

I've heard good reports over the years about this program, so undergraduates may want to take a look!