Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

A petition in support of philosophy at Illinois Wesleyan

Here.  (Thanks to Aaron Garrett for creating it.)

Is Illinois Wesleyan V-P for Finance Matt Bierman responsible for the disastrous proposals there?

Philosopher Christopher Pynes (Western Illinois), one of the editors of the PGR, writes:

I have to say that I feel bad for Illinois Wesleyan. Back in 2018, when Matt Bierman became a VP of finance there, I thought, maybe I should email the philosophers and warn them about him.  Matt Bierman was the budget director at WIU when philosophy, religious studies, women's studies, and Afrian American studies were eliminated in June of 2016.

Bierman was a major voice in the elimination of the programs as the WIU budget director. He believes that universities have to have six months operating cash in reserves (more than the WIU endowment by the way) and that all programs have to have so many majors and graduates a year to justify the programs. Have a look at my blog post from March 2016 on those metrics: https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/03/evaluating-philosophy-programs-a-cautionary-tale-about-the-ibhe.html

I don't know how much influence Matt Bierman has at IWU, but given what he did at WIU to promote the elimination of philosophy, promote layoffs, and other cost cutting measures, I believe he is at it again. He's one of the reasons I created the Budget Transparency Committee for our Faculty Senate. I now wish I had reached out to the philosophers at IWU, but it's hard to warn others of an idealogue like Matt Bierman without coming off like a crazy person oneself.  I figured at a liberal arts school, they could handle it.  I was wrong.

Here's the Bierman appointment announcement from 2018.

https://www.iwu.edu/news/2018/bierman-named-vice-president-for-business-and-finance.html

Board of Illinois Wesleyan, a leading liberal arts college in the Midwest, is considering eliminating Philosophy!

This is quite shocking in several respects:   the Philosophy Department, as noted in the PGR, is one of a small handful of regional liberal arts colleges with a notably strong philosophy faculty, all its members being well-trained and productive members of the profession; in addition, the President of Illinois Wesleyan is a classicist, S. Georgia Nugent, who in a prior Presidency, at Kenyon College, was noted for her strong commitment to the liberal arts and especially the humanities.

All four tenured members of the philosophy department received unexpected notifications on June 12 that their program might be closed and that their tenured appointments could be terminated if no suitable alternative positions were found in the university.    And it's not just Philosophy that is a target here, but also Anthopology, French, Italian, Religious Studies, Sociology, and the School of Music.  (26 Illinois Wesleyan faculty received these notices:  over 20% of Illinois Wesleyan's faculty!)  If they go through with this, there is no sense in which the school will remain a "liberal arts" college.

Over 2 million GBP grant from Templeton for project on "Global Philosophy of Religion"...

...led by philosopher Yujin Nagasawa (Birmingham).

On science denial

Philosopher Adrian Bardon (Wake Forest) comments.  I'm pretty skeptical of the adaptaionist explanation for this, even if the phenomenon described is currently all-too-real.

On the phenomenology of solitude

Philosopher Dermot Moran (Boston College) comments.

An interview with philosopher David Wallace (Pittsburgh)...

...about Black Holes.

COVID and higher education...

...with a particular focus on Boston University, from philosopher Daniel Star at BU.  BU has not been covering itself in glory with its approach to faculty and graduate students during the crisis.

Is the philosopher's concept of knowledge an outlier?

This is amusing, if not wholly surprising (after all, if the philosopher's just matched the "ordinary" one what work would the philosopher be doing?):

We find that academics and laypeople share a similar concept of knowledge, while philosophers have a substantially different concept. These experiments show that (a) in contrast to philosophers, other academics and laypeople attribute knowledge to others in some “Gettier” situations; (b) academics and laypeople are much less likely to attribute knowledge when reminded of the possibility of error, but philosophers are not affected by this reminder; and (c) non‐philosophy academics are overall more skeptical about knowledge than laypeople or philosophers.

Where is the self?

Philosopher Shaun Gallagher (Memphis) comments.

What is it like to be a philosopher? Anne Margaret Baxley edition

Here, courtesy of Clifford Sosis as always.

Philosopher James Ladyman (Bristol) on the plan to close philosophy at UWE

Here.

Another amusing take on Isaiah Berlin...

...from the theologian David Hart Bentley in this week's TLS, explaining his judgment that Berlin is "fraudulent":

I was moved to the more intemperate word by reading his short book The Magus of the North, putatively about Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), a volume universally deplored by Hamann scholars as a bumptious tour de force of ignorance and casual slander. It is clear that Berlin hadn’t much notion of what Hamann thought about anything, and clearly hadn’t consulted the scholarly literature....

In a sense, however, that book was an expression of the real problem with Berlin. He was a man whose learning was broad(-ish) but rarely deep. He wrote a good deal about philosophy and philosophers, but was himself possessed of very little in the way of philosophical sophistication. The result was that he tended to reduce the subjects of his work to simplified and rather vaguely impressionistic sketches. There is a definite intellectual laziness in his evaluations of the topics he discusses. Many of his essays, consequently, turn out to be little more substantial than senior common room chatter or an after-dinner talk delivered to an aldermen’s association over the port and cheese.

This is not an especially grave sin, but neither is it an especially admirable virtue. He was a generalist committed to a very particular and somewhat simplistic narrative of “Enlightenment” and he interpreted almost all of intellectual history through that fabulous ideal. As is inevitable when one looks at everything through a narrow and tinted lens, his view of the things he wrote about was often distorted, monochromatic and devoid of all those nuances that rigorous scholars insist on bringing to light.

(Thanks to David Gordon for the pointer.)

It pays not to read the mail: a Paul Grice story

A propos this, philosopher Ian Rumfitt (Oxford) wrote to John Rapko and myself the following (which he kindly gave permission to share):

Your story about finding an unopened letter from Isaiah Berlin in one of Paul Grice's books reminded me of a tale told by a colleague of Grice's at St John's College Oxford in the 1960s.

UC Berkeley was keen to lure Grice from Oxford. In the manner of those days, they wrote a formal letter offering him a full professorship with a specified starting salary. Some weeks having elapsed without their having received a reply, they assumed that Grice had found the proffered salary insultingly low and wrote again, with a better proposal. Once more, they heard nothing, so they wrote a third time, offering him a *very* generous salary. This last letter happened to arrive shortly before Grice's six-monthly opening of his correspondence -- which is how HPG came to accept the third offer and move to California.

I don't know what the moral of the tale might be. Maybe: it doesn't always pay to open letters promptly.

Isaiah Berlin's vendettas

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY

Suitably scathing description of the overrated windbag.

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Longtime reader John Rapko writes:

Thanks for posting Ali's bit about Caute on Isaiah Berlin; I had overlooked it. I share your view on Isaiah Berlin. I think you'll be amused by this anecdote: 20 or so years ago, I was looking at recent arrivals at Moe's Books in Berkeley, a store where I've passed a few thousand pleasant hours. There were quite a few battered old philosophy books from the 1930s through the 60's, some of which I had never seen. As I flipped through them, I quickly realized that this was part of the library of Paul Grice, who had recently died, as there were various identifying documents stuck in the books. So I got to see a number of Grice's lecture notes and annotations. There was also an unopened (!) letter from around 1960 from Isaiah Berlin to Grice. Of course I opened it, and read Berlin informing Grice that he, Berlin, had no objection to admitting the dim-witted son of some Tory MP to Oxford. The tone of the letter was very chummy--'Oh you know, Paul, I have no problem with that sort of thing'. I took the letter, and a couple of years later showed it to Richard Wollheim, who suggested that I send it to Henry Hardie, who was then editing Berlin's letters. Alas, I simply forgot to do so, and I'm pretty sure I've got it stuck in a volume of Berlin's selected writings. But perhaps it's for the best, as Hardie may well have chosen not to print it. If by chance you ever know of someone who's writing on Berlin's shady Cold War shenanigans, please let me know and I'll send them a copy of the letter.

You can reach Professor Rapko at:  johnrapko-at-yahoo-dot-com

Richard Marshall interviews Muhammed Ali Khalidi (York U, moving to CUNY)...

...at 3:16 AM.

David Hume statue targetted by protestors in Edinburgh

Who knew there were so many Kantians in Edinburgh?  Joking aside, if holding the same view as your 18th-century contemporaries is grounds for being de-statued, not many will last.

(Thanks to Filippo Contessi for the pointer.)

Australian government decides to destroy humanities in higher ed

What a disaster.

UPDATE:  Philosopher Antony Eagle (Adelaide) has more details about this mischief, which has ramifictions beyond the humanities.

On the meaning of statues

Philosopher Les Green (Oxford & Queen's U) comments.

In Memoriam: D.H. (Hugh) Mellor (1938-2020)

Professor Mellor, who spent his career at Cambridge University, was best-known for his work in metaphysics, although his philosophical interests ranged widely.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

"University" [sic] of the West of England proposing to close its philosophy program...

..no doubt as part of a plan to revert to being a polytechnic in all but name.  There's a petition in support of philosophy you can sign here, and details about the proposed closure and the department here; the latter includes contact information for the administrators at UWE.  Philosopher Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) kindly gave permission to share the apt e-mail she sent:

Dear Prof West; dear Dr Griffiths; dear Prof Coffey,

I am writing to express my profound disappointment and dismay at the news that UWE Bristol is proposing to shut down its philosophy department. A university without a philosophy department is not a university -- not, that is, an institution dedicated to free and humanistic inquiry. It is, instead, a technical shop that has subjected itself to the instrumentalist logic of efficiency and economic growth. If these plans are seen through, I assure you that your administration will be seen by academics across the UK and around the world as the people who not only destroyed what was once an excellent philosophy department, but moreover betrayed the values of learning, truth and education. In turn, the reputation of the institution whose interests you are charged with serving will suffer gravely. I urge you in the strongest possible terms to reconsider.

Yours Sincerely,

Amia Srinivasan

Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory

All Souls College, Oxford

Best places to publish in ancient philosophy and related questions

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JUNE 15--MORE COMMENTS WELCOME

A reader writes:

I know the top 4 specialist journals are (1) Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, (2) Phronesis, and tied for (3) Apeiron and Ancient Philosophy, but I've wondered about, e.g. The Journal of Ancient Philosophy, and also about the importance of varying between specialist journals and general history of philosophy journals. Also useful would be advice from established scholars on the extent to which one should form one's paper differently for an ancient philosophy specialist journal as opposed to a general history of philosophy journal as opposed to, potentially, a classics journal.

Signed comments will be very strongly preferred here.  Thanks.

Richard Marshall interviews John Burgess (Princeton)...

...at 3:16 AM.

The obstacles to ethical vaccine challenge studies

Bioethicist Carl Elliott (Minnesota) comments.

(Thanks to Mark Pavlick for the pointer.)

Statement by Alex Byrne (MIT) regarding the debate with Professor Dembroff

It is here (background here).  I would especially call readers' attention to his point #4, which sheds further light on Professor Dembroff's ongoing attempts to distract and deflect.

 

Still more on Phil Studies and the Dembroff-Byrne debate

Just a recap from last week:  

1.  Philosophical Studies (hereafter "PS") published a paper by philosopher Robin Dembroff (Yale) critiquing an earlier paper in PS by philosopher Alex Byrne (MIT).

2.  The Dembroff paper contained, as the former EIC Stewart Cohen put it, "unprofessional personal attacks" on Byrne (e.g., claiming that Byrne's paper was really "an unscholarly attempt to vindicate a political slogan that is currently being used to undermine civic rights and respect for trans persons” and wondering "about the motives of someone who would so confidently insert themself into this high-stakes discourse while so ill-informed.”  (Clarificatory note:  Professor Dembroff insists on referring to everyone by the third-person plural pronoun even if the indivdiuals in question would prefer "he" or "she," hence the use of "themself" to refer to Byrne)

3.  Springer policy forbids "descriptions of [an individual's] behavior or actions that could potentially be seen as personal attacks or allegations about that person."   Cohen, as EIC, was also committed to that policy.

4.  Given that the Dembroff paper was pretty clearly in violation of that policy, Cohen, as EIC, proposed two remedies:  (a)  PS would "make a public announcement owning up to the mistake" and reminding "prospective authors" that "personal attacks" are not permissible and that referees have a responsibility to alert the editor to such attacks; and (b) giving the target of the personal attack, Byrne, a right of reply.

5.  One other senior editor and Springer rejected these remedies, and Professor Cohen resigned as EIC and asked me to share his statement in public.

Laurie Paul calls to my attention that her colleague Professor Dembroff has now made a public response on Facebook.  It begins, oddly, with three statements of "principle" (as it were) that are not at issue in this case:

Regarding recent decisions at Philosophical Studies:

(1) All papers submitted to a philosophical journal should be subject to a transparent and professional editorial process. No paper should receive special treatment (be it harsh or favorable) because of an editor’s relationship to an author, or the editor’s personal views about the philosophical thesis defended.

(2) Academic freedom is a foundational value of philosophical scholarship. It should be restricted only with great caution. Calls to censor an academic paper that has been accepted after a transparent and professional editorial process, especially one that has gone through the double-blind peer review process, violate this foundational value.

(3) Typically, neither statements about matters of public interest nor true statements are defamatory.

Regarding (2):  there is no violation of academic freedom because a journal has editorial standards that bar personal attacks, as PS does; Cohen's proposed remedies (see my #4, above) did not include a "call[] to censor" the paper.  Perhaps Dembroff meant a call to"censure" the paper, which would be involved in a public statement acknowledging the failure to enforce journal policies.  But since the "censure" pertained to the violation of editorial standards, it would not implicate academic freedom, for the reasons already noted.  (It's a separate question whether post-publication censure is appropriate:  the issue arose during the Synthese debacle a number of years ago, and I'm inclined to think it's a bad idea, but it does  not violate academic freedom.  In the Synthese case, the editors, bizarrely, censured all the papers in the special issue, without naming the offending one.) 

Thinking in quarantine

Philosopher Zena Hitz (St. John's, Annapolis) comments.

Stewart Cohen (Arizona) resigns as editor of "Philosophical Studies" after 25 years (UPDATED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JUNE 7 (ORIGINALLY POSTED JUNE 5)--ADDITIONAL COMMENTS FROM PROFESSOR COHEN AT THE END

Professor Cohen asked me to share his full explanation for this decision, which I am happy to do:   Download Stewart Cohen resignation.   This is a real shame, but Professor Cohen is to be congratulated for editing the journal with great success for the last quarter-century, and making it an indispensable forum for philosophical work.

(I believe the controversy surrounds an article by philosopher Robin Dembroff [Yale] attacking Alex Byrne [MIT]; you can get a sense of Professor Dembroff's "unprofessional personal attacks" [as Professor Cohen calls them] here.)

ADDENDUM:   The linked list of "insults" from Professor Dembroff's piece is probably broader than what Professor Cohen had in mind; but comments like these clearly are "personal attacks" which an analytic philosophy journal might reasonably regard as beyond the pale:

“Byrne’s paper is fundamentally an unscholarly attempt to vindicate a political slogan that is currently being used to undermine civic rights and respect for trans persons.”

“All this leads me to wonder about the motives of someone who would so confidently insert themself [sic] into this high-stakes discourse while so ill-informed”.

Great stuff for blogs and Twitter, not so much for Philosophical Studies.

UPDATE:   Professor Byrne's reply to Professor Dembroff (the reply that Professor Cohen had solicited prior to being overruled by the publisher and another editor) is available here.

ANOTHER:  Apt comments from Professor Byrne on Twitter:

Any academic discipline needs to encourage skepticism and dissent, or it risks lapsing into an ivory tower priesthood where dogma replaces knowledge, heretics are shamed, and good faith disagreement with the pieties of the moment is seen as a sign of moral corruption.

 

Richard Marshall interviews John Cottingham (Reading)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Informative U Arizona article about Prof. Cohen's resigntion as EIC of Phil Studies

All student newspaper articles should be as professionally done as this one.

Robert Paul Wolff's "Apologia Pro Vita Sua'

This is charming.

An online set of essays about the 1973 film of Strawson and Evans discussing truth

Here; see the essay by Huw Price (Cambridge) for details.

A recent collection on fictionalism

This was a really good review, by philosopher Zoltan Szabo (Yale):  instructive, crisply written, giving a nice sense of the positions staked out in the volume.

Richard Marshall interviews Miriam Solomon (Temple)...

...at 3:16 AM.   Philosophy of medicine is likely to become a more important topic because of the pandemic, and it is certainly a very interesting one that Professor Solomon discusses (among other topics).

A call for police to take "collective responsibility" for police misconduct...

...from a former career police officer who also has a PhD in philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center.

(Thanks to Jonathan Gilmore for the pointer.)

Public health measures and "freedom"

Les Green (Oxford & Queen's U) comments (amusingly and aptly); an excerpt:

Admittedly, there are disagreements about freedom.  Some philosophers say these turn on people having different ‘concepts’ of freedom; others say that we have various ‘conceptions of the concept’ of freedom. (It can only be a matter of time before someone says that we have different ‘concepts of a conception of a concept’ of freedom.)  My own view is parsimonious.  I think we are free to do what we can actually do, and not free to do what we cannot do because we are prevented from doing it or because the action has been made infeasible.  What we disagree about is why freedom and unfreedom matter.

Some people hate restrictions just because they hate anyone making them do things they don’t want to do. (Teenagers, and some libertarians, tend to fall into this class.)  For others, unfreedom is of concern only if it also limits their autonomy, the power to shape their lives to fit their needs and character, as JS Mill put it.  Being forced to wear a mask while shopping may outrage the first group, but not the second because (save in special cases) wearing a mask does not limit any further activities.  A third group have still narrower concerns.  They only chafe under unfreedoms they judge to be imposed arbitrarily or unreasonably, in which cases they think they are being ‘dominated’.  These are all real disagreements, but they are fundamentally disagreements about the value of particular freedoms, not about freedom’s nature.

Yet another charlatan in the Trump administration

But at least he thought pretending to have a PhD in philosophy was better than having a PhD in management!

(Thanks to John Casey for the pointer.)

Philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) calls out some bad actors in academic philosophy

Here (and scroll down).

In Memoriam: Ronald Giere (1938-2020)

A leading contributor to the philosophy of science, Professor Giere taught for roughly twenty years at Indiana University, Bloomington, before moving to the University of Minnesota in 1987, where he spend the remainder of his teaching career.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

In Memoriam: Karen Neander (1954-2020)

MOVING TO FRONT, ORIGINALLY POSTED MAY 11--UPDATED

A professor of philosophy at Duke University since 2006, Professor Neander was well-known for her contributions to philosophy of mind, biology, and cognitive science.  Before Duke, she taught at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California at Davis in the United States, and before that, in her native Australia.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

UPDATE:  The Australasian Society of Philosophy memorial notice.

UPDATE:  The Duke memorial notice.

ANOTHER:   La Trobe's memorial notice.

Richard Marshall interviews Richard Gipps (Oxford)...

...at 3:16 AM.

On cruel moralizers

Philosopher Paul Russell (British Columbia & Lund) comments.

Works of philosophy summarized in one-syllable words

This game has been making the rounds on social media, and now many of the examples are collected here.  Many are quite good; the one on Nietzsche, however, is incompetent (makes me wonder whether the author actually read the book).

Naturalized epistemology, we need more of it

After Alvin Goldman, Hilary Kornblith (U Mass/Amherst) is my favorite among contemporaries in the analytic tradition, and this judicious review by philosopher Jennifer Nagel (Toronto) brings out his virtues rather nicely.

Why did the APA Board terminate the "Committee on Philosophy and Law"

See here, and for some further detail, the end of the 2018-19 report.  The latter seems to suggest it has something to do with the fact that so many legal philosophers are not in philosophy departments, but other units (like law schools, but not only there).   Does anyone know what the story is?

(Thanks to Michael Sevel for the pointer.)

 

APA announces Spring 2020 prizes

Here.

Spinoza: moving to center stage in the modern canon?

So argue two Spinoza scholars, Clare Carlisle (KCL) and Yitzhak Melamed (Johns Hopkins) in this interesting TLS essay; an excerpt:

The fate of the Ethics in the Anglo-American world is another story. In the 1970s and 80s most analytic philosophers regarded Spinoza as an uncritical and extravagant metaphysician, whose strange ideas might – at best – be allowed into serious discourse only once domesticated. This often meant abstracting his arguments from his complex engagement, constructive as well as critical, with Jewish and Christian scriptural and philosophical traditions.

This uneasy reception of the Ethics into contemporary anglophone philosophy changed dramatically with the re-emergence of analytic metaphysics in the 1990s. A new generation of rigorously trained philosophers and historians of philosophy – all of them indebted to Edwin Curley’s astute, scholarly translation of the Ethics – found Spinoza’s strict naturalism, uncompromising systematicity and deep aversion towards anthropocentric illusions immensely attractive. Don Garrett and Michael Della Rocca did groundbreaking work that repositioned Spinoza as a meticulous rationalist. In 2017 Della Rocca assembled twenty-five scholars to produce The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, much of it devoted to metaphysical issues arising from the Ethics, and since then OUP has published significant books on Spinoza’s metaphysics by the North American philosophers Sam Newlands and Martin Lin, as well as an outstanding new collection of papers by Garrett. The recent explosion of Spinoza studies – and of contemporary metaphysics and epistemology inspired by Spinoza – has resulted in a deep reorientation in analytic as well as continental philosophy. In many ways, Spinoza is now replacing Kant and Descartes as both the compass and the watershed of modern thought.

It is probably true that the "Spinoza boom" has something to do with the return of "analytic metaphysics," but since fashions change, sometimes quickly, that may mean the boom is short-lived.

Richard Marshall interviews David Weissman (City College of New York)...

...at 3:16 AM.

New report on the state of the humanities from the AAAS

IHE article here, and you can find the portion of the report specifically about philosophy departments here.  Robert Townsend, Director of the Washington Office of the American Academy, sent along this helpful summary of the findings for philosophy:

• Philosophy departments employed approximately 6,735 full- and part-time faculty members in fall 2017, with an average of nine faculty members per department. Sixty-eight percent of these faculty were either tenured or on the tenure track, and 22% were employed part-time.
• Seventeen percent of philosophy departments hired a new permanent faculty member for the start of the 2017–18 academic year (the smallest share found among the disciplines included in the survey), and 27% of the departments had a faculty member come up for tenure in the previous two years (also a comparatively small share).
• Total enrollment in graduate-level philosophy courses was 24,970 in fall 2017 (with an average enrollment of 33.2 students per department). The average number of students pursuing an advanced degree in philosophy was 54 per department that granted such degrees.
• On average, philosophy departments awarded nine bachelor’s degrees per department in the 2016–17 academic year (a statistically significant decrease from 2012). Students also completed an average of 8.9 minors per department.
• Forty-three percent of philosophy departments rated the career services programs at their college or university “good” or “very good” for their students, while 11% rated the services “poor” or “very poor.”

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

I learned this morning from Stacie Gutting, the editor of NDPR, that this summer will mark 20 years since NDPR's founding.   Kudos to Stacie and her late husband Gary for making NDPR the success it has become!  On July 1, a new editor will take over from Stacie, and ownership of the journal will transfer to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.  Philosopher Jeff Speaks, Chair of the Department at Notre Dame, is leading the search for a new editor.