Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

2022 Lakatos Prize goes to...

...Catarina Dutilh Novaes (VU Amsterdam) for her book The Dialogic Roots of Deduction.

 

On Raz's political philosophy

An essay by Steven Wall (Arizona).

Publishers no longer providing hard copies of books for review?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM MAY 16--AN EYE-OPENING SET OF COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME

A philosopher elsewhere, who is also a book review editor at a journal, writes:

Over the last few years, publishers having been increasingly pushing a policy of only providing digital copies of books for review in journals. This is making the book reviews editor’s job more difficult, since it is now quite common to find that a potential reviewer refuses to review the book if only digital copy is made available, thus further reducing the already small pool of potential reviewers. The fact that people are refusing of course also indicates that it makes the reviewer’s job more onerous. It is difficult to think of a good faith rationale for this on behalf of the press other than a money-saving one, and it is the already unpaid reviewer who is paying a further price for doing an important job.

I was unaware of this development.  How common is this?   I would certainly decline to review any book for which there was no hard copy.  I'm not surprised to hear I'm not alone on that front.

In Memoriam: Bruno Celano (1961-2022)

I was very sorry to learn (via Prof. Mauricio Maldonado) that Professor Celano, who taught at the University of Palermo for many years, has died.  He was undoubtedly one of the most gifted legal philosophers in Europe, and we were very glad to publish one of his English-language papers in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law.  There is more about his work here.

"Ethics in Action"

A philosophy podcast by Nir Eisikovits (U Mass/Boston).

"Why should capitalism self-destruct? Marx's account reconsidered"

This paper will be presented at a conference at the University of Amsterdam in late June; some of this material will migrate into the book on Marx I'm co-authoring with Jaime Edwards.  Here is the abstract:

Marx, partly due to the malign influence of Hegel, often expressed the view that capitalism would necessarily collapse. One of his arguments for that conclusion, the supposed tendency of the rate of profit to fall, fails. I focus mainly on the more important argument: the incentive for all capitalists to promote and embrace technological innovations means that human labor power will become less and less necessary in capitalist societies. Since most people depend on the ability to sell their labor power, consumption will inevitable decline in capitalist societies. Since profit is only realized when commodities are consumed, capitalists will have less and less reason to utilize their productive power to generate what humans want and need. Although this state of affairs--which is gradually being realized in the era of global capital--will result in economic depression, it need not, contrary to Marx, result in capitalism's collapse.

REF 2021 results for philosophy

The periodic Research Excellence Framework in the UK is significant because it affects the allocation of funding to the universities.   While in its origins it focused exclusively on research output, it has since incorporated criteria like "public" impact, which does not mean the impact of one's scholarship on one's field, but rather, e.g., how often one gets media coverage.   The "top ten" in the UK overall are, perhaps unsurprisingly, somewhat bizarre: 

1.  University of Birmingham

2.  University of York

3.  University College London

3.  London School of Economics

5.  University of Kent

6.  University of Southampton

7.  University of Manchester

8.  University of Warwick

9.  University of Glasgow

10. Cambridge University

Oxford, in case you're wondering, was 19th.  Less bizarre (and more like the PGR results) was the top ten based on "research power":

Bertrand Russell and the "realist" revolt in metaphysics

Philosopher Fraser MacBride (Manchester) discusses.

Abortion, involuntary servitude, specific performance

Philosopher/lawyer Alec Walen (Rutgers) comments.

Philosopher Erin Kelly (Tufts) wins Pulitzer Prize...

...for a co-authored biography of an African-American artist who survived the Jim Crow South.

(Thanks to Afton Greco for the pointer.)

In Memoriam: Joseph Raz (1939-2022) (Updated)

MOVING TO FRONT--ORIGINALLY POSTED MAY 2, MANY NEW UPDATES

After H.L.A. Hart (his teacher), Raz was the most important figure in Anglophone legal philosophy, and also made significant contributions to political and moral philosophy.  During his long tenure at Oxford, he trained many other legal philosophers, including John Gardner, Leslie Green, Andrei Marmor, Denise Reaume, Julie Dickson, Brian Bix, and Scott Shapiro, among others.   I will write more and add links later today.  As it happens, I am teaching his seminal paper "Authority, Law, and Morality" in jurisprudence this very day.

SOME MORE:   Raz's three most important books were Practical Reason and Norms (1975), The Authority of Law (1979), and The Morality of Freedom (1986).  Many entries at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discuss Raz's views:  his argument for exclusive legal positivism; perfectionism (and generally); and obligations and reasons.  A concern with the nature and kinds of reasons runs throughout his work, and figures, for example, in the paper I mentioned I'm teaching today (authoritative directives give exclusionary reasons for acting, and since all law claims authority, law must satisfy certain non-normative prerequisites for claiming authority...which rules out the inclusive positivism that Hart endorsed in the "Postscript" to The Concept of Law.)   Although much indebted to Hart, Raz explicitly rejected both Hart's naturalism and his skepticism about the objectivity of evaluative judgments.  (I'm with Hart, not Raz on this issue!)  My former student Michael Sevel (Sydney) is finishing the first comprehensive treatment of Raz's entire philosophy for OUP, which shall shed new light on the deep connections between his work in moral, political, and legal philosophy.

I'll add some more personal recollections later.  Readers are welcome to do the same in the comments.  (Submit comments only once, they may take awhile to appear, given my schedule today.)

ANOTHER:  Despite some debilitating health problems the last few years, Raz continued doing philosophical work.  His most recent book just appeared this past February, edited by his former student, the moral philosopher Ulrike Heuer (UCL).

SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS:  I first met Joseph in the summer of 1995 at Oxford, at an informal conference organized by Oxford and University of Southern California.  I presented some of my work on American legal realism.  Having never met him before, and being a youngster, I was rather taken aback by the aggressive nature of his questioning (and I had gone to Michigan, the place where students would sometimes cry in seminar!).   There was no hostility in Raz's style of questions, but he also had no "bedside manner."  While surprised (having never engaged with him before), I didn't mind, and the questions helped me clarify and revise the paper.  I held my own well enough, I guess, that John Gardner, who was also there, asked me to review Neil Duxbury's philosophically feeble Patterns of American Jurisprudence for Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.

Joseph Raz's final wishes

Joseph's longtime partner, Penelope Bulloch, kindly gave permission to share this message she had sent to various friends (earlier memorial notice):

Joseph did not want a funeral. 

He left his body to the London Anatomy Office, for education or research, and it has been accepted. They know he was a Professor, and told me ‘now he can go on teaching’.

Plato makes Socrates, on trial for his life, tell the jury why he will not stop talking about philosophy: ‘it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living’ (Apology 37e-38a).

In Memoriam: T.K. Seung (1930-2022)

My friend and former colleague, the philosopher A.P. Martinich (Texas), called to my attention that Professor Seung, who taught at Texas for nearly fifty years, passed away in February.  There is a memorial notice (and other information) here.  

I knew "Tom" Seung, but not as well as some others.  He was sui generis, both in the breadth of his philosophical and literary interests and his personal style.  When animated in a philosophical discussion, he would often slap the leg or arm of the person he was talking to!  There was no hostility in the gesture, it was like a physical punctuation point.  Al Martinich's recollection gives a nice sense of the person Tom was.

2022 Newcombe Fellowships for PhD students

Just two philosophy graduate students, one at Boston College and one at University of Wisconsin, Madison.  Some background on the Newcombe Fellowships and why philosophers fare so poorly, even though at the start philosophy PhD students typically got five or six of the awards each year.

The universe is not a wave function

Philosopher Eddy Keming Chen (UC San Diego) comments.

UPDATE:  Philosopher David Wallace (Pittsburgh) writes:

I saw you flagged Eddy Chen’s recent paper on the blog. A quick observation in case you’re interested: the article is engaging and provocative but risks encouraging a regrettably-common confusion, in that it mostly conflates 'the wave-function is representational' with 'the wave-function is real'. Consider: there are c.10,000 students at Pitt, and they take four courses per semester, so the academic results of the undergraduate body each semester are represented by a single point in 40,000-dimensional 'grade space'. Is the grade-space point representational? Does it represent objective mind-independent features of the world? Yes, obviously; indeed, we know what those features are - I'm supposed to be determining some of them now instead of writing this note. Is it real? That depends on your philosophy of math, but at most it's real in the sense that numbers are real. Is there an *object* it represents? No. Do Pitt undergraduates, collectively, live in 40,000-dimensional space? Obviously not.

It probably is the majority view in physics that the wave-function is representational, indeed that it represents inter alia the ordinary macroscopic features of the world. But that doesn't entail that the wave-function is real, or that the universe is a wavefunction. You can motivate that as a further move - it's not silly in the way that reifying grade space is silly - but it doesn't in any way follow automatically. It's a very substantive (and in my view incorrect) additional metaphysical move, by no means a consensus view in philosophy of physics and very heterodox in physics proper, even among those who agree that the wave-function is representational. Many physicists of a cosmological bent might assent to 'the wave-function represents all the dynamical properties of the Universe'; few indeed would assent to 'the universe is a wave-function'.

Chen himself appreciates the distinction, I'm sure, and the article occasionally acknowledges it ("One dominant interpretation of the wave function is that it in fact represents physical reality – some even argue that the universe as a whole is just a quantum wave function") but they're often conflated in the text and even more so in the headings and provocative title, though I appreciate Chen might not have written these himself.

More on Princeton's wealth and the "reality on the ground"

A Princeton professor writes:

Regarding https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2022/04/per-student-value-of-endowments-of-american-colleges-and-universities-2021.html , unfortunately you played right into the Princeton administration’s strategy of saying that life could not be better than being on faculty at Princeton. They have told me that for many years, as I struggled to make mortgage payments, to find time to advise dozens of senior theses and junior papers, to prepare brilliant lectures for the scions.

Several full professors, even endowed chairs, in philosophy earn significantly less than the Princeton average, and so significantly less than philosophy professors at Rutgers, NYU, or UCLA.

I appreciate your using your blog as a platform to highlight economic injustice.

Seven philosophers elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (CORRECTED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY

They are:  Jeffrey Barrett (UC Irvine), Elisabeth Lloyd (Indiana), Jeff McMahan (Oxford), Nancy Sherman (Georgetown), and Linda Zagzebski (Oklahoma).

UPDATE:  Two non-Anglophone philosophers were also elected:  Beate Roessler (Amsterdam) and M. Emanuela Scribano (Ca' Foscari).   (Thanks to Stefano Bacin for catching the error of omission.)

Linguistic Society of America moves to adopt the Chicago Principles on Free Expression

Here.   Will the American Philosophical Association do so?  I'm skeptical, but let us see.

ADDENDUM:  Some of the comments that follow make clear that Linguistics is afflicted by the same mindless identity politics that afflicts philosophy:

Some skepticsm about grouping Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch together philosophically

Philosopher Jennifer Frey (South Carolina) makes some very good points in this review essay of the recent books we have noted previously; some excerpts:

On both accounts, each member of the quartet was able to reach her full potential as a philosopher because the Big Men on Campus—A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Richard Hare and others—were away fighting the war. Their absence was critical, these books argue, because these men, who dominated the intellectual scene at Oxford, were hell-bent on destroying traditional philosophical reflection into metaphysics and morals...

This narrative frame comes from Mary Midgley herself, who, in 2013, wrote a letter to the Guardian arguing that she and her friends were able to thrive as philosophers because “there were fewer men about then"....

While this account fits with Midgley’s idea that women are bound by their sex to do philosophy differently (and perhaps better) than men, and surely reflects her own experience of Oxford, it strikes me as out of joint with what we know about the personalities of some of her friends. The insistence of all three authors on shoehorning these women’s stories into an all-too-familiar pop-feminist narrative distorts the unique nature of the bonds these women forged together. It also insinuates, insultingly, that they needed to be treated with kid gloves in order to mature intellectually. I find it difficult to believe that Anscombe needed to be sheltered from the clever men of Oxford in order to cultivate her legendary philosophical habits, or that Murdoch would have lacked the boldness to hold her own in a room full of men who plainly lacked the imaginative vision she herself possessed...

In Memoriam: Aaron Smuts (1975-2022)

MOVING TO FRONT, ORIGINALLY POSTED MARCH 25--UPDATED

I was very sorry to learn of the untimely passing of Professor Smuts, who wrote widely in value theory (including both aesthetics and ethics), and was, at the time of his death, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at Rhode Island College.  You can learn more about his work here.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

(Thanks to Noel Carroll for the information.)

UPDATE:  An obituary here.

ANOTHER:  A memorial notice in the newsletter of the American Society of Aesthetics is here.

2021-22 philosophy job market

Philosopher Marcus Arvan (Tampa) offers his informative annual assessment, with useful comparisons to prior years.

AFA sends letter to St. Olaf College after it removes director of the center that invited Peter Singer

AFA letter here.  The event itself went off without a problem, despite protests and calls to boycott.  But the center's director, Professor Santurri, is now being punished for inviting Singer and other "controversial" speakers.  What a disgrace!

British Journal for the History of Philosophy announces 2021 "Best Article" prize...

...and others (also).

(Thanks to Alix Cohen for the pointers.)

Thomas Kuhn and the ashtray

Long ago, we noted the filmmaker Errol Morris's allegation that during a heated discussion with Kuhn, Kuhn threw an ashtray at him.  We've also noted that Mr. Morris has a low opinion of Kuhn's contributions.  Philosopher of science Brad Wray (Aarhus U) now investigates the Morris-Kuhn history, and corrects the record.

Richard Marshall interviews Juan Comesana (Arizona, moving to Rutgers)...

...at 3:16 AM.

A 1961 program introducing existentialism

Here, featuring the philosopher (and Sartre's English translator) Hazel Barnes.

(Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)

Where untenured tenure-track faculty at the U.S. "top twenty" earned their PhD, 2022

MOVING TO FRONT FROM APRIL 4--CORRECTED

Following up on last week's post:  tenure-track junior faculty at the U.S. "top twenty" programs earned their Ph.D.s in philosophy from the following programs:

1.   New York University (8)

2.   Massachusetts Institute of Technology (7)

2.   Princeton University (7)

2.   Rutgers University, New Brunswick (7)

5.   Harvard University (6)

6.  Yale University (5)

7.   University of California, Berkeley (4)

8.   Columbia University (3)

9.  Cambridge University (2) (both Notre Dame)

9.   Oxford University (2)

9.   University of California, Irvine (2)

9.   University of Chicago (2) (both Columbia/Barnard)

9.   University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2)

9.   University of Southern California (2) (both Michigan)

Plus one each earned a Ph.D. from Indiana, DePaul, Paris I, UC Rvierside, Wisconsin, Harvard's Government Department, North Carolina, Toronto, Cornell, Pittsburgh, York (UK), Western Ontario, UCLA, and Potsdam.   Below the fold are the top twenty departments with the PhDs of their untenured faculty.  Please email me corrections. 

Religious liberty claims run amok, yet again

A philosophy professor with a spurious "religious" objection to addressing students by their preferred pronouns has prevailed in his lawsuit against the university.

Meriwether sued in 2018 after he was disciplined, and a federal district court dismissed the suit for lack of standing. Then, last year a three-judge appellate panel revived the lawsuit and sent it back to the lower court, where Meriwether could have argued his First Amendment rights of free speech and religion and his 14th Amendment right to due process were violated.

 

"As part of the settlement, the university has agreed that Meriwether has the right to choose when to use, or avoid using, titles or pronouns when referring to or addressing students," the release from Meriwether's attorneys read. "Significantly, the university agreed Meriwether will never be mandated to use pronouns, including if a student requests pronouns that conflict with his or her biological sex."

 

Shawnee University called it an "economic decision."

 

"Though we have decided to settle, we adamantly deny that anyone at Shawnee State deprived Dr. Meriwether of his free speech rights or his rights to freely exercise his religion," the school's statement read.

 

On knowing your genetic origins

Philosopher Daniel Groll (Carleton) comments.

A conference in honor of Charles Mills...

...at the CUNY Graduate Center a week from this Friday.  (Note that registration is required.)

(Thanks to Corey Beckford for the pointer.)

Justice Ginsburg is a philosopher, and other great moments in the Dunning-Kruger Effect

A propos this (and especially this), it was recently brought to my attention that philosopher Sandra LaPointe (McMaster), opined as follows on Twitter:

An open letter about calling attention to the open letter to OUP attacking an unread and unreleased book

A propos this (and see also), this response by philosopher Moti Gorin (Colorado State) is pretty funny:

By platforming this letter, which, unlike Lawford-Smith’s book, can be read — having been violently ripped from the realm of the merely possible to the realm of the actual — Weinberg promotes inaccurate stereotypes about unread books, such as the stereotype that they can be understood and assessed. Also, he may contribute to reality-oppressive practices, such as the possible creation of a journal dedicated to the review of unread books. The undersigned, as possible writers of possible books, are concerned, and call for a ban on such possible journals.

The possible risks are real. More troublingly, they are actually possible — some of the writers we like would go further and say the possible risks are immanent. Everyone we like agrees that possible risks can be much worse than actual harms of the sort for which evidence can be provided. This is because possible harms are very difficult to locate. They elude even the most intensive textual deconstruction, revealing themselves only in narratives of lived experience/diaries....

Moreover, criticism of as-yet unreleased and unread books is exactly like cancer: both are bad, both are violent, and both can spread. More specifically, such criticism can contribute to rhetorical violence (which we need not remind you is always-already there) against future, possible, unread books and their authors, or possible authors and publishers, or possible publishers....

Richard Marshall interviews Joseph Mitterer (Klagenfurt [Austria])...

...at 3:16 AM.  I thought this was interesting, about his road into philosophy and the situation in Austria after WWII:

Still at school I had the chance to attend the annual European Forum at Alpbach, a village in the Austrian Tyrol near my home town. There I met Hans Albert, Karl-Otto Apel, Paul Feyerabend, Walter Kaufmann and Herbert Marcuse amongst others.

It was the mid sixties of the last century, I hated the confinements of my high school, the Ex-Nazi teachers, and I couldn’t wait for these three weeks of intellectual challenge to arrive in late summer. I was excited by the atmosphere of Alpbach and it was there, where I decided to put my life on philosophy.

Academic philosophy in Austria back then was hardly attractive. Twenty years after the war the scene in Vienna was dominated by a transcendental philosophy whose Post-Nazi-representatives had prevented the return of the exiled philosophers of the “Vienna Circle”.

On Twitter, philosopher Nathan Ballantyne (Fordham) is collecting some interesting anecdotes from the history of American philosophy in the 20th-century

For example:   Richard Taylor's amusing description of the 1964 APA meeting in Boston; Roderick Chisholm's amazingly apt review of the work of Judith Jarvis (later Thomson) and Andrew Reck; and many more interesting stories and incidents.

NYT interviews philosopher Volodymyr...

...here (earlier coverage).

 

Philosopher James Ladyman (Bristol) talks about "Metaphysics Naturalized"...

...at Interalia Magazine.  An excerpt:

Scientists and others sometimes deride philosophy on the basis of very little if any evidence of what it is like. There is a lot of extraordinarily brilliant work in metaphysics but there is a predominance of a priori methodology and a lack of engagement with scientific knowledge. This means that while the work is not worthless, since it often exemplifies great rigour and clarity and sophistication of argument and concepts, it is largely irrelevant for someone interested in the nature of reality. Our idea is that naturalised metaphysics exists to say how the world is in the light of all the sciences, and to say something about how the ontologies of the sciences relate to each other and to physics. We define fundamental physics as the science that is maximally general in respect of the scales to which it applies. We argue that as yet we have no account of a fundamental level nor any reason to think there is one and so we ought to unify the sciences without reference to one. This we do with the ideas of scale relativity of ontology and real patterns. The latter have causal/lawlike structure so we are realists about causation, but also pluralists about it so that the causation in evolutionary dynamics can in principle be different from that in economics or medicine. The world conceived as a totality, a single finished entity, may not exist, but there are plenty of things that do including galaxies, cells, viruses, atoms and electromagnetic radiation, and let’s not forget people

In Memoriam: Gilbert Harman (1938-2021) (UPDATED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM THE FALL (FIRST POSTED NOVEMBER 14, 2021)--MORE UPDATES

Emeritus at Princeton University, where he taught for more than a half-century until his retirement in 2017, Professor Harman made significant contributions to epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and metaethics, among other areas. He also supervised many PhD students who became well-known philosophers in their own right, including Stephen Stich, R. Jay Wallace, James Dreier, Nicholas Sturgeon, Joshua Knobe, and Richard Joyce, among others. 

I am personally grateful to him for his standard practice in his undergraduate "Systematic Ethics" class of permitting students to revise their papers after receiving comments:  a great learning experience, but a lot of work for the instructor! 

The profile of him at the time he took emeritus status is informative about his work and career.

I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

UPDATE:  The Princeton memorial notice is here.

ANOTHER UPDATE (4/11/22):   Some informative short essays on Harman's major contributions to philosophy (many by former students).  And an obituary from a local newspaper (scroll down to see it).  (Thanks to Liz Harman for the pointers.)

Changing perceptions of time during the pandemic

Philosopher Ian Phillips (Johns Hopkins) comments.

Three philosophers win 2022 Guggenheim Fellowships

They are:   Juliette Kennedy (Helsinki), Christopher Peacocke (Columbia), and Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth).

Richard Marshall interviews Brian Skyrms (UC Irvine)...

...at 3:16 AM.  Very informative overview of his work.

Berggruen, money, and philosophy

The annual "money" issue of the New York Times (yes, they have such an issue) has a piece about the billionaire Nicholas Berggruen and his interest in philosophy.    Among the skeptics, I'm quoted, as is Ned Hall from Harvard.  (More context here.)   My suggestion was that rather than handing out million dollar checks, he could have more impact by endowing philosophy positions in different universities, but that didn't make it in.  Of course, my real view is that his wealth should be seized to meet human needs, but I figured that definitely wasn't going to make it into the "money" issue of the NYT!  (The author of this article, by the way, is author of a very funny piece on why sauvignon blanc is awful, which is why I agreed to talk to him!)

The culture and cities of octopuses

Philosopher Kristin Andrews (York/Toronto) discusses.

Adorno et al. on "The Authoritarian Personality"

An informative piece from the CBC.

2022 Lebowitz Prize from APA awarded to Cristina LaFont (Northwestern) and Alexander Guerrero (Rutgers)...

...for a project on democracy.

In Memoriam: William E. Mann (1940-2022)

Professor Mann, who was well-known for his work in philosophy of religion and medieval philosophy, taught at the University of Vermont from 1974 until his retirement in 2010.  He also served as Chair of the department for a total of 14 years, and was responsible in the 1980s for a brilliant streak of hiring that made Vermont one of the top B.A. programs in the country--this included Derk Pereboom (now at Cornell), David Christensen (now at Brown), Don Loeb (Vermont), Hilary Kornblith (now at U Mass/Amherst), and Charles Guignon (who moved to the University of South Florida, and is now deceased).

There is an obituary here.

(Thanks to Don Loeb for the pointer.)

On Wittgenstein's early private notebooks

Philosopher Kieran Setiya (MIT) comments; an excerpt:

With rare exceptions, analytic philosophy cannot be read as poetry. If it has value, it’s not the value of artistic achievement, unless perhaps in the medium of thought. Nor does analytic philosophy explore “the problem of life.” There’s plenty of work in applied philosophy, including ethics, engaging with practical questions—climate change, democracy, the treatment of non-human animals. But these are not the sorts of problems Wittgenstein fought. For the most part, analytic philosophy is detached, at least in its self-image, from the personal struggles of philosophers.

Not just philosophy, but philosophers: that is what these notebooks help us to see. A philosophy of philosophers, even—shown, if not said.

Philosopher George Sher (Rice) talks about the morality of "nasty thoughts"...

...at The Dissenter.

In Memoriam: Graham Nerlich (1929-2022)

Professor Nerlich--well-known for his work in metaphysics and the philosophy of science and physics--spent most of his career in Australia, first at the University of Sydney and then for many years at the University of Adelaide.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

(Thanks to Yi-Cheng Lin for the information.)

 

Richard Rorty, a.k.a., "Thersites Minor"

The story of his pseudonymous article mocking literary theory.  (The article itself is available via JSTOR.)

Scanlon talks to Yascha Mounk about "What We Owe to Each Other"

Here.  An excerpt:

Scanlon:  I think that the largest number of people really do care about the aspect of morality that I'm talking about: that is, the ability to justify their actions to others. And I think this is illustrated by my analysis of our contemporary politics. There was a symposium on my book at the American Philosophical Association. One of the commentators was David Gauthier, a philosopher who wrote a book that was similar, but defended a much more right-wing, libertarian view. He's a friend, and he loves exaggerating. When he started, he said, “Everything in this book is mistaken. Even the title is false; we don't owe anybody anything.” That might seem to be an expression of the view that you mentioned [i.e., egoism].