Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Bad journal practices: the case of rejection without reasons after R&R

A philosopher elsewhere shared this appalling story:

[A] paper I submitted on an r+r, for which I met every suggestion of the reader, was rejected because that same reader said "Reject" and gave no reason. The editors say that they cannot request the reader's reasons or go any further even though they liked the piece. It's just not supposed to work that way, is it?---we need to read the reasons in order to learn to improve; and in the absence of willingness to give reasons one worries about biases.

The journal editors here are incompetent:  they are responsible for final decisions, and they can of course demand reasons from referees, and should have done so.   I hope this is not a common occurrence, but I don't have the sense that it is.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy temporarily offline at Stanford site

Edward Zalta, the editor of SEP, shared the following:

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is currently offline due to a power outage on campus at Stanford University. We expect to be back online shortly after power is restored.

Meanwhile, you are encouraged to make use of the SEP’s Amsterdam mirror site at: https://seop.illc.uva.nl and the Sydney mirror site at https://stanford.library.sydney.edu.au/, though the search engine at the Sydney mirror is currently offline due to a pending system upgrade.

Wolff on Geuss

Here and here.   Professor Wolff is generous as always.

Remembrances of Joseph Raz

A website at Oxford collects them.  (The original memorial notice here also includes some recollections.)

Philosophy's declining significance on the French Baccalaureate exams

Here; an excerpt:

Under a reform introduced by President Macron’s government, the philosophy paper counts for between 4 and 8 per cent of the overall Baccalauréat mark, compared with up to 18 per cent until 2020.

Marie Perret, chairwoman of the Association of Philosophy Teachers, said the discipline had been reduced to a “derisory” place in the French school curriculum.

“It’s been totally marginalised,” she said.

Two philosophers elected to the American Philosophical Society

They are:   Anita Allen (Penn)  and Peter Godfrey-Smith (Sydney).

Richard Marshall interviews Cristina Lafont (Northwestern)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Katherine Hawley memorial conference at St Andrews, July 7

Details here.

Philosophy at Roehampton under threat

You can sign a petition in support of the program, and find other informamtion, here; an excerpt:

Managers at the University of Roehampton are threatening to close the BA Philosophy programme and the MA in Practical Philosophy, and reduce the number of philosophy staff from five to three. These plans are part of proposed redundancies and programme closures across the university.

Among the well-known philosophy faculty at Roehampton is Mark Sinclair, author of the very good Bergson volume in my Routledge Philosophers series.

A memorial conference in honor of Amelie Oksenberg Rorty at Tufts University...

...this September!  (Professor Rorty was a visiting professor at Tufts for a number of years.)

Sentience isn't conversation

Here's one takedown of the latest artificial intelligence fantasy, and a more succinct one from Ned Block (NYU) on Twitter:

Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) talks about what feminist theory should be...

...at Radical Philosophy.  I thought this bit was particularly interesting:

[I]n a review of my book in The Raven, Sally Haslanger accused me of lacking a social theory – that is, a theory of how a society works and how it changes, especially in progressive ways. Indeed, she declares that, whatever it is that I am doing in the book, I am ‘not doing theory’....I think her reading of my book reveals a fundamentally limited understanding of what feminist theory is and can do, one that is too much in the grip of the analytic worldview and too detached from the actual history of feminist praxis. By ‘feminist theory’ Haslanger seems to have in a mind an overt and systematic account of how society works under conditions of patriarchal domination. It is true that I offer no such account in The Right to Sex – as Haslanger notes, that is not the point of the book, nor (this is not noted by Haslanger) the point of many canonical works of what is generally taken to be feminist theory. But anyone coming from the broad tradition of Marxist and socialist feminism would recognise the social theory that underpins my work. It is this theoretical tradition and orientation that explains my focus on biological and social reproduction as central to women’s oppression; my insistence on the primacy of class as an analytic category for feminism; my specifically anti-capitalist critique of carceral feminism; my understanding of the heteronormative nuclear family as a central mechanism of capitalist production; my interest in forms of radical coalition across axes of identity; my conviction that poor women, especially poor women of colour, are agents of historical change; my anxiety about state power and bourgeois moralism; my embrace of certain psychoanalytic framings of sexual domination; and, above all, my insistence on a utopian spirit that Haslanger disparages as ‘wishful thinking’. (For what it is worth, I find the dismissal as ‘wishful’ of demands – like socialised childcare and on-demand abortion – that feminists of the 1970s thought would be quickly met, nothing less than a capitulation to a neoliberal common-sense that opposes itself in every way to women’s liberation....)

Analytic/Continental divide in the journals: a comment on Schwitzgebel's latest study

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) has posted another of his interesting empirical studies, this time of references to major "Continental" figures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida in four leading Anglophone journals:  Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Mind, and Nous.   This chart is a useful representation of what he found:

See Schwitzbgebel's post for similar charts about Heidegger and other Continental figures.  A few thoughts below the fold.

In Memoriam: Arthur Bierman (1923-2022)

Professor Bierman started the philosophy department at San Francisco State, and was especially well-known for several widely used anthologies and textbooks.   Perhaps he is most interesting to those too young to remember him because of his colorful and energetic life!

(Thanks to Christopher Morris for the pointer.)

Richard Marshall interviews Justin Tiwald (San Francisco State, moving to Hong Kong)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Another two-week freebie in the Cambridge Elements series: "Mathematics and Metaphilosophy"...

...by Justin Clarke-Doane (Columbia).

APA announces Spring prizes...

...here.

A debate over nothing

A popular piece on the Heidegger/Carnap debate.

The philosophy of Derek Parfit

A nice overview by Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami).

Richard Marshall interviews Michael Rosen (Harvard)...

...at 3:16 AM.

A memorial website in honor of Hugh Mellor...

...here, created by his former student Tim Crane (CEU).

Free will and punishment

Philosophers Dana Nelkin (UC San Diego) and Derk Pereboom (Cornell) discuss.

Training graduate students to actually teach philosophy

Georgia State actually does so in its MA program (the article is on page 4 of the linked newsletter).

"Thought: A Journal of Philosophy" will go open access with a new publisher

Crispin Wright (NYU/Stirling), one of the editors of Thought, asked me to share the following announcement:

The Editors of Thought, hitherto a subscription journal published by John Wiley, Inc., are pleased to announce that new publication arrangements for the journal have at last been agreed. From volume 11 onwards Thought will be published online only on an open access basis by the Philosophy Documentation Center (https://www.pdcnet.org/wp/)

              As before, each annual volume will comprise four quarterly issues, each of a target length of 8 papers, and will retain an emphasis on short (c.4000) word contributions on any of the following areas of analytic philosophy: philosophy of maths, philosophy of logic, logic (where there is clear and explicit philosophical relevance), philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and value theory.  The submissions and refereeing systems will be unchanged.

              The Editors would like to express their gratitude for the patience shown by those authors the processing of whose submissions has been delayed in the negotiations that have preceded the conclusion of our new publishing arrangements. We now hope to move forward speedily.  Accepted papers submitted under the previous arrangements will be published without any charge.

              At this time, we ask that authors respect a moratorium on new submissions until we have cleared the present backlog. A further announcement will be made when we are ready to receive new submissions— prospectively, towards the end of the summer.

Crispin Wright, for the Editors of Thought.

Richard Marshall interviews Paul Livingston (New Mexico)...

...at 3:16 AM.

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.