Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Oxford's Les Green interviewed...

..at 3:16 AM (Richard Marshall's new site for interviews with philosophers).

The full Holly Lawford-Smith interview is now up...

...at Richard Marshall's new website, which will soon include the archive of his past interviews as well.

ADDENDUM:  Richard confirm that he will continue his interview series, posting them at the new site, which is wonderful news! He has several interviews in process.

In Memoriam: Mary Warnock (1924-2019)

MOVING TO FRONT:  UPDATED

A moral philosopher, she was especially notable for her influential work on concrete policy questions in the UK over many years.   The Guardian obituary is here.

(Thanks to the many readers who sent notice of Professor Warnock's passing--I've been on the road, and haven't been able to respond individually.)

UPDATE:  Here is the actual obituary (by Jane O'Grady); the preceding, while interesting, was a news story.  (Thanks to Robert White from The Guardian for the pointer.)

Justin Weinberg does it again

Many readers have been writing me about Weinberg's coverage of the 3AM fiasco--in which Richard Marshall's interview with Holly Lawford-Smith was withdrawn because it offended those who "think correctly"--which may have set a new low for the ridiculous contortions required by the New Infantilism that he has long championed.  I'll let a couple of my correspondents do the commentary, although they have asked for anonymity for the obvious reason that Weinberg's standard modus operandi is to feign a commitment to civility while letting the anonymous commenters at his blog dish out the insults, abuse, and lies about the disfavored.

Weinberg titled his post "Richard Marshall resigns from 3AM Magazine," which manages to omit all the significant facts about what happened from the headline.   One reader amusingly suggested some other possible headlines in the spirit of Weinberg Whitewash:

"John F Kennedy Dies Suddenly"

"Sudetenland Now Part of Germany"

"Berlin Wall Disappears"

Of course, Weinberg can't wholly avoid acknowledging what transpired in the body of his post, but he quickly shifts gears to pandering to the thought police and their alleged special "knowledge."  (Philosopher Kathleen Stock [Sussex] tweeted aptly about this display, as did Daniel Kaufman [Missouri State].)  But a philosopher elsewhere who wrote to me put it best:

Thanks for your coverage of the 3AM nightmare. Watching Justin Weinberg turn that into another occasion to lecture us about the need for interpretive charity (!! -- and "moral resisters", FML) was enough to make me want to put a fork into my eye.

Despairing philosophers:  put down your forks, and remember that the most salient perspectives are often not the most sensible or typical.

UPDATE:  Another reader (not a philosopher, but a writer and journalist) writes with more amusing thoughts about the Weinberg Whitewash:

Minority cultural rights in liberal democraties

Philosopher Paul Patton (New South Wales) comments.

In appreciation of Richard Marshall's interviews at 3AM Magazine

A propos this, longtime reader and attorney John Bogart (who also has a PhD in philosophy) writes:

The Marshall interviews, whatever they are for folks in academia, are even more valuable to those of us in other contexts.  I am a devoted reader of them.  They are clear, largely jargon-free, short discussions of what a variety of philosophers are up to.  People like me, a lawyer, do not have colleagues down the hall to discuss what is going on in Phil Science, feminist theory, or Kant, or whatever.  The interviews have been a way to see a little of that.  They have been a public service, not just a service to philosophers.

It appears 3AM Magazine owner Andrew Gallix isn't coping too well with the response to his decision to pull the Lawford-Smith interview

Philosopher Jimmy Doyle (Harvard) shared Mr. Gallix's response to Prof. Doyle's e-mail of protest, calling it "rank cowardice" to pull the interview:

UPDATE:   At Richard Marshall's request, I've pulled Mr.  Gallix's intemperate and unfortunate response.  Richard writes that Mr.Gallix is "a good guy actually and is under a lot of pressure from the mob who surround him. I think he panicked and wishes he could walk back!"

Follow-up study about personality and philosophical beliefs

I posted about the initial study five years ago.  Now PhD student Nick Byrd (Florida State) asked me to share that he is conducting a follow-up study about the relationship between personality and reasoning. It should take only 10-20 minutes to complete the survey: https://fsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_2fukMpZiL7kwcLj

Godfrey-Smith on the influence of Australian philosophy...

...at least within the "analytic" tradition after WWII.  In addition to the philosophers Godfrey-Smith mentions (like J.J.C. Smart and David Armstrong), Australia has sent a huge number of undergraduate students for PhD education in the U.S. and England, who then embarked on successful academic careers both abroad and back home (examples, just off the top of my head, would include David Chalmers, Rae Langton, Ken Gemes, John Tasioulas, as well as Peter Godfrey-Smith of course!)

3AM Magazine's radical chic motto--"whatever it is, we're against it"--turns out to be bollocks

Their real motto is "whatever right-thinking zealots in our little corner of the universe agree on, we're for it."  The magazine has withdrawn Richard Marshall's interview with philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith (Melbourne) because in the course of the interview she denied that trans women are women, and expressed the gender critical view of these issues familiar to readers of the blog from the work of philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex).

Richard Marshall has resigned from 3AM Magazine, given this insulting treatment of his work.  He is right to do so, even though this is a huge loss for philosophy.  As he told me, it means the "end of the series" of interviews he has done over many years now, which now numbers nearly 400 interviews with philosophers about their work in accessible terms and freely available on the Internet.

If you value Mr. Marshall's work and freedom of expression and thought, then e-mail the owner and co-editor of 3AM to make that known.  He is Andrew Gallix, reachable here:   andrew@3ammagazine.com

Besides the loss for philosophy, it is also a further indication that, as Professor Lawford-Smith said in her interview, this issue is toxic in the UK.  Transwomen are transwomen.  Transwomen should be treated as women in most contexts.  There may be exceptions.   These sensible thoughts--well-expressed by a transgender philosopher noted here--are now verboten in the UK, it appears.

(And for the maniacs out there (you don't know who you are, but you are maniacs), here's links to evidence of my "transphobia" [sic].)

UPDATE:  Below the fold is the portion of the interview that has attracted the ire of the thought police:

Remembering Anscombe 100 years after her birth

Philosopher John Schwenkler (Florida State) offers a sympathetic overview of her work and public positions.  (Anscombe's Intention is undoubtedly an important work, but it seems to me overstatement to call it "the foundational text in analytic philosophy of action," although it is foundational to a certain tradition within analytic philosophy of action.)

Melbourne's Holly Lawford-Smith interviewed...

...at 3AM.

In Memoriam: A.S. Troelstra (1939-2019)

A distinguished logician, Professor Troelstra spent his career at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam.  Amsterdam's memorial notice is here.

(Thanks to Mark Van Atten for the pointer.)

In Memoriam: Anita Silvers (1940-2019)

A longtime member of the Philosophy Department at San Francisco State University, Professor Silvers was well-known for her work in applied ethics and feminist philosophy, especially as related to issues of disability.  The SFSU memorial notice is here.

(Thanks to Justin Tiwald for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  A lovely memorial tribute from philosopher Teresa Blankmeyer Burke (Galludet).

ANOTHER:  The NYT obituary.

P.F. Strawson at 100

A nice overview of his career and work from philosopher Anil Gomes (Oxford).

On intellectual vices

Quassin Cassam (Warwick) comments.

A combined PhD program for philosophy and psychology

Is this a first?  It certainly makes sense at Yale, which has philosophically-minded psychologists like Paul Bloom and psychologically-minded philosophers like Joshua Knobe and Laurie Paul.

Harvard's Mathias Risse interviewed...

MOVING TO FRONT FROM MARCH 9--UPDATED

...at 3AM.  Alas, they didn't talk about his Nietzsche work, which is also noteworthy!

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE:  Now the interview has been expanded to include some discussion of Risse's Nietzsche work!

Karl Marx makes it to Business Insider

Not bad, although it doesn't get the labor theory of value quite right.

"If trans women are women, what is a woman?"

Interesting essay from last fall by philosopher Sophie Allen (Keele) that only recently came to my attention.

Humanities, including philosophy, in community colleges

Robert Townsend, Director of the Washington Office of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, kindly wrote to share news of a new study from the AAAS:

[W]e have just released a new report on the humanities in community colleges (at http://bit.ly/HESCC2019), with a number of interesting findings about philosophy study in the sector, including:

• Between 255- and 275-thousand community college students took a philosophy course in the fall of 2015.
• Approximately 5,000 faculty taught courses in philosophy.
• Approximately 90% of community colleges offered a course in philosophy.
• Students taking philosophy courses comprised about 4% of total enrollments for credit at community colleges.
• Among students enrolled in philosophy courses at community colleges, 4%–7% were dually enrolled high school students.

You can find this summary with related data tables at https://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatorDoc.aspx?i=31303.

Would someone really buy a self-driving car that would *not* swerve to avoid hitting a human...

...while hitting a cat or dog? 

(Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)

Placement in PhD-granting programs

Given the time of year, this is worth linking to again.  Also this (note esp. the junior numbers).

A timeline of women in philosophy...

...from  OUP.  It contains several pieces of information that were new to me.

New Director of the Marc Sanders Foundation...

...which offers prizes for work in analytic philosophy.  The new Executive Director will be Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (North Carolina), who takes over from Mark Johnston (Princeton).

Another philosophy outreach program to high schools...

...this time at SUNY Geneseo.

(Thanks to David Levy for the pointer.)

On playing games

Philosopher Tom Hurka (Toronto) comments, drawing on a very clever book by Bernard Suits that he first called to my attention years ago.

In Memoriam: Tony Honoré (1921-2019)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 26--UPDATED

Professor Honoré was Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford University from 1971 to 1988, but lived and taught in Oxford for some seventy years, and was still co-teaching with John Gardner until just last year.  Among philosophers he is, of course, best-known for his classic work on Causation in the Law, co-authored with H.L.A. Hart, but his interests ranged very widely.  His passing is, as John Gardner wrote to me this morning, "the end of an era."

I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

UPDATE:  A memorial notice from the Oxford Law faculty, written by Professor Gardner.  And here is a memorial from his boarding school in South Africa.

More female faculty=more female PhDs from that philosophy department

That is what one would expect, and Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) confirms it with data.

10 (alleged) odd obsessions of famous philosophers

I have my doubts about the factual basis for these, but maybe there's something to each of them.  In the case of Nietzsche, he did try different diets, but the fruit consumption was short-lived, not a standing obsession.

Free speech, good and bad

Sean Illing, the philosophically-minded journalist at Vox, kindly interviewed me about this article.  One thing we didn't get to talk about is my view that the academy is, when functioning properly, one of the only places where the Millian background conditions for free speech to be truth-maximizing actually obtains.  (Mr. Illing does a lot of interesting interviews, you can check them all out here.)

"What we owe to rabbits"

Anglophone moral philosophy again at the cutting edge of what matters.  Someone wrote about this, as I recall.  But you don't have to be sympathetic to Marx to wonder whether how we treat rabbits is really an important moral issue of our time, or to wonder why highly renumerated professors at institutions whose purposes include reproduction of the ruling class spend their time writing about this.

Michael Jackson and Martin Heidegger

Les Green (Oxford) comments.  In addition to making some good substantive points and some wickedly funny jokes (at the expense of the Catholic Church and English academic bureaucrats), this is also a really good piece of writing.  Read it!

Vermont's Terence Cuneo interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Most important contributors to metaethics 1945-2000?

An undergraduate writes:

Hello! I'm an undergraduate at [SLAC name omitted] and a long-time reader of your blog. I'm wondering whether you could possibly do a poll on the most important Anglo-American metaethicists after 1945. Your other polls on subjects like this have helped me navigate me various philosophical sub-fields, and I'd be delighted to see who the readership of your blog thinks are the most important figures working in metaethics. 

As I explained to this student, in recent polls various  malicious jerks without actual lives have gone to a great deal of trouble to screw up the results with strategic or just irrational voting, so polling is currently on hold.   However, I did indicate I'd open this for comments from readers; signed comments only (full name, valid e-mail address).

I think it's fairly easy to name the major figures, say, 1945-2000:  Charles Stevenson, R.M. Hare, J.L. Mackie, Gilbert Harman, Richard Boyd, Allan Gibbard, Simon Blackburn, Peter Railton, John McDowell; maybe also David Wiggins, Nicholas Sturgeon, David Brink, among others.   Since 2000, others would be added (e.g., Derek Parfit, T.M. Scanlon, Sharon Street, David Enoch), but let's focus on 1945-2000 in the comments:  you can either add to the list, above, or express a view about the relative importance/influence of the philosophers mentioned above.

UPDATE:  Two signifciant omissions brought to my attention:  Michael Smith's The Moral Problem (1995) and Christine Korsgaard's Sources of Normativity (1996).  Just ot be clear, by metaethics, I mean contributions to questions about the metaphysics, epistemology, and semantics of value and value judgments.

New Books in February

Authors and/or publishers kindly sent me these new books this month:

Must Politics Be War?  Restoring Our Trust in the Open Society by Kevin Vallier (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Blockheads!  Essays on Ned Block's Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness edited by Adam Pautz & Daniel Stoljar (MIT Press, 2019).

Wittgenstein's Family Letters:  Corresponding with Ludwig trans. by Peter Winslow, edited by Brian McGuinness (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

Why Nationalism? by Yael Tamir (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Dimensions of Normativity:  New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence edited by David Plunkett, Scott J. Shapiro & Kevin Toh (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Moral Puzzles and Legal Perplexities:  Essays on the Influence of Larry Alexander edited by Heidi M. Hurd (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Is Whistleblowing a Duty? by Emanuela Ceva & Michele Bocchiola (Polity, 2019)

Perceptual Learning:  The Flexibility of the Senses by Kevin Connolly (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Why Free Will is Real by Christian List (Harvard University Press, 2019).

Freud and Philosophy of Mind, volume 1:  Reconstructing the Argument for Unconscious Mental States by Jerome C. Wakefield (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

The Scientific Attitude:  Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience by Lee McIntyre (MIT Press, 2019).

The Right to Do Wrong:  Morality and the Limits of Law by Mark Osiel (Harvard University Press, 2019).

How to Think Like a Roman Emperor:  The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius by Donald Robertson (St. Martin's Press, 2019).

 

"Joint know-how": humans do it, other primates don't

Philosopher Jonathan Birch (LSE) comments.

Pettit on Brexit...

...at The New Statesman's philosophy series.

Q&A with investor (and Johns Hopkins philosophy supporter) Bill Miller...

...about how his philosophy training affected his approach to the stock market.

In Memoriam: Pamela M. Huby (1922-2019)

A scholar of Greek philosophy, she taught for many decades at the University of Liverpool.  Her son, Bart Huby, writes:  "She published papers and books over a more than 60 year period from 1957 to 2018, still working into her early nineties.  In particular in recent years she collaborated with Professor Sir Richard Sorabji of Oxford University on translations of commentators of Aristotle, and with Professor Dimitri Gutas of Yale University and Professor William Fortenbaugh of Rutgers University, and the late Professor Bob Sharples of UCL London on a major project over several decades recording the works and commentaries of Theophrastus of Eresos, a Greek philosopher of the Peripatetic school, and immediate successor of Aristotle in leadership of the Lyceum in Athens."  Funeral information is here.

Karl Marx in Teen Vogue

Really.  This is from last year, but still remarkable.

(Thanks to Matt Lister for the pointer.)

Yale-NUS's Robin Zheng interviewed...

...at 3AM.  Shockingly, after gathering "more information", she found the reasons for the harassment of Rebecca Tuvel "much more urgent and compelling."  

UPDATE:  A young philosopher writes:

Zheng 'confesses' that she didn't completely grasp the force of the arguments being made in the open letter. I confess to finding those arguments manifestly absurd, as do many others. But, she tells us, she had faith that a large group of academics working in a highly moralized and politicized area of study would not collectively and publicly display their anger about something like this without good reason. As a result of this faith, she was open to hearing about several other views, which apprised her of some basic facts she hadn't known. She was grateful to others for letting her know of these views and facts. In light of these views, she found the arguments in the open letter much more compelling.

On being 97

A video about philosopher Herbert Fingarette, who died last year.  For anyone who has had the experience, as I have, of caring for a very elderly parent or relative, it is especially illuminating and moving.

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

What is it like to be a philosopher? Alastair Norcross edition

Here, courtesy of Clifford Sosis as always.

Philosophical papers on Bell's Theorem available at BJPS...

...to mark the 55th anniversary.

Einstein read and was influenced by Hume

How about that?

(Thanks to Peter Kail for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Matias Slavov, a visiting scholar in philosophy at UCLA, writes:

Thank you for providing the link to the Daily Telegraph, which features Hume’s impact on Einstein’s special relativity. As a regular reader of your blog, I got the news from you. But I wish to point out that the Telegraph article gives a fallacious picture of the Hume-Einstein connection. It is well-known and has been subject of scholarship for a long time. Victor F. Lenzen, for example, examined this relation already in his 1949 paper in the volume of Library of Living Philosophers that was dedicated to Einstein. More recently, John Stachel (2002) and John D. Norton (2010) have perused this relation: Stachel’s argument is that Einstein got a relationist ontology of space and time from Hume, whereas Norton argues that Einstein learned an empiricist theory of concepts which he then implemented in his argument for the relativity of simultaneity. When I (2016) wrote my article that essentially intertwines the relationist and empiricist arguments, I remember having difficulties of coming up with a novel interpretation because the Hume-Einstein connection had already been treated so many times.

The English translation of the correspondence with Schlick in which Einstein acknowledges his debt to Hume (and Mach) is in (1998) The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 8: The Berlin Years: Correspondence, 1914-1918. Ed. Robert Schulmann et. al. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Another Templeton windfall: $1.3 million for philosophy of religion to Houston's Luis Oliveira

News release here.

(Thanks to David Phillips for the pointer.)

There is no sexual morality

Philosopher Alan Goldman (William & Mary) comments.

Enoch on Case on arguing from epistemic realism to moral realism

Nice discussion here.  Of course, I'm inclined to think these same considerations just confirm epistemic anti-realism (vide Chapter 4 here.)

"Marx and Marxism" and relativism

A new essay, co-authored with an excellent PhD student here, Lawrence ("Dusty") Dallman (he is the lead author), which will eventually appear in The Routledge Handbook of Relativism, that the great Martin Kusch (Vienna) is putting together.