Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Would you take an immortality pill?

John Martin Fischer (UC Riverside) discusses the question at Brain in a Vat.

Honoraria for Zoom talks?

Philosopher Peter Vallentyne (Missouri) writes:

In 2014, you had some useful discussion of the role of honoraria for philosophy talks. I’m now wondering about whether people think that honoraria (e.g., $100-$300) should be paid for non-recorded virtual (e.g., Zoom) philosophy talks to other, roughly peer, philosophy departments. On the one hand, there are no travel-time burdens (the hassles of getting from A to B, downtime in the host city, etc.). Of course, valuable informal discussion with members of the host department may be lost, but there will also (at least sometimes) be a gain of avoiding non-valuable informal discussion.  Overall, it seems to me that the burdens of giving a virtual talk are generally significantly lower than those for a live talk. A small honorarium would still be appropriate, but, given the hassles of filling out the forms to provide an honorarium, it may not be worth it. I’m interested in readers thoughts on this issue. I focus on non-recorded talks, since there are separate issues for recorded talks.

My own view is that honoraria for Zoom talks are not warranted, but comments are open!

In Memoriam: Donald W. Crawford (1938-2022)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 25--UPDATED

A longtime member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was emeritus, and before that at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Professor Crawford was well-known for his work in aesthetics and the history of aesthetics.  He also served as editor of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.  I will add links to memorial notices when they appear.

(Thanks to Noel Carroll for the information.)

Professor Crawford's former colleague Elliott Sober (Wisconsin) and former PhD student Yuriko Saito (Emerita, Rhode Island School of Design) kindly shared this memorial notice they prepared (below the fold):

Have things really changed in philosophy since the 1990s when it comes to publication pressure and narrowness of specialization?

On the earlier thread, philosopher Gary Kemp (Glasgow) asks:

When I was coming up in the 1990s, the complaints were: Pressure/requirements to publish, and overspecialisation. I take it that the readers here think this has grown worse. What sort of evidence do we have?

This is a good question, and I'll open it for discussion.  I also "came up" in the 1990s, and it does seem to me that publication prior to entering the job market is almost de rigeur in a way it was not thirty years ago.  Specialization is more difficult to assess.  Specialization is the hallmark of the modern academy, as Weber observed more than a century ago, and it stands to reason that as more and more universities produce more and more scholars, the need to specialize even further (in order to make the proverbial "contribution to knowledge") will grow.  But that isn't exactly "evidence" for the phenomenon, just a reason for thinking it would occur.  Readers comments welcome.  Submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.

Mind, body, and illness

Philosopher Tom Stern (UCL) comments.  (Some readers will recall I am not a fan of his Nietzsche work, but I quite enjoyed this essay.)

In Memoriam: Paul Humphreys (1950-2022)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SATURDAY, AUGUST 13--UPDATED

Well-known for his wide-ranging work in philosophy of science, Professor Humphreys taught philosophy at the University of Virginia from 1978 until his death, where he rose to the rank of Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy.  There is a full list of his publications here, and an obituary is here.  I will add links to other memorial notices as they appear.

UPDATE:  The UVA memorial notice is here.

(Thanks to Harold Langsam for the pointer.)

Richard Marshall interviews Matthew D. Walker (Yale-NUS)...

...at 3:16 AM.

In Memoriam: Paul Snowdon (1946-2022)

Well-known for his work on the metaphysics of persons and the nature of perception, among other topics, Professor Snowdon was at the time of his death Emeritus Grote Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London.  Prior to moving to UCL in 2001, he taught for several decades at Oxford University.  There is a brief Oxford notice here.  I will add links to memorial notices when they appear.  Remembrances from those who knew Professor Snowdon are welcome in the comments.

(Thanks to Chris Timpson for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  The UCL memorial notice is here.

The "Elucidations" philosophy podcast is now posting transcripts of prior episodes

Here, including episodes with Agnes Callard, R.A. Briggs, Steven Nadler, Chike Jeffers, Nethanel Lipshitz, and others.

Philosophers Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse (both Vanderbilt) make it into the Edsall column at the NYT on "belief polarization"

Here.  The usual sources for Edsall are social scientists and sometimes law professors.

Korsgaard's Dewey Lecture

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--A COUPLE OF COMMENTS WERE CAUGHT IN THE SPAM FILTER, THEY HAVE NOW APPEARED

The text is here, and there is much that is interesting.  I excerpt some of her remarks about pressure to publish and the pernicious effects of peer review:

Young people are expected to produce an absurdly large number of papers, preferably published in refereed journals, in order to get tenure, or even in order to get jobs.  Some people even try to publish papers in order to get into graduate school.  The papers are supposed to be blind reviewed, and these days many referees for journals require that papers should respond to the extant literature on the topic, whether responding to the extant literature enhances the author’s argument in some way or not. Because the sheer mass of the literature is growing exponentially, people draw the boundaries of their specializations more and more narrowly, both in terms of subject matter and in terms of time.  The extant literature necessarily becomes the recent literature, which is a philosophically arbitrary category.  Big, systematic philosophy of the sort we find in Kant and Aristotle, philosophy that is responsible to the ways in which one’s views in one area fit in with one’s views about everything else, has become nearly impossible, because someone trying to do that kind of work would supposedly have to know the literature in too many areas…

In Memoriam: Geoffrey Brennan (1944-2022)

MOVING TO FRONT, ORIGINALLY POSTED JULY 29--UPDATED

A trained economist, Professor Brennan wrote widely in moral and political philosophy, and on practical and theoretical issues that arise at the intersection of politics, philosophy, and economics. He was, most recently, a member of the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University, and taught philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and political science at Duke University.  Earlier in his career, he taught at Virginia Tech with James Buchanan, and contributed to the development of public choice theory.  There is information about his career and work here.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

UPDATE:  A memorial notice from Duke's Political Science Department.

ANOTHER:  A colleague at the ANU has set up a memorial site, which also permits readers to share memories. (Thanks to Barry Maguire for the pointer.)

ONE MORE:   A brief memorial notice from the Phiosophy Department at UNC-Chapel Hill, which includes funeral information (which will be viewable online).

In Memoriam: John M. Cooper (1939-2022)

A longtime member of the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University, where he was emeritus, Professor Cooper was one of the leading scholars of ancient Greek philosophy of his generation.  Prior to joining Princeton in 1981, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard University.  I will add links to memorial notices when they appear.  I have opened comments here for remembrances from those who knew Professor Cooper.

UPDATE:  A memorial announcement from the Princeton department here.

Lauener Prizes in Analytical Philosophy

Two prizes:  for an outstanding ouevre in analytical philosophy, the winner is Susan Wolf (emerita, North Carolina); and for an up-and-coming philosopher, Matthieu Queloz (currently Oxford).

Past winners of the ouevre prize include Bas van Fraassen, Ruth Barcan Marcus, T.M. Scanlon, Hilary Putnam, Michael Dummett, Fred Dretske, Dagfinn Follesdal, and Patrick Suppes.

(Thanks to Paul Russell for the pointer.)

Two conferences in fall 2023 in honor of Joseph Raz

One at Columbia, one at King's College, London. 

In Memoriam: Terence Parsons (1939-2022)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 30

Well-known for his work in philosophy of language and metaphysics, Professor Parsons was emeritus at UCLA, where he spent the last twelve years of his career.  He taught before that at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of California at Irvine.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

(Thanks to Dom Lopes for the information.)

UPDATE:  Ed Zalta (Stanford) kindly shared this remembrance:

I was extremely saddened to hear that Terry Parsons passed away. Though I hadn't been in regular contact with Terry for some time, he had a significant impact on my philosophical development.  I took three classes from him while I was a graduate student at U. Massachusetts/Amherst (1976-1980): one on Frege, a graduate seminar on Tense and Aspect (co-taught with Barbara Partee), and a graduate seminar in which we read through the manuscript of his then forthcoming book Nonexistent Objects.  His classes were always insightful and helped me to get a sense of what was really going on in the texts we were studying. But it was his seminar on nonexistent objects that changed my thinking in radical ways.  I learned how to do axiomatic metaphysics in that class and though I started to work on an alternative to his theory of nonexistents, Terry agreed to supervise my thesis when I approached him about a dissertation.

Herbert Marcuse interviewed by Bryan Magee in 1978

Via Robert Paul Wolff's blog, I came across this interesting interview with Marcuse not long before his death.  His criticisms of the "New Left" are particularly striking (and apt).

A new Condorcet poll: journals that publish the best articles in moral and/or political philosophy

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--THIS POLL WILL RUN FOR ABOUT ANOTHER 24 HOURS

The new poll is here.  I've made a few changes from last week:  I've added some more journals in political theory and/or the Continental European traditions of moral/political philosophy. I've also dropped the area-specific applied ethics journals (e.g. in bioethics, business ethics), since they have always fared poorly against the more generalist journals in value theory, including those generalist journals that publish on applied topics. I'll let this run until Wednesday, and we'll see what the results look like.

Note that you can choose "no opinion" for journals you don't know anything about.  And note also that for your vote to have an impact you need to rank many journals:  just ranking your favorite journal #1 won't do much!

A "Long Covid" saga

Philosopher Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) has been living with long Covid since early 2021, and has kept a detailed and evocative account of the ordeal on his blog (the most recent installment is here, which includes links to all the earlier posts).  For those who have not had any experience with long Covid, this is extremely eye-opening, not to mention sobering.

A free online introduction to utilitarian moral theory...

...courtesy of a leading young utilitarian moral philosopher Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami).  Strong endorsements for this resource, as well, from leading philosophers!

Richard Marshall interviews Charles Travis (Porto)...

...at 3:16 AM.  An interesting bit:

One reason I don’t see Frege as a philosopher of language is that he explicitly says that is not his topic. It seems to me that for a long time now (probably since the Vienna Circle, but I suspect much longer than that) philosophers have tended to see too much in common between language and logic, as if language (if properly done) would just be a sort of less topic-neutral language. This, I think, is responsible for huge misperceptions as to the shape of philosophical problems.

A new pairwise comparison poll: specialist journals that publish the best articles in moral and/or political philosophy...

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--SEE UPDATE

...both theoretical and applied.  Note that you can choose "I can't decide," and then are given several choices, such as "don't know enough about either" or "think they're both the same" etc.

ADDENDUM:  As some readers have poitned out, some journal names are rather similar.  For example, Social Philosophy & Policy versus Social Theory & Practice.  And Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy versus Journal of Ethics verus Journal of Social Philosophy.

UPDATE:  I've closed this poll, since there was some indication on social media of folks rallying votes.  The top six were pretty consistent with last time (Ethics, PPA, J. of Political Phil, J. of Moral Phil., J. of Ethics & Social Philosophy, Utilitas), but after that I'm less sure the results weren't affected.  Pairwise comparison is more vulnerable to strategic voting than Condorcet, alas, although in the past Condorcet also had problems. I'll try running a Condorcet version of this poll next week, and see how that comes out.  Thanks to those who voted, and stay tuned for another stab at this next week.

Why try to rank journals, even in this unsystematic way?

A senior philosopher with tenure expressed puzzlement (on Twitter, of course) about these rankings.  A junior philosopher responded:

For those of us whose professional futures depend on the snap judgments of people reading 100s of CVs, it is really important to have a rough idea of where people tend to rank different journals.

Amusingly, this senior philosopher was unaware that rankings are very common in many other disciplines, including economics, chemistry, political science, physics, etc.  Indeed, others have used the h-index to rank philosophy journals in the past.

Best "general" philosophy journals, 2022

So with not quite 1,000 participants, and nearly 90,000 votes on comparisons cast, here are the top 25 (the score in parentheses reflects the odds of the journal prevailing in a comparison):

1.  Philosophical Review (89)

2.  Nous (87)

3.  Philosophy & Phenomenological Research (86)

4.  Mind (85)

5.  Journal of Philosophy (84)

6.  Australasian Journal of Philosophy (75)

7.  Philosophical Studies (74)

8.  Philosopher's Imprint (73)

9.  Philosophical Quarterly (69)

10. Analysis (65)

11. Synthese (62)

12. Canadian Journal of Philosophy (54)

12. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (54)

14. Ergo (51)

14. Erkenntnis (51)

16. European Journal of Philosophy (49)

16. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (49)

18. American Philosophical Quarterly (48)

19. Journal of the American Philosophical Association (46)

20. Inquiry (40)

21. Philosophical Perspectives (39)

22. The Monist (37)

23. Thought (36)

24. Philosophical Issues (33)

25. Philosophical Topics (30)

25. Ratio (30)

One error of omission was Analytic Philosophy, which might well have made the top 25 (as it did in 2018).  You can see the 2018 results here.  Online surveys probably have a slight bias in favor of online journals, like Philosopher's Imprint and, more recently, Ergo, although the former has been clearly among the top ten for quite some time now, and justfiably so it seems to me. Constructive comments/observations about the results are welcome.

 

Narratives that engage the emotions, not arguments, are more effective at producing charitable behavior

Interesting study, confirming what all Humeans and Nietzscheans already suspected.  As Nietzsche quips (in Twilight of the Idols), "Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect."

UPDATE:  More thoughts, on Twitter, from philosopher Matt Lindauer (Brooklyn Coll/CUNY).  (Link now fixed.)

A new survey on the best "general" philosophy journals

The last survey was in 2018.  This new survey uses the pairwise comparison method.  "General" here means journals that publish in several different areas (if not all of these):  e.g., value theory, metaphysics & epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of logic, history of philosophy.  If this works, I'll run some more pairwise comparison surveys about journals in particular areas of specialization.

Philosophical writing with a "moral" or "political point" is now almost exclusively written for academics...

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 20--SOME INTERESTING COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME

...but that was not always so.  Mill, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Marx, Aristotle et al. were not writing for other academics (in some cases, the category "other academics" did not exist).  How has this changed philosophy with a moral or political point (including moral and political philosophy), for better or for worse?

Five philosophers elected to British Academy

They are:   Richard Bradley (LSE) and Quassim Cassam (Warwick), as Fellows; and Pauline Kleingeld (Groningen), Deborah Mayo (Virginia Tech), and Wlodek Rabinowicz (Lund), as Corresponding Fellows.

On growing up in communist Albania, and the aftermath

Lea Ypi (LSE) is interviewed about her recent book.

Robert Cummins, the philosopher of mind and psychology, has made his articles available for free...

...at his website (scroll down).  It includes such gems as his amusing critique of reflective equilibrium as a method.

Pebbles can make landslides

Nice reflections from Robert Paul Wolff on his life and activism.

"In Defense of Linguistic Luddism"

Gorin v. Manne.  Rather amusing.  (On Twitter, Oliver Traldi [Notre Dame] has coined the term "Mannesplaining" for Professor Manne's style of scolding/instructing.)

Travels abroad, and some observations about philosophy

In June, I traveled overseas for the first time since 2019 (and I managed not to get Covid!).  London, Dublin, Amsterdam, and Bucharest were my airport destinations; Oxford University, University College Dublin, University of Amsterdam, and Dimitri Cantemir Christian University my academic hosts.  The events were ISNS in Oxford; a mini-conference on Nietzsche at UCD (papers by me, Tsarina Doyle [NUI-Galway] and Brian O'Connor [UCD]), and then an afternoon workshop on draft chapters of my co-authored Marx book; an anti-moralist conference on capitalism in the 21st-century in Amsterdam; and the IVR (international legal philosophy event) in Bucharest.

I'll start with travel stuff, which may be of some practical value to readers, and then move to intellectual substance.

Nagel on Wittgenstein's "Private Notebooks, 1914-1916"...

..in The New Statesman.

(Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)

GPT-3 or Daniel Dennett?

Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) and colleagues are conducting an experiment.

PhD application advice?

A prospective graduaute student writes:

As an undergraduate student who is preparing to apply for graduate programmes in the UK and US, I thank you for founding the PGR, which has been a very helpful resource in the application process. Thanks as well for your blog, which often provides professionally and philosophically interesting materials.

Here is a question I venture to put to you (and your readers, if you think appropriate): is there any application advice (especially concerning writing samples and personal statements) which most applicants would benefit from, or which many applicants get wrong? Professor Guerrero at Rutgers gave his advice here: https://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/1011404/28477892/1635443782310/Tips+for+applying+to+PhD+Programs+in+Philosophy2.pdf

I don’t know if you or your readers have seen this, and if so, what your opinions are.

Overall, I think Professor Guerrero's advice is good, but one needn't follow it precisely to succeed in applications at highly competitive programs.  On writing samples, I think the best bet is to use a piece of writing that got a very good grade in a course, and that you can then polish a bit more.  It is also fine to submit a paper offering exegesis of an important historical figure, especially if history is a primary interest.  (Rutgers is a fairly ahistorical department, so that is no doubt why Professor Guerrero doesn't say much about that.)

Comments are open for thoughts from readers.  Differences in UK programs might be particularly worth discussing, since Guerrero's advice works pretty well for most leading American programs.

APA to experiment with one virtual meeting (and two in-person meetings) each of the next three years

Announcement here.

An update on philosophy at Potsdam: some reasonably good news!

The full update is here (earlier coverage); an excerpt:

Before she left the college the Dean formally recommended that the philosophy program “be removed from provisional status once curricular work outlined in the alignment plan and a merger has been accomplished.” The curricular revisions referred to are the creation of a Philosophy of Justice course to support the Criminal Justice program (once a regular offering, it has not been offered since the retirement of Dr. Tartaglia), and the creation of an Animal Minds course.

She also recommended that we be merged with the Interdisciplinary Studies department and that Dr. Murphy [a philosopher] serve as chair of the merged department (whose chair recently resigned). In her letter to the Provost and Dr. Murphy she recommends that “Details of this merger—including but not limited to the renaming of a shared department, bylaws, and allocation of service obligations—would need to be worked out between stakeholders from both departments and should be completed by October 15th, 2022.” These recommendations were accepted by the Provost.

In Memoriam: Richard J. Bernstein (1932-2022)

A longtime member of the faculty at the New School for Social Research in New York City, Professor Bernstein taught for more than two decades before that at Haverford College, and before that at Yale University, where his denial of tenure in the 1960s was controversial.  Bernstein was best-known for synoptic works exploring connections between themes in American pragmatism and sometimes analytic philosophy, and various currents in 20th-century Continental philosophy such as hermeneutics and critical theory.  The Wikipedia entry is, surprisingly, fairly informative.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

"We learn about a face by drawing it. What can that tell us about how we learn the truth by thinking?"

Philosophy graduate student Michael Thorne (UCL) discusses at The Raven.

"The Folk Theory of Well-Being"

Here's the penultimate version of a paper forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, co-authored with two law colleagues (John Bronsteen at Loyola/Chicago and Jonathan Masur at UChicago) and one other philosopher in a law school (Kevin Tobia at Georgetown).  The project began years ago when I was arguing with John and Jonathan about the plausibility of hedonism as a theory of well-being.

Nietzsche on conscience

Philosopher Christopher Janaway (Southampton) comments.

Inflation and graduate student stipends

A soon-to-be PhD student writes:

I am an incoming philosophy PhD student at a university in a major U.S. city. While I have been fortunate enough to receive funding and a stipend for the duration of my program, I find myself increasingly worried about getting by with rising inflation and costs of living — especially considering that the stipend is the same for all five years.

Would you be willing to ask your readers how departments are thinking about this issue? Are any considering raising stipends to keep up to the cost of living? Would it be worth trying to transfer programs that provide better funding?

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Best wishes,

A concerned student

My general sense is that stipends do increase, and that the amount offered and guaranteed is, as it were, a minimum.  Students should raise these concerns with their departments.  Comments from others welcome; please submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.

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

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JUNE 24--COMMENTS ARE NOW OPEN, AT THE REQUEST OF READERS.  SUBMIT COMMENTS ONLY ONCE, THEY MAY TAKE AWHILE TO APPEAR.

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.

On Susan Stebbing and public philosophy

I just came across this interesting little essay from last year.

UPDATE:  The Stebbing book is available here for free.  (Thanks to Mike G. for the pointer.)

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).