Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

More signs of the times: hiring freezes, reduced PhD admissions

The NYT reports:

Since taking office, the Trump administration has issued orders that threaten to broadly undercut the financial foundation of university based research, including deep reductions in overhead cost reimbursements through the National Institutes of Health. Court challenges have paused some of the cuts, but universities are bracing for uncertainty. The University of Pennsylvania could face a $250 million hit in N.I.H. funding alone....

In some cases, schools are pre-emptively cutting their expenses as a precautionary measure.

North Carolina State University announced on Feb. 14 that it was freezing most hiring. Stanford University announced on Feb. 26 that it was freezing staff hiring, citing “very significant risks” to the community. At the University of Louisville in Kentucky, President Kim Schatzel announced an “immediate pause” on faculty and staff hiring until July. She cited the potential loss of $20 to $23 million in N.I.H. research funding. Dozens of other schools have announced hiring freezes or “chills.”

Many of the cuts are now hitting graduate education...

A graduate program in biological sciences at the University of California, San Diego, usually enrolls 25 new graduate students a year. This year, the number will be 17....

The metaphysical foundations of logic, with help from Kant and Hegel

Philosopher Jacob McNulty (Yale) discusses.

The "true and final value" of philosophy

The next time the Dean asks, you can point them to this amusing, self-described "rant."

"The Metaphysics of Talking to Aliens"

Who knew there was such a subject?  Philosopher Matti Eklund discusses.

ADDENDUM: Needless to say, the quoted title, above, was not Professor Eklund's doing, but it does catch attention!

A lecture by Susanne Langer on "Man and Animal"...

...from 1959.

(Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)

"The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited"

Audio of a 1959 lecture by Iris Murdoch at Yale.

(Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)

Bayne on Dennett

An illuminating essay on Dennett's ideas by philosopher Tim Bayne.

Comments are open for reader reactions from those knowledgeable.

Was there a Big Bang? Does time have a beginning?

Philosopher of physics Thomas Barrett called this interesting popular piece to my attention, noting in particular that, "It is always nice to see appreciation of the contributions that philosophy of science makes to science... the discussion of the Malament and Manchak results is particularly clear and insightful."  Comments from knowledgeable readers are welcome.

 

"Why must philosophy writing be so bad?"

Philosopher Steven Hales comments, with some amusing examples.

An interview with T.M. Scanlon about his moral philosophy

Here.  This I found particularly striking and interesting:

AR: You were part of a discussion group of maybe 10 to 12 people back in your Princeton days, with luminaries such as Tom Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Nozick, and many others. In an interview with The Utopian, you called this the most important thing in your philosophical development. What made it so important? 

TS: Well, it was like having this gang of great teachers, for one thing. In my career, I was mainly doing logic, philosophy, mathematics, things like that, although I was interested in moral and political philosophy, and I got more drawn into it because I was doing a lot of teaching in that area. So this was partly a way of developing more expertise in the field because I was just in the process of getting into it. Second, it was something that provided me with confidence in two ways: One, there really was a subject matter there that you could learn more about because in the 1950s, moral philosophy had a kind of skeptical air to it. It was sort of conventionalist or emotivist, non-cognitivist, and so on, and so we were drawn together by the fact that most of us in the group tended to think that there were real facts about right and wrong, and that just by thinking really hard and clearly about them, you could make progress, and that wasn’t what was going on in most of philosophy at the time. It wasn’t where the action was in philosophy; it was mostly in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, things like that.

So the group gave me confidence that there were other people who think that we’re not just banging things up, that there’s something there. And second, that gave me confidence in myself, because these people were willing to talk to me, and so I could be a member of this group, which was amazingly flattering. I was kind of a junior partner in the group, so I felt, wow, this is amazing. So it really was important in my philosophical development in those ways, giving me confidence in the subject, and, to some degree, confidence in myself.

Philosopher Laurie Paul profiled...

...at The New Yorker.  It's a nice write-up!

 

A review of the Edmonds biography of Parfit...

...in The Philosopher's Magazine.  The review starts by sounding a Nietzschean note:  "Philosophers tend to tolerate a high degree of personal strangeness in one another. More specifically, they tend not to worry – at least explicitly or on the record – about whether the weird philosophical beliefs and the weird non-philosophical actions of a colleague might have a common source."  For Nietzsche, of course, the philospohical systems of at least the great philosophers admit of psychological explanation.  Regarding the Edmonds biography, the reviewers note that,

The book is largely an entertaining, and highly revealing, exercise in psychological portraiture by means of anecdote. Parfit, Edmonds tells us, would peddle in the nude on his exercise bike, reading philosophy; he would brush his teeth for hours, reading philosophy; every day he would eat the same breakfast of muesli and yoghurt and the same dinner of carrots, cheese, lettuce, and celery, to maximise his time for philosophy; he would make coffee using water straight out of the tap, to maximise his time for philosophy; he would take a mixture of vodka and pills every night to help him sleep, since he couldn’t stop thinking about philosophy.

Heidegger against the philosophical tradition

A pleasingly clear short essay at IAITV, that has some affinities with the Dreydegger familiar in the Anglophone world, but is also importantly different and probably closer to the spirit of Heidegger.

 

Cailin O'Connor on game theory and misinformation (with particular reference to Covid)...

...at The Dissenter.

"On becoming an historian of philosophy"

Reflections from Margaret Atherton in her APA "Dewey Lecture" (this is from 2017, but still interesting!).

David Lewis on his approach to philosophy, on his education, and other topics (link fixed now)

A very entertaining lecture from 1991 [click on the PDF button] (which I learned about via Phillip Bricker's recent review of materials from Lewis's Nachlass).  The lecture contains a crisp statement of Lewis's "conservativism" in philosophy, which is characteristic of most of the Anglophone discipline:

I am a conservative philosopher. Fear not, I don’t mean that I make it my business to glorify the marvellous market and the Republican Party!—What would that have to do with resisting innovation? One thing I do mean is this. I think philosophy has no business challenging the positive convictions of common sense, and no business challenging established results of the natural sciences and mathematics. What should a philosopher do if he discovers a proof that he is the pope?  Boldly follow where argument leads?—No, or not unless he’s the philosopher Karol Wojtyła. Instead he should find the flaw in his proof. If he fails, he should conclude that the proof has a flaw he cannot find. The same goes, say I, if a philosopher discovers a proof that some truths are also false; or that motion or time or value or consciousness or freedom is unreal; or that it is unthinkable that anything exists outside the mind, or outside the text; or that there are no people, and no swizzle-sticks either; or that it is a wide-open scientific question whether anyone has ever believed anything; or that Cantor’s diagonal argument was fallacious; or that we make worlds with words. We should know a reductio ad absurdum when we see it! It is ever so much more likely that a philosophical argument has gone astray than that any of these things is true.

Gramsci's view of "common sense," and his reasons for skepticism about it, seems to me more plausible.

Idealism and realism about philosophy and its role

Philosopher Jimmy Lenman kindly gave permission to share this amusing and striking comment he made on FB:

I have moments of idealism. In my moments of idealism I think philosophy should be to bullshit what the medical profession is to disease. And I have moments of realism. In my moments of realism I fear how all too often philosophy is to bullshit what the munitions industry is to warfare.

So which are you, an idealist or realist?  Explain why.  (Comments require a valid email address, which will not appear.  If you wish to criticize specific philosophers or journals, you will need to do so with your full name.)

Three models of a PhD program faculty: Princeton, MIT, Pittburgh

On what I will call the "Princeton model" the center of gravity of the department is in contemporary areas of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, mind and science, and parts of value theory, but having at least one faculty member covering the major periods of the history of Western philosophy (ancient, early modern, Kant, less often post-Kantian) is thought essential.   The history of philosophy, however, is not particularly integrated with the pursuit of the contemporary "hot" topics in Anglophone "analytic" philosophy.  But its serious representation is treated as important.  The Princeton model is influential, and many major PhD programs follow it to varying extent:  e.g., NYU, Michigan, Berkeley, UCLA, Notre Dame, North Carolina, Brown, Cornell, Wisconsin. Outside the U.S., Oxford and Toronto certainly operate this way, although both are helped by being large, so they can cover quite a lot!

Philosophers born between 1928 and 1945 "disproportionately" cited in SEP...

...according to Professor Schwitzgebel's latest citation study which he kindly sent me.    Here are the philosophers born in this period ("the Silent Generation"), and their overall rank (and total citations in SEP articles):

"Silent Generation" (born 1928-1945)

1. Lewis, David K. (307)
5. Kripke, Saul A. (159)
8. Williams, Bernard (146)
10. Nagel, Thomas (137)
11. Nozick, Robert (135)
12. Jackson, Frank (130)
13. Searle, John R. (120)
14. Van Fraassen, Bas C. (117)
16. Harman, Gilbert H. (116)
18. Fodor, Jerry A. (115)

Professor Schwitzgebel asks:

So, what explains the Silent Generation's disproportionate representation among the most influential philosophers in the mainstream Anglophone tradition? I suggest that their influence is due to their objective importance. They achieved this importance through lucky timing and rising to a cultural occasion.

In the Anglophone world, especially the United States, the 1960s and 1970s were times of sharp university enrollment growth, as Silent Generation scholars were hired to teach the Boomers, as the college degree came to be seen as the standard path to social status and economic security, and as universities basked in the high prestige of science in this era (cultural pride in the space race, the success of the Manhattan Project, the polio vaccine, computers, antibiotics....). The academic job market was ridiculously easy by the standards of every subsequent decade, and professors from this era tell tales of how they landed jobs in the most prestigious universities sometimes with a single phone call.

The Silent Generation thus had a great demographic advantage: They were entering the profession in boom times. They engaged with their elders (Quine, Rawls, and Strawson, for example; Putnam and Davidson are edge cases due to Putnam's near-cutoff age and Davidson's late start), but even more, they engaged directly with one another, filling the journals with articles about the issues that interested them. Much of their seminal work was published in the 1970s while they were relatively young, and this work framed the debates of the 1980s, and the 1990s, and the early 2000s, and to a substantial extent (as my SEP analyses suggest) even today.

Philosophy actually does teach some intellectual skills!

Philosopher Michael Prinzing tweeted this interesting looking study at me the other day.  I have only read a bit of it, but would be curious to hear from readers who take the time to examine it more carefully.

Einstein vs. Bergson on the nature of time

A nice account by philosopher Evan Thompson of a debate most readers are probably unfamiliar with.  Curious to hear informed reader reactions from those of you who know your Einstein, or know your Bergson (or both)!

Richard Marshall interviews Kendall Walton...

...at 3:16 AM.  Very interesting!

Frick on Singer

These remarks were given by philosopher Johann Frick (now at Berkeley) at a Princeton conference in honor of Peter Singer, and make some interesting points.  For example:

Peter has been an avowed utilitarian for most of his career, and his commitment to utilitarianism no doubt played a major role in leading him to adopt many of the ethical stances for which he is known.

And yet, it is rare that you will find Peter, in his published work, making arguments of the form: “You should believe p, because p is entailed by utilitarianism, and utilitarianism is true”.

Much more commonly, you will find him skillfully appealing to mid-level principles that he expects will command the assent of people with widely divergent ethical outlooks. This genius for making his arguments as ‘ecumenical’ as possible is one of the major reasons for Peter’s success as a public intellectual.

This seems right, although it seems an incomplete account of his success as a public intellectual (surely he has been the perfect public moralist for the neoliberal era?).  Professor Frick also makes some interesting observations about Singer's "esotericism" as a public moralist.  I am not a fan of Singer's philosophical work, but I found this short essay quite interesting and illuminating.  

Richard Wollheim, his life and philosophical work (including the influence of psychoanalysis)

A short film, marking the centennary of his birth.  (Wollheim’s Freud book is excellent in my opinion.)

Reality is paradoxical

An interview with Graham Priest.

"Methods of Philosophy"

Ten lectures (in China) by Timothy Williamson.

Resources in philosophy of work and labor and related areas?

A young philosopher, teaching at a rural two-year college campus, writes:

I have taught retired police officers, future truck drivers, berry farmers, Wal-Mart employees — largely working-class folk. (They were, on the whole, wonderful students. It was a pleasure to be their teacher.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, discussion often turned to issues in, or about, the workplace. I was, and I remain, woefully unfamiliar with this area of philosophy. 

I am hoping you and your readers might have some suggestions for resources in: the philosophy of work and labor, the philosophy of bureaucracy, alienation, the philosophy of the corporation and its nature, Taylorism, Fordism, etc.

I am familiar with Marx's early political writings, especially his anthropology and its role in his arguments about alienation, and with Elizabeth Anderson's book, Private Government. I am mostly looking for resources I could use for teaching, such as readers, collections of essays, or stray essays. But suggestions for my own edification would be welcome, too.

Comments are open for reader suggestions.

The 376 most cited philosophers in the Stanford Encyclopedia that were born since 1900

Courtesy of Professor Schwitzgebel.  The list says a lot about Anglophone philosophy (and SEP), perhaps a bit less about philosophy. 

(Yours truly is tied at #377 according to the Schwitzgebel method.  So close to greatness, but, alas, no cigar.   No cigar, either, for Alexander Nehamas, Jonathan Lear, John Gardner, Leslie Green, Seana Shiffrin, Imra Lakatos, Gilles Deleuze, Robert Pippin, Frederick Neuhouser, and Mark Wilson, among other surprising absences.)   

ADDENDUM:  A reader sends this Google N-Gram (based on searching all books in google) for the period 2000-2020, using philosophers from the top, middle, and bottom of the SEP list, plus some of the "no cigar" folks.  Of course, this would not distinguish between authored and edited works, and it would also pick up "impact" outside philosophy.

A "philosophical eulogy" for Daniel Dennett...

...by David Chalmers:

 

An interview with Neuhouser on Rousseau and amour-propre

Another interview by Johnathan Bi, as part of his series on great books and ideas we noted previously.  Mr. Bi has a nice way of connecting the philosophical ideas to meaningful events in his own life, in a way that I imagine will resonate with other young people.   The interview is worth watching, and is a good introduction to Rousseau.

Some more old philosophy lectures on YouTube: Max Black, Norman Malcolm

Richard Marshall oncea gain sends along some interesting finds:

Max Black on analytic philosophical analysis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1TpzlgTki4&list=RDCMUC7q-GcHyjCHkTpXCUTLzy7Q&start_radio=1&rv=B1TpzlgTki4&t=10

Malcolm on G.E. Moore:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCZ8zMdCvi0&list=RDCMUC7q-GcHyjCHkTpXCUTLzy7Q&index=2

Malcolm on Wittgenstein:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=371LobXpUlo

Miranda Fricker's Whitehead Lectures at Harvard...

...on "Bernard Williams's Historical Self-Consciousness" are available here and here.  Professor Fricker's talk at the Williams conference in Lund several years ago was excellent.

A program on Philippa Foot on BBC Radio 4...

...with several philosophers discussing her life and work (Anil Gomes, Sophie Grace Chappell, Rachel Wiseman).  I was not aware how privileged her upbringing was!  Although I greatly admire Foot's work, especially the essays collected in Virtues and Vices, I was always puzzled by her thought that an adequate response to the Holocaust required rejecting emotivism (at least in its strongest form, Stevenson's).

Bradley vs. Russell

Michael Della Rocca--probably our leading contemporary monist--thinks Bradley won that debate.  Curious to hear from the Russellians!

"Parfit could make you eat shit"

Now I know that's some clickbait in the title, but philosopher Misha Valdman has a serious point to make (and some good anecdotes about Parfit) at his new substack with his wife, also a philosopher, Sarah Valdman.

Parmenidean oneness vs. common sense and human life

Michael Della Rocca vs. Tim Maudlin and Kathleen Higgins at IAITV.

What is it like to be "manic"?

Philosopher Paul Lodge discusses.  (This is from a few years ago, but I only just came across this interesting essay.)

ADDENDUM:  Philosopher Aaron Garrett calls my attention to this related piece.

An informative review of an intellectual biography of Alasdair MacIntyre...

...at LRB.

Philosopher Kristin Andrews talks about animal minds and culture...

...at Walter Veit's Podcast.  This seems to be a lively area of interest among philosophers these days, curious to hear from well-informed readers about issues raised in the podcast.

On the intellectual habits of contemporary philosophers that render them vulnerable to mobbing and "cancellation"

Interesting and apt discussion by philosopher Joseph Heath.

(Thanks to Chris Morris for the pointer.)

Timothy Williamson did not like Philip Kitcher's "What's the Use of Philosophy"

Not surprising, but he also has some pretty substantive and fair criticisms in my view.   From Williamson's conclusion:

Contemporary analytic philosophy has plenty to offer other disciplines, as its track
record of inter-disciplinary interaction shows. It will have even more to offer other disciplines
if it gets better at answering its own questions. There is plenty of room for methodological
improvement. Some of what Kitcher says is salutary in that respect, for instance: learn more
about modern evolutionary theory before you try to apply it. But most of his
recommendations would make philosophy worse: more anxious to imitate the neighbours and
impress the general public, and so with less to contribute of its own. That is not exactly his
intention, but as a pragmatist he should stand ready to be judged by his polemic’s
consequences in practice.

Curious to hear thoughts from readers after they read Williamson's review.

How to think like a Bayesian

Philosopher Mike Titelbaum (Wisconsin) explains.

Richard Marshall interviews Pedro Tabensky about Camus and Fanon...

...at 3:16 AM.

Rebecca Goldstein on Spinoza, atheism, and philosophy of literature...

...at Robinson's Podcast.

John Martin Fischer on the latest scientist's foray into free will

Here; an excerpt with a couple of interspersed comments:

The view that causal determinism is true is not new, nor is the view that this entails no free will or moral responsibility, but Sapolsky collates and marshals the evidence (some of it recent and cutting-edge) as it bears on these issues. The cumulative effect of the discussions and Sapolsky’s analyses can be an overwhelming sense that we might be wrong about our very foundational beliefs in free will and moral responsibility, and even our selfhood. He writes, “…put all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will” (8; emphasis in text) [footnote omitted]....

Surprisingly, in a book about free will, Sapolsky offers no definition of it (or, for that matter, determinism—or even moral responsibility!). He writes, “What is free will? Groan… I’ll do my best to mitigate the drag of this” (14). Although he does not present a full definition proper, it is clear that he holds that free will requires the falsity of determinism—by definition (not as a result of argumentation):  "[To establish free will] [s]how me a neuron being a causeless cause in this total sense. …Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will." (15)

This is problematic in various ways. First, it claims that “being a causeless cause” or “independent of the sum of its biological past” would be sufficient for a choice/action’s being an instance of free will. This is however surely false; pure randomness is incompatible with the control involved in free will. (In his discussion of quantum indeterminacy, Sapolsky is aware of this.) More plausibly, we should interpret him (here and throughout the book) as contending that, as a matter of definition or “meaning,” indeterminism is a necessary condition of free will. Note that the indeterminism of “causeless cause” or “independent of the sum of its biological past” is a very strong kind of indeterminism, leaving out the more appealing idea of not being fully determined by antecedent causes. (Sapolsky elides the distinction between causation and deterministic causation and thus does not consider indeterministic causal accounts of free will).

11 philosophers you [general reader, not professional philosopher] probably don't know, but should

For "World Philosophy Day" (whatever that is?), IAITV asked Martha Nussbaum, Cheryl Misak, Peter Adamson, Andrew Bowie and others to "nominate philosophers you probably haven't heard of, but you should know about."  The resulting list is eclectic and idiosyncratic, but includes some fine nominees including Porphyry (early animal rights advocate), Frank Ramsey, Cora Diamond, and Friedrich Schleiermacher (a key figure in Romantic hermeneutics, the scholarly kind that Gadamer sadly displaced).

"Loved, yet lonely"

Philosopher Kaitlyn Creasy comments.

Williamson on logic in everyday life and beyond

This short essay by Timothy Williamson is actually pleasingly clear and introductory, and could be profitably shared with someone who wanted to know "what is logic about and why does it matter"?

van Fraassen on Sellars

Philosopher Bas van Fraassen has another blog, and this one has a long and interesting post about Sellars.

What is it like to be a philosopher? Robert Stern edition

A very interesting interview--his reflections near the end about facing a terminal medical diagnosis are especially worth reading and thinking about.