Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

What is it like to be a philosopher? Saba Fatima edition

Here.

Montana's Paul Muench interviewed by Richard Marshall...

...at 3:16 AM.

In praise of a good philosophical fight

A very amusing essay by my colleague Agnes Callard.

Robert Paul Wolff on "The Future of Socialism"

Parts One and Two (with a third to come).   Well-informed and interesting, as always.

Philosophy at Rockefeller University in the 1960s and 1970s

Philosopher James Klagge (Virginia Tech) has put together a page of information and links about the short-lived but stellar PhD programs in philosophy and logic at Rockefeller University in New York City.  He writes:  "It is a small but significant part of the history of analytic philosophy in the 20th century.  I have had input from a number of those involved in the programs, but it is still a work in progress.  Additions or corrections can be sent to me at jklagge@vt.edu."

Significant omissions at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Jimmy Goodrich, a PhD student in philosophy at Rutgers, writes with a useful question:

This didn’t strike me as directly relevant to your recent post asking readers about the relative merits of already existing SEP articles, but I thought it might also be interesting and helpful to have readers note what they take to be glaring omissions in the SEP. After all, the SEP is extremely detailed about some topics, but pretty sparse about others.

For example: Both analytical and normative issues concerning power (political, social, etc.) are largely overlooked with the exception of an article on feminist perspectives on power and a separate one on domination, both of which are quite good. However, there’s a rich tradition which explicitly discusses power from both analytical and normative perspectives from Aristotle to Spinoza to Nietzsche to Weber to plenty of other 19th and 20th century thinkers. And yet, no entry is present to detail this or any other tradition which sees an important role for a concept of social or political power which isn’t identical to (or very nearly identical to) domination. It seems to me that there’s at least one if not two or three independent articles here.

I’d be very interested to learn whether others have found omissions they’d consider to be glaring. And perhaps this would be useful to the SEP editors as well.

I agree with Mr. Goodrich about the kind of article on power he suggests:  that would be wonderful.  Additional suggestions welcome:  again, full name and valid e-mail address, and explain, as Mr. Goodrich helpfully did, why the entry in question would be a welcome edition, what themes/authors it might cover, etc.

To reiterate something remarked on in the other thread, more than once:  SEP is great and very comprehensive; Ed Zalta has done yeaoman's work in maintaining and developing it.  Thanks to Professor Zalta and all those who have contributed to it, editors and authors.

NYU's Michael Strevens blogging at the "Brains" blog this week...

...about his new book offering an empirical-psychological defense of "armchair philosophy."

What is it like to be a philosopher? Peter Adamson edition

Here, courtesy of Clifford Sosis as always.

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!)

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.)

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!

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.

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

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

Warwick's Quassim Cassam interviewed...

...at 3AM.

The real diversity problem in Anglophone philosophy

It's usefully illustrated by the MIT Department, which helpfully lists the research areas of its faculty clearly.  Excluding emeriti, there are 14 tenure-stream faculty.  Here are the areas of philosophy as represented:

Metaphysics:   9

Epistemology:  5

Philosophical logic or logic:  5

Philosophy of language:  5

Philosophy of mind:  4

Ethics:   4

Philosophy of science:   2

Feminist philosophy/Philosophy of Race or Gender:  2

Philosophy of physics:  1

Philosophy of biology:  0

Ancient philosophy:  1

Medieval philosophy:  0

17th-century philosophy:  0

18th-century philosophy:  0

19th-century Continental philosophy:  0

20th-century Continental philosophy:  0

Non-Western philosophy:  0

So much for the idea that Anglophone departments are departments of "Western" philosophy:  MIT ignores several centuries worth of Western philosophy, and although MIT is a bit extreme, it is not atypical in its emphases.   Take the "top ten" programs in the 2017-18 PGR:   NYU, Rutgers, Princeton, Michigan, Pittsburgh, Yale, MIT, USC, Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA.   Rutgers, Michigan, MIT, USC, and UCLA have no specialists in either 19th- or 20th-century Continental philosophy:  none!   Princeton has one specialist in one major figure of 19th-century Continental philosophy, Pittsburgh has two (although their primary interests lie elsewhere), Yale has one, and Berkeley has one and has just hired another.   Only NYU, Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford have two or more faculty with research interests in 19th- and 20th-century Continental philosophy--although one of NYU's two senior faculty in these areas will be retiring soon.  The irony, of course, is that undergraduate demand for courses on figures like Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault remains huge, and yet many of the leading PhD programs can't be bothered.  (ADDENDUM:  As some readers point out, both Yale and NYU are presently looking at junior Continental candidates; we'll see what happens.)

"The why of reality": A four-year old asks a philosopher

A nicely done essay by philosopher Nathanael Stein (Florida State).

Vienna's Elisa Freschi interviewed (about Indian philosophy)...

...at 3AM.

Frank Ramsey's pragmatism

A quite interesting essay by philosopher Cheryl Misak (Toronto).

Illinois's Colleen Murphy interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Cal Tech's Frederick Eberhardt interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Michigan's Elizabeth Anderson profiled...

...at The New Yorker.  It does a pretty good job on her ideas!

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

Philosophy and cognitive science catch up with Nietzsche, part 242

Philosopher Peter Carruthers explains that "conscious thought is an illusion," as that German fellow knew.

Tilburg's Sander Verhaegh talks about Quine and naturalism in an interview...

...at 3AM.  I was amused to learn that the orignial subtitle of "Epistemology Naturalized" was "The Case for Psychologism."

A conversation with Charles Taylor...

...at Harvard, led by Michael Rosen.   Taylor is one of those thinkers who enjoys a better reputation outside Anglophone philosophy, than within:  partly it is a matter of his philosophical and intellectual sympathies (e.g., his interest in Hegel, his antipathy to naturalism), and partly a matter of the quality of his arguments when he engaged on territory familiar to analytic philosophers.  Not quite thirty years ago, we philosophy PhD students at Michigan prevailed upon the skeptical faculty to invite Taylor as the "Nelson philosopher in residence," and watching this conversation, with Taylor's open and engaging manner, reminded me of exactly how he was with we students back then.

Philosopher of education John White (UCL) interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Interview with Shelly Kagan (Yale) in the Erasmus Journal of Philosophy and Economics

Here.  A failed rabbi becomes a moral philosopher!  And lots of other intersting stuff.

 

UCSD's Manuel Vargas interviewed by Clifford Sosis

Here.

Can machines be creative?

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Margaret Boden (Sussex) and others discuss.

Philosophy, and boredom, in prison

Philosopher Kirstine Szifris (Manchester Metropolitan) comments.

 

Temple's Espen Hammer interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Rosenberg on the "threat" to our self-understanding posed by neuroscience

An accessible piece; an excerpt:

We’ve built our cultural, legal and political institutions on this theory that people’s actions are caused by choices made rational in the light of their beliefs and their desires....

But here’s the problem: the theory of mind we call carry around with us and use every day has no basis in what neuroscience—Nobel Prize winning neuroscience–tell us about how the brain works. Neuroscience has revealed that the theory is quite as much of a dead end as Ptolemaic astronomy. It’s been around for such a longtime only because it was the predictive device natural selection came up with, in spite of being fundamentally mistaken about how things were really arranged.

Eric Kandel, John O’Keefe, May-Britt and Edvard Moser, won Nobel prizes in 2000 and 2014 for experiments that showed exactly how the brain records information. Their work revealed it doesn’t do it in anything like the way the theory of mind says it does—in statements that represent the way the world is (beliefs) and ones that represent the way we want things to be (desires). This research program began with HM, the patient famous for being unable to acquire or store beliefs because of a lobotomy that went wrong and destroyed his hippocampus. The irony of this research is that it ended up showing that no ones’ brain acquires, stores, and uses information in the form of beliefs and desires....

But conscious experience is continually shouting out that belief/desire psychology is exactly how the mind does work. Introspection all by itself seems to refute the notion that we don’t have beliefs and desires with content that represent what we want and what’s available to attain our wants.

Alas, ever since Freud psychologists have diagnosed the illusions, delusions and confabulations in the mind’s eye and the mind’s ear, in the flow of experiences, feelings and sensations passing through consciousness. The theory of mind is just another one of these illusions, useful for survival and success in the Pleistocene, but a blunt instrument of limited predictive and explanatory power. It emerged out of the more fundamental mind-reading ability we share with other species and used to track predators and prey, threats and opportunities. That undoubtedly inborn ability combined with our unique gift, language, to generate the theory of mind. By colonizing consciousness spoken language turned it into a monologue of silent speech, tricking us that the meaning of spoken words is given by thoughts’ content when its just silent sounds passing through consciousness. Neuroscience shows that that in our brains the neural circuits neither have nor need content to do their jobs.

Thoughts from readers knowledgeable about this research?

"We are witnessing a Fichte renaissance"

There are, indeed, reasons to fear this is true, although it's worth remembering that professionalization breeds specialization (vide Weber), and Kant having been over-written to death, it's unsurprising people are turning to Fichte, the Kant on steroids.  But there are lots of "renaissances" going on, given that each generation of PhD students needs to make a "contribution to knowledge," which means dredging up what might best be forgotten. In philosophy, think only of the renaissances for Malebranche, NeoKantians, "early modern women" philosophers, Schopenhauer, among others.  Some of these folks probably deserve the attention.  But is Fichte such a case? It no doubt depends, again, on one's views about Kant:  it is unsurprising that leading contemporary Kantians have found Fichte attractive, but for those allergic to Kant's deranged psyche (the "catastrophic spider" as Nietzsche called him), Fichte can only seem even stranger.

Vienna's Johannes Steizinger interviewed...

...at 3AM.

A brief, "mind-expanding" interview with Andy Clark (Edinburgh)...

...at IAI news.

On racist and sexist stereotypes found in the "great" philosophers

Julian Baggini makes sensible points here, although it's telling about the current Geist that this kind of essay even needs to be written.

(Thanks to David Ozonoff for the pointer.)

NYU's Tim Maudlin interviewed at Scientific American

Entertaining read, with funny comments about Kuhn and Popper, among other topics.  With regard to his views about the free will debate, all one can say is, "Ignorance is bliss!"

Will this year *really* be a good job market for specialists in the post-Kantian Continental traditions?

Last year was shaping up to be, but in the end several of the places advertising hired in other areas or didn't hire at all.  (The excellent Samantha Matherne got some of the offers, and I was delighted an excellent student of mine also secured a tenure-track job--but overall, last year did not live up to promise for Continental candidates.)   But a job seeker this year writes:  "In glancing over this year's job ads, I get the impression that the trend continues to hold. By my count, there are jobs expressing serious interest in this area at Yale, UC Riverside (full prof.), Fordham, Boston College, Loyola Marymount, U. Mich/Dearborn, Vassar, McMaster, University College Dublin (4-year post-doc). Other ads voice interest in this area, even if they don't list it is as an AOS/AOC."  Let's hope so. The last two centuries of philosophy in Continental Europe are easily the most important and relevant in the last five hundred.  In the midst of all the diversity blather, we should remember that huge swaths of Western philosophy--the last two centuries of Continental European philosophy, not to mention medieval philosophy--are regularly ignored in Anglophone philosophy departments.  

'Philosophy of Hunting'...

...at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta.  As they say, philosophy is about everything in principle!

(Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)

Physics and reality

Philosopher Nancy Cartwright (Durham/UC San Diego) discusses with a physicist as well as the owner of IAITV, Hilary Lawson, who really puts himself in far too many of these discussions with experts.

3AM's Richard Marshall reviews the 2018 HowtheLightGetsIn festival in London

Here.

(Thanks to  David Maclean for the pointer.)

Barnard/Columbia's Frederick Neuhouser interviewed...

...at 3AM.  This is a very interesting interview, although I should note that it is implausible that Nietzsche was positively influenced by Rousseau; the similarities Neuhouser points to--"Both genealogies have 'de-naturalizing' ambitions—they reveal the human-made character of phenomena normally taken to be natural or merely given—and...both emphasize the contingent nature of the developments in question"--reflect ideas and themes important in German philosophy and culture, starting with Herder.  There was no need for Nietzsche to look to Rousseau for such an approach, and no evidence he did so.

Interactive timeline of the history of philosophy

Several readers sent along this neat link.

MIT's Stephen Yablo profiled...

...at the Oxford Review of Books by Oxford BPhil student Daniel Kodsi, who kindly shared this with me.

Philosophy in Mexico, 1910 to 1960

This is an informative review by philosopher Manuel Vargas (UC San Diego).  Many of the debates he describes will be familiar to those knowledgeable about other philosophical traditions and places at roughly the same time, suggesting the extent to which philosophical questions both transcend culture and place even as they reflect them.

Marlboro College's William Edelglass interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Anthony Appiah talks about 'Against Meritocracy'

Video here.

UCLA's Judea Pearl interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Chicago's Martha Nussbaum interviewed about her latest book...

...at 3AM.