Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Review of a new book about Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch

Here.  Unfair to emotivism, however--because the volume is Oxford-centric,it mentions only Ayer, but not Stevenson, although Foot took on Stevenson directly (not successfully though).

Why every department should have at least one or two faculty specializing in the post-Kantian Continental traditions in philosophy of the 19th- and 20th-century (UPDATED)

Following up on this earlier post about ranked departments that, remarkably, have no specialists in these traditions, let me note the most obvious prudential reason why all departments should want to have faculty teaching in these areas:   undergraduate students are interested, really interested, in Marx and Nietzsche, and, when given the chance, in Schopenhauer and Foucault and (someone I don't like much) Heidegger.   Philosophy departments can pass off the student interest in these figures to hacks and intellectual tourists in other departments, but that will just be large student enrollments lost to the Philosophy Department.  There are now so many excellent and philosophically-informed scholars in these traditions, that there is no credible excuse any longer for not having specialists in these fields.  You can hire someone who will bring in the student enrollments for 19th-century German philosophers and still be able to talk to the epistemologists and moral psychology folks in your department.

What is philosophy and why should we do it? Readings for high school students?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCT 29--INTERESTING DISCUSSION, AND MR FOISY RESPONDS TO SOME OF THE SUGGESTIONS

Reader Matt Foisy writes seeking suggestions:

I am a high school teacher in Calgary, Canada. I am clearly not a professional philosopher, but I do read quite widely in philosophy, and I even think I can understand most of what I read! I primarily teach history and politics, but am lucky enough to teach a philosophy course (extremely rare in high schools in Canada, as I’m sure it is in the US as well). My philosophy course is part of the IB or international Baccalaureate program, which is a quite widely recognized and rigorous academic program--so much so that most major universities will offer first year credits to students who score well enough on their exams. So basically I think I am teaching what might be the equivalent of a first year undergrad philosophy course.

As I am not part of the academy it is not always the easiest thing for me to find applicable resources or works or whatever for some things that my students must do, and this is the question I have for you.

On most topics that I need to discuss there are no issues, but I am hoping for a little guidance on one topic. The students must write a paper that is basically on the purpose or role of philosophy. Or basically what philosophy is and why we need to be doing it. My students are intelligent and can do this with their own thoughts and ideas quite easily, but they must engage with the academy on questions like this. So their answers to this question must consider and evaluate the work of other philosophers in coming to their answers. I of course think that this is a great thing for them to be doing, but I also find that on this topic I am a little short on resources, and it is not always the easiest for me to find the time to do all of the reading required to find these resources. Plato and Aristotle offer some good answers to these questions, as does Thomas Nagel (in an introduction to philosophy book I think), but unfortunately I don’t have too many other resources for this type of a question.

Death...and its role in life

Philosopher Susanna Siegel (Harvard) discusses.

Bourget & Chalmers on the 2020 PhilPaper survey of the views of philosophers

Here. And you can see detailed results for each question here.

A few striking results (rounded to nearest 1):  while 50% of respondents endorsed "naturalism," 73% of respondents believe there is a priori knowledge, 63% believe in the analytic/synthetic distinction (although maybe it's because they think there are trivial analytic truths), 62% are moral realists (only 26% are moral anti-realists [what an embarrassment!]), and only 11% hold the correct view about free will, namely, that there is none.  (59% are compatibilists about free will, pretty close to the figure for moral realists:  I'll bet there is some overlap here.)  Only 67% of respondents were atheists,  while 19% were theists.

77% of respondents would not enter Nozick's Experience Machine, one of the biggest majorities for a single position in the survey.

Comments are open, feel free to discuss the results that strike you.

"Causation with a Human Face"

The philosopher of science James Woodward (Pittsburgh) discusses his new book at The Brains Blog.

Carl Schmitt in China...

...or why the CCP is interested in Schmitt.

(Thanks to Matt Kramer for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  A PhD student with a special interest in China writes with some useful perspective:

What is it like to be a philosopher? Mike Huemer (Colorado) edition

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 14--UPDATED

Here.  An amusing interview, as one would expect.  He thinks there's not enough substantive philosophy on blogs like this one, but I guess the evidence suggests that trying to do actual philosophy on blogs doesn't always go well!

UPDATE:  Philosopher Colin McGinn responds to an allegation in Huemer's interview.  (Thanks to David Gordon for the pointer.)

A neuroscientist on "the self"

Anil Seth (Sussex) discusses his view at IAITV.

In praise of anger

A discussion of the new book by philosopher Myisha Cherry (UC Riverside) at The New Yorker.

(Thanks to John Martin Fischer for the pointer.)

Talking about the Chinese Room argument with a chatbot

Philosopher Blake Myers works "on issues at the intersection of philosophy, artificial intelligence, and data science."   He continues:

Most recently, I have been working with deep learning AI chatbots to assess their abilities with respect to self reports. One of these chatbots is GPT-3, which is arguably the best chatbot in existence right now, and one that has attracted the attention of some philosophers. Below I have copied and pasted a recent dialog session that I had with GPT-3 that I found interesting, and I thought your readers might enjoy reading it, as well.

There's more at Dr. Myers's homepage.   The dialog is below the fold:

Google is hiring philosophers...

...to work on ethical issues related to artificial intelligence.  Since Google is, like very capitalist enterprise, fundamentally about profit maximization, we'll see how much ethics they can abide!  But the job might interest some readers out there.

ADDENDUM:  As philosopher Sebastian Lutz (Uppsala) reminds me, Google has had a vexed history with its ethicists.

Richard Marshall interviews Rachel Zuckert (Northwestern)...

...at 3:16 AM.  Professor Zuckert has done important work on Kant, especially his aesthetics, and, more recently on Herder.

Philosopher Kristin Andrews (York U/Toronto) talks about animal minds and animal ethics...

...with Ricardo Lopes at The Dissenter.

An empirical study of philosophers' views about "moral expertise"

Here; not much that is surprising, although I found this amusing:

Notably, philosophers in the field of moral philosophy, and those who are publicly involved in advisory activities, tend to evaluate philosophers’ moral judgment capacity as stronger, while analytic philosophers tend to reject this view.

Far be it from me to pretend to "moral expertise," but this finding does suggest that moral philosophers are prone to rather self-serving assessments!

(Thanks to Michael Magoulias for the pointer.)

Jeffers on the later DuBois

Philosopher Chike Jeffers (Dalhousie) talks about some of DuBois's later works, many of which are less-known than his famous The Souls of Black Folk from 1903.  (Professor Jeffers, happily, is writing the volume on DuBois in my Routledge Philosophers series.)

"Anti-realism" and the analytic-continental divide

Philosopher Lee Braver (South Florida) comments.  Of course, Derrida really is a charlatan, but he is the exception and not the norm in the post-Kantian traditions in Continental European philosophy.

A call for greater opportunities for non-native speakers in "analytic" philosophy

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--SOME READERS ASKED ME TO OPEN COMMENTS, WHICH I HAVE NOW DONE (couldn't moderate them yesterday)

Dubbed the "Barcelona Principles" by its creator, philosopher Filippo Contessi, it adopts the currently trendy language of "inclusion," but its basic point is sound:  insofar as analytic philosophy tries to be a Wissenschaft, it should be open to scientific contributions from researchers across different linguistic cultures.  It seems to me doubtful, however, that one can evaluate "publications, presentations, proposals and submissions without giving" weight to their authors' "linguistic style" and "fluency," since the latter are often inextricable from the substance.  (One can, certainly, as the principle proposes, disregard accent.)  Far better, it seems to me, to invite non-Anglophone philosophers on the merits of their work and then help them, as needed, with their English expression.  (With the four volumes [so far] of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law, we have solicited a number of important legal philosophers outside the Anglosphere, and, when necessary, helped edit their English.)

Paul Pietroski (Rutgers) interviewed about his work in semantics and cognitive science...

...here.

(Thanks to Norbert Hornstein for the pointer.)

Fantasy or reality in narrative?

Philosopher Noel Carroll (CUNY Grad Center) and others discuss at IAITV.

Just when you thought the humanities were safe from postmodernism...

...along come the physicists to inform us there is no objective reality:

Nobel Prize-winner Eugene Wigner described a thought experiment in 1961 that highlighted an uncommon paradox of quantum mechanics. Specifically, it reveals the strangeness of the universe when two observers, like Wigner and his friend, observe two distinct realities....

In 2020, physicists realized that recent quantum technology advances had made it possible to create Wigner's Friend test in a real-world experiment. In essence, we can create different realities, and compare them in a lab to see if they can be reconciled, or cohere, in one system. And researcher Massimiliano Proietti of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, along with a handful of researchers, said they performed this long-awaited experiment for the first time: Creating distinct realities, compare-and-contrasting them, and discovering that they are, in fact, irreconcilable.

David Papineau (CUNY/KCL) talks about "The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience"...

...with Ricardo Lopes at The Dissenter.

"Seeing Clearly: A Buddhist Guide to Life"

Ricardo Lopes interviews philosopher Nic Bommarito (Simon Fraser) at The Dissenter.

Ranked philosophy departments that have no tenure-stream faculty specializing in the Continental traditions in philosophy after Kant

As philosophy departments increasingly hire specialists in currently trendy but niche areas like philosophy of race and gender (but never class), it remains remarkable how many departments currently do not have any tenure-stream faculty specializing in one of the most important periods of Western philosophy (but also hugely influential in non-Western traditions), that centered in Germany after Kant, but also reflected in other Continental European countries in the 19th- and 20th-century, especially France.  This, of course, puts the lie to the claim that Anglophone departments are "departments of Western philosophy," or "departments of European and American philosophy."  After considerable progress in the last forty years, it looks like Anglophone departments are now sliding backwards in terms of narrowness, even though I'm happy to bet that Schopenhauer and Marx and Foucault will be of interest in one hundred years, in a way that, say, the metaphysics of grounding will not.

Philosophy of journalism: the course

The journalist Carlin Romano may have dreamed of such a course, but now a competent philosopher has produced one:  you can see the syllabus and course description by Susanna Siegel (Harvard) at her homepage.  Thanks to the Trump catastrophe, I expect others may be interested in teaching such courses.

Philosopher Thaddeus Metz (Pretoria) discusses "Meaning in Life"...

...at Brain in a Vat.

Against moral philosophy (and morality)

From an essay by philosopher Ronald DeSousa (emeritus, Toronto):

Morality, I now believe, is a shadow of religion, serving to comfort those who no longer accept divine guidance but still hope for an ‘objective’ source of certainty about right and wrong. Moralists claim to discern the existence of commands as inescapable as those of an omniscient and omnipotent God. Those commands, moral philosophers teach, deserve to prevail over all other reasons to act – always, everywhere, and for all time. But that claim is bogus.

Deleuze did not like Wittgenstein

Amusing:

(Thanks to Guy Elgat for the pointer.)

 

Justin Garson (Hunter/CUNY) discusses madness...

...at Brain in a Vat.

Survey on "human extinction"

Philosopher Phil Torres is interested in having blog readers respond to a survey; he writes:

I'm conducting a survey with a colleague of mine, Bruce Tonn, on the topic of human extinction -- specifically, on what philosophers think about the ethical/evaluative implications of our permanent disappearance. Would it be good, bad, or neutral? How wrong, or right, would bringing it about be?  It's here: https://philosophersurvey2.questionpro.com/

In Memoriam: Richard Lewontin (1929-2021)

A few readers now have suggested I should note the passing of the great evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, whose work was very influential in philosophy of biology and with whom many philosophers of science studied at one point or another.  The NYT obituary is here, and there is a rich and very personal memorial by one of his best-known students, the biologist Jerry Coyne (Chicago).   Comments are open for those who want to comment on the significance of Lewontin's work for philosophy.

Kierkegaard as the father of existentialism

Philosopher Alastair Hannay (Oslo) comments.

Arts, humanities and AI ethics

Philosopher John Tasioulas (Oxford) comments.

"Moral Accounting" and good governance

Robert J. Bloomfield--an accounting professor at Cornell, who has written a number of papers tying accounting to philosophical issues, including limits to speech, and pragmatics of language--is seeking feedback from philosophers about his current project on "moral accounting" and governance.  Professor Bloomfield discusses the philosophical issues here, and some practical implications here.   These blog posts also include his email address, for those who would like to offer Professor Bloomfield comments.

Richard Marshall interviews Jessica Wilson (Toronto)...

...at 3:16 AM.  An excerpt:

[T]he original motivation for Grounding would be obviously enthymematic to anyone familiar with work in the metaphysics of science and mind, where it has been recognized since the 1970s that modal and conceptual/representational approaches to metaphysical dependence were unsatisfactory. In the ensuing decades, philosophers working in those areas (and others) generated a large literature exploring what I call small-‘g’ grounding relations, including type and token identity, functional and other forms of realization (including subset-of-powers realization), the determinable-determinate relation, the part-whole relation, constitutive mechanisms, and so on, which against backdrop assumptions about what is fundamental (typically, in these contexts, the physical goings-on), serve as properly metaphysical dependence relations. It’s hard not to conclude that the original proponents of Grounding were simply unfamiliar with all this work. That doesn’t make any less tiresome the ensuing literature on Grounding, which mainly consists in rehearsing counterexamples to the supposed formal features, pondering spandrel questions (What Grounds Grounding? What Grounds that the Grounds Ground Grounding?) generated by the failure of this stipulated primitive to actually close explanatory gaps, and offering Grounding-based ‘formulations’ of views (naturalism, physicalism) which are generic variations on the traditional schematic starting points of more substantive formulations.

Richard Marshall interviews Anya Plutynski (Wash U/St. Louis)...

...at 3:16 AM.  Quite interesting:  is cancer a natural kind? and other questions.

Patricia Churchland talks about the neurophilosophy of non-conscious decisions and morality...

...at IAITV.

Ludlow v. Haspelmath on naturalistic inquiry, language, and generative linguistics

If, like me, you don't know who Haspelmath is, you may still find this discussion interesting.

An intellectual autobiographical interview with K.A. Appiah...

...at IAITV.

"The Dangers of Thought Experiments"

Roy Sorensen (Texas) discusses at Brain in a Vat.

On what is truly important to oneself

Robert Paul Wolff reflects on the question.

Philosopher Samantha Matherne (Harvard) talks about her new book on Cassirer...

...at the New Books in Philosophy podcast.  (There's an ad for the book in the right-hand column on this blog.)

 

Philosopher Manon Garcia (Yale) discusses her new book on...

..."why women’s submission in a patriarchal system is understandable, rational, and pleasurable, though not in their best interests."

Shaun Nichols (Cornell) discusses the philosophy and psychology of morality...

...with Ricardo Lopes at The Dissenter.

Philosopher Michael Strevens (NYU) talks about "The Knowledge Machine"...

...with Ricardo Lopes at The Dissenter.

Connie Rosati (Texas) interviews Stephen Darwall (Yale)...

...about his career and work.  (Darwall was one of Rosati's teachers at Michigan in the 1980s.)

Richard Marshall interviews Alexander Klein (McMaster)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Why philosophy needs mathematics and vice versa

Mark Wilson (Pittsburgh) discusses at Scientific Sense.

"Africana Marxism"

Philosopher Vanessa Wills (George Washington) discusses at the "History of Philosophy" podcast.

Christ is contradictory...

...but non-classical logic (with help from philosopher Jc Beall [Notre Dame]) comes to the rescue!