Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The problem with Heterodox Academy is that it is "woke"

That's what philosopher Nathan Cofnas argues in this, shall we say, "provocative" essay.  I have never had anything to do with Heterodox Academy, not for lack of sympathy with their "principled" message about freedom of inquiry and speech in the academy, but rather because of their oft-expressed view that what the academy needs is more Republicans (which is rather different than saying the academy needs robust academic freedom norms and diversity of disciplinary methods and paradigms).  The Republican Party in the U.S. was once upon a time the place where pro-business apologists for capitalism went (pro-labor apologists for capitalism went to the Democratic Party). That is now ancient history:  Reagan sent the Repugs off the rails, and it got worse in the 1990s, and veered into fascist territory with Dopey Donald Chump.  (The remaining nominal Republicans in the academy are overwhelmingly libertarians and free-market utopians, who haven't much to do with the actual Republican Party.  My friend and colleague Richard Posner gave up on the Republican Party more than a decade ago!). The Democrats--which of course still represent the interests of the ruling class, albeit the prudent wing--are the only viable party in the United States, despite (or rather because) its center has been captured by "wokeness," that is, by the idea that all social injustices derive from "race" (and racial prejudice or "systemic racism") rather than class.  Adolph Reed, whom I've often linked to, is a good source for an "unwoke" perspective from the left.

"Intuitions are not a good guide to reality"

Philosopher Edouard Machery comments.  They are certainly not a good guide to moral reality (which does not exist).  They are useful for ethnography however!

Philosopher Brad Skow on Solon

This is amusing.

Not an analytic philosopher's conception of philosophy

"Philosophy is criticism and the superseding of religion and 'common sense."

            --Gramsci

Marx and Nietzsche would have agreed, albeit for somewhat different reasons.  But it is striking how utterly different this is than the highly conservative version of philosophy popular in the Anglophone world, which often aims to vindicate "common sense" and even religion.

"Western philosophy" and "Eastern philosophy"

A philosopher at a liberal arts college writes:

I’m writing to suggest a topic for a possible blog discussion that may be of potential interest to your readers. 

At my college I have proposed the creation of a new 100-level course entitled Ancient Wisdom: East & West, whose course description reads:

"An introductory exploration of ancient classics of Western and Eastern Philosophy. Topics to be explored include accounts of personhood and the self, definitions of happiness, the nature of right and wrong, and the place of humanity within the larger universe. Readings will be drawn from Greek sources such as Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, and the Stoics; Indian sources such as the Upanishads, Vedanta, and the Buddha; and Chinese sources such as Confucianism, Daoism, and Mohism."

My proposal got rejected in its current form by my school’s Curriculum Committee. In describing their objections, they wrote,

Did you know you have a "right" to "revelatory autonomy"?

Me neither, but if you make up such a right, The Guardian will write about it.  It does seem a bit odd to think friends and family act wrongfully by offering advice about major decisions in life, but the ever-evolving etiquette manual of academic philosophers is full of surprises!

UPDATE:  Philosopher Farbod Akhlaghi, whose work was being discussed in The Guardian, kindly shared a clarification about his views:

"Ameliorative"

Awhile ago, I observed that "whatever ameliorative analysis is, it's not an analysis," but philosopher Alan Thomas has done me one better on Facebook (which he gave permission to share):   "I long for the good old days, when we just called 'ameliorative conceptual engineering' 'Newspeak'."

Richard Marshall interviews Friedrich Lange...

...at 3:16 AM.  Lange was an immensely important figure in German philosophy in the second half of the 19th-century.  His major work on materialism became so well-known that Bertrand Russell wrote an introduction to an English edition in the 1920s.  The "interview" is both amusing and quite informative.

"Artificial Intelligence [sic] forever inanimate and dumb"

This is funny and probably right (and timely, given yesterday's thread):

The cognitive scientist Gary Marcus has been the most active when it comes to showing that, contrary to some of the claims referenced above, LLMs [Large Language Models] are inherently unreliable and don’t actually exhibit many of the most common features of language and thought, such as systematicity and compositionality, let alone common sense, the understanding of context in conversation, or any of the many other unremarkable “cognitive things” we do on a daily basis. In a recent post with Ernest Davis, Marcus includes an LLM Errors Tracker and outlines some of the more egregious mistakes, including the manifestation of sexist and racist biases, simple errors when carrying out basic logical reasoning or indeed basic maths, in counting up to 4 (good luck claiming that LLMs pass the Turing Test; see here), and of course the fact that LLMs constantly make things up.

Doubts about Amazon Mechanical Turk, which means trouble for Experimental Philosophy

Folks interested in XPhil should read this, if they have not already.  Comments welcome from those knowledgeable about the issues.

"Analytic" philosophy and the McCarthy era

Every few years this same story gets recycled (the latest iteration, complete with the non-sequitur that "because" [sic] analytic philosophy benefitted from McCarthyism it is not apolitical).  This story confronts an obvious problem:  "analytic" philosophy triumphed elsewhere (Britain, Australia) without McCarthyism.  Even in America, many of those fired were proto-analytic philosophers working in logic and philosophy of science. 

A more plausible story is the one suggested by Carl Schorske about the rise of the "new rigorism" across all disciplines after WWII, itself a continuation of the specialization that Weber had identified as the hallmark of the modern research university at the start of the 20th-century.  In addition, of course, there was the influx of logical positivists fleeing Hitler, many of them Marxists or Marxist sympathizers, who were no doubt more congenial to the loosely Deweyan naturalism that dominated American philosophy than NeoHegelians like Marcuse.  And then, of course, there was pure chance.   Harvard dominated American philosophy in the 20th-century, and Quine had joined that department in the 1930s.  He exerted increasing influence as the older generation retired (although, amusingly, he wanted to appoint Walter Kaufmann from Princeton in the 1950s--he could be catholic that way!).   As Harvard became solidly analytic it was inevitable, given the professional networks at the time, that other schools would move in that direction as well.  (John Wild, an enthusiast for phenomenology and existentialism, left Harvard for Northwestern in the early 1960s, probably a fateful mistake with respect to influencing the composition of the profession.)

ADDENDUM:  Comments now open, sorry about that.

Richard Marshall interviews Sir Isaac Newton (Cambridge)...

...at 3:16 AM.  An excerpt:

3:16: What made you become a philosopher? 

Isaac Newton: Philosophy is such an impertinently litigious lady, that a man had as good be engaged in law-suits as have to do with her. I found it so formerly, and now I can no sooner come near her again, but she gives me warning. Plato said that philosophy is the imitating God so far forth as man is able. Yet we may know God more and more until we behold him face to face in the kingdom of heaven; so that the scope is to glorify God in his wonderful works, to teach a man how to live well, and to be charitably affected helping our neighbours. This philosophy both speculative and active is not only to be found in the volume of nature but also in the sacred scriptures, as in Genesis, Job, Psalms, Isaiah and others.  In the knowledge of this philosophy God made Solomon the greatest philosopher in the world while the Queen of Sheba was allured to take a long journey to make an experiment of that wisdom — whereof she had heard so great a fame, and found it in effects far greater. Anaxagoras was a noble gentleman but more noble in wisdom and virtue; Socrates with many others condemned the pleasures of this world and gave ears to the study of natural philosophy. 

3:16: So for you philosophy is of the highest value?

IN: Philosophy has brought more profit to the world than Ceres did who invented the increase of corn and grain, or than Bacchus did that found out the use of wine, or Hercules who rid the world of monsters. For these things belong to the maintenance of the body by life and pleasure but philosophy nourishes the soul itself. 

Wittgenstein and Darwin

Philosopher of biology Michael Ruse writes:

I was fascinated to read the stuff on Wittgenstein [via the "Year in Review"] – but what did surprise me was that no one picked up on the evolution question – I think undoubtedly the most important discovery of the past centuries was the realization that we are not the end-product of a Good God on a creative spree but of a slow process of evolution fueled by the meaningless process of natural selection

How someone thinks this is not going to have profound philosophical implications – epistemology and ethics – beats me    -- what we believe is what works not divinely written on tablets of stone – same for ethics – I feel morally I ought to care for children for those of my would-be ancestors who denied this are only “would be,” whereas those who agreed we have moral obligations to kids do have descendants, namely us

Then I read in the Tractatus that “Darwin’s theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science” (Wittgenstein 1922, 4.1122).  he followed this up some years later by telling his groupies that Darwin’s theory doesn’t have the “required multiplicity” whatever the hell that means.

“I have always thought that Darwin was wrong: his theory doesn’t account for all this variety of species. It hasn’t the necessary multiplicity. Nowadays some people are fond of saying that at last evolution has produced a species that is able to understand the whole process which gave it birth. … you can’t say [that today].”Rhees, R. (ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, p. 174, 1981.

As always in these cases there is no evidence of serious study of the scientific literature

I am afraid that at this point, I closed the book on Wittgenstein and have never regretted it – he has led, I think, to some dreadful consequences for philosophy – as people like Kitcher are now pointing out, analytic philosophy has become so technical and inturned it is practically worthless.

Fantasies about AI

This seems a good antidote to the silly fantasies (or nightmares) about AI that animate some benighted folks in Oxford--and it comes from a leading AI researcher (who is, alas, a bit of a philosophical muddle on other topics).  An excerpt:

When you work so close to A.I., you see a lot of limitations. That’s the problem. From a distance, it looks like, oh, my God! Up close, I see all the flaws. Whenever there’s a lot of patterns, a lot of data, A.I. is very good at processing that — certain things like the game of Go or chess. But humans have this tendency to believe that if A.I. can do something smart like translation or chess, then it must be really good at all the easy stuff too. The truth is, what’s easy for machines can be hard for humans and vice versa. You’d be surprised how A.I. struggles with basic common sense. It’s crazy....

I’m a big fan of GPT-3, but at the same time I feel that some people make it bigger than it is. Some people say that maybe the Turing test² has already been passed. I disagree because, yeah, maybe it looks as though it may have been passed based on one best performance of GPT-3. But if you look at the average performance, it’s so far from robust human intelligence. We should look at the average case. Because when you pick one best performance, that’s actually human intelligence doing the hard work of selection. The other thing is, although the advancements are exciting in many ways, there are so many things it cannot do well. But people do make that hasty generalization: Because it can do something sometimes really well, then maybe A.G.I.³  is around the corner. There’s no reason to believe so.

3 Artificial general intelligence, which is like the kind of flexible intelligence we humans have, and which a machine would need to be able to learn intellectual tasks at the level of human beings.

Beauty is essential to the good life

Philosopher Nick Riggle comments.

"What is the value of philosophy"

Excerpts from interviews with a fairly eclectic group of mostly Anglophone philosophers, junior and senior, although clearly skewed towards those working in Mind/Language/Metaphysics/Epistemology (and relatively few value theorists and historians of philosophy) and including some non-philosophers (like Stanley Fish and Steven Pinker); among the contributors are Brian Skyrms, Tyler Burge, Timothy Williamson, Susanna Siegel, Roy Sorensen, Terence Horgan, Tim Maudlin, Frank Jackson, and many others.

 

Otto Neurath on "scientific management"

This was an aspect of his work with which I was unfamiliar.  Comments from those more knowledgeable about the accuracy of this account welcome.

Generation X has more utilitarian leanings than Baby Boomers

That's one curious finding discussed in this video from the Geography of Philosophy project, along with cross-cultural studies about the objectivity of aesthetic judgments, free will, and the Knobe effect:

An interesting question is what explains the differences?  People born between 1965 and 1984 (Gen X) would in the West would have been living through the globalisation of capital and the triumph of neoliberal ideas favoring market transactions as the basis for almost all of economic and social life.    Should it be surprising that those subject to pro-market indoctrination have more utilitarian intuitions?  Perhaps experimental philosophers will dig further into the surface variations they have discovered.

(Thanks to Steve Stich for the pointer.)

Williamson on Kripke's legacy

A remarkably accessible essay, that even discusses Kripke's early seminal contribution to modal logic.

Competitive debate and philosophy

Philosopher Ben Holguin (Johns Hopkins) discusses this and related topics at Dialexicon.  (The related article is here.)

"Young Plato"

Following up on yesterday's post about "Bronx Socrates," reader Mike G. calls to my attention "Young Plato," about a teacher sharing philosophy with his young pupils in a tough working class area of Belfast:

 

Janaway on Schopenhauer

A nice introductory lecture by Christopher Janaway (Southampton), also discussing Schopenhauer's influence on Nietzsche and Freud:

(Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)

An interview with Ronald de Sousa (Toronto) about the philosophy of the emotions

Here, courtesy of Andrew van Wagner.

Vida Yao (Rice) talks about her path into philosophy and the nature of moral philosophy...

...at Dialexicon.

Norbert Hornstein (Maryland) on linguistics, rationalism, Chomsky, and more

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 28--A VERY INTERESTING COMMENT FROM A LINGUIST IN RESPONSE TO MY (ADMITTEDLY) OPEN-ENDED REQUEST.  I HOPE OTHERS KNOWLEDGEABLE WILL WEIGH IN NOW.

The interview continues (earlier).  I would be interested in reactions from readers knowledgeable about these issues.

On certainty and uncertainy in our lives

Philosophers Simon Blackburn (emeritus, North Carolina and Cambridge) and Ruth Chang (Oxford) discuss, along with the owner of IAITV.

On addiction...and recovery

An interview with philosopher and clinician Hanna Pickard (Johns Hopkins) about her quite important work on addiction.

A short interview with Peter Singer about his meta-ethics and some misconceptions about his views

Not philosophically deep, but interesting nonetheless.   Here's his final comment:

I wish more philosophers would work on things that matter. I regret the fact that so many very bright and hard-working philosophers spend their time on issues that are of interest only to other philosophers, and will never have any impact on anyone outside philosophy.

I guess I don't think having an impact on people outside philosophy is necessarily a good marker that the things being worked on actually "matter."  Popular uptake for certain philosophical ideas is often a symptom of current ideological peculiarities that admit of other explanations (vide "Effective [sic] Altruism").  On the other hand, I would agree that uptake by scholars in other fields (at least serious fields) is often a good indicator that the philosophical work deals with stuff that "matters."

A whole generation of the "greats" of post-WWII "analytic" philosophy is now almost entirely in the past

Kripke most recently, but since 2000, we have also lost Quine, Rawls, D.K. Lewis, P.F. Strawson, Dummett, Putnam, Davidson, B. Williams, Fodor, among others.  From that generation (born 1940 or earlier), the only philosophers of comparable stature who are still with us are David Kaplan, Thomas Nagel, and T.M. Scanlon.   I am reminded of this observation by Harry Frankfurt from a few years back:

In the United States, even after interest in William James and John Dewey had receded, there was lively attention to contributions by Willard Quine and Donald Davidson, John Rawls and Saul Kripke. In addition, some philosophers were powerfully moved by the gigantic speculative edifice of Whitehead. Heidegger was having a massive impact on European philosophy, as well as on other disciplines--and not only in Europe, but here as well. And, of course, there was everywhere a vigorously appreciative and productive response to the work of Wittgenstein.

Letters to the editor of the NY Times after the 1977 article on Kripke

I mentioned the 1977 NYT article about Kripke in connection with the memorial notice posted last week.  As it happens, that article generated a number of letters to the editor which are here; they are a curious assortment, including the usual sneering at analytic philosophers that has continued until the present.  There is a lot wrong with so-called analytic philosophy, to be sure, but taking it out on Kripke, who is as good as any analytic philosopher in the last 100 years, is bizarre:   analytic philosophy, like many other traditions, has contributed to knowledge and understanding of its topics (even if others did not care about those topics!), and Kripke contributed more than almost everyone.

An interview with Norbert Hornstein (Maryland) on Chomsky as philosopher

Here.

Martha Nussbaum discusses "The Fragility of Goodness" with Bill Moyers...

...back in 1988.

(I found this link via Matt Kramer on Facebook--I'd never seen this clip previously.)

Creativity: its sources, its varieties, and the conditions under which it appears

Philosopher Peter Carruthers (Maryland) discusses.

"Academic philosophy and the meaning of life"

Philosopher Helena de Bres (Wellesley) comments.  Professor de Bres earned her Ph.D. at MIT, which no doubt colors her approach to this topic, but it is one that will resonate with many trained at analytic departments.

(Thanks to Jonny Thakkar for the pointer.)

Heck on philosophy of pornography

A podcast discussion with philosopher Richard Kimberly Heck (Brown).

Wittgenstein, metaphysician

A.W. Moore (Oxford) comments.

"Five Questions" with philosopher and clinical therapist Hanna Pickard (Johns Hopkins)...

...by Kieran Setiya (MIT).

Wimsatt on Lewontin and philosophy of biology

William Wimsatt (Minnesota & also emeritus here at Chicago) comments on Richard Lewontin's legacy and his influence, in particular, on philosophy of biology.   

(Biologist Gregory Mayer, who kindly flagged this essay for me, points out that, "Philip Kitcher was not a guest in Dick’s lab, but in Steve Gould’s area. Philip, though, was acquainted with and interacted with people throughout the Museum of Comparative Zoology.")

When the University of Sydney philosophy department "split" apart for political reasons in the 1970s

This article (from Honi Soit) has been making the rounds on social media; I asked one of the protagonists in these events, philosopher Michael Devitt (now at the CUNY Graduate Center) for his take on the article.  He kindly gave permission to share the following:

This is a good article in Honi Soit, and quite accurate. It mentions the undergraduate history honors thesis by David Rayment. This gives the most thorough account of the saga that I know of. There is, however, a good chapter on it, “The Sydney Disturbances”, in James Franklin’s book, Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia (Macleay Press 2003). (I supplied both authors with a lot of the original documents – oddly, I was the only participant on Left or Right who kept significant records.)

Free online lecture and seminar series on Chinese and comparative philosophy from East China Normal University

There is a fuller description here.   The lecture schedule is here, and the seminar schedule here.   The lectures are 90-minute talks, the seminars are short-courses that run anywhere from 2-6 weeks, meeting 2-3 times a week for two hours. 

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.)

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…

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).

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.

 

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?

On growing up in communist Albania, and the aftermath

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

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.

"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.

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.)

Wolff on Geuss

Here and here.   Professor Wolff is generous as always.