Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

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.

"Some Realism about Political and Legal Philosophy"

A draft now on SSRN; the abstract below the fold:

Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) talks about what feminist theory should be...

...at Radical Philosophy.  I thought this bit was particularly interesting:

[I]n a review of my book in The Raven, Sally Haslanger accused me of lacking a social theory – that is, a theory of how a society works and how it changes, especially in progressive ways. Indeed, she declares that, whatever it is that I am doing in the book, I am ‘not doing theory’....I think her reading of my book reveals a fundamentally limited understanding of what feminist theory is and can do, one that is too much in the grip of the analytic worldview and too detached from the actual history of feminist praxis. By ‘feminist theory’ Haslanger seems to have in a mind an overt and systematic account of how society works under conditions of patriarchal domination. It is true that I offer no such account in The Right to Sex – as Haslanger notes, that is not the point of the book, nor (this is not noted by Haslanger) the point of many canonical works of what is generally taken to be feminist theory. But anyone coming from the broad tradition of Marxist and socialist feminism would recognise the social theory that underpins my work. It is this theoretical tradition and orientation that explains my focus on biological and social reproduction as central to women’s oppression; my insistence on the primacy of class as an analytic category for feminism; my specifically anti-capitalist critique of carceral feminism; my understanding of the heteronormative nuclear family as a central mechanism of capitalist production; my interest in forms of radical coalition across axes of identity; my conviction that poor women, especially poor women of colour, are agents of historical change; my anxiety about state power and bourgeois moralism; my embrace of certain psychoanalytic framings of sexual domination; and, above all, my insistence on a utopian spirit that Haslanger disparages as ‘wishful thinking’. (For what it is worth, I find the dismissal as ‘wishful’ of demands – like socialised childcare and on-demand abortion – that feminists of the 1970s thought would be quickly met, nothing less than a capitulation to a neoliberal common-sense that opposes itself in every way to women’s liberation....)

Analytic/Continental divide in the journals: a comment on Schwitzgebel's latest study

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) has posted another of his interesting empirical studies, this time of references to major "Continental" figures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida in four leading Anglophone journals:  Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Mind, and Nous.   This chart is a useful representation of what he found:

See Schwitzbgebel's post for similar charts about Heidegger and other Continental figures.  A few thoughts below the fold.

Richard Marshall interviews Justin Tiwald (San Francisco State, moving to Hong Kong)...

...at 3:16 AM.

A debate over nothing

A popular piece on the Heidegger/Carnap debate.

Richard Marshall interviews Michael Rosen (Harvard)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Bertrand Russell and the "realist" revolt in metaphysics

Philosopher Fraser MacBride (Manchester) discusses.

Some skepticsm about grouping Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch together philosophically

Philosopher Jennifer Frey (South Carolina) makes some very good points in this review essay of the recent books we have noted previously; some excerpts:

On both accounts, each member of the quartet was able to reach her full potential as a philosopher because the Big Men on Campus—A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Richard Hare and others—were away fighting the war. Their absence was critical, these books argue, because these men, who dominated the intellectual scene at Oxford, were hell-bent on destroying traditional philosophical reflection into metaphysics and morals...

This narrative frame comes from Mary Midgley herself, who, in 2013, wrote a letter to the Guardian arguing that she and her friends were able to thrive as philosophers because “there were fewer men about then"....

While this account fits with Midgley’s idea that women are bound by their sex to do philosophy differently (and perhaps better) than men, and surely reflects her own experience of Oxford, it strikes me as out of joint with what we know about the personalities of some of her friends. The insistence of all three authors on shoehorning these women’s stories into an all-too-familiar pop-feminist narrative distorts the unique nature of the bonds these women forged together. It also insinuates, insultingly, that they needed to be treated with kid gloves in order to mature intellectually. I find it difficult to believe that Anscombe needed to be sheltered from the clever men of Oxford in order to cultivate her legendary philosophical habits, or that Murdoch would have lacked the boldness to hold her own in a room full of men who plainly lacked the imaginative vision she herself possessed...

A 1961 program introducing existentialism

Here, featuring the philosopher (and Sartre's English translator) Hazel Barnes.

(Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)

Justice Ginsburg is a philosopher, and other great moments in the Dunning-Kruger Effect

A propos this (and especially this), it was recently brought to my attention that philosopher Sandra LaPointe (McMaster), opined as follows on Twitter:

Richard Marshall interviews Joseph Mitterer (Klagenfurt [Austria])...

...at 3:16 AM.  I thought this was interesting, about his road into philosophy and the situation in Austria after WWII:

Still at school I had the chance to attend the annual European Forum at Alpbach, a village in the Austrian Tyrol near my home town. There I met Hans Albert, Karl-Otto Apel, Paul Feyerabend, Walter Kaufmann and Herbert Marcuse amongst others.

It was the mid sixties of the last century, I hated the confinements of my high school, the Ex-Nazi teachers, and I couldn’t wait for these three weeks of intellectual challenge to arrive in late summer. I was excited by the atmosphere of Alpbach and it was there, where I decided to put my life on philosophy.

Academic philosophy in Austria back then was hardly attractive. Twenty years after the war the scene in Vienna was dominated by a transcendental philosophy whose Post-Nazi-representatives had prevented the return of the exiled philosophers of the “Vienna Circle”.

Philosopher James Ladyman (Bristol) talks about "Metaphysics Naturalized"...

...at Interalia Magazine.  An excerpt:

Scientists and others sometimes deride philosophy on the basis of very little if any evidence of what it is like. There is a lot of extraordinarily brilliant work in metaphysics but there is a predominance of a priori methodology and a lack of engagement with scientific knowledge. This means that while the work is not worthless, since it often exemplifies great rigour and clarity and sophistication of argument and concepts, it is largely irrelevant for someone interested in the nature of reality. Our idea is that naturalised metaphysics exists to say how the world is in the light of all the sciences, and to say something about how the ontologies of the sciences relate to each other and to physics. We define fundamental physics as the science that is maximally general in respect of the scales to which it applies. We argue that as yet we have no account of a fundamental level nor any reason to think there is one and so we ought to unify the sciences without reference to one. This we do with the ideas of scale relativity of ontology and real patterns. The latter have causal/lawlike structure so we are realists about causation, but also pluralists about it so that the causation in evolutionary dynamics can in principle be different from that in economics or medicine. The world conceived as a totality, a single finished entity, may not exist, but there are plenty of things that do including galaxies, cells, viruses, atoms and electromagnetic radiation, and let’s not forget people

Changing perceptions of time during the pandemic

Philosopher Ian Phillips (Johns Hopkins) comments.

Richard Marshall interviews Brian Skyrms (UC Irvine)...

...at 3:16 AM.  Very informative overview of his work.

On Wittgenstein's early private notebooks

Philosopher Kieran Setiya (MIT) comments; an excerpt:

With rare exceptions, analytic philosophy cannot be read as poetry. If it has value, it’s not the value of artistic achievement, unless perhaps in the medium of thought. Nor does analytic philosophy explore “the problem of life.” There’s plenty of work in applied philosophy, including ethics, engaging with practical questions—climate change, democracy, the treatment of non-human animals. But these are not the sorts of problems Wittgenstein fought. For the most part, analytic philosophy is detached, at least in its self-image, from the personal struggles of philosophers.

Not just philosophy, but philosophers: that is what these notebooks help us to see. A philosophy of philosophers, even—shown, if not said.

Philosopher George Sher (Rice) talks about the morality of "nasty thoughts"...

...at The Dissenter.

Richard Marshall interviews Hud Hudson (Western Washington)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Blast from the past: Sean Kelly (Harvard) on the renewed interest in phenomenology

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--SOME INTERESTING COMMENTS, INCLUDING FROM PROF. KELLY

Back in 2008.  How do things look today?

Dolan reads Pinkard reading Sartre's "Critique of Dialectical Reason"

Interesting, especially considering how spectacularly difficult Sartre's late text is.

"Naturalism and Its Challenges," redux

The Iranian Institute of Philosophy has posted videos of all the talks from the conference earlier this week.  The videos aren't labelled, but many readers will no doubt recognize many of the speakers, including Timothy Williamson, Philip Pettit, Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Daniel Dennett, and others.

Russell vs. Hegel

A retelling of the story, more favorable to Hegel, by philosopher Paul Redding (Sydney).

On the meanings of Schrodinger's cat

Several philosophers (including Jenann Ismael [Columbia], Tim Maudlin [NYU], and Alyssa Ney [UC Davis]) are among those commenting.

Susanna Newcome, early 18th-century utilitarian

Interesting.

Misak on Lipscomb on Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch

This is one of the more philosophically substantial reviews I've seen; an excerpt:

Those in the grip of the picture that is supposed to result in inaction on the ethical stage were progressive socialists for the most part, heavily involved on the ground in political and ethical matters. Ayer was a left-wing activist and agitated against appeasement. The members of the Vienna Circle objected, in strong words and actions, to Nazism. Those who manged to flee (often to America) were engaged in progressive politics there. Hare had been a prisoner of war, building the Burma-Thailand railway under inhuman conditions, doing countless good deeds for his fellow POWs along the way. He worked out his philosophical theory during this time and would become a leading utilitarian in the 20^th century, a philosophical project deeply committed to social reform and individual improvement. He wrote papers on topics ranging from slavery to abortion to whether we shouldn’t eat animals.

Do we not require an explanation for how the [proponents of a philosophical outlook]...so apparently bloodless for ethics, could be believed by philosophers acting so powerfully at the moral coalface, at the place where whatever views they had about ethics met practical problems?...

Here’s [one] possible answer. Ayer and the members of the Vienna Circle found it liberating to distinguish fact from value, so that they could escape the constraints of the so-called ethical facts, which were lodged within a religious framework that dictated what was right and what was wrong.

"The return of metaphysics"

Philosophers Patricia Churchlanad (UC San Diego) and Galen Strawson (Texas/Austin) discuss at IAITV (also in the discussion, alas, is Hilary Lawson, the owner of IAITV--but one can skip past that if one wants).

Richard Marshall interviews Justin E.H. Smith (Paris VII)...

...at 3:16 AM.  Entertaining and eclectic!

A methodological problem for X-Phil?

Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) discusses recent work by his doctoral student Kyle Thompson.