Jon Cogburn's Blog

a tale of three receiverships (hat tip John Protevi)

Original story HERE. Man I miss Lingua Franca. Oh well, at least aldaily survived that implosion.

I knew two of the five people interviewed during the Schmidt era of the Yale Philosophy Department and the stories of how they were treated were pretty shocking. I mean, inviting someone in to give a paper for a senior position is supposed to be very different from interviewing someone right out of graduate school. And you are supposed to treat people right out of graduate school with respect, for that matter.

Reading the article makes me feel blessed to not be in a department riven by such factions. It sounds incredibly unpleasant.

Leiter's bestiary

Some real wisdom HERE. An excerpt:

The Absent Faculty:  Are the faculty who look so good on paper actually around and interested in working with students?  I heard a story about a key senior person in one department who is an alcoholic, and who simply ignores his students.  In another department, almost all the graduate students had to sign an open letter to the faculty a few years ago protesting the failure of faculty to return graded papers and their general lack of interest in mentoring the students.   In yet another department, a well-known senior member of the faculty spent so much time travelling and lecturing around the world, that he rarely had time to review or discuss work carefully with students. 

The Sexual Predator Faculty:  Are women treated as young philosophers and aspiring professionals, or do faculty regularly view them as a potential source for dates and sexual liasons?  It's a bit shocking to realize that this is still a live issue in some departments, but, sadly, it is.  Are faculty-student sexual relations common in the department?  What happens when the relations end?  Are there repeated cases of sexual harassment complaints against faculty in the department?  Do they ever result in discipline?  I suppose it is possible this could be an issue for male students, but all the reports I've gotten over the years have been from women victimized by male faculty. 

The Nasty Faculty:  Talented philosophers and scholars often differ, dramatically, in how pleasant they are personally and professionally.  I recall the story of one department where a member of the faculty was known to reduce students to tears in seminar.  In another department, a faculty member regularly refuses to work with students, even those interested in his areas; he works only with those he deems "worthy," and there are not many of them!  In another department, faculty openly express doubts about the competence of the graduate students and their ability.  Make sure the philosophers who seem most interesting to you don't fall into these categories!

The Factionalized Faculty:  Many faculties are "factionalized," in the sense that there are sub-groups that rarely see "eye to eye" about departmental issues, from appointments to admissions.  Where this becomes worrisome, though, for a prospective student is when certain members of the faculty who share interests and approaches control all the key resources--fellowships, resources for speakers etc.--and use that control to define "in" and "out" groups of faculty and students:  students with the "wrong" philosophical interests or who express an interest in the "wrong" faculty members are denied access to important perks and support.  This kind of ugly factionalization is less common, but it exists.

The context is Leiter encouraging visiting students to get information from current students.

schedule for LSU Mardi Gras conference this weekend

Keynote lectures by L.A. Paul and Levi Bryant.

It will be fantastic stuff (website for the book at left HERE).

2012 LSU Philosophy Conference Schedule
Location: Student Union (Third Floor)

Friday March 9—The Capital Chamber (329)
3:00: REGISTRATION

4:00: Session I—A
Joseph Forte, Ph.D. (Cand.)
The Catholic University of America
“Explaining Hope in Plato’s Philebus”
Comments: Leah Orth

5:00: Session II—A
Kaplan Hasanoglu, Ph.D.
Emmanuel College
“Why Fallibilism?”
Comments: Jeff Roland, Ph.D.
Friday March 9—The Red River Room (323)

4:00: Session I—B
Kurt Blankschaen, M.A. (Cand.)
Arizona State University
“The Moral Lie”
Comments: Paul Cynar

Not to speak ill of the dead, but. . .

A friend of mine reminded me today that Ruth Barcan Marcus signed the letter to Cambridge protesting Derrida's honorary degree. I hope we can deplore that while still cherishing Barcan Marcus' intellectual legacy and what she meant to so many people as a teacher and friend.

In  my previous note I criticized the tendency of so many people to blame Yale dysfunction on Marcus and Marcus alone. This apportioning of blame is, as far as I can tell, amounts to a null hypothesis for a couple of thousand people at least. I still think that it is mistaken.

This being said, I think we can also all deplore that it's taken so many decades for the phenomenological movement to be represented in Ivy League Schools. My understanding is that during the Yale dysfunctional period the warfare resulted in both analytic and continental philosophers not getting tenure, which is equally deplorable, and why the department was rightfully taken over by the administration.*

However, the damage done to analytic philosophy as a whole was negligible (though obviously the damage to the junior analytic philosophers caught up in the warfare was anything but). I mean, there was a kind of second-order damage to analytic philosophers just from not having continental philosophers around. But the damage done to continental philosophy was much more extreme, resulting in a kind of ghettoization that is both unjustified and dysfunctional in all sorts of ways. I hope that my generation, or maybe the next, is in the process of getting past this ghettoization.**

[Note:

*If I'm wrong about any of this, please correct me in the comment section.

**Note that one can hope this without hoping that the two traditions somehow merge, which I don't think would be a good thing. I can like cubism and abstract expressionism without hoping the two merge. Why should intellectual traditions be any different. Moreover as an abstract expressionist painter, I can still learn from cubists and pop art people without having the pretense that some one correct form of art is going to overtake all distinct traditions. What a perfectly horrible thing that would be.]

letter to the NY Times about Ruth Barcan Marcus

Via Leiter Reports HERE, a very nice letter from Michael Della Rocca, Don Garrett, and Diana Raffman to the people in charge of obituaries in the New York Times.

Dear Mr. McDonald and Mr. Kadden,

Because time is crucial in this matter, we will be brief, direct, and blunt.

Ruth Barcan Marcus -- who died, as we believe you know, on Sunday, February 19th -- was one of the central figures in philosophy over the last 65 years.   Her work advanced in multifarious ways our understanding of logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and moral philosophy.  Her results in logic in the 1940's alone -- work whose significance is still being plumbed -- is sufficient for her to have a permanent place in the pantheon of logicians.  Her discovery of the Barcan formula forever changed the way in which we must reason about necessity, possibility, and identity.  The seminal essays in which she introduced the formula quite simply created a new field of logic -- quantified modal logic -- a field which continues to thrive.    Her subsequent development of this work changed our understanding of the reference of words and proper names and made possible much of the most important work in the philosophy of language down to the present day.  Her pursuits in moral philosophy -- embodied in what is perhaps her most widely-cited paper, "Moral Dilemmas" -- changed the way philosophers approach the topic of moral obligation.  (This paper was a focus of the recent obituary in the _Economist_.)  All of this is enough to be worthy of recognition in the Times.

But this brief summary of Marcus' scholarly contributions does not even begin to touch on her powerful role in philosophy and in academia general.  She was one of the few women in philosophy and especially in logic at a time was sexism was rampant in the field.  She persevered and succeeded not only in establishing herself in the field but in helping to bring about changes in hiring practices so that appointments in philosophy were no longer governed by the "old boys network".  For this and other roles she played, the American Philosophical Association recently awarded her the Quinn Prize for service to the profession

I know that you have already received much information about Marcus' accomplishments and accolades.  So we will not say more about them here.  But we feel obliged to point out that the fact that an obituary has not yet appeared in the Times indicates that you have not yet decided whether to publish such an obituary or that -- absurdly -- you have already decided not to do so.  This is, in our opinion, outrageous.  The Times has, we are happy to note, provided timely recognition of many prominent philosophers in its obituary section in recent years.  (A list of several such obituaries was sent to you by Michael Della Rocca through Yale.)  None of these other philosophers has been more significant both to philosophy and to the profession of philosophy than Marcus.  And many of those who were recognized by the Times were, we must say, figures who were not nearly as significant in these respects as Marcus was.  If the Times were to fail to recognize Marcus, this would be not only an embarrassment for the Times, but it would reveal that the Times is woefully out of touch with what are the most significant developments within philosophy over the last half-century or more.  We do not expect the Times' authors and editors to be philosophers themselves, but we -- as well as the cultural and intellectual community at large -- do expect the Times to be aware of the most basic accomplishments in central academic fields, including developments in philosophy, the oldest and most fundamental field of intellectual inquiry.

We hope that the Times has not failed in its responsibilities.  There is still time to rectify this scandalous omission.  We urge you to do so.

Sincerely,

Michael Della Rocca
Andrew Downey Orrick Professor
Yale University

Don Garrett
Professor and Chair
Department of Philosophy
NYU

Diana Raffman
Professor
Department of Philosophy
University of Toronto

I don't know how big a deal a NY Times obituary is. But I understand the letter writers' angst.

The thing is, Marcus just got crap from all sides. And  sadly, I suspect that any woman or her overwhelming genius from that era got an equivalent amount of crap.

If you read the transcript of the classic meeting where she presented her refutation of Quine on quantified modal logic, then Kripke and Quine's pathological inability to take her seriously really do read like something out of one of the very most uncomfortable episodes of Mad Men (this is just an unbiased reading of the transcripts, maybe it was less foul in person). And she was right! I'm not claiming that Kripke plagiarized her. But the disconnect between how he and Quine treated her in the transcripts with the fact that his later work entails that she is right remains incredibly jarring.

On the other hand, there's a narrative from continental philosophers blaming her for every single aspect of the massive dysfunction of the Yale Philosophy Department during the period that led to them being put under receivership. But, again, these stories are way too convenient. In real life there's always blame to spread around for such institutional failures. The only analogue I can come up with is Roman historians (esp. Seutonisus) blaming Livia and Messalina for everything that went wrong during the reigns of Augustus and Claudius. This kind of thing was no more plausible then than it is now.

In both cases I can't help but seeing the typical sexist Catch 22 that talented women still face, how ever many decades after the Barcan/Quine/Kripke meeting. If you exhibit any greatness at all and you are female, people are so invested in you being out of line that they will treat you horribly and tell the most fantastical tales about you.

Well, Ruth Barcan Marcus was great. She has a formula, and an inverse formula, rightfully named after her. These formulae are so fundamental that one could do far worse than spending the rest of one's life thinking about the them.

Stuff that Senator Santorum Says

Rick Santorum just said that liberal professors desire to take religion away from students.

The thing is we're not very good at it. Americans who go to college are more likely to retain their childhood religions than Americans who don't (Charles Murray's recent book has the stats).

It's also kind of weird that Santorum calls Obama a "snob" in this context. First, Obama has been focusing on vo-tech and community colleges. Those of us at four year institutions haven't been having the best time of things these past four years. Second, if you know even just one person who teaches at a community college you realize that working class non-college educated parents desperately want their kids to get decent educations. So, again, the accusation of "snobbery" doesn't quite scan.

I think Gingrich is much better at cornpone populism than Santorum, and in fact maybe Romney's money people did the country a favor with all those millions of dollars of attack adds.

[Note:

As I wrote the above, I was not in a state of high moral dudgeon, and thus remained consistent with my Lent resolution. Bemusement fine. Indignation not.]

There is no such thing as good history of philosophy, a derivation

This is absolutely clear from the following deduction.

1. Good historians realize that inconsistency in belief is the norm for humans, and that any writer who has written enough will have achieved inconsistency.
2. Good philosophers read anachronistically.
3. People who do history of philosophy try to discern consistent interpretations that are not anachronistic.
4. Therefore, the history of philosophy is neither good philosophy nor good history.
5. Thus, from 4. by logic, it follows that there is no such thing as good history of philosophy. Q.E.D.

I think I'm actually serious about this.*

[Note:

*This being said, the above deduction should make us appreciate all the more people like Frederick Beiser, Jonathan Bennett, Strawson, and Martha Nusbaum who manage to do good history and good philosophy, though the fact that Bennett, Strawson, and Nusbaum are routinely derided by other historians of philosophy for being anachronistic proves my point in the most chilling possible way. Beiser rocks so much that he is sui generis. If the phrase "the exception that proves the rule" means anything, then Beiser's picture is in the dictionary next to it.]

Excellence Schmexcellence. . . Feh!

One of the weirdest things about being an academic in a time where higher education is no longer envisioned as a public good (but rather as a private investment made by the student), is that the management-speak of administrators sometimes becomes more and more galling.

An ex provost at LSU always used to say that we were reaching for "the highest tiers of excellence" as if reaching for excellence wasn't good enough. They even had a huge banner across the thoroughfare that runs through campus that had some trademarked catchphrase with the word "Excellence" in it (if I remember right, something extra stupid like "LSU. Excellence in Motion.").

This always bothered me. Why not, "LSU. A Pretty Good Deal, All things Considered"? Or "LSU. Not Too Shabby. Seriously." Or something like "LSU. We're Basically Competent."

There is actually a bigger issue here. I don't think that excellence is something that non-specialist managers are very good at selecting for. In my experience, the best universities with the highest levels of excellence are the ones where the administrators just work very hard to help to establish competence across the board. Then in that atmosphere, areas of excellence emerge organically. This is what Texas A&M decided to do around twenty-five years or so ago, and the results have been dramatic.

But there are pretty severe selective pressures against the A&M model being implemented today. The opposing idea, vastly more common at second string schools, is the "build to strength" model, where administrators shift resources to programs they perceive as being the strongest.The reason it is selected for is that it centralizes more power (and money*) in the hands of administrators, even in times when resources are declining.

But it is actually severely dysfunctional for all sorts of reasons. (1) As I noted, it maintains a lot of the bad aspects of communism, with people at the top making decisions about resource allocations that can't possibly be sensitive to what's really going on. So a Peter department that would have risen to national prominence if it were funded at a level of competence does not, while the Paul department that got all the extra goodies doesn't utilize those effectively. (2) Even if the administrators had a perfect track record, at the very best you get increasing mediocrity in most of your programs. But one or two great programs surrounded by mediocrity doesn't make a competent, much less "excellent" university. (3) It's a huge waste of resources. The amount of money to get your five lowest performing programs to raise ten spaces on national rankings (just by funding them to a level of competence) is almost certainly far less than to get your best program to raise one space. But this is exactly what "build to strength" does. Again, consider the A&M model. What's the norm for funding department x (numbers of lines, graduate assistantships, etc.) at schools ranked better than us but with comparable budgets? Take that as the null hypothesis and then stay out of the way as much as possible, restricting your meddling to things like putting incompetent programs into receivership. If you can establish a base level of competence, far more excellence will out across the board for much, much less money.

the most depressing thing about philosophical finitude

is that to make any progress in a philosophical project you have to bracket huge swaths of philosophy: issues, arguments, thinkers, epochs, etc. Say that you are working on inferring causality from mathematical equations in physics. To even address that issue you might have to just assume that Hume's skeptical problems about modality have been solved.

But the stuff one person brackets might be absolutely central to another person.

It would be very nice if we were all humble about this, but that's often not the case. Some weird facet of human psychology makes it the case that people want to be condescendingly dismissive towards the thinkers and issues that they are bracketing so as to get on with their own work.

I don't quite get why this is the case, though it's something I've both had to fight against in my own soul, and been victim to.

One of my best papers is probably the one with Jason Megill on the Lucas/Penrose argument, but it took us five years to get it published (in Minds and Machines, which is great). The paper is clear enough to place in a generalist journals, and we really do present a version of the Lucas/Penrose argument that does not fall prey to any of the extant criticisms. But after weird rejection after weird rejection, it just became clear to me that the phil. mind reviewers for a lot of generalist journals had an overwhelming psychic investment in the debate being closed.

Maybe that's arrogant. . . in any case it's not a big deal because Megill and I have published plenty, and Minds and Machines is a great place to end up in anyhow.

I think it's much harder with respect to how the lack of humility can damage friendships. I don't know how many times I've heard someone who has either not read a thinker I'm excited about (e.g. Robert Brandom, Graham Priest, Graham Harman, Crispin Wright), or who maybe read a little bit in graduate school, say something completely dismissive like, "well X is just deeply confused." In these contexts it's always when the issue is one that the person has to bracket to do their own work.

Which is fine as far as it goes. But still depressing.

I just wish we could be a little more humble about these kinds of judgments. Why can't we just admit that we're finite and we have to make bets about what is going to be most useful for our own work? Can't we do this without denigrating people who make different bets?

No. Humans are just too depraved.

[P.S. This train of thought motivated by an interesting and I think very difficult discussion at Leiter Reports HERE. The discussion caused my thoughts, but I'm not sure that my thoughts are that relevant to it. I don't take the above to be inconsistent with what anyone wrote, so I posted them on my own space.]

first day back at LSU after the break

I went in to school today to do transfer advising. This involves helping students get LSU credit for courses they took elsewhere. The trick is to try to make sure they get as much credit for classes that count towards General Education Credit. For example, the student may have taken a class that is a combination of practical and theoretical philosophy, but our practical philosophy class would only fulfill the "elective" component of their degree audit, whereas our theoretical ethics class fulfills one of their "humanities" GEC parts of the cafeteria tray. So in a case like that you try to get the student the GEC credit.

It sounds tedious, but it's actually really rewarding. You meet all these students who are really psyched to be coming to LSU and if you do your job well and look at their official degree audits you get to help them quite a bit as far as being on track to graduate in their major. It's three to five minutes of your time and you are meeting somebody cool and at their best and also making their day.

It's also the kind of thing that requires practical wisdom of the sort a computer is probably never going to master. There are just so many finely grained distinctions concerning how one class translates into another (this example actually illustrates Lance and Hawthorne's (correct!) take on Quinean indeterminacy really well, but I won't go into that).

This kind of thing changes alot when you have kids of your own. . . When I see these parents and their kids getting tours of the campus I sometimes get a little choked up now in a way I didn't used to. It's quite a fine thing actually, deeply rooted in love.

The Onion on LSU/Alabama Game

Maybe easier to read HERE.

I don't know how complicit I am in this sorry business.

I do teach at LSU, but the only sports I watch are professional wrestling and competitive cooking type reality shows. I can't for the life of me understand why people want to watch other people move little balls back and forth. Ever since I was a kid (surrounded by Alabama fans, coincidentally) I haven't been able to get it one bit.

I know that there is aesthetic pleasure to be had in watching anybody do something well, but that's pretty much vetoed by the other relevant fact, that if something is not worth doing, then it is not worth doing well.

Sorry for being grumpy. Geaux Tigers. . .

syllabus to class on Graham Harman

My syllabus to PHIL 4952 Topics in Metaphysics for this Spring Semester at LSU is on-line HERE.

This is going to be an absolute blast, and also help substantially with the Speculative Realism book that I'm writing now.

nice IHE essay by Jay and Graff on why Humanities degrees are good for employability

Essay HERE.

Joe Bob Briggs would have appended, "I shouldn't have to say this" to the whole thing, but it is something that we need to be saying over and over again.

 

Speculative Realism is neither continental nor analytic in the deeper substantive sense

Characteristically nice post about the analytic-continental divide from Graham Harman HERE.

Whenever Harman posts on this issue I find myself agreeing with everything he says. With Harman I think it is much more healthy than not that there are different traditions, and that they remain different

In place of thinking the division should disappear, I would instead make the following claims: (1) an a priori unwillingness from members of one tradition to learn from members of other traditions is problematic, (2) almost equally problematic are people from one camp who are only open to people from the other tradition to the extent that those people articulate views that seem to support those of the supposed pluralist's,* and (3) whatever you think about the different styles, the thinkers covered by continental philosophers should be taught in analytic programs (especially German Idealism and 19th Century more broadly, but also the things Leiter derides).

I should note in passing that one of the things I like about Speculative Realism is that its main practitioners do not embody any of the above vices. Analytic and Continental describe first and foremost training regimes for academic philosophers. But at a certain point you should put on your big boy pants just try to do philosophy, which requires following the muse wherever she wants to take you.

Avoidance of the above vices is not accidental, since Speculative Realists reject two substantive positions at the heart of the most significant continental and analytic philosophers, positions that started with the Positivists and Heidegger, and that rise up zombie-like over and over and over again.

This becomes crystal clear if one realizes that the divide between analytic and continental philosophers is much less philosophically important than a couple of other deeper divisions (1) between anti-metaphysical thinkers and at least anti-anti-metaphysical thinkers,** and (2) between naturalists and non-naturalists.

Weirdly, analytical philosophy's founding sin was combining naturalism and anti-metaphysics and continental philosophy's founding sin was combining non-naturalism and anti-metaphyiscs! But naturalism is false (see Michael Ruse HERE) and anti-metaphysics is incoherent (read the early critics of Kant or Graham Priest for that matter!).

In analytical philosophy anti-metaphysics is where naturalism goes to, if not die, continue some kind of a zombie-like existence. This goes all the way from Marburg School Neo-Kantianism to Robert Brandom, currently holding the office of the last positivist (after Bergmann then Quine and then Rorty before him). Brandom-type Pittsburgh Hegelianiasm, for all of its manifest virtues, almost constitutively returns to the kind of view that Heidegger derides in his very first (emergency war) lectures, of the universe as some valueless hunk with humans (in the guise of social practice) guilding and staining it. This is properly neo-Kantian, not Hegelian, as is the quietistic anti-metaphysics*** that obscures the basic move.

But, on the contrary, in continental philosophy anti-metaphysics comes from the Heideggerian view that science itself is a founded mode over something anti-metaphysics phenomenology reveals to be more originary. So while analytic naturalism leads to anti-metaphysics (because one must deride as meaningless questions that the natural sciences cannot answer), continental anti-metaphysics leads to anti-naturalism.

One is actually tempted to join the two above observations to make the following sort of argument. Analytic philosophy shows that naturalism refutes metaphysics. Continental philosophy shows that the refutation of metaphysics refutes naturalism. Therefore naturalism refutes naturalism.

In any case, I raise my flag with anti-naturalist anti-anti-metaphysicians. We're a tiny minority in both analytic and continental philosophy. With the possible exception of a non-trivial set of Christian apologists (usually working in a dialectical setting horribly tainted by either fideism or its opposition, IMHO), analytical philosophers who are not anti-metaphysicians are almost all naturalists (argument above notwithstanding)! And, with the notable exceptions of the Speculative Realists, Deleuzians, and some other heroic figures, continental philosophy by and large continues to chug along wearing the same old phenomenological straightjacket, with its attendent quietism and other forms of recycled neo-Kantianism. Note that this is perversely a straightjacket that any proper reader of the German Idealists would have thrown off long ago. Well with Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Priest's readings of this tradition,as well as Graham Harman's indefeteagable labor, at least some of us have begun to wiggle our way out of the damned thing.****

[Notes:

*It's very hard not to fall into this trap, perhaps impossible. Some strategies for an analytic philosopher who wants to be a "pluralist": (1) You must, must, must avoid the temptation to use your continental friends to give yourself a patina depth by simply adding a footnote when one of those continental friends tells you that someone you've never read has an idea kind of like yours, (2) You must go to talks about thinkers you don't like and be vigilently open to the idea that informed people of good will disagree with you about your assessment, (3) As much as possible, maintain an active reading life that has nothing to do with whatever current project on which you are working; this helps in all sorts of ways.

**The distinction between anti-metaphysics and anti-anti-metaphysics should not be confused with the distinction between anti-realists and anti-anti-realists. John McDowell is both an anti-metaphysician and an anti-anti-realist. See the next note.

***John McDowell is, like most continental philosophers, actually anti-metaphysical and non-naturalist. Brandom claims to be non-naturalist, but he really is not, at least in the important sense that the early Heidegger adumbrated. This is the entire reason, I think, that Crispin Wright famously put John McDowell down as not really being an analytic philosopher, but (as far as I know) has never said anything remotely similar about fellow Pittsburgh Hegelian Robert Brandom.

****Just because nothing above makes this sufficiently clear- I think Heidegger is one of the most important five philosophers in history and also that Brandom is easily in the top five of living philosophers.]

Michael Ruse on Alvin Plantinga's recent bout of sophistry

Chronicle Brainstorm article HERE. Takeway:

So this is my beef with Plantinga – as it is with others of his ilk, including those at his institution, Calvin College, that led to the theologian John Schneider getting the sack because he suggested that Adam and Eve are not literal figures. It is not that they are Christians or that they believe in the bible or design. My defense of the legitimacy of these views is what gets me into hot water with the likes of Dawkins and Coyne. It is rather that, because of their unsophisticated versions of these beliefs, they simply are not prepared to engage in mature, responsible scholarship. And they bully those who are.

 I kind of feel sorry for Plantinga, because I think it would be very hard to keep one's wits about oneself if one were deified to the extent that he is by so many people, especially analytic philosophers who are both religious and conservative.

As someone who grew up in a conservative, religious millieu I get this. It's kind of like C.S. Lewis. . . You have no idea how empowering the Narnia novels are for kids who love fantasy but whose parents don't let them read huge swaths of literature. For a lot of my friends Plantinga was like a grownup version of that. They could actually engage with reasonable philosophy in these really crude evangelical colleges where you are taught ludicrous things about scripture and the world. You have no idea how liberating just being allowed to discourse reasonably, reading good philosophy and literature, is in that kind of awful atmosphere. . .

But it seems clear to me that Plantinga now is complicit in this very atmosphere, with his actions regarding homosexual faculty, defaming people who support science education, and yes, before that with his awful "Advice to Christian Philosophers" paper.

To whom much is given. . .

You aren't the exception

Nice Inside Higher Ed essay HERE by Nate Kreuter on why we still go to graduate school even though the chances of tenure track employment are so dim. One take away:

What is so impossible for many graduate students to understand is that everybody in their cohort is just as smart and hardworking as they themselves are. At the graduate level, the smarts and diligence that once set students apart from their undergraduate peers will no longer set them apart, but merely allow them to keep up. It is almost impossible for many beginning graduate students to grasp that having above average intelligence and an unimpeachable work ethic will mean only that they are average graduate students. That's quite a shock to some people.

Then there's luck.

Kreuter's adumbration of different way luck intervenes during your late twenties and early thirties really hit home with me, bringing back all sorts of memories of my own path through that decade as well as the travails and triumphs of many dear friends.

It's a lovely piece; Joe Bob says check it out.

Todd May is my hero

And not merely for developing the theory of post-structuralist anarchism.

Please read his open letter to the rest of us HERE.

Related petition HERE.

weird practice of sending unsolicited books to philosophy departments

If you are in the biz long enough, you start getting free textbooks. This much is understandable.

What I don't quite get is groups that bombard philosophy departments with non-textbooks. In my ten years at LSU these have come from the following three sources: (1) The Church of Scientology (various works attributed to L. Ron Hubbard), (2) The Ayn Rand Institute (various works attributed to Leonard Peikoff), and (3) an institute affiliated with the now beatified Antonio Rosmini.

What's the point of doing this? I don't see it.

With Hubbard and Peikoff, I kind of get it. The people working around them are insecure because at some level they realize they worship complete hacks. So this manifests itself in two contradictory desires: (1) to get academic recognition, (2) to harass the academics (who realize that they are hacks) by bothering them with boxes of crap books. Though the desires are contradictory, they lead to the same action.

With Rosmini the motivation has to be different, because from what I can tell, he was in no way a hack (nice wikipedia article HERE). But the amount of money spent sending the books could probably at this point have endowed several chairs where the holder agrees to teach classes on Rosmini. Maybe the institute is doing this too. I don't know. Maybe there is some payoff to sending out all those books that I'm not getting.

Professor or Hobo?

HERE. I scored eight out of ten. Beat that!

I've actually been mistaken as an indigent person in Baton Rouge on multiple occasions. But I think in my case it's more because walking and riding bicycles are associated with poverty in the American South. I mean, I don't have a big beard, and my personal hygiene is generally beyond reproach.

The first two times were both on Thanksgiving days. I was walking around downtown Baton Rouge and people just assumed I was looking for the free Thanksgiving meal for poor people. On one occasion this led to a minor altercation with a police officer who kept insisting that I get back in line. The third time was when I happened to ride my bicycle near a Pancake prayer breakfast for homeless people underneath the Mississippi River Bridge. The pancake cookers really meant well. . . The fourth time was after Hurricane Katrina. Again, I was riding my bicycle. Some nice young aid worker from the North stopped me and kept trying to give me toothbrushes and stuff. He just didn't believe that I was a college professor. Maybe if I did have a big beard I would have been able to convince him. . .

[Just Breaking Update: Graham Harman only gets five out of ten right, which means I am currently in the lead by three professor/hobos.]

brief meditation on Leitericity Ranking

A few months ago Roy Cook did an interesting M-Phi post on Erdos numbers (full disclosure: my Erdos number is equal to my Cook/Erdos number minus one), that sensitized me to statistical linkages, and in this spirit I want to propose a blog tracking measure known as Leitericity Ranking, which is determined by taking the number of links on your blog divided by the number of times on which those links are clicked.

From personal experience I'd say that Leiter Reports has a Leitericity Ranking of around 9,000, which is pretty remarkable for a philosophy blog. The fist day one gets on average 6,000 hits if Leiter links to one of your posts, with a drop off of slightly over half that on the second day, and then a more significant drop the day after that.

Also from personal experience I know that if Brian Leiter links to a blog post that links to one of your own posts, then you will get about 800 more hits over three days than you would have otherwise. This ranking would be much harder to measure though, since there is no automatic way to measure how many hits you would have gotten otherwise.

Another Christian University Bans the Least Among Us

Once again, the rest of us must humbly implore Jesus to protect us from his followers.

Shorter University in Rome Georgia, has just forced all 200 employees to sign a pledge testifying that they aren't homosexuals. Story HERE. Highpoint of the article:

Shorter President Don Dowless told WSBTV that the goal wasn’t to offend people, and that lots of Christian schools have similar pledges. "These are biblical positions," he said.

I should note that not one of these schools prohibit wearing different types of fabric at the same time or seeing a naked woman menstruating or having sex without the purpose of procreating (possibly one or two prohibit divorce, even though the divorce rate of conservative christians is much higher than it is for the rest of us). None of them encourage polygamy. Even though these are all much, much clearly"biblical positions" than anything one might think about homosexuality (please watch the video at right).

The point is, everyone has to pick and choose which biblical injunctions count as moral ones. If you are an unchristian bigot who uses the religion in the manifestly Luciferian pursuit of wanting to feel better than others, then you are going to pick parts of the bible that help you be an even crappier person. If you take Jesus' actual words with a modicum of the seriousness they deserve, you are not.

The point at which I have joined the loyal opposition

Well, I am officially a member of SPEP now.

It's something I frankly should have done years ago, and my own particular obligation to sign THIS PETITION gave me the final push.

Finally, I know that there's a meme loose in the land that SPEP isn't really pluralist enough. O.K. Assume that's true, then whose fault is that? There are a lot of us analytical philosophers now who are interested in things like Phenomenology, German Idealism, Existentialism, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, the Parisian 68ers, etc. We meet each other at APA presentations on these things and increasingly have a great time mingling with SPEP members who are also there.

Well, I think it's time for us analytical pluralists to take the next step, to put up or shut up.

We can't complain about SPEP being this or that or the other if we're a priori unwilling to join. In particular to the extent that SPEP isn't pluralist enough, it just seems to me that this is largely the fault of those of us interested in what a lot of SPEP scholars write about but who have not ourselves joined.

It can't be said enough that SPEP isn't this monolithic force hell bent on seperatism. It's just an organization with people interested in stuff that has been traditionally underrepresented in American philosophy departments. Note that first, if they were this monolithic thing bent on no dialogue with others there wouldn't be so much cool stuff at APAs that I noted earlier. This is the result of a lot of work by SPEP members engaged in dialogue with non-SPEP members. Second, (a) friends of mine in SPEP have encouraged me (and nearly all my publications are in analytical metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of logic) to join for three years now, (b) read the actual mission statement on their web page, and (c) the last conference had all sorts of cool papers overlapping analytic and continental philosophy. Alva Noe spoke there, for example.

[Addendum: I should have posted this originally. The SPEP website is a pleasure to use, and joining is really easy. Just go HERE.]

SPEP Members Against the Advocacy Committee Resolution

Petition HERE (hat-tip to anonymous commentor at Philosophers Anonymous). [Note: My initial posts concerning the resolution itself (with links that lead to Rebecca Kukla's important posts) are archived HERE. From the newer preamble, it is clear why I think this petition is such an important thing. This being said, in my original posts the level of expressed outrage was possibly damaging to good faith efforts to correct the problem, such as those made by Professor Kukla and others over and over again in the feminist blogosphere; this is why I removed them from Newapps and archived them here with an explanation.]

I'm not a member of SPEP so I can't sign it, but here's the full text, which I think is fantastic:

• Target: The Executive Committee of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
• Sponsored by: this will appear publicly. e.g. Advocates Against Workplace Bullying

The annual conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy was held in Philadelphia, PA, from 19 to 22 October, 2011.

At the business meeting on 21 October, the Advocacy Committee proposed a resolution expressing support, on behalf of the entire SPEP membership, for "the independent efforts of the new Pluralist's Guide to Philosophy to: 1) provide new sources of information on areas of philosophy that remain underrepresented in most doctoral programs in the discipline and 2) provide information on the conditions for women and minorities in graduate programs." The resolution was passed by 118 members.

As SPEP members, we, the undersigned, strongly condemn the Committee's support of the "Climate for Women in Philosophy" section of the Pluralist's guide. 

We believe that the information contained therein is misleading (at best) and libellous (at worst). We believe this has been conclusively demonstrated in numerous venues.

Furthermore, we believe that the editors of the Pluralist's Guide have displayed profound irresponsibility in refusing to remove this information from their website.

We ask that the Committee retract this resolution, or to amend it by removing all references to "The Climate for Women in Philosophy."

Tonight I found out that I exist

In graduate school my dear friend Roy Cook used to say that to be was to be the value of a footnote.

I (and my other dear friend Mark Silcox) actually exist now!!! Check out footnote 7 in the awesome Wikipedia article on Mona Sax.

And here is a video of me reacting to the good news.

Why I took some posts down off of Newapps

[IMPORTANT UPDATE: Please go HERE to read the full text of the petitition titled "SPEP Members Against the Advocacy Committee Resolution, and if you are a member of SPEP please consider signing your name. Also go HERE where I encourage people to join SPEP (and become eligible to sign the aforementioned petition).]

I decided to take the following three posts down from NewAPPS. There is a consensus that they might work to undermine the kind of rapprochement between analytic and continental philosophy that the Newapps bloggers are trying to establish. Also, they infuriated more than one dear friend for whom I have a lot of respect and love. Finally, there's a weird dynamic that when one posts about controversial issues in a group blog, then people tend to perceive the posts to somehow be reflective of the group itself. This certainly is not the case with the three posts I've moved here, and I'm moving them in part to forestall any such confusion.

If I was writing them today I'd change a couple of things about them, but would not change the very things that have gotten me the most angry e-mail from people I don't know.

Erdos Number Ten

THIS is cool. Here's the Mathematical Reviews path for me:

Jon Cogburn	coauthored with	Roy T. Cook	MR1748923 (2001c:03019)
Roy T. Cook	coauthored with	Stewart Shapiro	MR1638775
Stewart Shapiro	coauthored with	Timothy G. McCarthy	MR0912646 (89b:03064)
Timothy G. McCarthy	coauthored with	Kit Fine	MR0765994 (86c:03007)
Kit Fine	coauthored with	Gerhard Schurz	MR1462362 (98f:03016)
Gerhard Schurz	coauthored with	Hannes Leitgeb	MR2169548
Hannes Leitgeb	coauthored with	Philip David Welch	MR1976934 (2004c:03026)
Philip David Welch	coauthored with	Benedikt Löwe	MR1950032 (2003j:03010)
Benedikt Löwe	coauthored with	Andreas R. Blass	MR2310342 (2007m:03095)
Andreas R. Blass	coauthored with	Paul Erdős1	MR1149902 (92j:05178)

So everyone who has published with me has a minimum Erdos number of ELEVEN (insert Spinal Tap joke).

What passes for populism these days

via www.newappsblog.com

(Leiter linked post at) New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Please consider sending a signed copy of the following letter to the relevant politicians (can someobody implore Leiter to link to this as well?). Maybe we can stop a Middlesex situation from happening to what is supposed to be the flagship school of the state of Louisiana.

light posting

Posting is so light because I've been hit with my annual Fall-in-Louisiana sinus infection. This one's pretty bad. Today the laryngitis is so extreme that I can't teach. I think probably because we don't really get winters here the whole state ends up being like a petri dish. I'll take the sinus infection for the sunlightyear-round  though. . .

A couple of weird insights from being assistant chair: (1) Department chairs have to keep up with a mind-boggling amount of things at all times. I'm actually a little ashamed that I just had no idea how much work they do until I started helping one. (2) I'm humbled by the seriousness and decency that academics bring to the practice of writing letters for other academics' promotions and performance evaluations. This is something that people get no return on, but from what I can see, many extraordinarily busy people still put a tremendous amount of effort into it, and also overwhelmingly do so in a properly charitable spirit. This makes me feel better about being an academic, and a human being for that matter.

I won't quote the line from the Iggy Pop song about being (assistant) chair

Well, as of today I'm Assistant Chair for the LSU Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and Director of Philosophy.

As far as I can tell, it's mostly stuff like scheduling classes, helping students, and running meetings. This last one will take some work. When you aren't running the meeting you can be more opinionated I think. But when you are running the meeting you are working for everybody, even people you might disagree with about something. So for a lot of things you should not be a strong advocate once you get in such a position (I think something like this is why chairs don't get votes during hires). I'm confident I can get this down.

More generally I think it's a mistake to think that administrative roles involve deciding what constitutes excellence and then pushing that through. Rather, your job is to help create an atmosphere conducive to basic competence (and pride therein!). When that happens excellence arises all on its own in ways you never would have predicted. This is the Taoist theory of governance. Maybe it doesn't apply to being assistant chair. We'll see.

Oh well, heck I might as well include the Iggy Pop song with the great line. [Note: it really doesn't describe me at all. One of the great gifts of literacy is that once you hit a certain threshold of reading you never really get bored. There's a really beautiful bit in Angela's Ashes about this when Frank has to leave the old man to whom he reads. But the board/bored pun is just too good to pass up. And this performance is a high point in the Western Cultural Canon. So here it is.]