June 02, 2004
Two More Lateral Appointments at Vanderbilt Law
In addition to Tracey George (law and social science) from Northwestern University and Lawrence Helfer (international law) from Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, Vanderbilt made two other tenured appointments this year: Margaret Blair (corporate law) from the Brookings Institution (she has also been a visiting professor at Georgetown), and Owen Jones (law and evolutionary psychology) from Arizona State University.
Republican Ron Paul (Texas) on the "Misnamed Patriot Act"
"The misnamed Patriot Act, presented to the public as an anti-terrorism measure, actually focuses on American citizens rather than foreign terrorists. For example, the definition of 'terrorism' for federal criminal purposes has been greatly expanded; future administrations may consider you a terrorist if you belong to a pro-gun group, a citizen militia, or a pro-life organization. Legitimate protest against the government could place you (and tens of thousands of other Americans) under federal surveillance. Similarly, your Internet use can be monitored without your knowledge, and your Internet provider can be forced to hand over user information to law enforcement without a warrant or subpoena.
"The biggest problem with these new law enforcement powers is that they bear little relationship to fighting terrorism. Surveillance powers are greatly expanded, while checks and balances on government are greatly reduced. Most of the provisions have been sought after by domestic law enforcement agencies for years, not to fight terrorism, but rather to increase their police power over the American people. The federal government has made no showing that it failed to detect or prevent the September 11th attacks because of the civil liberties that will be compromised by this new legislation."
More on the Philosophy Job Market and Philosophy Admissions
My earlier correspondent writes with a report of astonishingly bad advice from faculty mentors at an MA program:
"One of our faculty advisors said that [student X] had better take the offer [of admission from a top 25 PhD program, whose name is omitted here] because everyone gets exactly one shot to apply for PhD programs. He thought that reapplying was very unlikely to improve the outcome. He implied that the stigma of having been previously rejected would cripple any subsequent applications. Is that true? Another faculty member told her ambitious grad students that there was 'no point' in getting a PhD from any program outside the top 10."
There's much to be said for a "bird in the hand," but the advice reported here is too absolute to be sensible. While there's certainly no reason to think that applying another year with the same dossier will lead to better results, one question to ask is what can be accomplished in the intervening year. A publication? Some new letter writers? More coursework and grades? As to "stigma," this may attach, and it may not: membership on admissions committees does rotate, and departments vary considerably in how well they keep track of who has applied before.
It is clearly silly to say there is "no point" in getting a PhD from a program outside "the top 10," and I say that, obviously, as someone who thinks the quality of a program--overall and in the areas of most interest to a student--is VERY important. There was presumably a "point" in getting a PhD for these philosophers who didn't go to "top 10" programs (at the time they went) but who are now employed as philosophers at top 10 programs:
Desmond Hogan (PhD, Yale) at Princeton
Matt Evans (PhD, Texas) at NYU
Kit Fine (PhD, Warwick) at NYU
Richard Foley (PhD, Brown) at NYU
Don Garrett (PhD, Yale) at NYU
Frances Egan (PhD, Western Ontario) at Rutgers
John Hawthorne (PhD, Syracuse) at Rutgers
Peter Klein (PhD, Yale) at Rutgers
Ernest LePore (PhD, Minnesota) at Rutgers
Howard McGary (PhD, Minnesota) at Rutgers
Brian McLaughlin (PhD, North Carolina) at Rutgers
Ted Sider (PhD, U Mass/Amherst) at Rutgers
Dean Zimmerman (PhD, Brown) at Rutgers
Edwin Curley (PhD, Duke) at Michigan
Peter Ludlow (PhD, Columbia) at Michigan
Joseph Camp (PhD, Brown) at Pittsburgh
James Lennox (PhD, Toronto) at Pittsburgh
John Norton (PhD, New South Wales) at Pittsburgh
Lanier Anderson (PhD, Penn) at Stanford
Allen Wood (PhD, Yale) at Stanford
Jeff Helzner (PhD, Carnegie-Mellon) at Columbia
Achille Varzi (PhD, Toronto) at Columbia
Peter Godfrey-Smith (PhD, UC San Diego) at Harvard and ANU
Alison Simmons (PhD, Penn) at Harvard
David Chalmers (PhD, Indiana) at Arizona
Thomas Christiano (PhD, Illinois/Chicago) at Arizona
Michael Gill (PhD, North Carolina) at Arizona
Rachana Kamtekar (PhD, Chicago) at Arizona
Uriah Kriegel (PhD, Brown) at Arizona
Chris Maloney (PhD, Indiana) at Arizona
Calvin Normore (PhD, Toronto) at UCLA
Sheldon Smith (PhD, Ohio State) at UCLA
And this, remember, is just from the top 10; you don’t have to go far outside the top ten to find many more examples, such as,
Jesse Prinz (PhD, Chicago) at North Carolina
Robert Kane (PhD, Yale) at Texas
A.P. Martinich (PhD, UC San Diego) at Texas
A.P.D. Mourelatos (PhD, Yale) at Texas
Michael Tye (PhD, SUNY-Buffalo) at Texas
Alan Code (PhD, Wisconsin) at Berkeley
Branden Fitelson (PhD, Wisconsin) at Berkeley
Brian Weatherson (PhD, Monash) at Cornell
etc.
Would any of these philosophers have been well-advised to forget about graduate school because they didn’t get in to a top 10 programs? Plainly not.
And there are, of course, dozens more successful philosophers at PhD- and MA-granting programs—as well as tens of dozens at liberal arts colleges, state universities, etc.—who earned their PhDs from non-top 10 programs. (Note, of course, that in the above lists, most of the philosophers earned their PhDs at top 20ish programs. But the list of graduates would become more diverse as we consider a wider range of institutions of higher education.)
UPDATE: A graduate student at a top 20 program writes:
MORE...Irrelevant "Inside" Blogosphere Humor
Eugene Volokh, maistro at the Volokh Conspiracy, announces the newest "guest" bloggers:
"I'm delighted to say that the University of San Diego law professors from The Right Coast — Gail Heriot, Sai Prakash, Mike Rappaport, Maimon Schwarzschild, Tom Smith, and Chris Wonnell — will be guest-blogging here from Wednesday, June 2 to Tuesday, June 8.
"This is really a first-rate group of accomplished scholars and thinkers, and I'm very pleased that they agreed to join us for the week. You will, I suspect, find them a bit more conservative than the average Volokh Conspirator, but we've got a Big Tent here."
A "Big Tent" indeed: from the friendly far right to the friendly lunatic right!
Or so it looks to those of us in the cosmopolitan center!!!
Remind Us Why We Invaded Iraq?
Here's a powerful video/animation compiling the lies of Bush, Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld. Watch the whole thing.
June 01, 2004
What Liberal Academy?
Yes, it's true that when you raise the intellectual bar high, as serious universities do, you get fewer right-wing kooks, but that simply doesn't mean there is political indoctrination going on at universities. The fact that the U.S. has moved farther to the right during the same time period when the universities have allegedly moved to the left ought to be taken as empirical confirmation of that point. For other plausible anecdotal evidence, see the discussion here.
UPDATE: More on the subject from Pharyngula here. He notes: "Maybe the real complaint conservatives have with the 'liberal academy' is that we aren't in the business of merely confirming their a priori prejudices. And the more ignorant, the more wrong, and the more strongly-held an individual's prejudices are, the more deeply they will resent universities."
Draft Faculty Lists for Fall 2004 PGR Survey
UPDATED AGAIN AS OF JUNE 1, 3 PM: Thanks yet again...
NOTE: UPDATED AS OF MAY 27, 5 pm: Many thanks to all those who have already submitted corrections and additions; I've added those to the document, below. Note that, in response to feedback, I've created a category of faculty with "Major Administrative Duties" (Deans, Provosts, etc.).
============
In order to maximize the accuracy of the PGR surveys, and with the approval of the Advisory Board, we are making available for departmental review the draft faculty lists. You may download here the current draft faculty lists for the planned fall 2004 survey for the Philosophical Gourmet Report for 2004-06. Please read the introduction to the draft lists carefully, and notify me of corrections and additions. Remember that in the actual survey, school names will not be included. Also remember that the aim is to present the likely shape of the faculty by fall 2005 based on information we have now about hires and retirements. Thanks for your assistance.
More Philosophers on the Move: George Bealer, Michael Strevens Accept Offers
George Bealer (metaphysics, epistemology) at the University of Coloradoa at Boulder has accepted the offer from the University of Texas at Austin, to start in fall 2004. However, he still has open offers (to start fall 2005) from both the University of Florida at Gainesville and Yale University (though we have no doubt that once he's in Austin, he won't give these offers a second thought!).
Michael Strevens (philosophy of science, philosophy of physics) at Stanford University has accepted the tenured offer from New York University.
Harvard Profs Spearhead Letter to Congress over Human Rights in Iraq
I have been invited to share the following:
============
Dear Colleagues,
A group of us has been working for the past few weeks to draft a letter to Congress addressing recent human rights issues in Iraq. The letter is attached in PDF format. The letter, as well as an updated list of signers, will be available at www.iraq-letter.com by June 1. We hope that many of you will want to join us in signing.
The letter focuses on issues of democratic accountability and responsibility, calling upon Congress to take action (1) to assess responsibility from the highest civilian officials on down for the abuses that have occurred and any policies enabling those abuses, and (2) to take responsibility for reviewing any coercive interrogation policy and for deciding whether this country should adopt any such policy, and if so in what form and with what protections against abuse.
Through informal networking, we are circulating the letter to a variety of law schools, faculties of public policy, diplomacy and international relations. Our goal is to send the letter with signatures to Congress by June 9, 2004. Should you wish to sign on, please do so at your earliest possible convenience but no later than Monday, June 7, 2004. To sign, please send a brief email indicating your name and title, institution and chair if applicable to: letter@law.harvard.edu.
We would appreciate your forwarding the attached letter to your colleagues and to those at other schools, inviting them to sign and circulate the letter further. Those interested in signing should write to: letter@law.harvard.edu, rather than directly to you or us. (Although some may get this too late for the initial letter to Congress in early June, people can and should continue to circulate the letter and send in names even after the initial deadline. We will continue to collect names and will send them to Congress as a supplement to the initial list at a later date).
Elizabeth Bartholet, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
James Cavallaro, Associate Director, Human Rights Program, Harvard Law School (jcavalla@law.harvard.edu)
Christine Desan, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
===============
Needless to say, in my view this letter doesn't go far enough.
UPDATE: Nice to see that Stephen Bainbridge, distinguished corporate law expert at UCLA, has already seen fit to insult his colleagues here: "Clearly, [the letter] is to be regarded as more of a partisan political act than opinio juris." But Professor Bainbridge's judgment about the letter is, by contrast, informed scholarly opinion, not "partisan political act." Indeed!
Start-of-the-Month Blog Stats
As expected, a slight drop in readership during the past month, as school lets out, and faculty and especially students scatter: a bit over 64,000 visits last month, down from well over 66,000 in April, but still well over the 52,000 in March. Unless I antagonize the National Review or some other slimy right-wing venue again, I expect an average of about 2,000 visits per day will be the norm for the rest of the summer. Thanks, as always, for stopping by.
New Blog Devoted to Free Will and Action Theory
John Martin Fischer and two of his graduate students at the University of California at Riverside have started a blog devoted to philosophical issues about free will and philosophy of action.
This is a novel undertaking in several respects, the least of which is that it is the first substantive blog related to these philosophical issues. More interesting is that it combines the talents of faculty and students, moreover faculty and students at the same department, a department with particular distinction in that area. What will be next? Texas faculty and students will have to start an ancient philosophy or Nietzsche blog. "Decisions, Decisions" could be the blog from faculty and students at UC Irvine. "Stanley Cavell Central" (or "No M&E; Allowed") from the University of Chicago. You get the idea.
UPDATE: I note that a few philosophers of action from other schools are joining the list of contributors to the new free will blog.
May 31, 2004
Q&A; on the Philosophy Job Market
One student writes with a series of questions that may be worth answering publically; I intersperse my answers and comments:
Student: "I just read your Leiter Report post on the philosophy job market. It is reassuring to know that candidates from top-5 programs still have a good chance of landing a tenure-track job. How fast do these odds diminish as you move down the ranking scale? For example, how do the odds of top-10 or top-20 graduates compare to those of top-5 PhDs?"
Leiter: It's hard to give a general answer, since while there is a quite strong correlation between faculty reputation and job placement, it is not perfect. Fortunately, most departments now post job placement data, so it is possible to do some checking. But bear in mind that a faculty with a relatively weak overall reputation may nonetheless have areas of real strength, where its graduates are routinely employed. (An example would have been Texas, which was not in the top 20 overall until fairly recently, yet almost all graduates in ancient philosophy got tenure-track jobs, many at research universities, going back to the 1970s.)
Student: "I'm also curious about the prospects of an excellent graduate from a merely adequate program. The admissions cliche is that top-ranked PhD programs reject several highly qualified candidates for every student they accept. Statistically, one would expect at least a few Princeton-caliber applicants to end up in lesser programs--whether by bad luck in admissions, seductive funding packages, or strong desire to remain in a particular region. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that students should think very carefully about doing a PhD anywhere besides the very top programs."
Leiter: I didn't mean to imply that. But the weaker the PhD program, the more carefully a student needs to think about the decision to attend. The prospect of becoming an "invisible adjunct" goes up at a less reputable program. That was the only point I wanted to make in the original posting.
Student: "PhD program strongly predicts marketability, but academic ability strongly predicts where an applicant is likely to get in. So, the placement records of top programs are confounded by academic ability. How does your advice apply to students with high academic ability and poor admissions options? Would it be foolhardy for this type of applicant to attempt to prove their mettle in a respectable but undistinguished program?"
Leiter: This is tricky, for epistemic reasons: how can the student be confident in his or her "high academic ability" when he or she can not secure admission to any reputable (say, top 50) PhD programs in the US? This may seem like harsh advice, but my inclination is to think it is in the student's best long-term interest: if you are unable to get in to any reputable PhD program, you should take that as a judgment on your likely success in academic philosophy. A reliable measure of "high academic ability" in philosophy is that at least some admissions committees consisting of professional philosophers at reputable PhD programs judge the student to be someone worth admitting and funding for graduate study.
UPDATE: Timothy O'Keefe (Philosophy, Georgia State) writes with the following sound addendum to the preceding:
"I think you gave good advice on the philosophy job market in your 5/31 posting. But here's one thing you might want to add (similar to a piece of advice already in the gourmet report):
"If a student is unable to get into the sort of Ph.D. program she'd like to get into (and with the sort of funding she'd like), she might want to consider applying to a good terminal M.A. program. This will allow her to shore up her philosophy background, polish a piece of writing as a sample, and get additional letters of recommendation. She may then be in a better position to reapply to reputable Ph.D. programs. From the POV of long-term success in the academic job market, I think a student would probably do better pursuing this strategy rather than going directly to a really weak Ph.D. program."
UPDATE: More on the general topic here.
Adjudication in a Police State
Is this how it works?
A good writer
I like the name of this blog ("The Maggot Hammer") and I like the writing in this posting in particular:
"It's good to see that the world is still here, at least. Still war, still slimy crypto-Nazi pornographers of the spirit, still tiny bleating liars with enormous voices and no words."
"Tiny bleating liars with enormous voices and no words": that's good. Andrew Sullivan anyone? Glenn Reynolds? Nice.
May 30, 2004
Philosopher Siegel turns down Arizona
Susanna Siegel (philosophy of mind and language), currently an untenured (but tenure-track) associate professor at Harvard University, has turned down the tenure-track offer from the University of Arizona--I will leave it to Matthew Yglesias to figure out why!
Burning Bridges
This big-firm associate isn't planning on coming back, it appears. From his parting e-mail to colleagues at the law firm:
"While I have a high degree of personal respect for PHJW as a law firm, and I have made wonderful friendships during my time here, I am no longer comfortable working for a group largely populated by gossips, backstabbers and Napoleonic personalities. In fact, I dare say that I would rather be dressed up like a pinata and beaten than remain with this group any longer. I wish you continued success in your goals to turn vibrant, productive, dedicated associates into an aimless, shambling group of dry, lifeless husks."
The Arguing-with-Rorty Game
Pascal Engel (Paris/Sorbonne) summarizes it well:
"[The editors] identify correctly the difficulties of criticizing Rorty and of playing with him the usual game of exchanging arguments. In the first round, Rorty attempts to undercut some traditional philosophical thesis – Platonism, Foundationalism, Representationalism, etc. (always a capital letter!) – with the intention to show that a) everyone in the tradition and on the contemporary scene more or less subscribes to it, b) that it rests upon some mythological conception (e.g. the Given, Reality in itself) or upon some false dualism which has been debunked by some Great Figure (e.g.: ' Since Heidegger, Dewey and Davidson we know that…'), or c) by taking an extreme counterposition, 'a tactic that seems to suggest that all positions on the topic are somewhat arbitrary' (p.30). If the opponent protests that the so-called thesis has been caricatured, and that one can nevertheless give some reasonable defense of the attacked thesis, free of the so-called mythological implications, then Rorty redescribes his opponent’s position to make it trivially true or outright false. Or he practices ignoratio elenchi. In the second round, when the opponent objects that this is not good argument, then Rorty admits that he does not care for argument, which is useless and counterproductive and claims that what matters is only the attempt to demythologise and to put forward new ways of thinking. And he adds that in so objecting the opponent is in the grip of one of the mythologies and wrong dualisms that he is denouncing - a belief in some antecedently given Truth of the Matter or some Objective Point View. The game can go on, without there being anything much to do but to admire the artist."
Actually there is another option: stop playing. Surely this paragraph well captures why the vast majority of philosophers have stopped reading Rorty.
UPDATE: Keith DeRose (Yale, Philosophy) points out to me an amusing and sharp review of several Rorty-related books by Jay Rosenberg (North Carolina, Philosophy), which is available to JSTOR users here.
Putting Your Life Where Your Mouth Is
This letter-writer to the NY Times gets it right:
"Joshua Foer has omitted the most critical reason his privileged classmates at Yale have had such overwhelming support for the war in Iraq: there is no military draft.
"This conflict is being fought by working-class and poor kids who joined the military as a viable economic option. The undergraduates at Yale would be shutting down the campus if we had a universal draft with no college deferments."
The point can be generalized beyond navel-gazing Yale undergraduates. I'd find the various bloggers who pontificate about war less nauseatingly pathetic if they would take a leave of absence from their cushy academic posts, and put their lives where their purported "principles" are--or at least if they shipped their oldest child off to war pronto. But the fact is that these dreary pundits are frauds, eager to send others to die, and willing to risk nothing--nothing!--themselves. (That many are childless is surely not irrelevant to their bloodthirsty posture.)
If you really think the war in Iraq was a moral cause, Professor X, then request a leave of absence tomorrow, and get to work. Risk something. Until then, realize that all the world knows a hypocrite when it sees one.
May 29, 2004
A Sharp Message for "Hawks" with "Second Thoughts"
A real human being--who doesn't, apparently, blog in favor of sending other people's children to war--writes to The New York Times as follows:
"In 'The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts' (Week in Review, May 16), you note that the shapers of thoughts and architects of the war now have troubling doubts about their enthusiastic support of the invasion of Iraq. How sad for them.
"I am the mother of Sgt. Sherwood Baker of the Pennsylvania National Guard, soldier 720. That number is seared on my soul now, along with the screams and despair of my family and the wind carrying the sound of taps above the weeping crowd at the grave site of my son.
"To me and mine, the consequences of the failed judgment and outright lies of the Bush administration and its apologists and spokesmen are not just becoming 'depressed' or 'angst-ridden.' We have lost our brave and beloved son, who was ordered to the war these folks dreamed of and hoped for."
This is as good an explanation as any of why one might think Andrew Sullivan and Instapundit, among many others, are morally depraved.
Who's "Hot" in Metaphysics?
For some refereeing work, one of the complimentary books I requested from OUP is the new Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics edited by Michael Loux (Notre Dame) and Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers). This is an impressive, very much state-of-the-art volume, with a detailed index that gives an idea whose work in metaphysics is most-discussed these days. The most-referenced figures? They are (those who are also contributors are marked with an *): David Armstrong (emeritus, University of Sydney); John Bigelow (Monash University); the late C.D. Broad; the late Roderick Chisholm; *Kit Fine (New York University); *Sally Haslanger (Massachussetts Institute of Technology); Mark Hinchliff (Reed College); *Jaegwon Kim (Brown University); the late David Lewis (the most referenced philosopher, appropriately enough, in the volume); E.J. Lowe (University of Durham); Ned Markosian (Western Washington University); Hugh Mellor (emeritus, Cambridge University); Trenton Merricks (University of Virginia); Alvin Plantinga (University of Notre Dame); the late A.N. Prior; Hilary Putnam (emeritus, Harvard University); the late W.V.O. Quine; *Michael Rea (University of Notre Dame); the late Bertrand Russell; *Ted Sider (Rutgers University, New Brunswick) (close to Lewis in terms of discussion in the volume); Lawrence Sklar (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor); *Michael Tooley (University of Colorado, Boulder); *Peter van Inwagen (University of Notre Dame); *Timothy Williamson (Oxford University); *Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers University, New Brunswick).
Also much-discussed (though perhaps a bit less than the preceding) are the following philosophers: Robert Adams (emeritus, Yale University); a bloke named Aristotle; Jonathan Bennett (emeritus, Syracuse University); the late George Boolos; the late Rudolf Carnap; William Lane Craig (Talbot School of Theology); the late Donald Davidson; another bloke named Descartes; Michael Dummett (emeritus, Oxford University); the late great Albert Einstein; Bob Hale (University of Glasgow); Mark Heller (SMU moving to Syracuse University); a bloke named Hume; Mark Johnston (Princeton University); Saul Kripke (CUNY); Leibniz; Lawrence Lombard (Wayne State University); *Tim Maudlin (Rutgers University, New Brunswick); Gideon Rosen (Princeton University); J.J.C. Smart (emeritus, ANU); Quentin Smith (Western Michigan University); Robert Stalnaker (Massachussetts Institute of Technology); Peter Strawson (emeritus, Oxford University); Bas van Fraassen (Princeton University); Wittgenstein; Crispin Wright (University of St. Andrews/New York University).
It is gratifying to note that the institutional affiliation of the philosophers having the most impact on discussions in contemporary metaphysics, as reflected in the Oxford Handbook, maps rather well on to the ranking of programs in metaphysics in the last PGR (some of the discrepancies have to do partly with how the category is defined, and partly with faculty moves since).
May 28, 2004
Legal scholar links to Coulter Column
My former colleague, the prolific and distinguished legal scholar Michael Rappaport (San Diego Law), has linked, approvingly, to a column by Ann Coulter. Really. Now I've seen everything.
Good News for India
Now that the religious zealots have been ousted from control of the government, there appears to be hope for India: a first good sign is the repeal of India's own police state "anti-terror" laws. Now if we can oust our own zealots, perhaps we can get rid of the Patriot [sic] Act too?
Metaphysician Heller from SMU to Syracuse
Mark Heller (metaphysics, epistemology) at Southern Methodist University has accepted a senior offer from Syracuse University, where he took his Ph.D. twenty years ago under William Alston, Jonathan Bennett, and Peter van Inwagen. This caps several years of strong hiring by Syracuse (other additions at the tenured level during this time include Edward McClennen, Kenneth Baynes, Frederick Beiser, Andre Gallois, as well as several junior hires), after the back-to-back losses of Gendler, Hawthorne, Nolan, Sider, and Zimmerman.
Yale Joins the Pursuit of Philosopher Bealer
Texas and Florida have already made offers to George Bealer (metaphysics, epistemology) at the University of Colorado at Boulder; now Yale has made him an offer as well. Hopefully this will resolve itself before the new PGR survey in early September.
Philosopher Colin Allen from A&M; to Indiana
Colin Allen, a philosopher of mind best-known for his work on animal cognition, is moving from Texas A&M; University to Indiana University at Bloomington this fall, where he will be Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science.
Right-Wing Bloggers May be Parodies of Themselves...
...but, just in case you didn't get the joke, read this.
(Thanks to Bill Childs for the pointer.)
May 27, 2004
The "catastrophe" of pragmatism
From Tim Crane's review of Jerry Fodor's Hume Variations (OUP) in the Times Literary Supplement, May 7, 2004, p. 4:
"With characteristic hyperbolic gloom, Fodor calls pragmatism 'the defining catastrophe of analytic philosophy of language and philosophy of mind in the last half of the twentieth century.' Its attempts to do without (something like) the theory of ideas is 'a shambles from which philosophy has yet to fully recover.' But what exactly is pragmatism? The essence of the view is that thinking or having concepts should be understood in terms of abilities: for example, in terms of the ability to classify things, or to make inferences, or to be able to recognize things, and so on. What pragmatism is opposed to is the theory that (in Barry Stroud's words) 'having an idea is fundamentally a matter of contemplating or viewing an "object"'--in other words, that ideas are mental particulars or objects in the mind. The pragmatist argues that this view, supposedly one of the targets of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, is fundamentally flawed because it cannot account for the function of thinking or having concepts; instead this function must be explained in terms of practical or mental abilities....
"The idea that thinking is a kind of ability or activity or capacity is initially attractive; until one starts to try to figure out what kind of ability it might be. Consider the idea that the ability to think about Xs, say, is the ability to distinguish Xs from other things. But what is it to 'distinguish' [sort] something from something else?...
"[Fodor's] objection is that even if one were able to sort the Xs from the Ys--let's say by putting them into two piles--this would not show that one was sorting Xs from Ys as such. Suppose someone had the task of sorting triangles from squares, by putting all the triangles in one pile and the squares in another. The problem is that though the piles are the result of sorting the triangles from the squares, they would also be the result of sorting the trilaterals from the squares, since all triangles are trilaterals and vice versa. Sorting Xs from Ys is therefore compatible with not sorting them as Xs and Ys."
Is Fodor right? Comments are open.
MORE...Philosopher Roth to be New Chair at UC Santa Cruz
Paul Roth (philosophy of social science, philosophy and sociology of science) at the University of Missouri at St. Louis has accepted appointment as Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
George Mason's Lederman Offered Tax Chair at Indiana
Tax scholar Leandra Lederman at George Mason University has been offered the chair in tax law at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she will visit next academic year before deciding on whether to make the move.
Copyright Scholar Netanel from Texas to UCLA
Neil Netanel (intellectual property, copyright) at the University of Texas, Austin has accepted the offer from UCLA, where he has been visiting this past year. Neil, who grew up in L.A. and has friends and family there, will be missed here in Austin!
Wicked Political Humor
Photos here.
An "Interview" (sort of) with Dr. James Dobson...
...right-wing religious zealot and crusader for morality: here. A sample:
FAFBLOG: So! How's the Family?
JAMES DOBSON: The Family is in deadly danger, Fafnir.
FB: Danger? Oh no! I like families!
JD: Yes, danger from the homosexual agenda which has been trying for decades to destroy it.
FB: I never knew homosexuals had an agenda! I just thought they were ordinary people who were easily stereotyped as lovers of musical theater.
JD: So they and the gay-controlled Hollywood elite would have you believe. But the Forces of Gay are now closer than ever to destroying the divine institution of the civil marriage certificate, and with it, the family itself.
FB: You must hate gay people then, since they're trying to destroy the family.
JD: We don't hate gay people, Fafnir. We just want them to functionally cease to exist by having them suppress all their natural physical impulses and force themselves to marry and have sex with members of the opposite gender.
FB: Wow. That's a very loving attitude to take Dr. Dobson.
JD: Yes, it is.
May 26, 2004
You Can Say That Again...
“The global security agenda promoted by the US Administration is bankrupt of vision and bereft of principle. Violating rights at home, turning a blind eye to abuses abroad and using pre-emptive military force where and when it chooses has damaged justice and freedom, and made the world a more dangerous place.”
--Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan
The Next Time Some Right-Wing Oaf Says, "What's the Evidence of Abuses under the Patriot Act or in the name of the 'War on Terror'"
...direct them to these two examples: the now notorious and disgraceful treatment of Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield (details and links here) and now the harassment of art professor Steve Kurtz (details here).
Wake up, folks!