Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Most Significant Philosophers of Science of the 20th-Century--One More Time!

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 15--TODAY IS THE LAST DAY TO VOTE

Given the omissions noted in the prior iteration of this poll (some of whom might have made 'the top ten'), I thought we'd run it one more time with the top 13 from the last poll (there was a significant drop off after Sellars), plus adding Michael Polanyi, Moritz Schlick, David Lewis, Frank Ramsey, and David Hull.   I've also added Pierre Duhem, because though he lived mainly in in the 19th-century, his main contributions to philosophy of science were, in fact, produced in the early 20th-century (thanks to Roger Ariew for pointing that out to me).  Some folks suggested Foucault, which seems to me more of a stretch, in comparison to folks who influenced him like Bachelard and Canguilhem, who did not poll well last time around.  One of the peculiarities of Foucault's writings is that he seems to take for granted a kind of positivist picture of the natural sciences, and he doesn't really have an explicit argument showing anything about the epistemic status of the human sciences.   (I discuss the matter here.)

Anyway, here is the new poll.

And here are the results of the earlier one, with 660 votes cast: 

Kant's Moral Acuity

Yet more evidence.

Illinois Issues Report on Termination of Religion Adjunct Howell

Details here.  It seems a sensible assessment, and, fortunately, the report does note the sheer incompetence of the content of the e-mail in question.

For Students Interested in Doing Graduate Work Related to Nietzsche

MOVING TO FRONT (FOR LAST TIME) FROM SEPTEMBER 14

I am pleased to report that I will be taking up an appointment as Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University for portions of the academic year 2011-12.  This arrangement has been made with the aim of stimulaing interest in advanced research on Nietzsche among current and prospective Oxford graduate students.

I will be co-teaching an intensive research seminar on Nietzsche in Michaelmas Term 2011 with Peter Kail, the distinguished Hume scholar who has begun doing important work on Nietzsche in recent years, including the often striking similarities between naturalistic themes in Hume and Nietzsche.  (I will not be in residence the entire term, so some of my teaching will be comrpessed.)  In Trinity Term, we will organize a faculty-student conference on Nietzsche at Oxford as a follow-up to the autumn teaching. 

In Memoriam: Edna Ullmann-Margalit (1946-2010)

A longtime faculty member at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Professor Ullmann-Margalit passed away yesterday.  She was well-known for wide-ranging work in political philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of science.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear. 

Boycott Fox "Thug" TV

One of the really sick ironies of life in the United States right now is that those who have the most in common with the most notorious moral monsters of the 20th-century, the Nazis and their fascist fellow-travellers--namely, the various far right hate-mongers and serial liars on TV and radio, from Michael Savage to Glenn Beck--regularly accuse Democrats (the most conservative "left" party in any major Western democracy) of being fascists and Nazis.  (This, by the way, is illuminating on Mr. Beck.)  And like the good fascist he is, Mr. Beck is also good at inciting mindless violence against his political enemies.  So, as the link suggests, it's time for advertisers to boycott Fox, and for consumers to boycott any company that advertises on Fox.

Friday Poem: "The Girl I Saved"

                         The Girl I Saved

 The girl I saved has probably forgotten me though once

 In an accidental meeting she thanked me for what I had done

Truly until this moment I had forgotten her

Forgotten her then as well and not knowing what I had done

I had once been her teacher one of many

And had apparently stumbled on the right words

While she dangled over the cliff of life

That is how one serves I imagined unaware innocent of

One’s actions just doing something that turns out to help

No formula or plan or intention a modest seizing of the day

When we last met she had a young child and a calm young life

She gave me credit for having brought it about

I did not quarrel was somewhat proud took and savored the praise

 

We went on with our lives independent of each other

Until this moment had forgotten her as she no doubt me

I had been reading some playful poems about one’s death

Written I suspect by people who think themselves immortal

Death tourists hiding the truth from themselves

As they fancy themselves authentically Vallejo

This is when I remembered her and what she claimed I had done

Pulled her out of deep despair bringing her back from the edge

Setting things right with words of fortunate provenance

It was a reassuring memory to know that I who then as now

Had been on my own edge had had the wherewithal to save her

 

I think we keep ourselves alive by keeping others alive

Or some such fragile illusion

 

10/12-10/13/10

Copyright 2010 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

America is doomed, part 114

This is unbelievable.  These Tea Party bozos (that's a nice word for them) who may get elected make George W. Bush look like a paragon of intellectual sobriety and moral acuity.   That the response of large segments of the brain-dead electorate to the current crises of capitalism and American empire is to turn to crazies to the right of Bush is the clearest sign that all hope is lost in this increasingly dysfunctional country.

Blackburn v. Parfit

Serious reading, but with some laughs too!

Dramatic Changes Proposed for Funding of Higher Education in Britain

Story here.  I'd be interested to hear from U.K. readers what this is likely to mean in practice and how the proposal is being received by scholars and philosophers in Britain.

Notable Retirements (Recent and Prospective) That Prospective Students Should Be Aware Of

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 20 

Especially because we may not get a new PGR out till 2011, I thought it might be useful for students thinking about graduate school in philosophy to flag some significant recent or imminent retirements of well-known philosophers; in many cases, the affected departments have already made new appointments in the areas affected by the retirement:

Neera Badhwar (ethics) has retired at the University of Oklahoma, Norman.

Simon Blackburn (ethics, philosophy of language) will retired from Cambridge University at the end of this academic year (he will continue part-time at UNC-Chapel Hill).

John Brough (phenomenology) has retired from Georgetown University.

Patricia and Paul Churchland (philosophy of mind, science, and cognitive science) have retired at the University of California at San Diego.

Edwin Curley (early modern philosophy) has retired at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

John Earman (philosophy of science and physics) has retired at the University of Pittsburgh.

Daniel Farrell (moral & political philosophy) has retired at Ohio State University.

Jerry Fodor (philosophy of mind, cognitive science) is on a phased retirement at Rutgers University at New Brunswick.

R.G. Frey (applied ethics) has retired at Bowling Green State University.

Alan Gabbey (early modern philosophy) will retire from Barnard College and Columbia University in 2012, but 2010-11 will be his last year of teaching.

Martin Golding (philosophy of law) has retired at Duke University.

William L. Harper (decision theory, philosophy of science, Kant) has retired at the University of Western Ontario.

W.D. Hart (philosophy of mathematics, logic, metaphysics) has retired at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Brian Loar (philosophy of mind and language) has retired at Rutgers University at New Brunswick.

Alasdair MacIntyre (ethics) has retired from the University of Notre Dame.

Patrick Maher (philosophy of science, decision theory) has retired at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Alexander P.D. Mourelatos (ancient philosophy) will retire at the University of Texas at Austin as of January 2011.  (He will continue to be in residence, and, knowing Alex, I am sure will remain involved with the classical philosophy program.)

Derek Parfit (ethics, philosophy of mind) has retired at Oxford University (though will continue part-time, to the best of my knowledge, at NYU, Rutgers, and Harvard, as he has been doing).

Alvin Plantinga (epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of religion) has retired at the University of Notre Dame.

Peter Smith (logic) will retire from Cambridge University at the end of this academic year.

Michael Stocker (ethics) will conclude a phased retirement this academic year at Syracuse University.

Gisela Striker (ancient philosophy) will retire from Harvard University this year.

Allen Wood (Kant, 19th-century) will retire from Stanford University at the end of the 2010-11 academic year.

Let me know of omissions of significant recent (this past academic year) or impending (scheduled for this academic year) retirements.

Most significant philosophers of science of the 20th-century?

More pollling amusement.  Same ground rules as before:  no living greats, only the dearly departed.  Main work must have been done in the 20th-century.  Remember:  evaluate these philosophers in terms of the significance of their contributions to philosophy of science, not their general or other contributions to philosophy.  Have fun.

UPDATE:   Eric Schliesser flags two clear oversights:  Moritz Schlick and David Hull.  My only excuse on the latter is that he died so recently, I still had him filed in my mind as a "living" philosopher.  Alas.

ANOTHER:   Jordi Cat points out another oversight:  Michael Polanyi.

AND MAYBE ONE MORE?  Barry Loewer makes the case for David Lewis:  "he contributed more to phil science than most on the list.(of course he was more than a philosopher of science but the same goes for Carnap, Quine, Kuhn, Goodman... etc)...   theoretical terms, accounts of laws, objective probability, subjective probability, counterfactuals, direction of time, time travel, causation, explanation, physicalism, even a paper on quantum mechanics that is closer to the mark than any of the others on the list."  Of course, once one opens this list to any relevant work in metaphysics....

Wittgenstein on Twitter!

Well, not exactly:   Zeph Auerback, a grad student at King's College, London, is tweeting Wittgenstein's life (relying mainly on Ray Monk's biography).  Quite amusing!

"On Being a Woman in Philosophy"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8:  This appeared in the evening, a low traffic time, and it would be a shame if readers missed this.

==============================

Anne Jacobson (Houston) (in comments) and Kristen Irwin (Biola) (in e-mail) have both flagged for me a new blog that collects accounts by women of their experiences in academic philosophy.  It makes for gripping reading, and more than one of the stories posted so far matches incidents I have heard about from students and colleagues elsewhere.  Hopefully once even more stories are recorded, someone or some organization (maybe the APA?) will undertake a systematic survey to find out how widespread such misconduct is using some of the recurring "types" of malfeasance recorded here as a benchmark.  In conjunction, it would be interesting to know how much of this kind of misconduct ever results in disciplinary action.  I know from bitter experience at another university with a department that had a serious sexual harassment problem (including one incident of sexual harassment far worse than anything on the current blog) that male colleagues can be quick to turn a blind eye, and administrators can be slow to act, often because of concern about legal repercussions.  Deans and Provosts should, perhaps, be invited to peruse the new blog.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.  It's got quite a lot of commentary on what sounds like (from what I've read) Sam Harris's extremely silly book about morality and science.  The less they know, the less they know it.  Alas.

Long Lost Derrida Manuscript on the DeMan/Nazism Scandal Surfaces

Philosopher Edward Engelmann (Merrimack College) brings it to my attention, and I quote it in full:

Who is Paul De Man?  In circumscribing this thought, we must look closely at the text.  De Man.  What is De Man?  Some journalistic philosophy imposters want to imply that De Man is a Nazi.  But how can De Man be a Nazi?  After all he is De Man.  On the one hand, De Man looks like a Nazi.  On the other hand, he is De Man.  This text is valorized already always.  De Man is surely the Man.  How can the Man be a Nazi?  On the one hand, “the Man” refers to dictatorial oppression.  But on the other hand, “the Man” is an object of admiration, as in “he’s da Man.”  Dialectically, the latter wins out, as shown by American dialect.  In American slang “he’s da Man” means “he’s the Dude.”  The Dude.  The Dude cannot be a Nazi.  De Man is now seen always already to be Da Man.  Da Man is The Dude.

I can not, however, vouch for the authenticity of this piece, but it sure sounds real.

APA Fails to Place a Job Ad, Never Tells Department!

In the midst of a catastrophically bad job market, this conduct is really hard to believe.  From Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh, HPS):

The HPS department requested the APA to include an ad for a new tenure- stream position (philosophy of cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of physics, or methodology) in the HPS department at the University of Pittsburgh. It turns out that for some reason the credit card number we gave the APA did not work. Instead of calling my department, the job placement service of the APA just decided to ignore the ad, which, as a result, did not make it to the October issue of Jobs for Philosophers! Perhaps they thought that there are too many available jobs out there!

Well, at least there is one more.  But what's alarming here is the process.  Surely the APA should follow-up with a department in a situation like this.

A.J. Ayer, Spy

The truth is known at last.

(Thanks to Timothy Fuller for the pointer.)

Rush Limbaugh, Neo-Aristotelian

Not really of the Foot/Thompson variety, though.

(Thanks to Jeff Glick for the pointer.)

World Philosophy Day in Tehran: Vigilance Required!

An Iranian philosopher writes:

I guess you have already heard about the debate on the organisation of the World Philosophy Day in Tehran (see, e.g., this or this). With a number of my colleagues, we are highly troubled about the political turn it has taken. The main problem for us is that Mahmoud Ahmedinejad himself, and some of his close collaborators, are trying to transform this event to a propaganda show in favour of their politics in the academic domain.

Unfortunately, we could not be able to manifest publicly our own reaction to this situation, mainly due to the risk of sanctions. On the other hand, our general position is that a total academic embargo of Iran presents serious disadvantages for us and for our students in the current situation. However, we follow carefully the mobilisation of the Iranian colleagues in other countries and their appeal to boycott this particular event. Such appeals are necessary for reminding international academics of the problematic situation of Iranian universities during the last year.

Since the last presidential elections, hundreds of scholars and students have been arrested and/or dismissed from universities and many university campuses in several cities have been attacked by the Revolutionary Guards. I should also sadly mention that tens of students have been killed during the last year's demonstrations, among whom a young woman, Neda, was a philosophy student, and no judiciary actions have taken place to clarify the circumstances of their deaths.

From the first days of the suppression, the Iranian Supreme Leader pointed to the “Humanities” and “academics” as the main cause and instigators of the popular resistance, and condemned them. Following this condemnation, prosecutors of mass trials in August 2009 went so far to name Max Weber, Jurgen Habermas, John Keane, etc. in their indictments. Since then, the attack on humanities has become a major policy of Ahmadinejad's government. According to new regulations, graduate students admissions and scholar recruitments are centralized in the hand of the government in a way that so-called moral and political evaluations must take place before any academic evaluation. Moreover, several programmes and departments in the human sciences have been discarded.

Despite all these problems, we try to do our work. The World Philosophy Day in Tehran could still be an opportunity for us and for our students to learn more. Our main worry is that, very probably, Ahmedinejad himself will participate in the opening session, make a speech, and hijack the event for his political purposes. As the chief of government, he has employed all means at his disposal to degrade the academic liberties in Iran, particularly in the domain of the Humanities. Given what he has done, his probable participation in the opening session will be an insult to all Iranian scholars and students who have suffered during the last year. Furthermore, considering his past performances on similar occasions, he is likely to deliver a speech about themes like moral values, culture, justice, progress etc. As citizens and members of the academic community of Iran, we condemn his forthcoming talk as pure hypocrisy.

For all these reasons, we want to remind our foreign colleagues who have decided to participate in this event that their vigilance will be highly appreciated.

"The Demarcation Problem in Jurisprudence: A New Case for Skepticism"

The final (quotable and citable) version is here, for those who might be interested.  It reflects the useful feedback and discussion at the international conference in Girona last May.

If you're a malevolent know-nothing, how do you get featured in an article in the NY Times?

Run a blog defaming Muslims, of course.   It can not pass in silence that Pamela Geller, our brainless idiot and bigot du jour, is also devoted to Ayn Rand.  

"Anywhere out of this world," said Baudelaire.

UPDATE:  "Loonwatch" has a good write-up on Geller.

The most significant moral philosphers of the 20th-century: the results

So with 620 votes cast, here's the 'top ten':

1. Bernard Williams  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

2. G.E. Moore  loses to Bernard Williams by 291–256

3. G.E.M. Anscombe  loses to Bernard Williams by 343–194, loses to G.E. Moore by 323–198

4. Philippa Foot  loses to Bernard Williams by 369–163, loses to G.E.M. Anscombe by 280–230

5. R.M. Hare  loses to Bernard Williams by 371–156, loses to Philippa Foot by 301–205

6. W.D. Ross  loses to Bernard Williams by 363–147, loses to R.M. Hare by 245–220

7. John Dewey  loses to Bernard Williams by 401–103, loses to W.D. Ross by 267–172

8. Charles L. Stevenson  loses to Bernard Williams by 428–52, loses to John Dewey by 227–170

9. Richard B. Brandt  loses to Bernard Williams by 414–46, loses to Charles L. Stevenson by 174–167

10. H.A. Prichard  loses to Bernard Williams by 418–51, loses to Richard B. Brandt by 175–165

Just outside the top ten were C.D. Broad (loses to Prichard by 182 to 155) and W.K. Frankena (who lost to Broad by 171-163).

Ralph Barton Perry, a major figure in American philosophy before and to some extent after WWII, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, came in dead last.  (Perry was sufficiently important that in the 1950s, Joel Feinberg wrote his dissertation on Perry at the University of Michigan, under the supervision of Charles Stevenson.) I confess to being surprised that Anscombe did so well, and that she beat Foot.  I'm also puzzled by Dewey's strong showing.  For my money, Williams, Foot, and Stevenson are the three most interesting, but, being fond of Nietzsche, I guess I would think that. Comments are open for reader reactions.  Signed comments preferred.

The American University of Iraq

Yet another triumph for the criminal war of aggression against Iraq.

(Thanks to Blake Taylor for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  The link is now fixed.

October JFP

Several readers have e-mailed that it is out, and that it has somewhat more positions this year than last, but still way off even two years ago.  (I have not seen a copy yet.)  Comments open for more precise figures and observations.

"Gender and Philosophical Intuition"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 27:  COMMENTS NOW OPEN

Wesley Buckwalter (CUNY) and Stephen Stich (Rutgers) have posted this remarkable paper on SSRN:

In recent years, there has been much concern expressed about the under-representation of women in academic philosophy. Our goal in this paper is to call attention to a cluster of phenomena that may be contributing to this gender gap. The findings we review indicate that when women and men with little or no philosophical training are presented with standard philosophical thought experiments, in many cases their intuitions about these cases are significantly different. In section 1 we review some of the data on the under-representation of women in academic philosophy. In section 2 we explain how we use the term ‘intuition,’ and offer a brief account of how intuitions are invoked in philosophical argument and philosophical theory building. In the third section we set out the evidence for gender differences in philosophical intuition and mention some evidence about gender differences in decisions and behaviors that are (or should be) of considerable interest to philosophers. In the fourth section, our focus changes from facts to hypotheses. In that section we explain how differences in philosophical intuition might be an important part of the explanation for the gender gap in philosophy. The fifth section is a brief conclusion.

If I may summarize a bit too crudely from the paper's very careful discussion of these matters:  if female undergraduates tend to have intuitions about standard philosophical puzzles that differ from the "official" intuitions sanctioned in the literature, then it is perhaps not surprising that the females pursue philosophy (at least intuition-driven philosophy) at lower rates than their male counterparts.

Perhaps after folks have had a chance to actually digest the research and the analysis, we'll open a thread to discuss the paper.

UPDATE:   I hope those interested have had a chance to read and think about the Buckwalter & Stich paper--Wesley and Steve will try to respond to comments and questions over the enxt few days.  Comments are open, and signed comments are far more likely to appear.  (For some reason, the link to the paper on SSRN no longer works, not sure why, and I can't seem to find the right one.  But I know close to 1,000 folks downloaded the paper while it was there.)

Woods to Leave Stanford and Return to Indiana

Allen Wood (Kant, 19th-century philosophy) will retire from Stanford University at the end of this academic year, and return to the full-time faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington in summer 2011.  Rega Wood (medieval philosophy) will also take up appointment at Indiana as Professor of Philosophy.  The last PGR surveys were done when the Woods were previously on the Indiana faculty, so this move means the results from those surveys can still be considered reliable currently for Indiana and Stanford.

Philosopher Shelly Kagan: Youth Idol in China!

Really!

(Thanks to John Behan for the pointer.)

Howard University Philosophy Department Under Attack

Several readers have forwarded me this e-mail from philosopher Richard Jones at Howard:

Dr. Sidney Ribeau, president of Howard University, is recommending that Howard University’s Philosophy Department be eliminated.  Would you be kind enough to help support those of us who see this as a strategic mistake in the struggle for Black equality.  In showing support would you write a letter to Dr. Ribeau giving your opinions on the historic centrality of the Philosophy Department at Howard University and the reasons why you believe it should be continued.  This will be a tough fight and Dr. Ribeau will make this decision final December 1, 2010.

Please write to: Dr. Sidney Ribeau, President, Howard University, 2400 6th Street NW,     Washington, DC 20059

I've been trying to find out whether there is a reason an e-mail address was not included as well, but have not yet gotten a response.  For the time being, you may e-mail Dr. Ribeau at sidney.ribeau@howard.edu.

Howard is (I believe) the nation's oldest "historically Black" university, that has played a major role--through its faculty and its alumni--in promoting equality for African-Americans in the United States.  Faculty and/or alumni include Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Nobel Laureates Ralph Bunche and Toni Morrison, and the distinguished American philosopher Alain Locke, among many others.

That what is arguably still the nation's premier historically Black university would contemplate eliminating the core discipline that is the hallmark of any serious research university qualifies as nothing less than appalling.  Alain Locke must be spinning in his grave.  Let us hope Dr. Ribeau reconsiders.   

CORRECTION:  Carl Seaquist writes:   "For what it's worth, I believe Cheyney University of Pennsylvania is the oldest HBCU (Historically Black College and University) in the nation, founded in 1837.  Lincoln University calls itself the 'first degree-granting historically black university,' going back to 1854.  Howard gives their founding as 1867."

In Memoriam: Claude Lefort (1924-2010)

The French political philosopher and student of Merleau-Ponty has died.  A brief obituary (in French) from Le Monde. 

(Thanks to John Protevi for the pointer.)

Political philosophers are feeling left out...

...especially because Rawls wasn't included in the other poll, but, after all, he is a political, not moral, philosopher (a clear and obvious distinction!).  So who are the most significant political philosophers of the 20th-century?   Late greats only (or in the case of Strauss, late fakes).  Probably should have included Carl Schmitt, but, alas, too late now.

UPDATE:   With more than 100 votes cast, several folks have ranked Strauss #1.  Those readers must immediately leave the blog and not return!

ERROR ALERT:   The "Charles Macpherson" on the survey should really be "C.B. Macpherson."  Sorry for that error!

ANOTHER:  I've decided to shut down this poll, which has clearly been invaded by a lot of non-philosophers (one need only look at the detailed ballot reporting on Leo Strauss, for example!).   These results seem to me more idioscynratic than illuminating, but with nearly 650 votes, here's the top ten:

1. John Rawls  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

2. Michel Foucault  loses to John Rawls by 347–202

3. Hannah Arendt  loses to John Rawls by 365–165, loses to Michel Foucault by 277–216

4. Tied: Theodor Adorno  loses to John Rawls by 360–169, loses to Hannah Arendt by 259–204 Isaiah Berlin  loses to John Rawls by 410–108, loses to Hannah Arendt by 286–199

6. Robert Nozick  loses to John Rawls by 451–59, loses to Theodor Adorno by 261–236

7. John Dewey  loses to John Rawls by 394–116, loses to Robert Nozick by 246–226

8. Antonio Gramsci  loses to John Rawls by 368–166, loses to John Dewey by 232–223

9. G.A. Cohen  loses to John Rawls by 422–86, loses to Antonio Gramsci by 231–226

10. H.L.A. Hart  loses to John Rawls by 431–54, loses to G.A. Cohen by 240–189

I'm mystified by the strong showing of Dewey and Berlin, but perhaps it's related to why Strauss came in 20 instead of dead last.

 

Who are the most significant moral philosophers of the 20th-century?

The passing of Professor Foot, and my (uncontroversial) description of her as one of the "towering figures" of post-WWII moral philosophy, led to some interesting correspondence with various readers about late great figures in moral philosophy from the preceding century.  So the only way to adjudicate such weighty matters, of course, is with a poll.  Have fun!  And note:  I've included only late greats, no living greats in the poll. 

UPDATE:  So with more than 500 votes cast since yesterday, here is the current top ten:

1. Bernard Williams  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

2. G.E. Moore  loses to Bernard Williams by 240–224

3. G.E.M. Anscombe  loses to Bernard Williams by 296–158, loses to G.E. Moore by 280–164

4. Philippa Foot  loses to Bernard Williams by 316–134, loses to G.E.M. Anscombe by 238–196

5. R.M. Hare  loses to Bernard Williams by 318–130, loses to Philippa Foot by 253–178

6. W.D. Ross  loses to Bernard Williams by 307–125, loses to R.M. Hare by 204–193

7. John Dewey  loses to Bernard Williams by 340–88, loses to W.D. Ross by 223–152

8. Richard B. Brandt  loses to Bernard Williams by 351–39, loses to John Dewey by 192–126

9. Charles L. Stevenson  loses to Bernard Williams by 367–43, loses to Richard B. Brandt by 150–143

10. H.A. Prichard  loses to Bernard Williams by 359–41, loses to Charles L. Stevenson by 160–140

I'll open comments for discussion of the results either later this week or next week.

 

More Peculiarities of the NRC Rankings: The More Women and Minorities, the Worse the Program!

David Hilbert (Illinois/Chicago) writes:

You're probably sick of NRC email but this seemed interesting enough to be worth sharing.  I've been playing around with the NRC spreadsheet trying to understand the basis of our ranking.  There's two interesting features of the R-rating that I haven't seen discussed yet (although perhaps I missed it). 

I was interested in the coefficients used in constructing the rankings.  If you look at the variables tab in NRC  spreadsheet they give the plus and minus one standard deviation for the coefficients on each of the variables used in both the R- and S-ratings (for the discipline of interest).  The coefficients in the S-rating are pretty much what one would expect to emerge from a survey of faculty with the publications variable receiving the most weight.  One variable has a negative coefficient, the time to degree variable, which makes sense since larger numbers here are widely thought to show something bad about a program.

If one looks at the coefficient distributions for the R-rating system on the other hand there are two things that immediately stand out.  First, there are several variables for which both the plus and minus one standard deviation coefficients are negative.  That means higher scores on these variables are likely to have lowered a program's ranking (both at the 5th and 95th percentile).  If one looks at percent female faculty, for example, the coefficients are -0.062 and -0.034.  The negative signs on these coefficients means that having a higher percentage of female faculty members will tend to lower a department's R-rating. Given the way these coefficients were determined this makes sense if those departments that were higher in the sample representational ranking (that is not reported in the data) tended to have a lower percentage of female faculty.  There were five variables for which the plus and minus 1 SD were negative: percent faculty interdisciplinary, percent non-Asian minority faculty, percent female faculty, percent first year students with external funding, and percent completing within six years.  Doing better in any of these areas will tend to lower a program's position within the R-ranking. It's particularly striking that the two equal opportunity factors ended up hurting rather than helping in this ranking system. The problem here is that the one that Ned Block pointed out prospectively, the failure to distinguish between signs of quality and determinants of quality.

The second thing I was struck by was the low weights given to two out of the three variables relating to faculty quality in the R-ranking.  Both the productivity measure and the percent faculty with grants count for less than does, for example, average student GRE or the average number of PhDs produced per year.  If the R-rating were to be taken seriously and the coefficients held fixed then programs would have more effect on their rating by granting more PhDs than by increasing faculty productivity.

Since I imagine others have, by now, had a chance to digest the data, I invite other signed comments on the NRC data.  I am particularly curious to hear how administrators at your school are responding to the NRC report.  The University of Chicago appears to have been the only major research university to not issue a press release touting its performance, because of the devastating analysis of the value of the results by the statistician Stephen Stigler here.  (Some of Stigler's points about the way the R-Ranking was constructed based on only partial reputational surveys may bear on the odd bias noted by Professor Hilbert.)

On footnotes

Jo Wolff (UCL) has some amusing reflections.

In Memoriam: Philippa Foot (1920-2010)

Professor Foot, one of the towering figures of post-WWII Anglophone moral philosophy, passed away yesterday.  I am sure many obituaries and memorial notices will appear, so check back for updates.

UPDATE:  A remembrance from Larry Solum (Illinois).

ANOTHER:  An obituary from The Telegraph.  This strikes me as less informative than the typical biographies of philosophers in English newspapers.  In particular, it really does no justice to the range of important papers in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s that were later collected in Virtues and Vices, which I suspect will remain her most influential contribution to the discipline.

AGAIN:  A rather more illuminating obituary from The Guardian.  (Thanks to Simon Kirchin for the pointer.)

ONE MORE:  Well-informed obituary in the New York Times.

Impending Catastrophe at Louisiana State University?

Philosopher Jon Cogburn (LSU) has details and suggestions about what readers can do to help.

The school formerly known as the State "University" of New York at Albany

They're wiping out just about all their programs of language study, and the tenured faculty with them.  What a disgrace.

UPDATE:  Reader Bécquer Medak-Seguín has forwarded to me a letter from Brett Bowles, an Associate Professor of French Studies at Albany:  

Today the seven members of the French faculty at SUNY--Albany (all tenured) were informed that by presidential decision, ostensibly for budgetary reasons, the French program has been "deactivated" at all levels (BA, MA, PhD), as have BA programs in Russian and Italian. The only foreign language program unaffected is Spanish. The primary criterion used in making the decision was undergrad majors-to-faculty ratio. We were told that tenured faculty in French, Russian, and Italian will be kept on long enough for our students to finish their degrees--meaning three years at the outside. Senoir faculty are being encouraged to take early retirement. The rest of us are being urged to "pursue our careers elsewhere," as our Provost put it.

Needless to say, the decision is personally devastating to those of us affected, but it is also symptomatic of the ongoing devaluation of foreign-language and other humanities program in universities across the United States. I'm writing to ask for your help in spreading the word about this decision as widely as possible and in generating as much negative media publicity as possible against SUNY--Albany and the SUNY system in its entirety.

There is much background to add about how this decision was reached and implemented, too much for me to explain fully here. Suffice it to say that the disappearance of French, Italian, and Russian has resulted from an almost complete lack of leadership at the Albany campus and in the SUNY system. Our president, a former state pension fund manager, holds an MBA as his highest degree, has never held a college or university teaching position, and has never engaged in any kind of scholarship.

More disturbing still, due process was not followed in the decision-making process. The affected programs were not consulted or given the opportunity to propose money-saving reforms. Our Dean and Provost simply hand-selected an advisory committee to rubber stamp the president's decision. The legalities of the situation remain to be discussed with our union, UUP, but in the meantime I welcome any advice you may have.

Fortunately, there does appear to be a faculty union; one hopes the union will file a lawsuit and seek to enjoin the faculty terminations.

"Thinking about a major? Major in thinking"

Here's a great poster that philosopher Christopher Pynes (Western Illinois University) prepared, which I saw last week when I was visiting his department.   I asked if he would share it with readers of the blog, and he kindly agreed:


Professor Pynes is happy to have other departments borrow the idea.  He writes:

What do Search Committees think of Interfolio?

A philosophy job seeker writes:

I was wondering if you might get a discussion going on your blog about what search committees think about Interfolio.  I am on the job market and debating about whether or not to use it.  It makes things much easier for us applicants, but I have heard that some search committees don't like how Interfolio sends dossier materials.  It would be valuable to hear people's opinions on this.  

Comment are open.

A Former Department Chair's Perspective on the NRC Fiasco

This is representative of a number of e-mails I've gotten from philosophers about the NRC, though this is particularly interesting as the perspective of a former Chair of a Department at the time the NRC data was being gathered:

First, I’m sure I speak for many people when I say that I’m very grateful to you for the posts and the links. Departments across the country are going to be asked by their administrations to speak to their rankings in the NRC report and I’m sure they’re very grateful for the information and analysis that you’ve provided yourself and that to which you’ve provided links.

Second, I understand that some of your analysis is influential beyond philosophy – my wife tells me that you were quoted on the IHE web site the day that the NRC report was released.  It’s in that connection that I’m writing now. 

I really think that someone needs to point out one implication of the fact that the rankings are – as you put it – a fiasco.  The implication is that an enormous amount of faculty and administrative time was simply wasted at the data-gathering stage.  I was department chair at that stage and spent hours exhorting my colleagues to fill in their surveys, filling in my own faculty survey and filling in the departmental survey. 

Chairing an academic department is, as you know, extremely burdensome.  I never minded doing the kind of work that was legitimately needed to maintain and build a department.  But asking people to spend squander so much of their time providing data for a report that is ultimately valueless is simply unconscionable.  The people who ran the survey ought to be embarrassed at the product.  They ought to be ashamed of the process that led to it.  I hope that at some point, you’ll use your platform to make that point.

More Stuff Coming on the Weekend...

...I have been occupied having a good time, philosophically and socially, with the folks at Western Illinois University today and yesterday.

National Association Representing Computer Scientists Denounces NRC Rankings

Here.  I do not recall any national association of scholars reacting this way to prior NRC reports (though, of course, prior ones were straightforward surveys of experts evaluating faculty and program quality).  Here's an excerpt from the CRA statement:

CRA has serious concerns about the accuracy and consistency of the data being used in the evaluation of the Computer Science discipline.

CRA has identified a number of instances in which data were reported under different assumptions by institutions, leading to inconsistent interpretation of the associated statistical factors.

CRA has further identified a number of instances where the data is demonstrably incorrect - sometimes very substantially - or incorrectly measures the intended component.

CRA is pleased that the NRC acknowledges there are errors in the data used to evaluate computer science departments and that, in the words of NRC Study Director Charlotte Kuh, “There’s lots more we need to look at for computer science before we really get it right.”

CRA will continue to work closely with its member departments and the NRC to help correct these errors and determine more suitable data sources for the evaluation.

What are the odds these problems are limited to computer science?  More strikingly, Ms. Kuh, who apparently bears the primary responsibility for this baroque and senseless methodology, acknowledges that the NRC rankings in computer science are worthless.

In fairness to racists

They aren't all in the Tea Party and they don't all use e-mail.

A Devastating Analysis of the NRC Ratings from a Leading Statistician

Here.  I added this as an update to the main post on the NRC rankings, but it deserves special notice.  Charlotte Kuh and Jeremiah Ostriker, who bear primary responsibility for this fiasco, really have good reason to be embarrassed.

More NRC Reactions

Epistemologists are not impressed!

Brad DeLong, an economist at Berkeley, makes what I suspect will become a typical mistake in interpreting the results.   According to the NRC, there is a 90% chance that the "true rank" of Berkeley Economics is between 4 and 8.

Every school in the nation is "among the nation's best" according to their press releases, but given the NRC's failure to actually rank the programs in an intelligible way, this seems a defensible gloss!

A Quick Guide to the New National Research Council (NRC) Rankings

UPDATE:  Given the large number of (largely new) visitors coming to this post, and the various updates I am adding to it, I will leave it at the top for a few days.  Regular readers are encouraged to scroll down for new postings.  Thanks

=========================

The NRC ranking of doctoral programs for 2005-06 is finally out .  A few quick points, and then some details about the results relevant to philosophy:

1.  The NRC ranking is not a ranking of faculty quality, so not really comparable to the PGR, even the PGR from 2004-06, the closest in time to the data the NRC collected, which was for 2005-06.  While in every past NRC report, the NRC collected and published expert opinion about faculty and program quality, this time the NRC did not.  Only one of the 20 variables used by the NRC even has any connection to faculty quality, and that variable (major awards and grants [adjusted for faculty size], such as Guggenheims, NSF Fellowships, American Academy membership and the like) is only a very weak indicator, for a host of obvious reasons:  only a small number of such awards occurred during the time period studied, so just one or two faculty can make a huge difference to the results on a small faculty; many of these awards favor some areas of philosophy over others [philosophers of science and logicians can get NSF awards, other philosophers usually can't; Guggenheim and ACLS Fellowships appear to favor historians of philosophy and value theorists over folks in philosophy of mind and epistemology; American Academy membership is 'chummy' and tends to go to "friends of friends" and older faculty, thus being a better backward-looking than forward-looking metric--a school with great younger faculty won't get picked up on this metric, etc.].

2.  The NRC ranking purports to be a measure of program quality or attractiveness.  (The idea that you could measure program quality without having any real measure of faculty quality is, in itself, astonishing.)  It purports to do this by aggregating twenty different factors in the humanities, broken into three categories:  Research Activity (meaning the one qualitative variable noted above, plus per capita publications, which imposes no quality control for journal, publisher, impact, etc., so is largely meaningless); Student Support and Outcomes (e.g., graduate student funding [rich, private schools fare better on average on this metric], job placement (without, as far as I can tell, any audit of the data schools reported), time-to-degree, availability of student health insurance, and several other variables); and Diversity of the Academic Environment (i.e., ethnic and gender diversity of the faculty and student body).  Note an irony about the use of job placement, which I assume got significant weigh in both the overall rankings (about which more, below).   A school reporting job placement in 2005-06 for the preceding five years would be reporting on the success of students who chose the school in the early-to-mid-1990s.  The last NRC, which included a regular reputation ranking of faculty quality, came out in 1995.  My guess is the correlation between the job placement statistics and the 1995 NRC report (and the mid-to-late 90s PGRs) is probably pretty strong, but that, of course, is because job placement is always a backwards-looking measure.

(I do want to emphasize that there is no indication that the NRC audited all the self-reported data from schools:  on job placement, time to degree, even the faculty rosters and the CVs.  I know from PGR experience that departments err in their self-reporting of information in only one direction.  If I'm mistaken about this, please let me know.)

From this mass of data, the NRC constructed two rankings.  The R-Ranking assigned weights to these variables in order to mimic, in effect, the results of a secret reputational survey of an unknown number of putative experts in each field (seriously).  More precisely:  "a sample group of faculty were asked to rate a sample of programs in their fields.  Then, a statistical analysis was used to calculate how the 20 program characteristics would need to be weighed in order to reproduce most closely the sample ratings.  In other words, the analysis attempted to understand how much importance faculty implicitly attached to various program characteristics when they rate the sample of programs."  The NRC does not report the results of its reputational survey, amazingly.  Nor is it clear on my reading whether there was any reason to think that faculty evaluating programs were even aware of, let alone interested in, some of the NRC variables.  The NRC insists the R-Ranking is not a reputational survey, and that is right.  It's essentially a weird and not very reliable approximation of a reputational survey of an unknown group of evaluators of unknown size.  (UPDATE:  On page 198 of the NRC report, we learn that "up to 200" evaluators for each field were surveyed, and on p. 286, we learn that a total of 171 philosophy faculty [no indication of how they were chosen, or what distribution of expertise or areas they represented] were each asked to evaluate not more than 50 programs; that each program had an average of 46.7 faculty evaluate it, with a low of 34 faculty for some programs, and a high of 57 faclty for some others.  A typical PGR survey collects responses from between 250-300 faculty for each program evaluated, and, of course, the list of evaluators is public.  Note that not all the philosophy programs were evaluated by any rater--see the comments by Stigler in Update #8, below.)

The NRC also calculated an S-Ranking, which assigned weights to the variables based on the weights respondents in each field said the criteria deserved.  This is vulnerable to the confusions Ned Block (NYU) noted.

Given the huge range of variables and the baroque methodology (which will no doubt generate its own cottage industry of commentary), it should not be surprising that the results (for Philosophy) qualify as somewhere between "odd" and "inexplicable."

3.  The huge time lag--the NRC Report released today is already five years out of date--is quite significant, especially for the "Research Activity" measures, which, because it employs per capita (or percentage of the faculty) measures, can be quite sensitive to just one or two faculty movements.  And since the Research Activity measures were, it appears, given the most weight in the R- and S-Rankings, these changes are also quite significant.  (One guesses, of course--I can't tell from the material I've seen--that it was the Awards & Grants that dominated, since per capita productivity is such an obviously poor measure.)  So, consider that Yale, which according to the NRC is not close to the top 25 in either the R-Ranking or in "Research Activity," did not have on its 2005-06 faculty two highly 'decorated' and recognized senior philosophers, Stephen Darwall, who moved from Michigan, and Thomas Pogge, who moved from Columbia.  (Even without them, it seems bizarre that Yale was not in the top 25 for "Research Activity.")  Given the relatively small size of the Yale Department, it's hard to see how just these two, even by the NRC's criteria, would not have changed the results significantly.   Similarly, the 2005-06 University of Chicago faculty roster would have included John Haugeland (Guggenheim winner, now deceased), Charles Larmore (Fellow of the American Academy, now moved to Brown), and William Wimsatt (productive and influential philosopher of biology, now retired).  These examples could be multiplied in both directions, though I think the important point to remember is that the NRC was not really measuring the philosophical quality of the faculty.

Putting these criticisms and concerns to one side, there is data in the NRC Report that should be of interest to prospective students, particularly, the systematic data gathered on time-to-degree.  I hope they will make that data easily available on the Internet.

Below the fold, a sample of some of the results for Philosophy.

Congratulations to Boston University!

The first school to officially violate the NRC embargo on the rankings!  (8:25 am CST.)

The NRC Rankings Aren't Officially Released Until This Afternoon...

...but already serious mistakes are being alleged in the data collection and processing.  "Garbage in, garbage out," as the first link puts it.  (I should add that inaccurate data appears to be the least of the problems.)

Harvard and Marty Peretz Redux

Robert Paul Wolff has the details of the event.  Kudos to Professor Wolff for doing the right thing!

The National Research Council Will Release Its Rankings of Graduate Programs for 2005-06 Tomorrow

I'll have more to say then, but now seems a good time to bring forward Ned Block's earlier comments about the methodology and its peculiarities:

I am not criticizing using polling to derive rankings. That is what the PGR does and I (like a lot of other people) think the PGR ratings, despite flaws, are good enough to be of considerable utility. However, it is already clear that the NRC procedures are so poor as to make their results specious and misleading. It is important to be clear on what the NRC did. The 21 variables that they used (e.g. number of faculty publications, whether students have health insurance, percentage of international students) were not arrived at by any kind of research. They were a result of deliberation within the NRC committee. There were two methods of “weighting” the 21 variables (20 in the case of the humanities since citation data in the humanities was inadequate)....

The first method was just asking people about their views. These were the “direct weights”, and the method used was NOT complicated or hard to understand. They asked people which characteristics were "the most important to program quality". (The one minor complication was that they asked this question within each of 3 categories and then asked people a similar question about the categories themselves.) My point against this procedure is that in asking people which characteristics were “the most important to program quality” they did not distinguish between indicators of (i.e. factors that give information about) program quality and features that themselves constituted a kind of program quality even if not very relevant to the all important intellectual quality of the program. I mentioned that the percentage of students with portable fellowships (Mellons, NSFs) is an indicator or assay but not itself a kind of program quality. I mentioned health insurance as something that it is itself a kind of quality but not much of an indicator. This is an absolutely crucial confusion since (at least I would argue) the use of many of the variables including the 5 measures of diversity (of 20 variables) could not be justified on the basis that they are significant indicators of the intellectual quality of the program. The whole rationale of assembling a lot of weak indicators into a stronger measure is undermined if the question asked is straightforwardly ambiguous in this obvious way. In addition, it is a repeated result in experimental psychology that people who can make an expert evaluation (e.g. a doctor evaluating symptoms or a faculty member evaluating a graduate application) are not usually very good at saying what the factors are that justify the evaluation or which is more important. Thus academics may know high quality work when they see it but not what justifies the evaluation.

The second method of weighting the variables is the one that is hard to understand. But in overview it is simple. They ascertained which weights made the variables correlate best with a PGR-like ranking. Here my point is that those who object to the PGR ranking (e.g. Christopher Gauker) can hardly have high expectations of a ranking to the extent that it is derived from a PGR-like ranking. A further point is that the NRC has not told us HOW WELL their weighted variables predict the PGR-like ranking. And they are not revealing the PGR-like ranking itself. I think this is an astonishing piece of intellectual acrobatics. They got PGR-like rankings from their respondents but won’t tell us about what they were because they involve mere opinions about the quality of philosophy programs, but they think well enough of those opinions to use them to choose the weights of the variables they used. They actually describe themselves as using the PGR-like rating to weight “objective variables” so as to “imitate, to the extent achievable, the judgment criteria of the initially surveyed faculty” [i.e. the PGR-like rating]. The chair of the NRC committee (Ostriker) and one of the members (Kuh) cite a joint 2003 book as having shown how to do this. Christopher Gauker is right that for each evaluated program, they did provide a link to a page that provided information about the program. One thing I like about their PGR-like ranking (the one they aren’t going to tell us the results of because it isn’t “objective” enough) is that they asked for both a rating and how familiar the rater was with each program. This is something the PGR could learn from (though at the cost of complicating the process).

The NRC methodology is so technical (see Ostriker & Kuh, 2003) that most readers will lack the expertise to understand it. The key fact to focus on though is that eyeballing the list of 20 variables they used, only 4 have much prima facie plausibility as indicators of intellectual quality (as opposed to other kinds of goodness) in a philosophy program. Those are the number of publications of faculty, percent of faculty holding grants, faculty awards and GRE of students. The first of these is rendered uninteresting because no attempt is made to evaluate the substantiveness of the publication or the quality of the venue. One point for articles, five for books; that’s it. The percent of faculty holding grants is a matter of faculty holding grants at the very moment they filled in the form, rendering it uninteresting. GREs…well we all have our own opinion of the value of GREs. The award variable seems to me the most significant, although as Brian pointed out, some awards just perpetuate traditional hierarchies. Putting it all together, no matter how wonderfully advanced their method of weighting these variable is, it is unlikely that the information is there in those variables to make a highly significant predictor of actual intellectual quality of philosophy programs. And when you add the fact that it is already 3 [ed.--now five] years out of date, the word ‘pathetic’ comes to mind.