Thanks to Joe Patrice at Above the Law for summarizing all that.
I read the underlying article — "Leiter to Step Down from PGR / The New Consensus" — but I was finding it hard to think of how to get readers up to the speed where something interesting could be said. Catch up with all that if you want, if you think you need to follow the doings of the philosophers. I'll just say that it looks as though the women philosophers are making their presence felt, and philosophy in the form of invigorating insults like "sanctimonious asshole" and "stupid" will not be the way to show one's philosophical stuff in the future.
I don't read too much philosophy, but I enjoy some of the great old aggressive aphorisms and epithets, including and especially attacks on bland, blabby, blurry writing. Here's a nice list of "The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History." Who called whom "A great cow full of ink"? "An idiot child screaming in a hospital"? "[T]he king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses"? "He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices"? "[A] queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples"?
But let the philosophers in the academy deal with their own problems. Leiter had reigned over a rankings system, and that gave his words a power to intimidate that extended beyond the meaning of those words.
By the way, I too am a woman who has been targeted by Leiter. The funny thing is that I don't care enough to remember what the dispute was. I need to publish this post so I can click on the "Leiter" tag and bone up on my own old lost history.
ADDED: Oh! I see I fought insult with insult, and — so amusingly — predicted that women would be his downfall. From September 10, 2006:
Nerd wants love.
Thinks sucking up to feminists is a good move. Don't you realize all the best feminists laugh at that?
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17 comments:
Philosophy as such does not arise for women. It's a male obsession. I'll find the quote.
Who knows what philosophy departments are like today, though.
the quote
As author on author insults go I'm partial to "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'the' and 'and'".
And I'm dismayed by definitions of feminism that are overbroad
That's good in a Tom Swifty kind of way.
Leiter abused a lot of people.
At the wbsite i was drawn to the 'Non-Academic Hirings' list. Two examples I particularly liked:
Don Goodman-Wilson (WUSTL, philosophy) hired by Screenhero [http://screenhero.com], founding engineer, May 2013. TA, RA, hardware engineer at Railstars [http://railstars.com], pizza delivery.
Lindsay Weir (MA, University of Waterloo), Hired by Lear Communication as an Administrative Assistant since April 2014. Past positions included an administrative assistant in the Oil and Gas industry, and as an HR assistant in big box retail.
In their previous incarnations one sold pizza, the other sold their soul.
Overdetermination in action
Leiter
leader; (einer Abteilung) head; (eines Instituts) director; (einer Schule) head teacher; headmaster (BrE) ; principal (esp. AmE) ; (Vorsitzender) chair[man]
also ladder.
Wittgenstein: an infinite ladder is not a ladder.
Name the Philosophers:
“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
"Easy - remind you police are overseers and slave catchers, who blacks have little reason to trust or respect, and I'm fine with whatever blacks have to do to escape them - including trying to restrict THEIR freedom by killing them."
The three best known female philosophers are Simone deBeauvoir, Hannah Arendt, and Ayn Rand. Rand was the only one who figured out how to make deep thought pay off in her personal life.
Great intelligence and social skill is not gender specific. Gold is here you find it
Bullies love attacking unpopular people. Leiter did it, until Leiter was unpopular enough for other people to do it.
A pox on both their houses.
Whatever the reasons, things are now changing. Over the past couple of years, philosophers have witnessed the emergence of a new consensus—one that rejects acquiescence to abuses of power in philosophy, one that seeks to overturn rather than turn away from the profession’s problems, one that seeks to support rather than silence the vulnerable.
Ahahaha. The new ruling class displaces the old ruling class by appeals to old abuses. But the one thing which is certain is that the new ruling class will invent its own abuses.
The new consensus did not emerge by magic, nor is it complete. There are still many with legitimate personal and structural complaints about our profession. Progress has been, and will continue to be, the result of courageous and creative persons struggling against complacency and convention. We are lucky to have such people among us, and we are lucky to be a part of this exciting slice of the history of philosophy.
A simple theory of academia:
Advancing professionally by actually making advances in the capabilities of a field is incredibly hard. It's a "many are called, few are chosen" sort of thing. Therefore, *anything* you accept in the place of actual professional achievement will end up being produced in ridiculous excess.
If you accept prestigious degrees, you will end up with pompous blowhards who went to prestigious programs and haven't produced anything since.
If you accept people who advocate the Marxist program, or the feminist program, you will end up with too many advocates.
Right now, people think that "influential critic of the philosophical profession" is a way to advance in philosophy without actually producing philosophy. For all I know, they are completely right in their criticisms, and every change they advocate is unreservedly good. But the time will soon come when "criticism of the philosophical profession" will become a smothering blanket of censorship and conformity.
I you have been attacked by Brian Leiter, you are not in an exclusive group. You would be in the class "disagree with Leiter" which is a much larger class than the class of "agree with Leiter".
I remember Brian Leiter from law school in Ann Arbor. Once a gunner, always a gunner.
Leiter has successfully parlayed the Philosophical Gourmet Report ranking thing into a law professorship at the University of Chicago and founding directorship of its Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values.
Still, it's best to think of him as a biathlete. Good but not great at track and good but not great at shooting, he found a sport where he can run and gun.
Leiter would want it to be said that his success is also due to his being "one of the leading Nietzsche scholars in the world."
So, like Nathan Leopold, we can track his crimes back from Chicago to studying Nietzsche at the University of Michigan.
It's hard for me to imagine Brian as someone who would inspire fear. Yet in true Tom Sawyer fashion he seems to have garnered the respect of a community of 550 "nominated evaluators" to whitewash his PGR fence every year.
I find it equally incredulous that he has provoked 645 philosophy professors to sign up to boycott him. That means they take him seriously. It would be equally wrong to think that he's gone.
Man, that "30 harshest" didn't even reach my No. 1, G.K. Chesterton on Theodore Dreiser:
He describes a world which appears to be a dull and discolouring illusion of indigestion, not bright enough to be called a nightmare; smelly, but not even stinking with any strength; smelling of the sale gas of ignorant chemical experiments by dirty, secretive schoolboys -- the sort of boys who torture cats in corners; spineless and spiritless like a broken-backed worm; loathsomely slow and laborious like an endless slug; despairing, but not with dignity; blaspheming, but not with courage; without wit, without will, without laughter or uplifting of the heart; too old to die, too deaf to leave off talking, too blind to stop, too stupid to start afresh, too dead to be killed, and incapable even of being damned, since in all its weary centuries it has not reached the age of reason.
Now that's invective as it ought to be!
I'm amazed that the "30 Harshest" list doesn't contain my own fave, Chesterton on Dreiser:
He describes a world which appears to be a dull and discolouring illusion of indigestion, not bright enough to be called a nightmare; smelly, but not even stinking with any strength; smelling of the stale gas of ignorant chemical experiments by dirty, secretive schoolboys -- the sort of boys who torture cats in corners; spineless and spiritless like a broken-backed worm; loathsomely slow and laborious like an endless slug; despairing, but not with dignity; blaspheming, but not with courage; without wit, without will, without laughter or uplifting of the heart; too old to die, too deaf to leave off talking, too blind to stop, too stupid to start afresh, too dead to be killed, and incapable even of being damned, since in all its weary centuries it has not reached the age of reason.
C'mon, that's what I call first-class invective.
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