The Sooty Empiric

Some time back there was some hubbub about an APA blog post piece posing the question " Should we continue to read and honour immoral philosophers? " The answer, it was widely thought, is so obviously "yes" that it is a sign of the moral decay of philosophy - dare I say western civilisation more broadly! - that this is now in doubt. Unfortunately for those of us seeking a fun day out on the internet, however,  the piece in fact agreed the answer is obviously "yes" and proceeded to argue as much. Curses . So why don't I give the internet what it wants and actually try to argue for the absurd proposition?  I will say up front: in the end, I don't buy it. Common sense is basically right on this one. Sometimes you can learn valuable things from people who did bad stuff. Honouring people is, I guess, a bit more iffy; but in many cases we honour people who did bad stuff for different good stuff they also did. I suppose we could put a blanket ban on ever ...

A conversation with a colleague the other day prompts me to explain in more detail why I think myself and most of those like me are wasting our lives. I have already explained that I think analytic philosophy is a degenerative research programme building shoddy structures from inadequate material. But the sunny optimism of Daniel Stoljar's engaging book has given me the tools to explain in somewhat more detail where exactly my worries lie. Stoljar makes a rough and ready division of questions one may ask into three sorts: topic questions, big questions, and small questions. I will give a slightly wrong description of his division here to suit my purposes. Topic questions are agenda setting big picture concerns that get a person wondering in the first place, the driving curiosity that lie behind whole swathes of inquiry. They are or can be pretty vague and high level -- "What's everything made out of?" "How can I live a good life?" etc. Big questions are ...

Recently I read this post -- " Behavioural Science Needs to Return to the Basics " -- and I didn't like it. In this blog post I am going to complain about it. To be clear my complaints are not going to dispute that there are lots of tiresome prigs in academia, that given the general demeanour of academics tiresome moralists tend to be of the liberal left variety, and even less that in work (both ideological and not) there is a lot of slapdash reasoning. All of those claims are certainly true, and (aha) the lived experience of any academic will confirm them adequately enough. (If you don't believe me then see here .) These are pretty central claims to the linked piece, so that's a substantial amount of agreement! But alas in academia we don't just care that you say true things, we care that you say true things for the right reasons. The old joke that philosophers are the kind of people who say "I know it works in practice but does it work in theory?" ...

So I decided to rank the races. In particular, I wanted to see just how many more white philosophers there are on the list of the 376 Most Cited Recent Philosophers in the Stanford Encyclopaedia compiled  by Eric Schwitzgabel.  I didn't have any way of telling more sophisticated than using my background knowledge plus google images search to examine the exact shape of people's brows to work out their ethnic background. So I am sure I made some mistakes (is Richard J. Arneson just really swarthy or what? And no link to ethnicity but shout out to Will Kymlicka's moustache it's great) -- but on the whole I think I am at least roughly correct. So I think there are 8* non white philosophers on the list:  Jaegwon Kim, 59th most cited. Amartya K. Sen, 83rd most cited. Richard Sorabji, 111th most cited. Kwame Anthony Appiah, 158th most cited. Linda Martín Alcoff, 260th most cited. Mohan Matthen, 272nd most cited. Charles W. Mills 335th most cited. Sahotra Sarkar, tied ...

This is literally happening right now at universities across the world. Exactly this. There has been another round of discussion online about evil humanities professors disordering our political life by spreading pernicious relativism about truth and objectivity. I remain convinced that this is a distraction, that in fact none of our disputes in political and social life are actually about the nature of truth. Apparently I have not persuaded people! So today I try a different approach. I will try to persuade you that all the sorts of things people do to actually create trouble for claims of objective truth are, in the main, unobjectionable, or even where controversial not really the sort of thing that divides us politically. When philosophers discuss truth we have a stock example of a true sentence -- "snow is white". This is because of the role the claim played in a classic, really genre defining, paper by the polish logician Alfred Tarski . In the serene peace of academic...

The American educational system teaches children to distinguish between "facts" and "opinions". A recent paper in Misinformation Review  has even made mastery of this distinction a marker of civic political competence. Per this paper facts are those statements that "can be proved or disproved with objective evidence" whereas opinions are those statements that "depend on personal values and preferences". I think this is a bogus distinction and should not have any role as a marker of political competence or as part of children's education.  Now, this is a topic other better philosophers have handled and I agree with their critiques. Corvino outlines the trouble with trying to draw the distinction in any coherent fashion. The NYT piece by McBrayer linked above correctly points out there is no way this could sensibly divide all claims in the manner sometimes suggested. Jenkins-Ichikawa points out the kind of category error involved, how the d...