tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post3424401834520075070..comments2024-01-17T23:23:29.732-06:00Comments on Jacob T. Levy: Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post-36270204637403946052009-01-22T18:35:00.000-06:002009-01-22T18:35:00.000-06:00Cohen was visiting at the law school and philosoph...Cohen was visiting at the law school and philosophy department at Columbia last fall. He's visited at CUNY in the recent past, too. This sort of part-time gig for mandatorily retired top philosophers from the UK (and other countries) is fairly popular, pretty low-stress as far as work-loads, and pretty well-paying, too, it seems. (See, Joseph Raz, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, etc.) I expect he'll do that sort of thing with some regularity but have no idea if it will become a regular on-going thing like it is for Raz at Columbia and Horstmann at Penn.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post-47953856607757074582009-01-22T18:03:00.000-06:002009-01-22T18:03:00.000-06:00Brian, that's persuasive evidence from the other f...Brian, that's persuasive evidence from the other fields; thanks.Jacob T. Levyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02575549001627195334noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post-5646774630638673482009-01-21T17:21:00.000-06:002009-01-21T17:21:00.000-06:00If G.A. Cohen has retired from Oxford, what's he g...If G.A. Cohen has retired from Oxford, what's he going to be doing now?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post-27981809460310458202009-01-21T16:20:00.000-06:002009-01-21T16:20:00.000-06:00If I had been writing for publication, and not on ...If I had been writing for publication, and not on a blog, then I would not have said "can't"-but you know how it goes on blogs. So, yes, it "could". But the usual way that works is someone sees the name, "Harvard," and thinks Rawls/Nozick, great place for political philosophy: they're responding just to the name of the school, nothing else. Most evaluators surely figure out after reading through some fo the faculty list what department it is, that's true, and so I suppose it's possible they then suffer from nostalgia and overrate Harvard in political philosophy. But notice that we don't see a similar effect in other areas where Hravard was once dominant, like philosophy of language and mind--apparently folks don't say, ah "Harvard," home of Quine/Putnam, great place for philosophy of language and mind. No, they look through the list and see that Hravard is no longe rdominant in these areas, even though they have some good younger people.<BR/><BR/>So bottom line is I'd be more likely to credit the worry if it appeared to be more widespread: e.g., if Princeton were tops in metaphysics, even though Kripke and Lewis are gone (it's not); if Chicago were still way up there in philosophy of physics even though Malament and Stein are gone (it's not); and so on. If Scanlon and Sen retire--both might before too long--and Harvard *still* comes out on top in political philosophy, then I concede the point. I'd bet money that won't happen.<BR/><BR/>By the way, I've had so many ancedotal reports from evaluators about the powerful effect of not using university names (e.g., evaluators report doing a double-take when they realize, "Jeeez, I'm looking at Harvard, wow has that placed changed") that I suspect it does the work it is supposed to: it forces evlauators to look at the faculty, and think about who is really there and what work they are doing. Of course, that also implies something unhappy about the other kinds of evaluations of schools and faculties (US News most notoriously in the US) that do nothing to try to counteract the 'halo' effect.Brian Leiterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08749548844483929392noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post-89141140475575336842009-01-21T11:36:00.000-06:002009-01-21T11:36:00.000-06:00Thanks, Brian. Certainly, your method of distribu...Thanks, Brian. Certainly, your method of distributing faculty rosters rather than university names is as much as can be done to mitigate the effects of nostalgia and name-brand valuation-- and it does a very good job at it. As I noted, the Brown, Stanford, and Arizona rankings all show that; and the very fact that we are discussing what one or two faculty arrivals or departures per school make sense of the rankings shows that they're sensitive to real changes.<BR/><BR/>But, while you're here, I might as well ask: do you think that means that nostalgia or name-brand effects play absolutely *no* part? It's not as though your evaluators see the faculty roster that includes Scanlon, Sen, Kamm, Shelby etc., and don't *know* that it's Harvard-- or don't know that Harvard has occupies a unique place in North American political philosophy over the past couple of generations. <BR/><BR/>I guess I was just surprised by your "can't" in "Harvard's rating in political philosophy can't be nostalgia." It's certainly less about nostalgia than any other useful method I can think of would be (though there are less-useful methods like citation counts that would strip the effect away completely)-- but surely sometimes the thought process could go, "ah, the Harvard list; what do I think of Harvard as a place to study political philosophy?", couldn't it?Jacob T. Levyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02575549001627195334noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post-46892580558999496772009-01-21T11:15:00.000-06:002009-01-21T11:15:00.000-06:00Waldron left Columbia for NYU prior to the 2006 su...Waldron left Columbia for NYU prior to the 2006 surveys, so that was not a factor; Pogge's move surely was.<BR/><BR/>I would be surprised if Shapiro's move had any effect on the political phil ranking for Yale or Michigan.<BR/><BR/>Epstein isn't leaving Chicago, he is teaching part-time in the Law School at NYU and part-time in the Law School at Chicago, as he has been doing for a number of years. NYU, alas, has been misrepresenting this rather badly.<BR/><BR/>Harvard's rating in political philosophy can't be nostalgia, since evaluators receive a list of faculty names, not a school name. That list has on it T.M. Scanlon and Amartya Sen (as others have noted), among others, and several cognate faculty working in and around political philosophy.Brian Leiterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08749548844483929392noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post-32010172466117115402009-01-20T20:44:00.000-06:002009-01-20T20:44:00.000-06:00Ah--right all around. Thanks for filling in my ab...Ah--right all around. Thanks for filling in my absent-minded gaps.Jacob T. Levyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02575549001627195334noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post-3877137506472949472009-01-20T19:08:00.000-06:002009-01-20T19:08:00.000-06:00As for Columbia, they also lost Waldron to NYU. (...As for Columbia, they also lost Waldron to NYU. (In truth Pogge had not really taught at Columbia for more than 6 years, according to students there- he was always on some visiting position or other, but the still benefited from him in the rankings.) Yale gained Pogge and also Darwall (mostly ethics but lots of political stuff, too) and Shapiro, whose work is relevant to political even when not directly on it. If Pogge will actually be at Yale they probably deserve the spot though it's not clear to me that they are _lots_ better than some others.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post-24019699943842387472009-01-20T17:05:00.000-06:002009-01-20T17:05:00.000-06:00Columbia also dropped out of the 2nd group, which ...Columbia also dropped out of the 2nd group, which I suspect is attributable to Pogge leaving for Yale (which in turn explains why Yale is now in group 2)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post-15368013489551429642009-01-20T15:36:00.000-06:002009-01-20T15:36:00.000-06:00Sreenivasan to Duke.Which reminds me that I agree ...<A HREF="http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/05/sreenivasan-fro.html" REL="nofollow">Sreenivasan to Duke.</A><BR/><BR/>Which reminds me that I agree with Matt about Duke. Allen Buchanan, Martin Golding, Wayne Norman, Gopal Sreenivasan, with Michael Gillespie and Ruth Grant affiliated and Geoff Brennan elsewhere on campus, has to add up to a major program.Jacob T. Levyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02575549001627195334noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post-77224980441947028742009-01-20T15:00:00.000-06:002009-01-20T15:00:00.000-06:00Isn't Sreenivasan still with Toronto? There hasn't...Isn't Sreenivasan still with Toronto? There hasn't been any news about his move from Toronto.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post-83422380329158739802009-01-20T14:30:00.000-06:002009-01-20T14:30:00.000-06:00I would have ranked some of the programs a bit dif...I would have ranked some of the programs a bit differently but it's mostly at least defensible. As for Harvard, this year they included in their faculty list a number of "affiliated" faculty, as all schools were allowed to do. I'm never sure how much weight they should be given because it's hard to know how useful they are to the actual philosophy students. But, the Harvard group included Michael Rosen, Richard Tuck, and Matias Risse, at least, in addition to Thomas Scanlon, Tommy Shelby, and Frances Kamm. Now, since some of those work more on ethics than political philosophy proper and many are not primarily in philosophy I wouldn't have ranked them '5', but it's not crazy. Michigan also lost Scott Shapiro, (who went to Yale), and though he doesn't work directly in political for the most part he was surely a contributor. There are several other faculties that seem to me to be at least as strong in political as some of these (Duke, Virginia, and Penn, if I may say so w/o seeming too self-interested, all seem to me as good as Yale or University College London, for example) but over-all it's not a bad ranking.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post-1919329422241445462009-01-20T13:23:00.000-06:002009-01-20T13:23:00.000-06:00Well, Harvard is the only department with a Nobel ...Well, Harvard is the only department with a Nobel prize-winning political philosopher!<BR/><BR/>I'm sure that the evaluators vary on how much they rank "political" as a freestanding field and how much they take into account strength in ethics or moral philosophy-- based in part on their own sensibilities about the relationships among those fields.Jacob T. Levyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02575549001627195334noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post-22895982275796248042009-01-20T13:07:00.000-06:002009-01-20T13:07:00.000-06:00Harvard? Really? How much of this is nostalgia f...Harvard? Really? How much of this is nostalgia for the days of Rawls and Nozick? Is this really the single best faculty for political?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3456948.post-38521005849657975592009-01-20T11:33:00.000-06:002009-01-20T11:33:00.000-06:00And (mixing departments for a moment) I'm told NYU...And (mixing departments for a moment) I'm told NYU will shortly have Richard Epstein, which is great news for those of us who aren't in academia but need an amazing lecture once in a while. (Leaving Chicago is all the rage.)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com