Internet round-up: the Psmiths on class; Harper’s on Oklahoma universities; Leiter on ChatGPT

My favorite Substackers have reviewed Paul Fussell’s Class and applied its principles to today’s political landscape (and other things).

I get the vibe they’d read Class before.

If you haven’t read Class, you really ought to.

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From Harper’s’s “Weekly Review”:

Lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced a bill mandating that every state college erect a statue of [Charlie] Kirk in a “highly visible and easily accessible” plaza that bears the activist’s name.

The bill is here.

Just one more example of politicians trying to control what colleges say.

Kirk may have debated on campuses, but he wasn’t a faculty member or even a degree earner. And his work wasn’t scholarly. It didn’t try to adhere to the standards of any guild of experts.

I’d hope that no professional academic would wish to flaunt him as a symbol of what colleges and universities do.

Then again, a lot of schools are happy to put up statues of their football players. The state doesn’t even have to enforce that.

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Brian Leiter posts about how a colleague of his got a chatbot to write an “alarmingly competent” philosophical essay.

“How much trouble are we [academic philosophers] in?” Leiter asks.

I’ve never seen any undergraduate writing with the chatbot’s precise style, but (*shudder*) I’ve seen lots of PhD- and journal-level prose just like it.

So, yes, we philosophers – or, at least, those who aspire to a livelihood based on the production and evaluation of scholarship – are in big, big trouble. Because, with just a little input, robots can do those tasks now (or, if not now, soon). Not superlatively well, but well enough to impress the profession’s gatekeepers.

Worse: readers of philosophy are in trouble, and have been for some time, because so much scholarship makes the grade even though it sounds like it rolled off a conveyor belt. The prose is undistinguished, and stock “-isms” (contractualism! particularism!) are opposed or combined almost mechanically.

Body-text fonts, pt. 30: Utopia

The editors of the distinguished journal Philosophy & Public Affairs have resigned en masse – apparently, to escape the clutches of the publisher, Wiley – and have founded a new open-access journal. There is some understandable consternation about the Rawlsian overtones of the new journal’s title (see this blog post’s comments). I think it would be catchier, not to say less sanctimonious, to simply call the new publication “Footnotes to Rawls.” For a long period, the old journal was, in effect, a Rawls-commentary venue. Some readers found this dull; my rejoinder is, Not as dull as whatever it is the journal has been publishing lately.

But that’s neither here nor there. My concern about the switch to open-access publishing is about whether the new typesetting will suck. Since the 1990s, the old journal has been, typographically as well as thematically, outstandingly unadventurous, “safe as houses.” This despite the typeface’s name: Utopia.

I used to hate how the typeface looked. Now I don’t.

Reading articles from PPA’s Rawlsian heydey feels like slipping into a warm bath. Tonight I look back, fondly, at a specimen from 2004 (a response to Singer, not Rawls, as it happens):

My enthusiasm for this prose has grown over the years. (It probably helps that I knew the author.) Here is the exact price of the designer label sweater. Here is the exact price of the department-store brand sweater. Here is the difference. Now here are some goods that these savings could buy. The author’s boredom with the scenario is palpable. That’s as it should be. The scenario is over-discussed in the literature. But, paradoxically, the boredom verges on amusement. The designer label sweater is “stunning,” and it’s on sale for just $49.95 (what an irresistible find).

To apply all the requisite shades of beige, one needs a big block of text and a bland typeface – but not a cheap-looking one. Utopia is just right.

Erewhon and Heuristica are free Utopia “clones.”

More dead philosophers

Two lovely parties this weekend: one, yesterday, for the seventieth wedding anniversary of Dorothy & Gene, from church; and another, today, for the first birthday of my niece, Penelope.

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Two more philosophers have died: Daniel Dennett and Charles Parsons.

There have been several remarks along these lines: Dennett was one of the greatest recent philosophers. I don’t agree, but he was a wonderfully lively writer. He was … opinionated. This is from the first page I looked at, in the preface of the new (2015) edition of Elbow Room:

The varieties of free will worth wanting, the varieties that underwrite moral and artistic responsibility, are not only not threatened by advances in (neuro-)science; they are distinguished, explained, and justified in detail [in the book]. There are other readily definable varieties of free will that are incompatible with what we now know about how human beings control their behavior, such as “libertarian freedom” or “agent causation.” They don’t, and can’t, exist, but although some philosophers still take them seriously, they are of only historical interest, like mermaids and leprechauns.

Now that’s confidence. (Is there much historical interest in leprechauns?)

I don’t know if Parsons was unconfident, but he was no Dennett; lecturing, he’d pause mid-sentence for minutes … then carry on. (Brilliantly, it’s said.)

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Robert Adams advised the dissertation of one of my dissertation examiners (Derk). My recent browsing of Adams’s work inspired me to find out more about my other examiners’ advisers. Nick’s was the formidable Gilbert Harman; I don’t plan to write about him tonight. Dick’s adviser was Rogers Albritton. Now here was a unicorn – a philosopher so great, he barely published; whose few publications read like spillage from a sloshing cauldron of rich, still-brewing philosophy soup ( fanesca, perhaps); whose notebooks have been mined for posthumous publication. (Cf. two interesting obituaries, here and here.)

By the way, there will be a memorial conference for Dick this Saturday. I wish I could attend: to honor and learn more about Dick, and to see my Salvationist friend, Yvonne, Frank’s widow, whose health is failing.

R.I.P. Robert M. Adams (the philosopher, not the English prof)

He was my favorite living philosopher of religion. He also wrote about ethics, metaphysics, and the early modern philosophers. The one talk I heard him give at Cornell took issue with Rawls on political disagreement; rereading the article it became, I’m sure it was this work that inspired me to hew certain paths in my dissertation.

I’ve taught two of his essays –

“Saints”;

“Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief ”

– as well as one of his briefs for the divine command theory of morality (which of them, I’d have to check; on this topic, see the first part of “Moral Arguments,” above).

He looked and sounded like a grump, but his former students were devoted to him. Some trekked in from out of state for that talk at Cornell.

See too these remembrances on Leiter’s blog, especially Leiter’s, Zimmerman’s, Brennan’s, and Buras’s.

Notice that Zimmerman regards as a kindness Adams’s evisceration of his ideas on free will. It’s stunning that in 1991 Zimmerman interviewed to work at UCLA having written little more than a four-page proposal for his dissertation. A different era!

Buras reports an experience rather like mine, of not-fully-conscious absorption of Adamsian thinking. I’ve actually never read “Flavors, Colors, and God.” Maybe I should do so tonight, along with David Lewis’s reply. Ah, for the days when so many important papers were short.

Mitfords, pt. 8; body-text fonts, pt. 26: Dante; effects of nuclear attack

N. Mitford’s seventh novel, The Blessing (1951), is about an Englishwoman who moves to France with her promiscuous French husband and their son (and their son’s English, xenophobic nanny, who once was the Englishwoman’s nanny).

France-Britain comparison had been creeping into Mitford’s previous novels and here is “on at full blast.” Mitford lived her last years in France.

The dedication is to Evelyn Waugh.

My reading copy is The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford: nearly 1,000 large pages set in teeny-tiny Dante (a font with pleasing apostrophes). What follows is a rather atypical passage for Mitford, since the main speaker is from the USA. The setting is a dinner party. The New Worlders want to talk global politics; the Old Worlders want to forget warring and get back to bedroom politics.

– let me finish –

what they ought to do in the case of atomic explosion, such explosion is robbed of half, or one-third, its terrors.’

‘Thank you, Charlie,’ said Mr Dexter. ‘I for one feel a lot easier in my mind. There is nothing so dangerous as a policy of lassair-aller, and I am very glad that the great American public, if I may say so, M. de Valhubert, without offending your feelings, is not hiding its head in the sand, but is looking the Bomb squarely in the eye.’

(“Heck” – para. 3 – is not an expletive but a British-conceived U.S. diminutive of “Hector.”)

This is hardly my favorite N. Mitford passage. But it goes nicely with this remarkable essay in the Daily Mail, also read by me today, which gives “macabre minute-by-minute detail” about what would happen during a nuclear attack. (Hat tip: Leiter.)

Sobering stuff, even if flanked by links to articles about celebrities, conjoined twins, sea monsters, and UFOs.

R.I.P. Dick

Dick, my adviser at Cornell, has died.

An obituary.

Cornell’s memorial notice, with reminiscences.

Brian Leiter’s notice, with a few more reminiscences in the comments.

Dick wrote on a wide range of topics. I’ll just mention some of the political ones.

He became known, early on, for his work on Marx.

His final views on economic justice can be glimpsed in:

this online profile …

this Washington Post opinion piece (he was always listening for wisdom from libertarians, utilitarians, and other sirens, but wasn’t seduced by those philosophies) …

and the 2019 article “Social Democracy and Free Enterprise” (listed with other writings here).

When I was at Cornell, Dick was writing Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power and conducting seminars on war, foreign aid and trade, global warming, and the rise of China.

His research into the last topic is another good example of how he would listen to lots of people as he formulated his views. He studied the Chinese language and got to know Chinese scholars and non-scholars. He even directed this documentary film about a provincial migrant to Beijing.

He also learned to cook delicious Chinese meals, which Karin & I enjoyed during our stay in his house. That was four years ago. I intended, later, to travel to Ithaca for a conference planned in his honor. The pandemic struck; the conference was put on hold. As far as I know, it was never rescheduled.

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I arrived at Cornell in 2005 expecting to focus on metaphysics or something comparably Laputan. Alas, I had a miserable first semester. In Dick’s political philosophy class, too, I was making a fool of myself; but at least I was learning. (Note: It’s not always good when your remarks cause the other graduate students to snigger into their sleeves.) Nevertheless, Dick treated my ideas with greater seriousness than anyone else ever had. I started to treat them more seriously, too.

The next semester, I was surprised when, at a departmental function, Dick impishly asked under whom I wished to write my dissertation. It took me another year to choose him. I wonder if he’d have been so nice about it if he’d known that the project would take more than a decade to complete. He retired the day after I defended the thing.

I used to bump into him at the Cornell Cinema, where he’d make some wry comment. Once, we both happened to come out of Scorsese’s The Departed. Boom, boom, boom, was all he said. His light reading was Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot. He hated lewdness. And greed. But he was willing to give people the benefit of the doubt when they decided that nice clothes and gourmet cooking really would significantly improve their lives. He was committed to stamping out poverty and injustice, but he was no ascetic. He wanted people to be empowered to discover their own meaningful projects and direct their own lives.

He was a good man. I’m still absorbing the lessons he taught me. Above all, I’m grateful for his kindness.

He was an atheist. He used to tell how his wife, who had lost her religious belief, would visit the nuns who had schooled her. They’d ask how her prayer life was going. He liked that about the nuns. I hope non-Catholics won’t mind if I pray for his soul. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.

Lament

Whatever did I do to receive several emails each day from Conservative Direct (which appears to be a spamming agency)?

What robot decided I was the sort of person who’d want or need to read endless “BREAKING” allegations against “Sleepy” Joe Biden? (Not to mention his son.)

I ought to mark this as spam, but, every day, the headlines reel me in.

Some of today’s offerings (pretty mild, really):

(1) “Biden Retiring the U.S. Dollar” (in case I’d missed this bombshell the first four dozen times).

(2) “Hunter Biden Probe Will End with ‘Very Sympathetic Plea Agreement,’ Former Federal Prosecutor Predicts.”

(3) “BREAKING: Does Biden Really Have COVID or Is It an Elaborate Cover Up?” To be fair, this is where I first saw that Biden has COVID. (I’m assuming it’s not an elaborate cover-up.) I guess it’s possible to get real information if you read between the lines.

Next, the blogs and tweets of academia. Leiter rails against the woke young PhDs who are one-upping each other on Twitter. (These people really are pretty ludicrous.)

Do I have a short memory, or is public discourse at its lowest ebb since I was born? Or maybe I should say “discourses.” I was reading a postmodernist historian today who disparaged talk of the “discipline” of history in favor of talk of various “discourses” of history. (More on him some other time.) Are political “discourses” usually this insular? Are they usually this money-and-status-driven? (How do these things get measured?) Is this just par for the course, humanity-wise? In Shakespeare, old Lord Timon puts all his money into “culture,” gets zilch in return, quits Athens, and goes to live in a cave.

I would keep on ranting, but Karin wants us to go to sleep.