Academia – Page 15 – Maverick Philosopher

Still More on the Colorado Situation

Laughing Philosopher talks sense. I've corrected some typos, added a hyperlink, and intercalated some comments (in blue.) Excerpt:

I applaud the move to end sexual harassment seriously in the discipline. However, there are many ways in which the APA committee’s report seems extremely problematic. While I don’t know the nature of the alleged harassment or alleged inappropriate sexualization at Colorado, I find it very hard to believe that many of the report’s recommendations are necessary to prevent such behavior even if the report were factually accurate. Following those recommendations will, however, almost certainly damage the department and put it under the control of the administration in precisely the way Benjamin Ginsberg has warned us about in his must-read book, The Fall of the Faculty. In particular:

1. The report is overtly hostile to the dialectical/democractic model and demands that it be replaced with blatant dictatorship. The department is told to “[d]issolve all departmental listservs. Emails should be used for announcements only, as one-way, purely informational, communication. Any replies need to be made in person” (p.6). Since the department chair has now been ousted and replaced at the administration’s discretion for an indefinite period with no apparent opportunity for review at any point in the future (as urged by the report), this effectively cedes all departmental autonomy, in perpetuity, to the administration. There will be no clear avenues for discussion or dissent, and the restrictions on department members meeting outside of working hours helps to limit the ability of any faculty or students in the department to formulate dissenting views together: they may not meet to do so in the evenings or on weekends, and they may not do so via email. Moreover, the very act of reasoning or deliberating about policy is taken by the report as a sign of inappropriate resistance, according to the anti-philosophical views of the report (“Their faculty discussions… spend too much time articulating (or trying to articulate) the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior… they spend significant time debating footnotes and “what if” scenarios…” – p.7)

2. The report uses terms like ‘family friendly’ in bizarre ways to restrict productive and innocuous department activities whose elimination would significantly harm collegiality, departmental morale and the learning experience of graduate students. In a ‘Special Note’ on p.12, the report discusses and prohibits the department’s planned spring retreat. This retreat was to involve a combination of philosophical talks and ‘unscheduled time’ in a scenic mountain area over a weekend. It is difficult for me at least to imagine an event I would more like to bring my children to — what family wouldn’t love some unscheduled time outdoors in a beautiful natural area? But bizarrely enough, the very fact that this event was to take place on the weekend makes it “an examplar for a family-unfriendly event,” according to the report. The justification for this absurd claim is that “Under no circumstances should this department (or any other) be organizing the social calendars of its members.”

3. The report claims that no philosophy department should, under any circumstances, ask its members to attend events outside of the hours of 9-5, Monday to Friday. On p.12 of the report, we are told that “If there are going to be social events, then they need to be managed such that members of the department can opt out easily and without any penalty. (Please note that best practices for family-friendly speaker events include taking the speaker out to lunch instead of dinner so that participants may have their evenings free to attend to other obligations)”. In particular, we are told that “all events, including retreats, need to be held during business hours (9-5) and on campus or near campus in public venues.” Please try to imagine what departmental life would be like under such a rule.

4. The report categorically prohibits all critical discussion of feminist philosophy by all members of the department, even in a private, off-campus conversation between two graduate or undergraduate students. ”Realize that there is plurality in the discipline. If some department members have a problem with people doing non-‐feminist philosophy or doing feminist philosophy (or being engaged in any other sort of intellectual or other type of pursuit), they should gain more appreciation of and tolerance for plurality in the discipline. Even if they are unable to reach a level of appreciation for other approaches to the discipline, it is totally unacceptable for them to denigrate these approaches in front of faculty, graduate or undergraduate students, in formal or informal settings on or off campus.”

BV: This (the quoted statement) is unbelievably obtuse and an excellent example of political correctness gone wild. First of all, critical discussion is not the same as denigration even if the critical discussion is trenchant and leads to rejection of the approach criticized. To take but one example, academic philosophers rightly criticize Ayn Rand's Objectivism. Much of that criticism is harsh but on target. It is not the same as denigration or dismissal. Of course, some do denigrate and dismiss it. Well, it is their considered opinion that it ought to be denigrated and dismissed. Surely they have a right to their view, as offensive as it is to Objectivists.

Second, while there is a plurality of approaches and views in philosophy, that fact does not insulate any view from examination and criticism. Toleration is not to be confused with approval. I can tolerate your view while rejecting it.

Third, a plurality of views is not to be confused with a plurality of equally tenable views.

Fourth, toleration is not to be confused with appreciation. I tolerate the views of eliminative materialists but I don't appreciate them. Note also the confusion in the quoted statement of appreciation of plurality with appreciation of the different views constituting the plurality. One can appreciate that there is plurality in the discipline both in the sense of acknowledging it, and in the sense of thinking it a good thing; but this is obviously distinct from approving of each of the views that constitute the plurality.

Finally, what the authors say is "totally unacceptable" must be accepted. Some views deserve denigration, as should be obvious. Suppose someone were to maintain that no woman should be allowed to study philosophy beyond the undergraduate level. That is a view that deserves denigration. So denigrate it, and give your reasons.

5. The report relies in part on clearly biased survey findings. On p.15, for instance, we find that subjects were asked whether they agree or disagree with the following statement: “I am confident that if I were to raise a complaint about sexual harassment or discrimination, the judicial process at my university would be fair.” 38% of respondents felt confident about this, which seems very high for any department! Most members of most departments would have no good grounds for confidence either way. Why doesn’t the survey ask instead whether subjects are confident that the process would be unfair? More tellingly, why doesn’t it simply ask whether subjects agree or disagree with the statement, “If I were to raise a complaint about sexual harassment or discrimination, the judicial process would be fair,” and allow the responses ‘Agree’, ‘Disagree’ and ‘Not sure’? Particularly among philosophers, ‘confident’ entails a very high epistemic standard. While it isn’t clear whether the committee intended to skew the results by asking such questions or whether they simply didn’t take care to prepare a fair survey, the survey is misleading at best and politically motivated at worst.

6. The report mentions, and then completely ignores, very serious graduate student concerns about damage to the department’s reputation; and in the process, it reduces the likelihood of future reporting of sexual harassment. “They [some graduate students] are worried that they will be tainted by the national reputation of the department as being hostile to women.” (pp.3-4). As a result of this, it was essential for the report to take steps to ensure that word about the department’s problems be carefully managed while steps are taken to eliminate the problem. At the very least, the report needed to ensure that the release of the report not be made into a worldwide media event. However, the report contains nothing of the sort and, as a result, the worst fears of the graduate students have now been realized (I, for one, had never heard a single negative thing about this department). This merits serious attention: if the price of reporting sexual harrassment is the destruction of one’s department’s reputation worldwide and the blackening of one’s own name by association with it, how many departmental members (student or faculty) would ever take the suicidal step of reporting it? By mindlessly neglecting these concerns, the committee’s report has surely had a dampening effect on reports of sexual harassment in departments around the world.

7. The report’s standards of ‘family friendliness’, while tangentially connected with sexual harassment, show a complete lack of understanding of philosophical work and culture. On p.6 of the report, the committee’s view on best practices is expanded upon: we are told that “[e]vents should be held during normal business hours (9-5) and should be such that you would feel comfortable with your children or parents being present.” Indeed, as we are told on p.12, children should be positively welcome at departmental events. I’m not concerned here with the disruptions that would be caused by young children at colloquia, but rather with how this might affect the content of philosophical talks. I, for one, would not feel comfortable discussing abortion, circumcision, sexual harassment and rape, cruelty to animals, pornography, torture, or the existence of God in front of someone else’s children. Should it follow from this that I should not present a colloquium paper on such a topic? What if my philosophical work deals entirely with such issues: should I never present my philosophical work in an open forum?

While we should all applaud genuine, careful and viable efforts to eliminate sexual harassment, my view (unless persuaded otherwise) is that we should certainly not endorse the actions of this committee. Instead, I think, we should quickly work out ways to prevent this from ever happening again. But I anticipate disagreement and would love to hear and engage opposing reasons.

The Philosophy Situation at University of Colorado, Boulder

I have no opinion yet on the goings-on at the UC Boulder philosophy department. I just hope it is not another instance of the US becoming the SU. If you are interested, click away.

Here, here, here, and here. And two of the articles infra.

Update (2/7)

A conservative take: Something Fishy in Colorado.

The Decline of the West: How Long Can We Last?

Victor Davis Hanson, The Last Generation of the West and the Thin Strand of Civilization. "Note the theme of this essay: the more in humane fashion we provide unemployment insurance, food stamps, subsidized housing, legal advice, health care and disability insurance, the more the recipients find it all inadequate, inherent proof of unfairness and inequality, and always not enough." [. . .] "Popular culture is likewise anti-civilizational ^[11]. Does anyone believe that Kanye West, Miley Cyrus, and Lady Gaga are updates to Glenn Miller, jazz, Bob Dylan and the Beatles? Even in the bimbo mode, Marilyn Monroe had an aura ^[12] that Ms. Kardashian and Ms. Hilton lack. Teens wearing bobby socks and jeans have transmogrified to strange creatures in our midst with head-to -toe tattoos and piercings ^[13] as if we copied Papua New Guinea rather than it us. Why the superficial skin-deep desire to revert to the premodern? When I walk in some American malls and soak in the fashion, I am reminded of National Geographic tribal photos of the 1950s."
Nat Hentoff on Obama the Lawless. He calls for impeachment, and rightly so. Hentoff is a liberal I respect, but then his liberalism has little in common with the extremism of the liberal fascists of the present day.
Jonathan Tobin on Andrew Cuomo's Version of Liberal Tolerance. Cuomo is a 'liberal' who deserves contempt; he is what I call a LINO, a liberal in name only. Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism. There is precious little of it in this extremist. If you can't see that he is an extremist, then you are an extremist and part of the problem.
The universities ought to be in the business of transmitting high culture, not pandering to the trends of the moment. But the universities abdicated their authority in the '60s. It has been said that there is no coward more cowardly than a college administrator. Hanson, above, mentions Dylan and the Beatles, alluding to their vast superiority to such cultural polluters as Kanye West and Miley Cyrus. But I say that no serious university would devote more than a tiny fraction of its curricula to the works of Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, or the Beatles. (As anyone who reads this weblog knows, I am a big-time aficionado, from way back, of the aforementioned. I know their work inside and out.) What we have now is a major assault on the humanities. See Heather MacDonald, The Humantities and Us.
David Gelernter, The Closing of the Scientific Mind. On the same theme of an assault on the humanities. A pack of anti-humantistic ignoramuses have infiltrated the sciences. (My way of putting it, not Gelernter's.) I could round up the usual suspects, but if you read these pages you know who they are. See Scientism category. You must study Gelernter's piece. He knows whereof he speaks. His article begins thusly: >>The huge cultural authority science has acquired over the past century imposes large duties on every scientist. Scientists have acquired the power to impress and intimidate every time they open their mouths, and it is their responsibility to keep this power in mind no matter what they say or do. Too many have forgotten their obligation to approach with due respect the scholarly, artistic, religious, humanistic work that has always been mankind’s main spiritual support. Scientists are (on average) no more likely to understand this work than the man in the street is to understand quantum physics. But science used to know enough to approach cautiously and admire from outside, and to build its own work on a deep belief in human dignity. No longer.<<

It Pays to Publish, but Don’t Pay to Publish

I am regularly solicited by Open Journal of Philosophy for article submissions. The e-mails never reveal the dirty little secret behind publishing scams ventures like this, namely, the charges levied against authors. Poke around a bit, however, and you will find this page:

Article Processing Charges

Open Journal of Philosophy is an Open Access journal accessible for free on the Internet. At Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP), we guarantee that no university library or individual reader will ever have to buy a subscription or pay any pay-per-view fees to access articles in the electronic version of journal. There is hence no income at SCIRP that comes from selling any forms of subscriptions to this electronic version of journal or from pay-per-view fees. In order to cover the costs induced by editorial procedures, routine operation of the journals, processing of manuscripts through peer-reviews, and the provision and maintenance of a publication infrastructure, the journal charges article processing fee that can normally be defrayed by the author's institution or research funds.

Manuscript Page (as per the typeset proof)	Article Processing Charges
Paper within ten printed pages	$600
Additional page charge above ten	$50 for each additional page

So it would cost you a grand to publish an 18 page paper, and a minumum of $600 to publish anything. And who reads this journal anyway? If you need to publish for tenure or promotion, then you need to publish in a decent journal. And if you publish to be read by people worth interacting with, ditto.

Besides, it is not that difficult to publish for free in good outlets. If I can do it, so can you. Here is my PhilPapers page which lists some of my publications. My passion for philosophy far outstrips my ability at it, but if you have a modicum of ability you can publish in decent places. When I quit my tenured post and went maverick, I feared that no one would touch my work. But I found that lack of an institutional affiliation did not bar me from very good journals.

Here are a few suggestions off the top of my head.

1. Don't submit anything that you haven't made as good as you can make it. Don't imagine that editors and referees will sense the great merit and surpassing brilliance of your inchoate ideas and help you refine them. That is not their job. Their job is to find a justification to dump your paper among the 70-90 % that get rejected.

2. Demonstrate that you are cognizant of the extant literature on your topic.

3. Write concisely and precisely about a well-defined issue.

4. Advance a well-defined thesis.

5. Don't rant or polemicize. That's what your blog is for. Referring to Brian Leiter as a corpulent apparatchik of political correctness and proprietor of a popular philosophy gossip site won't endear you to his sycophants one or two of whom you may be unfortunate enough to have as referrees.

6. Know your audience and submit the right piece to the right journal. Don't send a lengthy essay on Simone Weil to Analysis.

7. When the paper you slaved over is rejected, take it like a man or the female equivalent thereof. Never protest editorial decisions. You probably wrote something substandard, something that, ten years from now, you will be glad was not embalmed in printer's ink. You have no right to have your paper accepted. You may think it's all a rigged wheel and a good old boys network. In my experience it is not. Most of those who complain are just not very good at what they do.

Sorry if the above is a tad obvious.

Linkage

Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues

The Highly Educated, Badly Paid, Often Abused Adjunct Professors

ObamaCare Puts the Screws to Faculty Adjuncts

Adjuncts are the peons of the academic world, the lowest men and women on the collegiate totem pole, the bottom-most rungs of the ladder of higher education — pick your metaphor. But a consequence of ObamaCare, intended or not, is that many are now worse off than they were before. There is some irony in this considering that Obama himself was once an adjunct professor of law.

Because they are paid so little, adjuncts must teach many courses to make a living. But the ACA requires employers with more than 50 full-time employees to provide health insurance if they work an average of 30 hours per week including work both within and outside the classroom. Finding the financial burden too heavy to bear, many colleges have simply restricted the number of courses adjuncts can teach. The result is that the lowly adjunct must shuttle between different institutions, wasting time and gasoline, to keep his number of courses the same. The top-down initiative that was intended to help the poorly paid part-timers ends up making them worse off. Central planning in action.

For more, see this Chronicle of Higher Education piece.

Related: In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct

Should You Go to Graduate School in Philosophy?

I have discussed this question several times before. Here is my short answer. By all means, go to graduate school in philosophy, but only if you satisfy all of the following conditions.

1. Philosophy is your passion, the one thing you think most worth living for.

2. People in the know have advised you that you have philosophical aptitude.

3. Your way is paid in toto via fellowship including tuition remission or else you are independently wealthy. No student loans!

4. You are willing to live for 10-12 years, minimum, before relaxing with tenure. (I began grad school in '73 and received tenure in '84 = 11 years.) You will be under a fairly high degree of pressure during that decade or so, including such stressors as: living on a meager income as a grad student, writing a dissertation, earning the doctorate, landing a tenure-track position at a school where there is a real chance of getting tenure, surviving the tenure review.

5. You are willing to chance jumping though all the hoops, and then not get tenure, in which case you are no longer young somewhat damaged goods who may have to re-tool career-wise, or accept a lesser position. I know a philosopher who failed to get tenure at the University of Hawaii and had to take a job in Toledo, Ohio. It was a full-time philosophy position, but Toledo ain't Honolulu. It is easy to go up, hard to go down.

6. You understand that, if you do get tenure at Cleveland State, say, then you are stuck there for the rest of your career unless you are unusually talented. Tenure is a boon and a shackle, 'golden handcuffs' if you will. The security is purchased in the coin of a reduction of mobility.

7. You understand that the humanities are in trouble, the job market is bad, and that competition for tenure-track positions is ferocious.

In sum: if philosophy is your passion, you are good at it, have an opportunity to pursue it for free at a good school, and would not consider the years spent in grad school wasted if no job materializes — then go for it! Live your dreams! Don't squander your self for pelf!

The Professor-Student ‘Non-Aggression Pact’

William J. Bennett and David Wilezol, Is College Worth It? (Thomas Nelson 2013), p. 134:

Knowing that students prefer to spend more time having fun than studying, professors are more comfortable awarding good grades while requiring a minimum amount of work. In return, students give favorable personal evaluations to professors who desire to be well received by students as a condition of preserving their employment status. Indeed, the popularity of the student evaluation, which began in the 1970s, has had a pernicious effect.

I would say so. Here is an anecdote to illustrate the Bennett thesis. In early 1984 I was 'up for tenure.' And so in the '83 fall semester I was more than usually concerned about the quality of my student evaluations. One of my classes that semester was an upper-level seminar conducted in the library over a beautiful oak table. One day one of the students began carving into the beautiful table with his pen.

In an abdication of authority that part of me regrets and a part excuses, I said nothing. The student liked me and I knew it. I expected a glowing recommendation from him and feared losing it. So I held my tongue while the kid defaced university property.

Jeff H. and I had entered into a tacit 'non-aggression pact.' (And I got tenure.)

The problem is not that students are given an opportunity to comment upon and complain about their teachers. The problem is the use to which student evaluations are put for tenure, promotion, and salary 'merit-increase' decisions. My chairman at the time was an officious organization man, who would calculate student evaluation averages to one or two decimal places, and then rank department members as to their teaching effectiveness. Without getting into this too deeply for a blog post, there is something highly dubious about equating teaching effectiveness with whatever the student evaluations measure, and something absurd about the false precision of calculating averages out to one or two decimal places.

Jones is a better teacher than Smith because her average is 3.2 while his is only 3.1? Well, no, but if the chairman is asked to justify his decision, he can point to the numbers. There is mindless quantification, but it takes someone more thoughtful than an administrator to see it.

I strongly recommend the Bennett-Wilezol book to anyone thinking of attending college or thinking of bankrolling someone's attendance. Here is a review.

Colin McGinn and Paula Deen

What do they have in common? Not much, except that in each case the 'punishment' seems wildly out of proportion to the 'crime.' Here is the latest in the McGinn saga.

The Higher Education Hustle

I am tempted to excerpt parts of this longish piece by William Voegli, but, as they say, it's all good. In fact, it is the best thing I have read on this topic to date.

Liberal Education and Government Abuses

Peter Berkowitz has an excellent column under an awful title: Tenets of Liberal Education Underpin Government Abuses. (I am assuming, perhaps wrongly, that Berkowitz chose the title.) The problem is not liberal education. The problem is the hijacking of liberal education by leftists, and the PoMo Prez who is a product of left-hijacked educational institutions. Excerpt:

The administration’s misleading of the public reflects a teaching that is common to much literary theory, sociology, anthropology, political theory, and legal theory on college campuses today: Knowledge is socially constructed, and therefore the narrative is all.

The very word 'narrative' should raise eyebrows and and set off your LBD (leftist bullshit detector). A narrative is a story, and stories needn't be true. Talk of narratives is a way of suppressing the crucial question: But is it true?

Knowledge is socially transmitted, but not socially constructed. The very notion is incoherent.

Truth is absolute.

Colin McGinn: Good News and Bad News

First the good news: Homunculism, McGinn's NYRB review of Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.

McGinn, like John Searle, is a formidable critic of bad philosophy of mind, and in this brilliant review he utterly demolishes Kurzweil's neurobabble, and indeed the whole type of which it is a token. The devastation of the demolition job is commensurate with the chutzpah of Kurzweil's subtitle. It is not that McGinn has said anything really new, at least not in this review. The key points have been made before by Searle and Nagel and so many of us, but McGinn does the critical job with great clarity and great skill and gives it a (to me) slightly new slant: the ubiquity of the homuncular fallacy. (I won't explain what I mean; you'll catch my drift by carefully reading the review.)

I don't understand how anyone who is intelligent and informed could read with comprehension McGinn's piece and still take seriously the sort of neuroscientistic nonsense of Kurzweil and Company.

And please note that McGinn has no religious agenda: he is not out to resurrect the immortal soul or find a back door to the divine milieu. The man is an atheist, a mortalist and a (damned) liberal too. Just like Nagel. Neither of these gentlemen are looking for a way back to substance dualism. The former goes the mysterian route, the latter the panpsychist. Both are naturalists. More importantly, both are dispassionate truth-seekers.

And now for the bad and sad news: Prominent Philosopher to Leave U. of Miami in Wake of Misconduct Allegations.

UPDATE 7 June 2013. McGinn's side of the story is here, here, here, and here.

Pseudo-Latin French Bullshit: The Cartesian Castle

In Misattributed to Socrates, I announced my opposition to "misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression." But I left one out: the willful fabrication of 'quotations.' And yesterday I warned myself and others against pseudo-Latin.

Today I received from Claude Boisson an example of a willful fabrication of a 'quotation' in pseudo-Latin:

An anecdote on pseudo-Latin + French bullshit rolled into one.

A rather infamous but self-satisfied French sociologist, Michel Maffesoli (yes, some of our sociologists are as bad as some of our philosophers), recently gave an interview in one of the major weeklies, L'Express, in which he said "Everybody knows the Cartesian sentence Cogito ergo sum, but we tend to forget the rest: Cogito ergo sum in arcem meum."
[I think therefore I am in my castle.]

I ferociously answered that in an article of his, available on line, he had already committed the same sin, unforgettable for a university professor, of forging a quotation ("the Latin formula in its entirety is more interesting" he had stated). And this was in a development supposed to prove that the concept of the individual is ascribable to "the beginning of modernity", since, only "collective thought" was known to the benighted thinkers of the Dark Ages.
I then told him

(1) that the Discours de la méthode was written in French, and was translated into Latin seven years later by Etienne de Courcelles, so there was no real need for showing off Latin (Je pense donc je suis being the original Cartesian French);

(2) that the invention in arcem meum is, alas!, doubly mistaken since it piles a syntactic error ("in" with a local meaning must be followed by an ablative) onto a morphological error (the name "arx" is feminine), so the real Latin should read in arce mea; no scholar would have been guilty of these atrocious mistakes in Descartes' day;

(3) that the metaphor of the "citadel of the soul" was known to such people as John of Salisbury (who duly wrote in arce animae) in the 12th century, and long before him to the Stoics, including Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius;

(4) that for anybody desirous to meditate on "modernity", Saul Steinberg's jocular Cogito ergo Cartesius sum was perhaps of more interest than a forged quotation.

All this is easily accessible on the Internet.

Disgusting! Another example of the destruction of the universities and the decline of the humanities 'thanks' to leftism, post-modernism, and scientism.

On Throwing Latin, and a Jab at the ‘Analysts’

If you are going to throw Latin, then you ought to try to get it right. One of my correspondents sent me an offprint of a paper of his which had been published in American Philosophical Quarterly, a very good philosophical journal. The title read, Creation Ex Deus. The author's purpose was to develop a notion of creation out of God, as opposed to the traditional notion of creation out of nothing (ex nihilo). He knew that 'God' translates as Deus, and that 'out of' is rendered by ex. Hence, ex Deus. But this is bad Latin, since the preposition ex takes the ablative case. Deus being a second declension masculine noun, its ablative form is Deo. Ex Deo would have been correct. Mistakes like this are not as rare as they ought to be, and we can expect more of them in the future.

It says something that the error just mentioned was caught neither by the author, nor by the editor, nor by the referees, nor by the proofreader. It says something in particular about 'analytic' philosophers. I am sorry to report that many of them are ignoramuses (indeed, ignorabimuses) wholly innocent of foreign languages, knowledge of history (both 'real' history and the history of ideas), and of high culture generally. One name analyst implied in print that the music of John Lennon was on the level of that of Mozart. There are Ph.D.s in philosophy who have never read a Platonic dialogue, and whose dissertations are based solely on the latest ephemera in the journals. Here, as elsewhere, ignorance breeds arrogance. They think they know what they don't know. They think they know what key theses in Kant and Brentano and Meinong mean when they have never studied their texts. And, not knowing foreign languages, they cannot determine whether or not the available translations are accurate. Not knowing the sense of these theses, they read into them contemporary notions. And if you told them that this amounts to eisegesis, they wouldn't know what you are talking about.

Not all analytic philosophers are ignoramuses, of course. Hector-Neri Castañeda, for example, had a grounding in classics. When he founded Noûs, a top analytic journal, in 1967, he placed Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus on the masthead. It is a take-off on Terence, philosophicum replacing humanum. It is telling that the Latin motto was removed by Castañeda's successors after his untimely death in September, 1991. Princeton University, I understand, removed the language requirement for the Ph.D. in philosophy in 1980. An appalling development. It has been said that if you don't know a foreign language, you don't know your own.

The fact that many analytic philosophers lack historical sense, knowledge of foreign languages, and broad culture is of course no excuse to jump over to the opposite camp, that of the 'Continental' philosophers. For lack of historical sense, they substitute historicism, which is just as bad. For lack of linguistic competence, they substitute a bizarre linguisticism in which the world dissolves into a text, a text susceptible of endless interpretation and re-interpretation. For lack of broad culture, they substitute a super-sophistication that empties into a miasma of sophistry and relativism. Worse, much of Continental philosophy, especially much of what is written in French, is border-line bullshit. Indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, one he applied to Jacques Derrida, Continental philosophy gives bullshit a bad name. Some substantiation here. It is therefore no surprise that the Continental types jump to embrace every loony idea that emanates from the Left.

You can see that I am warming to my theme. I am also brushing in very broad strokes. But details and documentation are readily supplied and have been supplied elsewhere on this site. In short, a pox on both houses. Be a maverick.

What inspired this post was a query of a correspondent. He wanted to know how to render 'seize the world' into Latin. Well, we know that 'seize the day' goes into Latin as carpe diem. And we should have picked up by now that 'world' is mundus. 'Seize' takes the accusative, and since mundus is a second declension masculine noun, we get: Carpe mundum. If I am wrong about this, Michael Gilleland will correct me.

And another thing. I find it appalling that so many people nowadays, college 'educated' people, are completely innocent of grammatical terminology. Words like 'genitive,' 'dative,' 'ablative,' etc. elicit a blank stare. Grammar being a propaedeutic to logic, it is no wonder that there are so many illogical people adrift in the world.

Now have a nice day. Seize it and squeeze it.

Universities as Leftist Seminaries

'Seminary,' like 'seminar,' is etymologically related to 'semen,' seed.

seminary (n.)

mid-15c., "plot where plants are raised from seeds," from Latin seminarium "plant nursery," figuratively, "breeding ground," from seminarius "of seed," from semen (genitive seminis) "seed" (see semen). Meaning "school for training priests" first recorded 1580s; commonly used for any school (especially academies for young ladies) from 1580s to 1930s. Seminarian "seminary student" is attested from 1580s.

The universities today are places where the seeds of leftism are planted in skulls full of mush.

See Harvey Mansfield, The Higher Education Scandal.

"Today’s liberals do not use liberalism to achieve excellence, but abandon excellence to achieve liberalism."