Consider the following two sentences:
A follows from 'not-not-A' -- but not intuitionistically.
B follows from 'A and not-A' -- but not relevantly.
Are they contradictory? Perfectly fine? Infelicitous?
(If you don't know why I'm asking, Google grice "cancellation test".)
1/29/2009
1/22/2009
history of analytic rankings
Let me say, first of all, that I am not one of the Philosophical Gourmet/ Leiter haters. In my personal opinion, the benefits of Leiter's rankings (both general and special) far outweigh the costs.
That said, I was a bit surprised by "The top 10 faculties in History of Analytic Philosophy," which was just posted. What was more surprising to me than the 10 schools that made the cut was the set of evaluators. The evaluators (or at least the ones whose work I know) are all unquestionably excellent philosophers -- some of them absolutely top-notch. However, many of them were not people that I think of as historians of analytic philosophy. I've decided not to pick on anyone in particular, but if you look at the list of evaluators in the above-linked post, and then look at each evaluator's publication record, you will see what I mean. About half of the evaluators have primary research areas outside history of analytic.
What was most surprising to me was who was left out of the list of evaluators. To give you a general sense: if you look at the list of contributors to the recent Cambridge Companions to Quine, Carnap, and Logical Empiricism (that's about 35 people total), a grand total of one appears on Leiter's list of evaluators (Thomas Ricketts, who I think definitely should be on the list of evaluators). But missing were, among others: Michael Friedman, Richard Creath, Peter Hylton, Alan Richardson, William Demopoulus, Thomas Uebel, and other leading figures who have a large proportion of their research in history of analytic.
Of course, I don't have all the facts about how the list of evaluators came into existence; perhaps Professor Leiter did solicit opinions from the folks just mentioned, and they declined to participate. If so, that's a shame; the rankings could perhaps have been better with their input.
Again, in general I really appreciate the existence of Leiter's rankings; and in particular, I think the Philosophy of Science specialty ranking (the only other area where I feel at all competent to judge) is quite well done. And finally, I actually think there is a pretty serious difference between history of analytic and other subfields like ethics or philosophy of science: whereas a big research university could well have four ethicists, or four philosophers of science, virtually nobody has four historians of the analytic tradition. So the 'department' rankings for history of analytic end up depending mostly on how good the one (or perhaps one and a half) people who do that are -- contrast this with Rutgers' strength in language, or Pittsburgh's strength in science.
That said, I was a bit surprised by "The top 10 faculties in History of Analytic Philosophy," which was just posted. What was more surprising to me than the 10 schools that made the cut was the set of evaluators. The evaluators (or at least the ones whose work I know) are all unquestionably excellent philosophers -- some of them absolutely top-notch. However, many of them were not people that I think of as historians of analytic philosophy. I've decided not to pick on anyone in particular, but if you look at the list of evaluators in the above-linked post, and then look at each evaluator's publication record, you will see what I mean. About half of the evaluators have primary research areas outside history of analytic.
What was most surprising to me was who was left out of the list of evaluators. To give you a general sense: if you look at the list of contributors to the recent Cambridge Companions to Quine, Carnap, and Logical Empiricism (that's about 35 people total), a grand total of one appears on Leiter's list of evaluators (Thomas Ricketts, who I think definitely should be on the list of evaluators). But missing were, among others: Michael Friedman, Richard Creath, Peter Hylton, Alan Richardson, William Demopoulus, Thomas Uebel, and other leading figures who have a large proportion of their research in history of analytic.
Of course, I don't have all the facts about how the list of evaluators came into existence; perhaps Professor Leiter did solicit opinions from the folks just mentioned, and they declined to participate. If so, that's a shame; the rankings could perhaps have been better with their input.
Again, in general I really appreciate the existence of Leiter's rankings; and in particular, I think the Philosophy of Science specialty ranking (the only other area where I feel at all competent to judge) is quite well done. And finally, I actually think there is a pretty serious difference between history of analytic and other subfields like ethics or philosophy of science: whereas a big research university could well have four ethicists, or four philosophers of science, virtually nobody has four historians of the analytic tradition. So the 'department' rankings for history of analytic end up depending mostly on how good the one (or perhaps one and a half) people who do that are -- contrast this with Rutgers' strength in language, or Pittsburgh's strength in science.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)