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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Megalomaniacs in M&E?

Brian Leiter

Interesting remarks from a leading young philosopher working in “metaphysics & epistemology” (broadly understood, as it usually is in these discussions, to include also philosophy of language and mind). All names have been omitted, to protect the innocent (and the guilty):

“I think there is a bad problem with senior people in M&E currently. Basically, there are too many older megalomaniacs who are extremely hostile to anyone who doesn’t genuflect. And the megalomaniacs are spread out across different areas…. If I get like that when I’m older, I hope you will remind me of these words. I remember when a department I was in asked [one megalomaniac] for a comparative judgement on two tenured philosophers [in M&E]. He claimed not
to have heard of one of them, and didn’t offer any judgement on the other. He then (unsolicitedly) provided a ranked list of his ‘top twenty’ philosophers [in M&E]–each and every one of them was one of his old buddies, or a younger…philosopher…who is a camp follower of his. It was utterly shocking to my department (and became somewhat of a joke)….

“The megalomaniacs in M&E are not helping their cause. To take an example from the philosphy of language, people outside philosophy of language (unless they’ve been indoctrinated) typically think that the ‘direct reference’ program has been a tempest in a teapot, and hasn’t yielded a great deal of philosophical insight. And they’re right. So they’re not going to hire more direct-reference hacks. If the elder philosophers of language insist that only direct-reference hacks should be hired in M&E positions, then they’re just going to succeed in getting historians and ethicists hired.

“Generalizing, the point is that pushing students of one’s own agenda, even if that agenda has led to some interesting positions, is self-destructive. Those outside the field will associate that agenda with the senior statesperson, and not think the younger senior-statesperson flunky is original. They’ll then conclude that there is nothing new happening in that subfield, and look elsewhere for appointments. So one worry with M&E now is that too many of the senior statespersons are megalomaniacs with the self-destructive agenda of pushing their own programs. And that affects hiring in M&E. Fewer historians seem
to have been infected with meglomania, to the great credit of history of philosophy (though maybe it’s something in the nature of the study of history vs. advancing one’s own philosophical agenda).”

I’ve opened comments on this one, and invite philosophers working in these fields to react. NO ANONYMOUS POSTS.

UPDATE 5/9 (3 pm): If you’ve read this far, do read the comments too for a number of quite interesting observations by others, faculty and students.

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19 responses to “Megalomaniacs in M&E?”

  1. Fritz Warfield

    Hi Brian,

    About the announced topic: though I've never encountered situations as extreme as those described in the post, I think anyone involved in high level faculty hiring encounters this kind of situation regularly. I see no reason to think it's limited to "M&E broadly construed" – surely we see it to the same extent in ethics, philosophy of science, logic. In history of philosophy the phenomena may be less clear but I think something similar exists: the divide between what many still call "Bennett style" history vs (allegedly) more "scholarly history" seems to bring out the knives.

    About your presentation of this topic and rules for comments: as you know I'm not bashful about signing my name to my remarks so forbidding anonymous posts doesn't matter to me. It is amusing though that your original correspondent is kept anonymous.

    Fritz Warfield
    University of Notre Dame

    Reply
  2. Brian Leiter

    Fritz, I'm inclined to agree that this phenomenon is more widespread–I think esp. of the Kantian ethics mafia and the way they sell their students! On "anonymity," two points: (1) I know the source of the posted comment, obviously, but that means I know that it is worth crediting (even if one disagrees with it); with anonymous comments, none of us would know; (2) in the posted comment, I removed names of philosophers; anonymous commenters are unlikely to be so discreet.

    Brian

    Reply
  3. Brandon Butler

    As a graduate student with limited first-hand experience of philosophers' personalities, I will say that when I DO come across a professor who has very strong opinions not just about ideas but about people in the profession – which ones are hacks and which ones are any good, with themselves firmly ensconced in the latter camp – it can be very disconcerting. I will say that this is most noticeable to me in the "M&E" camp, for what that is worth.

    Again, my experience is very limited, and I'm so new to this whole world that I don't know what to make of it. I'm sure part of my discomfort over what egotism I have seen is that I'm afraid that these people are right – that philosophy is populated mostly by incompetents, and that I may very well be one of them. Especially in the "M&E" field, which I don't much enjoy, it can be very intimidating to get the impression that if you don't do what they do, you're a second-rate philosopher. I can't say whether this is really a character flaw on their part or if it just doesn't comport well with the fear on my part that I can't hack it in my chosen field. From what I've heard about graduate students generally (though, oddly, this doesn't apply to any of the ones I know here at UT!), this fear is widespread. Professors who are outspoken in their conviction that they and their compatriots are the only ones doing anything worthwhile could either be helpful (to toughen us up, or encourage us to leave if we really are mediocre), or hurtful (driving away talented students who are not sufficiently full of themselves to disregard these sugggestions). I've not been driven away, yet, at any rate.

    Brandon Butler
    2nd year grad student
    UT, Austin

    Reply
  4. C.E. Petit

    It sounds like philosophy departments are catching up with literature departments. That is not a good thing. This thread describes the hiring practices in English and in German in the 1980s and 1990s; the difference in labels does not signify a difference in substance.

    Reply
  5. Brian Weatherson

    Maybe it's just my good fortune, but I haven't really encountered anything like this. The following little anecdote is indicative of how I've found things.

    So just last week I was at an epistemology conference that had many concurrent sessions and a handful of plenary sessions. Apart from the plenaries, the biggest audiences (as far as I could see) were for papers by Ram Neta, Jonathan Schaffer and me. And there were plenty of senior epistemologists at all three. If there's some school that Ram, Jonathan and I are all part of, so this is just evidence of how far you can go if you say the right things, I've got no idea what it is. So it's hard to believe that senior epistemologists as insular as your letter writer suggests.

    I do think there's a fair amount of geographic bias throughout philosophy. It's a lot easier to get noticed, read, published and hired if one is physically close to the major centres. Two little anecdotes to back this up. When I went on the market after doing my postdoc at Syracuse, I got at least some attention from every northeast school I applied to – and got no responses at all from the Californian schools I applied to. (With one exception where I knew the chair of the hiring committee.) That's not to say I should have got more attention in California, just that I did a lot better at nearby schools than far away ones. More recently, Princeton and NYU just made 8 job offers – 6 of them to people in New York or New Jersey. I thought they were all excellent choices, probably the exact choices I would have made. But then I'm on the east coast too. I think it's really easy to overrate people around you, and I think it happens the world over, and that could easily come off as the kind of agenda-pushing your correspondant sees.

    (I know I'm arguing from anecdote a lot here. So these arguments are very defeasible. But given the size of the data set I think exchanging anecdotes is the best we'll be able to do.)

    Reply
  6. David Velleman

    I think that your anonymous correspondent is expressing one side of a growing generational split in the profession. Let me say how I think that the split looks from the other side. (I consider myself to be somewhere in the middle, though closer to the elder side both chronologically and intellectually.)

    Many oldsters, including those who are Internet geeks, tend to regard the philosophical blogosphere as symptomatic of troubling intellectual trends, of which I'll list just a few: an indiscriminate fascination with puzzle cases, and a correlative loss of interest in foundational issues; a fascination with snippets of empirical information drawn from linguistics, neuro-science, evolutionary biology, and so on, with no serious thought about whether their apparent relevance to philosophy is real; a blurring of the distinction between recreational philosophical banter and polished works of philosophy, with the result that speed and cleverness of response is valued over intellectual substance; and, finally, an expectation of recognition and reward simply for being at the center of the puzzling-solving, factoid-citing, one-upping action, irrespective of any prospects for lasting intellectual impact.

    The preceding is a rude and unfair caricature. But your anonymous correspondent has also offered a caricature, based largely on the behavior of a single bad actor, who is not at all representative of any group, either disciplinary or generational. Like all caricatures, however, these have some basis in truth. There is a noticeable acceleration of the pace at which philosophy is being done, and this acceleration generates, in some observers, an impression of excitement and significance and, in others, an impression of superficiality.

    I don't think that any purpose is served by talking about "older megalomaniacs". Older philosophers are not the only ones who sometimes give undue favor to their own interlocutors and disciples while dismissing the interlocutors and disciples of others. There are glaring examples of such behavior in the younger generation as well, and none of these cases warrants a diagnosis of megalomania: they're just cases of plain old-fashioned human weakness.

    What's more, many of the changes and divisions in the discipline reflect changes and divisions in the broader culture, all of which have their good and bad aspects. We don't need any inter-generational name-calling; but it might be good to have a discussion of how philosophy ought to be done.

    Reply
  7. Allan Hazlett

    I'm inclined to agree with much of what Prof. Velleman said (all this talk of a generational gap is making me feel humble, sorry for the "Prof.") – are "older" megalomaniacs any more common than young ones, or middle aged ones, or whatever? (And, as has been noted, there's no way this in confined to M and E.)

    In my limited experience, I think there's a number of mistakes that would probably count as signs of megalomania which us young'uns are far more likely to commit than oldsters, including 1) undervaluing the work of a philosopher whose views are radically divergent from our own, 2) overvaluing the work of our grad school chums, 3) overestimating the aptitude of the author of a recently stunning new book or article, while forgetting that such-and-such oldster's article X was equally stunning in 1974.

    Older professors, the good ones, aren't fooled by appearances in these ways. They usually aren't enraged when their philosophical opponents get published, because they're published. They were around in 74 and remember just how stunning that god-awful article seemed back then. (And, BTW, that date is picked completely at random, with appologies to those who wrote stunning articles that year.)

    Reply
  8. Lindsay Beyerstein

    As a young philosophy geek, I agree with much of what Prof. Velleman says about the online philosophy scene. Yet, I don't see any evidence that this banter is destructive. One could argue that online exchanges are blurring the distinction between polished philosophical work and idle chitchat, to philosophy's detriment. Based on the same data, one could also argue that, at least in some circles, chitchat is getting more substantial without any obvious harm to philosophy.

    There seems to be a generational difference in how people perceive online communication. Younger people are apt to see blogging as akin to conversation, as opposed to a substitute for scholarly writing. Many online debates are analogous the banter that used to be confined to bars and common rooms. Most conversation is ephemeral, but informal exchanges are a vital part of a balanced intellectual diet. When it comes time to write their memoirs, many of today's eminent philosophers cite informal peer interactions ("intellectual ferment") as an important influence on their development.

    Prof. Velleman sees the blogosphere as fostering superficiality and rhetorical gamesmanship over substance. This may be true. But philosophical blogging also has intellectually healthy side effects. Perhaps philosophers are putting effort into writing posts that would be better spent writing papers. On the other hand, if we see blogging as an extension of conversation, we might see online philosophy as a good habit. At least bloggers must express their views in writing and spar with people beyond their home institutions. If anything, blogging may be an equalizer between lightning quick debaters and more thoughtful, retiring opponents. Online communication is much faster than published exchanges, or pencil and paper correspondence. However, it unfolds in slow motion compared to ordinary conversation. The timeframe for a "quick" rejoinder may be hours or days, instead of seconds.

    Blogging also allows philosophers to try out new ideas, solicit input on works in progress, and voice opinions they might hesitate to publish or articulate in person. Inevitably, the signal to noise ratio will be less favorable than in published work. The value of blogging, however, is as much the process as the finished product.

    Reply
  9. Hunt Stilwell

    I've enjoyed this little exchange. I'm not in a philosophy department, so what I see, I see from the outside. From a distance, it doesn't look like the goings on of philosophy departments are much different from those of any other area of academia. Furthermore, it doesn't look new. Young academics, especially in philosophy and science, and philosophers and scientists with "new" or "different" ideas, have always complained about the intellectual nepotism and incest of the academies. I think of the constant griping about Hegel and Hegelianism in German universities by Schopenhauer and Schelling, or the trouble cognitivists had with the behaviorist-dominated American universities. People who think in certain ways will inevitably try to shape departments and disciplines (especially by editing jouiirnals, or in the sciences, working on the committees that dole out grant money) based on their own perspectives. The adherents of the "old schools" will inevitably work to maintain their paradigms' spheres of influence.

    I don't think the effects of this sort of thing are always bad, either. It means that new ideas and young thinkers have to undergo rigorous analysis before they can be widely accepted or praised. In the end, the best ideas and thinkers always win out, and I don't think disciplines usually suffer too much for the all-too-human odurateness of their elder statesman and dogmatists.

    Reply
  10. David Velleman

    A brief clarification, in response to Lindsay Beyerstein.

    I should have been more explicit in my remark about blogging. What I said is that the philosophical blogosphere is "symptomatic" of various trends, not that it has cuased them. What I meant is that all of philosophy is becoming more and more like the blogosphere. It is increasingly diven by "postings" — not just Web postings but all sorts of occasional squibs that are prompted by a particular puzzle or fact. It is increasingly dependent on who "links" to whom — not necessarily on the Web also by citation, by co-authoring, by invitations to attend conferences or contribute to ad hoc volumes. It increasingly values participation in semi-anarchic discussions at the expense of well-developed, independent, peer-reviewed publications.

    Blogging didn't cause these developments; but it is a very clear manifestation of them, and it probably contributes to them in some degree. I have nothing against blogging itself. After all, here I am posting comments on a blog. If philosophical blogs were the only part of philosophy that were bloggish, I wouldn't have made a comment at all. My point was that, in the eyes of some older philosophers (myself included sometimes, but sometimes not), *all* of philosophy is starting to look bloggish, which may not be good for the discipline.

    Reply
  11. Lindsay Beyerstein

    I'm sorry, Prof. Velleman. I'm afraid I misconstrued your position.

    The tenor of the blogosphere is certainly consistent with the trends you describe, but I'm not sure whether it's /symptomatic/ these trends. I'm arguing that the blog medium is intrinsically conducive to that style of discourse.

    If philosophy as a whole is getting more bloggish, it would appear to be doing so with the complicity of influential members of the philosophical establishment. Most journal editors, conference organizers, and compliers of ad hoc volumes are in the mid-to-late phase of their careers. If this is indeed a generational split, could it be that younger practitioners of M&E are more influential than is commonly supposed?

    Reply
  12. Simon Keller

    I think that the problem under discussion is relatively minor with regard to M&E, but major with regard to ethics and the history of philosophy. My view is that metaphysicians (especially) are by far the most likely to take an interest or see talent in philosophers with whose views or styles they disagree.

    In a variety of contexts at a number of institutions, I've been struck by the speed with which ethicists and historians of philosophy are prepared to reject junior candidates – and even applicants to grad school – whose approaches differ from their own.

    I've often heard junior candidates dismissed with the comments, "He just seems to me like a consequentialist", "She's just another Kantian", "She's a student of Straussians", "She writes about Plato as though it was published in Mind last year". I've never heard anyone be summarily dismissed for being a foundationalist, presentist, dualist, reliabilist, descriptivist…

    If you look around the major departments, I think you'll find many in which approaches and views differ between the junior and senior M&E people. It's much harder to find places in which senior historians and ethicists have hired young philosophers whose approaches differ greatly from their own. Would you rather be a descriptivist applying to a deparment dominated by direct reference theorists, or a virtue theorist applying to a department dominated by utilitarians?

    Some of this is probably a result of how things stand in the profession sociologically. But I wonder whether part of it is due to the "rules of the game" being a bit clearer in M&E. When someone offers a good argument in M&E, it's hard to miss, even if you disagree with the conclusion. In history and ethics, it's much easier to roll your eyes and stop listening as soon as you hear a term like "virtue" or "deep text". And that's what too many of us tend to do.

    Reply
  13. Ned Hall

    A quick follow up to Prof. Keller's observation that "When someone offers a good argument in M&E, it's hard to miss, even if you disagree with the conclusion." Point well taken — with the possible exception of arguments whose value turns on contentious issues about how philosophical inquiry in M&E (well, I guess I mostly have M in mind) ought to be conducted. For example, I have heard an eminent (and excellent) philosopher in M&E dismiss David Lewis's _On the Plurality of Worlds_ as "armchair physics", obviously unimpressed by the kind of "believe the thesis because it's so useful" methodology that Lewis endorses. *That* kind of megalomania — "philosopher X's way of doing metaphysics is idiotic" — doesn't seem to me as uncommon as one might wish.

    Reply
  14. Jeremy Pierce

    One problem with this whole discussion is that metaphysics and epistemology have as little in common as ethics and philosophy of science. The older group people have been discussing did include a number of people who did both, but that seems to me to be an accident of history. In my experience, there's been a growing abandonment of classic epistemology by young metaphysicians, who won't touch Alston-Goldman-style epistemology with a ten-foot pole despite having their foot in 5-6 other fields that might vaguely be associated with epistemology but might more properly be thought of as moral psychology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, or philosophy of religion.

    I do think there's a resulting gap between older and younger philosophers who might describe themselves as working in epistemology, and I could see some of those older people not appreciating some of the work of some of those older people, though the lack of appreciation seems to me to run in the other direction.

    I don't see anything like this in metaphysics, which shouldn't be too surprising given that I've been running in almost the same circles as Brian Weatherson (though in reverse order, with a couple years of overlap), with the exception of his Australian roots. I have little background outside the circles he's been in, anyway, which is all we need for the lack of surprise here.

    Reply
  15. Matt Weiner

    Sometimes it seems to me as though there are many epistemologists who won't touch Alston-Goldman style epistemology with a ten-foot pole!

    What Prof. Velleman is describing looks to me like specialization, or perhaps overspecialization. When a lot of people work on a fairly narrowly focused debate, the arguments will themselves become even more narrowly focused–you'll get papers like "Is Burge's Acceptance Principle compatible with Local (but not Global!) Reductionism with respect to testimony?" (That's a not-very-much exaggerated summary of one of my papers, so nobody thinks I'm getting personal.) To some extent I think that's healthy–problems can really get worked out in a lot of depth, if people in the field are able to keep up with what everyone else is publishing. But it can also be unhealthy–both because one loses track of why the field itself is interesting, and because one stops communicating to anyone who's not working in that field.

    I think the original correspondent's remarks about direct reference may reflect this to some extent. Direct reference is a program that has to some extent created its own problems and goals. But this may mean that the papers that get written on those problems don't seem interesting to people outside it. Should they? Well, I think it would be a bad thing if those papers couldn't get written, or we'd never see what the program could do; but it would be good to have more debate about the assumptions and relevance of the program itself, concurrent with the debate within the program, to make sure that the program really was yielding insight.

    (I get the impression that direct-reference type stuff has been immensely influential in linguistics; but I may have a broader conception of the direct refernce program than the original correspondent!)

    Reply
  16. Brian Weatherson

    In the circles I move in (which may not be typical) the direct reference program has been remarkably uninfluential in linguistics. Issues about reference just aren't that big in formal semantics, so questions about whether reference is direct or indirect are a little by the by. In Montague-inspired programs names are usually taken to be type e, which could be interpreted as meaning that they contribute objects to propositions. But that interpretation would be, at the very least, anachronistic. For more informed commentary on this, see Geoff Nunberg. (Warning: that's a link to a PDF file.)

    The program has, however, had a very large impact on other areas of cognitive science. Work on content externalism, and the importance of natural kinds to mental content, has been very influential on people working on concepts from a more experimental direction. Maybe the original correspondant doesn't want to regard that as part of the direct reference program, but it has always seemed part of the one approach to me.

    Reply
  17. Brian Weatherson

    Oops – the intended link in the previous post didn't work. Here's the paper I meant to link to:

    http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/neworleans.pdf

    Sorry about that.

    Reply
  18. Mark Engleson

    Is M&E one field? As noted, it encompasses metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Now some philosophers may be doing serious work in all four fields, but many philosophers may have interests in some but not all of those fields. Even within those fields there are a variety of areas of research and study. I, myself have interest in epistemology and philosophy of language. In the latter, my interests are largely confined to pragmatics (speech acts, meaning, interpretation) and truth and vagueness. My interests do not include, for example, formal semantics and linguistics. I have some interests in metaphysics, particularly in acts and causation, and in personal identity, but not in debates in realism/antirealism, the nature of numbersm general ontology.
    It seems to me that the sort of interests I have – which connect, largely, with interest in legal and moral philosophy, are not the central issues in M&E that the megalomaniacs are talking about. Mind is king: the action in M&E including language, is really subservient to the philosophy of mind. A caveat: as a graduate student, I can only base this on my direct experience as a student and my discussion with friends at other schools, and what I see being published.

    Reply
  19. Lindsay Beyerstein

    Good question, Mark. I've been wondering the same thing about the link between M and E. It seems like the habit of chunking M&E together is a relatively recent trend. The phrase "M&E" seems to crop up most often discussions about academic politics. My theory is that M&E are frequently mentioned in the same breath qua prestigious philosophical specialties.

    By contrast, M&L seem be conjoined more often in substantive philosophical discourse (as evidenced by journal titles, the large literature about the connection between mind and language/language and thought/language of thought, etc.) It seems like the fact that M&L are mentioned in the same breath has more to do with philosophical beliefs about their relevance to one another, their shared subject matter, or their similar methodologies.

    So, I'd like to ask the other participants: Is the lumping of M&E as recent as I think it is? Is it necessary to posit further sociopolitical facts to explain their conjunction, or can it be explained more parsimoniously in terms of real or perceived overlap (as with M&L)?

    Reply

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