Details here. In fact, philosophy seems to attract the lowest rate of geniuses of any humanities discipline.
My former colleagues at another university in Middle East have also been moved to online teaching indefinitely, with the students…
18 responses to “Genius Three Times More Prevalent in American History than in Philosophy (J. Stanley)”
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Wow, The MacArthur Foundation must really think highly of both Musicology and Biography. It awarded six fellows (three apiece) to the study of these two subjects- the exact same number of philosophy fellows awarded.
Is there any signifigance to the fact that Rorty and Cavell received an award? Does this mean the MacArthur foudation is not a fan of mainsteam analytic philosophy? I mean, Rorty and Cavell do great work but they aren't really mainstream right?
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There are philosophers listed under different domains: Gregory Vlastos is a classicist, and there is a whole category for History and Philosophy of Science which includes some quite prominent philosophers.
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Lisa,
The same is true of other disciplines — e.g. Danielle Allen is a well-known classicist, but is listed under political science, not classics. Secondly, it is also the case that a substantial minority of those listed under philosophy are not people who philosophers would classify as fellow philosophers. I assume a similar situation is true of other disciplines. So a few philosophers occur under other categories, and a few of the people who appear under 'philosophy' aren't philosophers. The same is true in classics, and probably American History as well (e.g. David Levering Lewis is widely considered a great American Historian, but he appears under 'biography'). So taking those facts together suggests to me that it is a pretty good estimate of the relative rates of award winners to just go by the numbers in the listed categories.
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Wow. Patricia Churchland as the representative Genius of analytic philosophy. I want my money back.
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If I am not mistaken, many of those other fields are far larger than philosophy, so it would be interesting to know what percentage of historians versus percentage of philsophers receive MacArthur grants. I suspect the percentage of philosophers would still be lower. I don't think it's because history has a higher percentage of genuises, but because the content of contemporary philosophy is less appealing than the content of history to those writing the grants.
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Classics is much smaller than philosophy, but they have a comparable number of award winners. Art History is also a much smaller discipline than philosophy. But Art History has almost double the number of award winners, especially if one takes away the two or three people that are listed as philosophers, but really aren't. American History is a sub-discipline of history. I am sure that there are more philosophy professors than members of this sub-discipline of history.
Maybe another sign of the lack of genius among philosophers is that the people who won this award are certainly not the ones philosophers would think of as geniuses (I do notice that three out of the six teach at Harvard — what is that about?).
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I'm not quite sure I understand what definition of 'genius' is employed here (clearly I'm not genial). Care to explain, anyone? MacArthur Fellow = genius?
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yeah, Brian has blogged about the low number of philosophers in the American Academy, and it's probably true for some of the other honorary fellowships.
I suspect these facts may all be related, in that it is peers who recommend peers for these prizes. So when the Mac people want to know who to give a pot of money to, they ask people who are AAAS members (inter alia), and if not many of *them* are philosophers….
Certainly the google-mail model at work here (you have to be a member before you can recommend a friend) has a lot to do with the number of Harvard people among the philosophers.
You know, Jason, I think we should just start our own prize. I propose we call it the Stanley Cup, 'cause that has a certain ring to it. And I nominate you for the first recipient. Next year you nominate me, okay?
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I'm glad to see that Patricia Churchland made the list. I loved her "Neurophilosophy" text. Just wish that she and Dr. Rhawn Joseph could get together and kick Herbert Maruse around the room for a couple of hours…
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Dear Prof. Stanley,
Most of the comments so far in this post have focused on quantitative factors. I accept most of them and resonate with your complaint. However, looking at the MacArthur Foundation's nomination and selection criteria seems revealing about qualitative factors behind your complaint.1) Nomination: candidates are nominated by a rotating pool of external nominators. It looks like it's a select group who are supposed to be "identified for their expertise and familiarity with exceptionally creative people in their respective areas of focus." The net result is that the MacArthur foundation receives about several hundred nominations a year. But it is hard to see how it would be like the Leiter Reports where a substantial sample of a profession is polled.
A little reading between the lines might lead one to expect that the nominees that will have the best chance of getting selected will be those who have the most visibility (i.e. public intellectual). But let us look at the next factor.
2) The selection process is even more vulnerable to equating genius with visibility. The Foundation says: "The Selection Committee consists of approximately 12 people who serve confidentially and are chosen for their breadth of experience, excellent judgment, and curiosity. In identifying members for the committee, we look for depth of interest in at least one major field, broad familiarity with other major fields, and, above all, an enthusiasm for creative ideas and important issues within and outside of their areas of expertise." This Committee reviews information like letters of evaluation composed by the Foundation's senior staff and a file containing samples of the nominee's work. All the work is done anonymously.
However, based on my work experience in offices for non-profits, it seems to me that it is more likely that the senior staff supervises a bunch of junior interns. It's the junior staff who does the actual work of redacting the file and of composing evaluation letters. The quality of the evaluation will seem to depend a lot upon the quality of the supervision by the senior staff, as well as the competence of the juniors.
Translation: think of an admissions committee or a hiring comittee but with one crucial difference. Philosophers might not be evaluating fellow philosophers. But one can make a good bet that the selection will be a bit of crap shoot, that for the most part will end up with "safe" candidates picked as "geniuses."
To clarify: I respect the work done by the philosophers that the Foundation actually selected. But I think an examination of the MacArthur Foundations process would lead some (cynical) eyes to have good reasons to believe that geniuses like Kant and Frege would be overlooked!
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Surely the humanities discipline with the LOWEST rate of MacArthurs is actually Literary Studies! There are only 12 MacArthurs on that list, compared to 6 under straight philosophy. For comparison the membership of the APA is about 10,000 while the membership of the MLA is about 30,000 (according to the ACLS).
(For further comparison the AHA has about 18,000 members and the OAH (Organization of American Historians, i.e. people who study American History — there is of course considerable overlap between AHA and OAH memberships). This doesn't account for the difference between the 42 MacArthurs in American History and History combined, compared to the measly 6 philosophers.)
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DIdn't John Lachs write a letter to the APA Proceedings a few years ago where he said that the main reason that philosophy get fewer NEH dollars than other fields is that philosophers sabotage each other. I believe he said that philosophers are more likely to be critical of each other's projects (as we are trained to be), and so when a project comes up for review, the philosopher on the grant committee is likely to elaborate all of the project's problems. The other committee members conclude that the project isn't worth funding. I wonder if something similar happens with the MacArthur grants.
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Oops — I meant to say that the OAH has about 9,000 members. Somehow I left that out.
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Alan Wong: The MacArthur Foundation selection committee solicits opinions about potential recipients from others in their fields. (This year I was asked for my opinion about someone — that's how I know this.) Where they get the list of people about whom to solicit opinions, or the list of people from whom to solicit opinions, I don't know. But at least there is some test beyond mere visibility, in which philosophers get to evaluate philosophers, at the later stage of the process.
Jason: What you describe might happen with the solicitation of opinions that I mentioned — since here philosophers are evaluating philosophers!
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Because noone has brought this up, I guess I'll have to do it: maybe the poor showing reflects the judgment of intelligent outsiders on mainstream philosophy. Maybe they don't want to encourage more of what the profession already encourages, and do want to encourage the sort of thing that intelligent non-philosophers might consider interesting.
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Billycash,
I wonder how intelligent "intelligent outsiders" can be, when they defend their ignorance of philosophy by attempting to undermine its practice. Do you think philosophers who don't find Chinese history interesting should seek to eliminate leading Chinese historians from competition for research funds?
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Michael,
I'm glad that the MacArthur foundation solicited you for recommendations. I'm happy to stand corrected.However, I realized that their process to nominate candidates was likely to canvass the opinion of philosophers about other philosophers. But the selection process for picking who wins the awards does mystify me. It does not seem to be the sort of process that would award a grant to someone doing cutting edge research in philosophical logic, though someone writing a sexy biography on Frege seems to have a better chance of winning.
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Perhaps one issue here is the awkward place of philosophy among the humanities. Technical issues arise in any field, including humanities. But philosophy, especially innovative, technically-oriented philosophy, is unlikely to find many appreciators among other humanists. Personally (not that I would belong on a list of MacArthur 'geniuses') I have much more contact and share more interests with mathematicians and natural scientists. As the social and cultural gap between the sciences and humanities continues to grow, I'm afraid we fall, at least to a significant extent, between the two stools…
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