Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. Fool's avatar
  2. Santa Monica's avatar
  3. Charles Bakker's avatar
  4. Matty Silverstein's avatar
  5. Jason's avatar
  6. Nathan Meyvis's avatar
  7. Stefan Sciaraffa's avatar

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

Significant omissions at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Brian Leiter

Jimmy Goodrich, a PhD student in philosophy at Rutgers, writes with a useful question:

This didn’t strike me as directly relevant to your recent post asking readers about the relative merits of already existing SEP articles, but I thought it might also be interesting and helpful to have readers note what they take to be glaring omissions in the SEP. After all, the SEP is extremely detailed about some topics, but pretty sparse about others.

For example: Both analytical and normative issues concerning power (political, social, etc.) are largely overlooked with the exception of an article on feminist perspectives on power and a separate one on domination, both of which are quite good. However, there’s a rich tradition which explicitly discusses power from both analytical and normative perspectives from Aristotle to Spinoza to Nietzsche to Weber to plenty of other 19th and 20th century thinkers. And yet, no entry is present to detail this or any other tradition which sees an important role for a concept of social or political power which isn’t identical to (or very nearly identical to) domination. It seems to me that there’s at least one if not two or three independent articles here.

I’d be very interested to learn whether others have found omissions they’d consider to be glaring. And perhaps this would be useful to the SEP editors as well.

I agree with Mr. Goodrich about the kind of article on power he suggests:  that would be wonderful.  Additional suggestions welcome:  again, full name and valid e-mail address, and explain, as Mr. Goodrich helpfully did, why the entry in question would be a welcome edition, what themes/authors it might cover, etc.

To reiterate something remarked on in the other thread, more than once:  SEP is great and very comprehensive; Ed Zalta has done yeaoman's work in maintaining and developing it.  Thanks to Professor Zalta and all those who have contributed to it, editors and authors.

Leave a Reply to N Krishna Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

32 responses to “Significant omissions at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy”

  1. Matt Lister

    Kit Wellman's entry on immigration is quite solid, but scholarly discussion and good literature has progressed in the last several years to the point where it would, I think, be completely reasonable to have distinct entries on at least several of the sub-categories of his entry. In particular, it would be useful and interesting to have distinct entries on refugees (and related topics), on irregular migration, and more on "discretionary" migration. At the very least, refugees and related issues would be a good topic, both as it's an area full of issues that become more difficult the more they are probed, and that are of significant practical importance.

    Reply
  2. Matt Knachel

    Given the (welcome!) increased interest lately in "socialism" here in the USA, it would be nice to have a comprehensive SEP entry under that heading. I had to use scare quotes because the use of the term in the discourse is so muddled it barely has a stable meaning. Maybe an SEP entry would help. Or at the very least, it would give me a place to send interested students. (These kids aren't going to indoctrinate themselves; I need resources to facilitate our Leftist Academic Agenda.)

    Reply
  3. Charles Pigden

    I know I am an interested party here, since this is one of my research specialities, but there is nothing much on the Stanford about ‘Hume on Is and Ought’ and specifically next to nothing on recent work arising from attempts to answer Prior’s seminal 1960 paper ‘The Autonomy of Ethics’ in which he purports to develop logically valid counterexamples to No-Ought-From-Is. Names conspicuous by their absence in *this* connection (though sometimes present in others) include those of Arthur Prior himself, J.M. Shorter, Frank Jackson, Gerhard Schurz, Gillian Russell, Greg Restall, Hakan Salwen, Stephen Maitzen, Mark Nelson, Lloyd Humberstone, Daniel Singer, and Barry Maguire. I sometimes think this work is relatively neglected a) because people think that No-Ought-From-Is was done to death in middle of the 20th Century (though in my view much of the mid-century work, collected in W.D. Hudson’s well-known anthology, is vitiated by obvious mistakes) and b) because the recent material is too logical for the Humeans and meta-ethicists, to meta-ethical for the Humeans and logicians and too Humean for the logicians and meta-ethicists. But I think that there is enough interesting material on this topic to merit an entry in the Stanford especially as it relates too interesting issues in sematic taxonomy. (Can one and the same sentence function as an ethical statement in one connection and a non-ethical statement in another?)

    Again I am an interested party, but there is also nothing on the philosophy of conspiracy theories which has become a burgeoning sub-field since Brian Keeley and I started to write about it in the nineties. Missing names in this connection include Keeley, Coady, Dentith, Hagen, Basham, Clarke and Stokes.

    Reply
  4. s.wallerstein

    In light of what Matt Knachel says above, an entry on Marxism (there is a very insufficient entry on Marx himself) would be useful. There are articles on individual Marxist thinkers, Lukacs, Althusser, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse the Frankfurt School (Critical Theory), but there should be one which ties them and others together as a long and fruitful tradition.

    Reply
  5. Charles Pigden

    How about Vaihinger and the Philosophy of 'As If'? Also (though I loathe them both) entries on Lenin and Leninism and Trotsky and Trotskyism would not come amiss. If a dull dog like Althusser rates an entry so should they. And there do not seem to be entries on Analytical Marxism or the leading Analytical Marxists such as G.A.Cohen & Jon Elster.

    Reply
  6. Enzo Rossi

    Regarding power, an obvious way to fill that lacuna would be to have an entry on political realism (Bernard Williams, Raymond Geuss are the main contemporary exponents, though the tradition is old and is experiencing a strong revival).

    Reply
  7. Clayton Littlejohn

    Looking over the epistemology entries, it seems that it might be helpful to have an entry on credence/degree of belief. Some of the relevant information is contained under related headings (e.g., belief, certainty), but I don't think that they can do justice to these kinds of topics given their current aims (e.g., Reed's entry on certainty contains lots of really useful information for traditional epistemologists, but it doesn't really engage with the things that formally minded epistemologists are interested in and I don't think it should be expected to). We can piece together some of what matters from the entries on formal epistemology and formal representations of belief, but there are some questions about psychological reality, rational role, and connection to other states of mind that these entries won't really address in sufficient detail.

    Reply
  8. Dean C. Rowan

    I see that both Carnap and Vaihinger are listed in black type (without links) in the Projected Table of Contents: https://plato.stanford.edu/projected-contents.html Also appearing there, political realism. My interest in this derives from work as a librarian with only the most fleeting familiarity with random bits of what sometimes passes for philosophy. I've used SEP a good deal, but I've never done what any respectable librarian should do, namely, read the preliminaries to discern how the work is developed. I've always just assumed SEP was a glorified Wikipedia, which it is not, clearly.

    Reply
  9. N Krishna

    The SEP is very good on my own main area of interest (20th-c British philosophy) and commendably has entries on such relatively unread figures as HA Prichard, WD Ross and Cook Wilson, as well as on such heterodox figures as RG Collingwood. But I'd like very much to see entries on HLA Hart, Stuart Hampshire, Iris Murdoch, Michael Dummett and Richard Wollheim.

    And speaking of Wollheim, I think SEP entries on Arthur Danto and Stanley Cavell would be very useful, particularly the latter, whose work seems to me valuable but difficult to integrate into an analytically-focused course on aesthetics.

    Reply
  10. Andrea Guardo

    I'd like to see an entry on Kripke's Wittgenstein's rule-following paradox. It is one of the most important arguments of last century's analytic philosophy, and the relevant literature is huge. Granted, the SEP has an entry on private language, but the Kripkean connection between the issue of rule-following and that of private language is controversial and, in any case, most of the recent literature on rule-following completely ignores the issue of the possibility of private languages.

    Reply
  11. Jimmy Goodrich

    For what it's worth, I think an articled dedicated to Political Realism would be helpful. But it wouldn't completely fill the power lacuna I had in mind. Of course, the SEP is a tool for the philosophical community and others, not just me. So perhaps that would fill the lacuna sufficiently well by everyone else's lights.

    Reply
  12. Steven Hales

    I'm surprised there is not a standalone entry on state-of-nature theories in political philosophy. That's an influential approach ranging over several canonical authors, and not so narrow a topic that it is merely of niche interest.

    Reply
  13. Nicolas Delon

    Off the top of my head:

    There is nothing on Captivity (or something in the vicinity). Even the entry on Punishment (a pretty succinct one by SEP standards) doesn't contain much on incarceration or imprisonment. You'll find mentions of prisons across a bunch of entries, but no dedicated entry to prison, much less captivity in general. There is a good entry on Coercion, but the relation to captivity is tangential. There is, however, a growing literature on captivity in ethics, social and political philosophy, so I figure that'd be something to consider.

    There is no entry dedicated to the Ethics of killing, despite a couple entries on death, doing/allowing, war, and some other connected topics.

    There is no entry dedicated to Vulnerability, even though it's part of many entries on feminism and feminist perspectives.

    Finally, I just realized there is not an entry on Genealogy. There's Nietzsche, there's Foucault, there's Williams (although nothing about genealogy there), there's evolution and morality, but nothing on genealogy proper. Again, since there's a growing vibrant literature on the topic, this would be welcome.

    Reply
  14. Christopher Hitchcock

    The SEP regularly receives suggestions for new entries. If you have suggestions, you can send them to Ed Zalta, or perhaps better, to one of the subject editors (listed here: https://plato.stanford.edu/board.html). It's best if you can say something about what you imagine the contents of the entry would be, and how it would differ from existing entries. It also helps if you suggest suitable authors. You can volunteer yourself, but there is no guarantee that if the SEP accepts the suggestion for an entry on the topic, you will be asked to write it.

    In relation to the earlier thread, if you have criticisms of a particular entry, you can also send those to the editorial team. Explain why you thought the entry was unhelpful: e.g. it presupposed X, which most people using the entry would not already know; or it didn't include coverage of Y, which is central to the topic. Typically, in such cases, the subject editors will decide whether the concerns have merit, and if so they will ask the author(s) of the entry to address them in the next revision.

    Reply
  15. Mohan Matthen

    I'd like to second Chris. Whenever I have written to Ed and/or a subject editor, they have responded thoughtfully and made conscientious efforts to look into my points. I think revisions have ensued, at least on one occasion. There's no reason simply to live with what you're given.

    Reply
  16. Kenneth Simons

    I would suggest an entry on consent. There is a current entry on informed consent, but this focuses more narrowly on medical decision-making. And there are entries on authority, decision-making authority, and related issues, but not the basic question of the meaning and criteria of consent. Relevant issues include whether consent is a mental action or attitude or instead a communication or performative; whether its meaning varies according to context (consent to what otherwise would be a moral wrong, or a legal wrong, or an illegitimate exercise of political authority; possible distinctive criteria for consent to sexual conduct); the requisite conditions of voluntariness, knowledge, freedom from coercion, freedom from fraud, etc.); whether one can consent to serious wrongs or harms; whether consent to *risks* of harm or of a wrong should be analyzed differently from consent to harm or to conduct that would otherwise be a wrong.

    Reply
  17. Paul Russell

    I am surprised that there are articles about the likes of Auguste Comte and Bernard Bosanquet but not on Vladimir Lenin or Antonio Gramsci (two of the most important and influential Marxist thinkers of the 20thC)?

    Reply
  18. s.wallerstein

    I second your suggestion of articles on Lenin and Trotsky (whom I do not loathe). I thought about mentioning them in my comment above, but unlike you, was afraid to do so. Let's include Gramsci in the wish list too.

    Reply
  19. John Tilley

    Bernard Mandeville, Francis Hutcheson, Richard Price

    Reply
  20. Charles Pigden

    Totally concur with John Tilley. I regularly teach courses featuring all three. Also they are kind of fun. But if the Stanford is to do Hutcheson (and I think it should) , shouldn't there also be entries on his chief opponents Gilbert Burnett and John Balguy?

    Reply
  21. Nathanael Green

    I would like to see an entry on "Philosophy of Literature."

    There should be an entry on Diderot.

    And there should probably be separate entries on Mikhail Bakhtin, Susan Langer, Karl Polanyi, Alisdair Macintyre, Gaston Bachelard, Noam Chomsky, Claude Levi-Strauss, Georg Simmel, Gustav Bergmann, Michel Dufrenne, JGA Pocock, Marjorie Grene, Fritz Mauthner, Charles Wright Mills, Emile Durkheim, Anthony Giddens, Zygmut Bauman, Roman Jakobson, Arne Naess, Murray Bookchin, Mikhail Bakunin.

    Some of these figures are social scientists rather than overt philosophers, but all are influential in philosophy.

    Reply
  22. Russell Blackford

    There seems to be no general article on humanism. Lots of articles on related topics, but no article bringing the broad idea of humanism together in one place.

    No article on transhumanism or posthumanism. I realise some people see the former, in particular, as faddish, but even if you think that, many very dubious ideas have their own articles in the SEP. Besides, there are articles on related topics such as human enhancement. Posthumanism is now pretty important as a broad philosophical and literary movement.

    No article on Benjamin Constant – that's a very important and influential political thinker to overlook!

    Reply
  23. David Liakos

    I think it is shocking that there is no entry on Freud.

    Reply
  24. Scott Wisdom

    SEP is great, but ditto to David Liakos Freud's continued absence is shocking — especially since there's an article on Lacan.

    Also, the Lacan article is couched in the cant of initiates with lots of needless nominalization & omits reference to one of the first and best philosophical treatments of Lacan in English (Richard Wollheim's NYRB article "The Cabinet of Dr. Lacan").

    Reply
  25. Nick STang

    By and large the SEP is great, but I do think they need more Hegel coverage (especially given how often students need a good readable secondary sources on Hegel). I would suggest at a minimum separate entries on the three main parts of the system: Logic/Metaphysics, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Spirit. Ideally, additional entries on main parts of the Philosophy of Spirit: in addition to Aesthetics (which is already there), Religion, and Moral/Political Philosophy.

    Reply
  26. Heath White

    Let me echo many others in saying the SEP is fantastic as a whole and a tremendous service to the profession.

    I would like to see an entry on Racism. Racism is mentioned numerous times in other articles but the content of the concept is usually taken for granted in those other places. If you are looking for a nice concise definition, or an examination of various competing concepts of racism, you are out of luck. Given the current political discussion surrounding questions of race this seems like a significant omission.

    Reply
  27. Matt Shockey

    Heidegger has only two entries, which isn't many compared to other figures of comparable or much less significance. I'd love to see more detailed entries focused on the different phases of his work as well as more thematically focused ones like the aesthetics entry by Iain Thompson, or ones focused on his engagement with particular historical figures (since so much of his own work came out of such engagement). Something on his influence/reception, and perhaps one on the debates about how his Nazism relates to his philosophical thought, would also be nice.

    Reply
  28. Charles Pigden

    No dedicated entry on Hilary Putnam. Since Richard Rorty, a vastly inferior philosopher of the same generation gets and entry to himself, this seems to me a significant omission.

    Let my add my voice to the many hosannahs praising the SEP. As with many other contributors to this thread these are all suggestions about how to make an excellent thing even better.

    Reply
  29. Dan Dennis

    A couple of general suggestions.

    1) A button where one could download all the articles – so one does not need to go online to find them each time or have the hassle of downloading the ones that one wants individually. It should be quite easy to do. The SEP could even charge a dollar or two for it. In an ideal world there would also be an 'update' button so that one could update the copy that one has already downloaded – but that might be too high tech.

    2) Offer MP3s of the articles. It would be great to be able to listen to articles whilst on the go. It would be a great way of broadening one's general philosophical knowledge. Perhaps public spirited individuals could record themselves reading articles, along the lines of https://librivox.org . For those articles that no one has yet recorded, perhaps an electronically read version could be supplied (these have improved in recent years).

    Thanks to all involved in the SEP.

    Reply
  30. PAUL Russell

    Paul Russell

    It is probably too late for this to be relevant – even for those who might be interested – but along with the two names I mentioned above (Lenin and Gramsci) I would also add that of Nikolai Bukharin. After Lenin, Bukharin was arguably the most important philosophical theoretician of the Russian Revolution. His work was admired by Lenin and was subject to criticism by, among others, Gramsci and Bertrand Russell. The Bukharin/Gramsci debate was not only a very important debate in within Marxist theory, it shaped much of the history of Marxist thought and had real impact in the political world. This debate is also is highly relevant to any assessment of "analytical Marxism" (i.e. as it developed at the end of the 20th C).

    There is, in any case, little or nothing about the debate concerning Lenin/Bukharin/Gramsci et al in the SEP. What this shows that there are significant movements and developments in philosophy (e.g. Marxism) that are still sorely neglected in the SEP. Despite its considerable merits and achievements, the SEP has a rather narrow and contentious conception of what 'philosophy' is. It is arguable that this reflects a deeper problem, with what could be called the "APA outlook". This is an outlook that includes a rather crude understanding of how philosophy can and should be politically "active". It is heavily focused on “professional” issues (and interests) and it is largely disconnected from real world politics and history – lacking any credible understanding of the role that philosophy has had and that it might play outside its narrow academic/professional concerns.

    On Bukharin:

    https://www.nytimes.com/1973/11/25/archives/bukharin-and-the-bolshevik-revolution-by-stephen-f-cohen.html
    https://monthlyreview.org/product/philosophical_arabesques/
    https://www.nytimes.com/1973/11/25/archives/bukharin-and-the-bolshevik-revolution-by-stephen-f-cohen.html

    Arguably, Bukharin's most important work was "Historical Materialism":
    https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1921/histmat/index.htm

    Finally, if anyone is trying to gauge how unbalanced the SEP is – and, arguably, the way in which this reflects a lack of balance and judgment throughout contemporary philosophy – you might consider the number of listings in the SEP that are devoted (entirely) to feminism and feminist issues.

    SEP articles devoted to feminism and feminist philosophy:

    Feminist Philosophy

    Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues
    Feminist Perspectives on Rape
    Latin American Feminism
    Feminist Perspectives on Objectification
    Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science
    Feminist Moral Psychology
    Feminist Bioethics
    Feminist Philosophy of Law
    *Feminist Perspectives on Science
    Identity Politics
    Feminist Perspectives on Sex Markets
    Feminist Perspectives on the Body
    Feminist Ethics
    Feminist Perspectives on Disability
    Feminist Philosophy of Religion
    Feminist Philosophy of Language
    Feminist Perspectives on the Self
    Feminist Social Epistemology
    *Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender
    Feminist Metaphysics
    Feminist Environmental Philosophy
    Feminist Philosophy of Biology
    Feminist Aesthetics
    Feminist Perspectives on Class and Work
    Feminist History of Philosophy
    Feminist Perspectives on Globalization
    Feminist Perspectives on Power
    Feminist Political Philosophy
    *The History of Feminism: Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet
    Intersections Between Analytic and Continental Feminism
    Intersections Between Pragmatist and Continental Feminism
    Psychoanalytic Feminism
    Continental Feminism
    Pragmatist Feminism
    Analytic Feminism
    Liberal Feminism

    There are a total of thirty-seven articles devoted to feminism and feminist issues in the SEP. I have omitted from the above list (complete) articles devoted to a number of significant feminist philosophers and thinkers.

    Along with many others, I share the concern that within philosophy (i.e. “the profession” of philosophy) women have, in any number of respects, been marginalized and treated with a lack of due concern and respect. Clearly, however, the SEP is not guilty of any charge of this kind. It is true, as well, that other imbalances – both over-representation and under-representation – could be found within the contents of the SEP. Nevertheless, when it comes to politics and social and political activism, broadly conceived, the contrast between Marxist philosophy and feminist philosophy seems particularly apt – and is certainly worth some further consideration. For example, it could be argued that the lack of balance and the various omissions found within the SEP shows that the existing “power relations” within “philosophy” are a messier affair than various APA apparatchiks would like us all to believe. The dominant interests and the interests that dominate may be more suspect than many of our (senior) colleagues are able or willing to acknowledge.

    Reply
  31. B.

    Could some one please explain to me how the SEP content is curated? Is there a committee selecting topics and writers, is it upon request or recommendation or maybe self selection? I think this would be interesting also wrt the overrepresentation of feminist philosophy?

    Reply
  32. Matt Lister

    If people like Lenin should be included (and it seems as plausible as a lot of entries, though maybe that's not the right standard) then I'd think there should clearly be entries for Bakunin and Kropotkin, both of whom are at least philosophically much more interesting than Lenin is. They are both discussed a bit in the entry on Anarchism, but seem like strong candidates for their own entries. In Bakunin's case in particular, while I don't think his positive views are very plausible, his criticisms of Marx seem to have been fairly strong in practice, and worthy of more reflection. With Kropotkin, his criticism of punishment practices, and his work on evolution, are both worthy of more reflection and discussion, I'd think.

    —–
    KEYWORDS:
    Primary Blog

    Reply

Designed with WordPress