Nova PhDs

Today, Leiter has had some stuff up on his blog regarding "philosophical genealogy"--meant in the straightforward sense of lineage based on dissertation directors. Obviously, all of the stuff on his blog has to do with analytic philosophers. I started thinking about ours, though it is really hard to draw out. For those of us who worked under Busch, I could only go back as far as our "grandfather"--John O. Riedl. He got his PhD from Marquette in 1930, but I don't know under whom.

As you might imagine, Ammon's is the most imediately impressive--IF we accept habilitations and dissertations. If you allow for that (and I don't see why we shouldn't), one can do the following: Ammon-Denny-Gadamer-Headgear-Heinrich Rickert-Wilhelm Windelband-Hermann Lotzes. Lotzes is the last one I could figure...

Any more thoughts on this?

so, since all 5 of us are now on board and posting, i have a suggestion for our outreach. it would involve a little work for each of us, and a teensy bit more for J.C. (sorry, dude)

joe, i know you're loath to consider yourself the blogger-in-chief, but you are at least the mastermind here, so i think an intro. letter to everyone really ought to come from you, as an honorary thing, at least. if the other 4 of us get you the email addresses for all of the other phds and abds (besides the 5 of us currently in the "authors" list, i count 24 in my revised directors post), would you be willing to do that, just so the invitation is consistent and nobody feels slighted?

for me, farhang, greg, and ammon, this would involve each of us getting the email address for 6 of the remaining phd's or abd's and forwarding it on to joe. would this be amenable to you guys?

joe, if you're okay with sending the letter, could you comment below? then, the rest of us can divvy up the people we need to contact and get the ball rolling. what say you?

Folks,

Not only "novaphds" is now on google, but if you type the words villanova and philosophy, we are among the first hits. This means that potential graduate students, during the research on different programs, would come across our blog. This is great since we are trying to show that one of Villanova phd program's greatest strength — its community of grad students — continues beyond the boundaries of St. Augustine Center grad lounge.

Well, I don't think that anyone would mistake me for an analytic philosopher (aside from the large community of analytic Heideggerian poetologists at Oxford), but . . .

Your anticipation not withstanding, Joe, I think that I am largely in agreement with at least one interpretation of the first claim:

1) Provided we give "know-how" a broad enough meaning (hopefully not so broad that it becomes vacuous . . .) I think that we would end up with a good description of the way in which most 20th century philosophers are (and ought to be) commited to a certain kind of nominalism (I suspect that this interpretation would no longer be stictu sensu a form of pragmatism, giving some credence to Joe's anticipation of my possible recalcitrance). That is to say, philosophical thought is a praxis whose concepts don't have meaning apart from the linguistic communities that employ them . . . but, as John points out, at this point we're in pretty broad terrain. To my mind, this doesn't make it an unimportant claim nor even historically unilluminating. It strikes me that this first claim would be a little like saying that 17th and 18th century rationalists all held that the truth of a judgment depended upon proper use of the faculty of reason, whose development was critical for the progress of science and philosophy. This is both true and an essential part of their project, but doesn't really distinguish them from empiricists, for whom it is still true, and still important, but in a strikingly different way.

I guess I'm not clear how what we'd be talking about differs in a substantive way from the so-called linguistic turn, which cuts across the analytic-continental divide. . . This explains why the poor Husserlians don't make the cut (maybe somebody who knows more about Deleuze than I do can tell me if Deleuzians —- or Deleuzers? —- do). Similarly, I think you'd be hard pressed to impute any interpretation of what Fodor is calling semantic pragmatism to someone like Frege, or even to early versions of logical positivism and logical atomism (although the day I claim to be an expert in pre-analytic philosophy, hell will have already been frozen over for some time —- and deep apologies for this aside, I really enjoy using the future perfect tense and try to find cases where it is relevant, as you will have noticed it was here). Incidentally, while I agree with both of you that the second claim of Fodor is both obviously wrong and not a good description of very many philosophers, I do take it that a version of this claim was actually endorsed by the logical positivists, for whom, if I am not mistaken, the rules of inference were ontologically distinct from empirical investigations, and the exclusive proper object of philosophy (Philosophy didn’t get to decide what was shown, just what could properly be said about that which was shown . . . )

2) (I bet that by now you will have forgotten that there had been a number 1). If, however, you mean something narrower, then I take it this point becomes more debatable as an interpretation of either analytic or continental philosophy (it also becomes an inappropriate goal for what I will follow Heidegger in pretentiously calling ‘The Task of Thinking’ —- as an aside to any e-passers-by who don’t know me and think it’s insufferably pretentious, please be assured that my tongue is thoroughly ensconced in my cheek. To borrow a phrase from Al Franken, I’m “kidding on the square”).

If we interpret “know-how” more narrowly to refer to how to pragmatically engage in a (non-conceptual? or non-linguistic?) world, this seems to me not to describe a good deal at least of what I take some continental philosophers to be up to (and from the little, and admittedly idiosyncratic, bit that I know about analytic trends in the philosophy of science and cognitive science, I take it that it would no longer describe all, or even most, analytic philosophers either). To stick with Heidegger, for example, even in Being and Time, it isn’t simply the case that use-relations constitute Dasein’s primary relationship to the world. It’s certainly true, as we’ve all heard countless times, that in Division One, he argues that this is the primary form that Dasein’s everyday relationship to the world takes, and he takes it as the proper task of philosophy to explicate the meaning of this relationship. But even in Being and Time, before Heidegger sells the farm —- if that’s the word I’m looking for —— as Ryle, Dreyfus and so many others seem to have seen it, the meaning of these pragmatic relationships isn’t itself necessarily understood pragmatically, but linguistically. I’m thinking in particular of the end of Chapter Five of Part Two, where Heidegger is talking about historicality. Two quick asides before I try to wrap up a comment that is already far-too-long. 1) This same section will also be one of the few places where Heidegger discusses what he calls the temporality of concept-formation and the place where he most directly engages the questions this post is discussing in language that might be comprehensible to the larger philosophical community. 2) Although this chapter is crucial to the hermeneutic tradition, this also serves to distinguish Heidegger from the hermeneutic answer which, while less cognitivist than the position we’re discussing here, is thoroughly ensconced in the interpretation of philosophy as principally a praxis. This is because the temporality of discourse, which underwrites how we discuss and understand Dasein’s historicality, should be understood on the horizon of the present (through the phenomenon of dating) rather than the past . . . It’s not that our conceptual and pragmatic relationships to the world are thoroughly ensconced in the historical configurations of language that we think in, it’s that we think in historical configurations because we are beings whose projects project themselves onto the past. In this way, I think he might be able to avoid some of the scruples you all are expressing with too-broad a usage of the work language. As an aside to this aside, it’s interesting to note that in Being and Time, all of this is the task of philosophy, which would mean that Heidegger goes through the “linguistic turn” before he undergoes the “poetic turn” which supposedly happens simultaneously. My deepest apologies for such a long aside).

If I have a point here, and it’s debatable whether or not I do, it’s that the transformation of philosophy into practical philosophy isn’t necessarily the done deal that we’ve been assured that it is. Even if we endorse a version of what I would prefer to call “nominalism” and not pragmatism, and say that the meaning of our concepts is given only through some sort of intersubjective consensus (another concept which cuts across the analytic-continental tradition), this doesn’t necessarily entail our accepting the position that all meanings are therefore pragmatic. I take it that this is important insofar as twentieth century critiques of metaphysics (be they the critiques of Quine or of Derrida) largely depend upon such a move. Kant said that nothing moved him so much as the starry skies above and the moral law within. (My apologies for being to lazy to go look up the exact wording). My concern is that we post-metaphysical philosophers (urban-dwellers that we are) have let the bright lights of the big city blind us to even remembering that there are starry skies above. To paraphrase someone else (I’ve forgotten who), we’ve forgotten that there are ontological questions worth forgetting about . . .

I remember a discussion we had several years back, Joe, where I think we were in agreement that the ultimate horizon for understanding the meanings (and truth) of things was something like intersubjective verification, given not by an ideal community, but by factually existing socio-political communities. Where we differed (and correct me if I’m wrong) was that you took this to mean that ultimately, the value of all questions ought to be referred to the life of these communities (we only care about questions insofar as they pertain to humanity), whereas I didn’t want to make this move (while language, truth and meaning might be only possible within a community of human beings, the meaning of humanity can still be in a sense ecstatic, oriented beyond itself to questions that don’t pertain to us at all except for insofar as we are the ones being so oriented.) If I’ve understood you correctly, I’d be tempted to say that you were endorsing what we are here calling semantic pragmatism, and I was endorsing what I think I’ll call (referring to another conversation we had) neo-metaphysical nominalism or critical ontology.

I hope that some of this pertains to some of what we are talking about.

incidentally, i just did a little count of phd's and abd's still around the program. these are the directors; please correct me in comments if i'm wrong, and if you know for sure some of the ones i'm unclear on. by my count, we've got 18 phd's conferred, and 11 abd's at the moment.

caputo: jennifer, jamie smith, darin, michael andrews, dana, john, adam (abd), andrea (abd), greg (abd), danny (abd), mike brogan (abd)
busch: chris, joe, farhang, seth (abd), matt (abd), naz (abd ???)
schmidt: matthias, ted, shannon, jamey findling, ammon
brogan: sarah, lucio, mike shaw (abd)
carvalho: josh (abd), andy (abd ???)
scholz: steve
mccartney: tim


edited to reflect comments below. do we think naz and andy gallinger are ABD or not?
also: my understanding is that mike brogan may or may not actually complete the program at this point; that's why i didn't include him initially. but i suppose i had andy on there, so i've added mike brogan, as well.

Glad to share this news with you all. Matt Groe is officially ABD. He defended his proposal yesterday — June 21st — the first day of summer! — and here is the title of his forthcoming magnum opus:

“Ethical Coexistence Beyond Dualism: The Converging Visions of Dewey and Merleau-Ponty”

Dr. Busch is the director; Dr. Betz and Dr. Margolis are readers.

I have asked Matt reply to this post and to share with us a brief synopsis of his work. I think it is wornderul to have a Villanova PhD on MP and Dewey, showing the "convergence" — to use Matt's word — of these two great traditions.

Congratulations, Matt!

okay, as promised, here is the list of placements for this year:

Tenure-track Positions
Farhang Erfani — American University (Washington D.C.)
Lucio Privitello — The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
Christian Diehm — The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point
Dana Belu — California State University-Dominguez Hills
John Whitmire — Western Carolina University

Other Full-time (one year or renewable) Positions
Adam Miller — Collin County Community College (TX)
Ammon Allred — Villanova University (Philosophy)
Gregory Hoskins — Villanova University (Core Humanities)

Villanovans Moving Elsewhere
Jennifer Gossetti — Fordham University (NY) (tenured Associate Professor)

one of you guys can copy this stuff and post it to leiter, if you like — i think just the new tenure-tracks.

i just wanted to share with you all that i just received an email from Sartre Studies International informing me that they have accepted my paper on Les Mots — the revision of the sartre chapter in my diss! they said that it should come out next year (2006), probably in the fall edition.

so i'm pretty excited right now, as this will be my first solo article in print, and it's in a pretty specialized journal!

now, we've talked about this before, but i thought that i would run a question by you guys, since you've all got some things out already. when you get comments for critical revisions, what do you generally do with them? do you attempt to accomodate everything all the reviewers had to say, or what? any feedback here would be helpful.

thanks guys!

I know that we love to hate him (and given that we are SPEP members, we are pretty much academic dirt in his view), but Brian Leiter can put some pretty interesting stuff on his blog.
Anyway, by following some links on his blog I came to an old post titled "What is Analytic Philosophy?," which contains Jerry Fodor's thoughts on that subject. In the post, Fodor says the following (this is long, but bear with me):

"there are a couple of theses that major US and UK philosophers have more or less agreed about (mostly implicitly, to be sure) over the last fifty years or so, and that have largely shaped the landscape of philosophical discussions...

"The first is semantic pragmatism: the idea that intensional content is to be explicated as some sort of `know how'... The typical avatar of this view is the thesis that concept possession is something like knowing how to evaluate inferences whose validity turns on the concept, and/or knowing how to sort things that the concept applies to...
The second is the methodological doctrine that philosophy does (or should) procede by the method of `semantic ascent'; that is by translating metaphysical questions (eg. how does perception work) into questions of conceptual analysis (`how do we use the word `see'; or `what is the concept of seeing'. The translation is supposed to underwrite the (putative) a priority of philosohical theses, and the (putative) fact that philosophy is a game that anyone can play (`you don't need to be a psychologist to understand how seeing works; we ALL have the concept SEE (and/or we ALL know how to use the world)."

Fodor then goes on to say that he disagrees with both, in rather dismissive fashion. Anyway, I think this is interesting, particularly when considering his first "methodological doctrine." Is it not the case, when we consider the general view described above, that the majority of 20th Century Continental philosophers are "semantic pragmatists"? Any existential phenomenologist (and most prominently Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) clearly is, I think. So have we actually been doing analytic philosophy all along?
The second "methodological doctrine", on the other hand, strikes me as being so asinine that I feel certain that Fodor is beating a straw man. It also strikes me as obviously not fitting with semantic pragmatism. If you really believe that "knowing that" is dependent upon some prethematic "know how", and that "know how" is really understood in a pragmatic sense as being related to some kind of doing or being in the world, conceptual analysis would have to be tied to some broadly empirical investigation, viz. the laying out (Auslegung!!) of that being in the world. Certainly only a hard-core Husserlian who believes in the most "platonic" interpretation of Husserl's "eidos" or "a priori history" would think that that "auslegung" could be wholly non-empirical (when "empirical" is taken in the most general sense).

Anyway, does this make sense? Am I possibly missinterpreting the quote from Fodor here? This is more to me than a passing question, I would say, insofar as I put a lot of importance on the idea of phenomenology being a kind of conceptual analysis based on a semantic pragmatism...

Since this fall's SPEP program just came out, I figured I would post all the current and past members of Villanova's PhD program who are participating. First, those who are giving papers (if there is no school listed after their name, they are still affiliated with Villanova):

Thursday, Oct. 20
1:00:
Gregory Hoskins, "Political Membership and the Politics of 'Dangerous Memories'"
Farhang Erfani, American University, “The Agony of Global Democracy: Chantal Mouffe and Paul Ricoeur on Cosmopolitan Citizenship”
Theodore D. George, Texas A&M University, “The Worklessness of Literature: Blanchot, Hegel and the Ambiguity of the Written Word”

Friday, Oct. 21
9:00:
Adriel Trott, “Toward a New Metaphysics: Difference in Irigaray’s Reading of Plato’s Cave”
Alexi Kukuljevic, “To Be Done With Finitude”
Eric Butler, “Prime Matter or Void: Heidegger and Badiou on the Grounds of Ontology"

Saturday, Oct. 22
9:00:
J.C. Berendzen, Loyola University, New Orleans, “Enabling Limitations: Rule Following, Creativity, and Morality in von Trier’s The Five Obstructions”
Joshua Delpech-Ramey, “Has Selma Seen It All?: Visibility and Ethics in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark”
12:00
Michael Shaw, Utah Valley State College, “Madness and Politeia: Aesthetic Disruption in Foucault and Plato”
Matthias Fritsch,Concordia University, “Liberalism and Agonistic Democracy"

Note that Greg and Farhang are on the same panel, Eric and Alexi are on the same panel, and Josh and I are on the same panel. All others at the same time are on competing panels.

Also, on the concurrent SPHS program giving a paper at 2:45 on Friday is Jamey Findling, Newman University,“ Gadamer’s Interpretation of the Republic.”

On the program in some other capacity are:
Ammon Allred
Sarah Donovan, Wagner College
Shannon Mussett, Utah Valley State College

Clearly, we will be well represented in Salt Lake City...

Hello! This blog is designed to provide graduates and ABDs of Villanova's Philosophy PhD program with a forum wherein we can keep in touch academically. All of the authors will fit the above description, and will be posting information about their academic and research activities, as well as general philosophical questions of interest.

Currently, this blog is in a trial phase, beginning with just a few authors. As things get rolling and we get closer to the academic year, invitations to join will be sent to all people who fit the above criteria for being an author. If you happen across this and fit that criteria but have not been invited, you have not been excluded. I swear! We have merely not gotten around to inviting you yet. If you are a Nova PhD or ABD and want to join, click on "novaphds" in the sidebar under "contact", and send us a note.

Comments, on the other hand, are open to anyone in principle. We do require comment accounts, however, and they have to be approved by group members. We envision comments coming mainly from friends, family, colleagues, and members of the Villanova Philosophy family who are not PhD grads or ABDs.

Of course, this thing is just starting, and it is wholly possible that any or all of the things noted will change...

Finally, I suppose I should note that this forum is operated voluntarily by graduates of Villanova's Philosophy PhD program, and has no official link to Villanova's Philosophy Department or Villanova University in general.

This blog will be up and running soon...