I was a little harsh on Notre Dame in the first post here, wasn’t I? To put this in some kind of perspective, here’s another junky M&E ranking that I pulled together from the last report. It’s an average of the mean and median scores in metaphysics and epistemology for departments for which all four of those scores were reported. (They weren’t reported, for e.g. MIT in epistemology or Berkeley in metaphysics.)

1. Rutgers
2. Oxford
3. NYU
4. ND
5. Princeton
6. Pitt
6. Brown
7. St. A
8. ANU
9. Arizona
9. U-Mass
10. Cornell
11. Texas
11. UNC
12. Cambridge
13. UCLA
14. Wisconsin
15. Michigan

That makes ND’s fourth place in Leiter’s new rank look a little more plausible than I was suggesting. (On the other hand, it does back up my thought that U-Mass was ranked much too low.) Obviously there have been a lot of changes in the 2 years since, and this isn’t a particularly meaningful measure even of how things were 2 years ago. But I’d say that in cases where my list and Leiter’s radically differ, you should take both with a boulder of salt.

I made one mistake in my note on Leiter’s M&E rankings yesterday. Texas is actually fifth, behind Notre Dame at outright fourth. My apologies for that.

As Aidan notes in the comments on that post, the rankings do come attached with the following disclaimer.

bq. This measure obviously favors large departments (which can cover more areas) and does not discriminate between the relative importance and prestige of sub-fields within the metaphysics and epistemology category.

There’s a suggestion that this makes up for some of my criticisms. I rather think it doesn’t – it still looks like a junk stat to me. Much more as to why under the fold.

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Brian Leiter is “previewing”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/another_pgr_pre.html various gourmet report nuggets. The news today concerns a rather odd measure.

bq. This year, we set up the survey to calculate the mean for each faculty across all the areas of “metaphysics and epistemology” evaluated: in other words, the mean score across philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, philosophy of action, and philosophy of religion.

The top department is Oxford, naturally enough. Tied for 2nd are NYU and Rutgers. Again that’s fair enough, though personally I’m surprised by the size of Oxford’s lead. Anyway, after that it gets odd. Tied for fourth are Notre Dame and Texas. Look, there are really good people working in M&E at ND and Texas. But it’s pretty odd to think these departments are better at M&E than Princeton or MIT. (Those depts are tied for 6th with the St Andrews/Stirling joint program.)

I think this is a quirk of the measure. Princeton and MIT might both rank close to 0 on philosophy of religion. (I don’t know how well MIT would have done on philosophy of action. I think Richard Holton’s work should be considered really important work on action theory, but I’m not sure whether it is so considered around the world.) Even if they are substantively better than ND and Texas on the other six categories mentioned, that may be enough to lower them in the average.

Anyway, I think the Leiter rankings as a whole are a pretty useful measure. And I think the speciality-by-speciality rankings are pretty useful. But I don’t think these averages tell us much at all. By the time we’ve got a ranking that includes both language and religion, we may as well be looking at entire department rankings.

In the corridor I just saw a really nicely designed poster advertising the inaugural David Lewis lecture. I hadn’t even known there was such a thing as a David Lewis lecture, so this was pleasing to discover. The inaugural lecturer is Frank Jackson, which is a good choice, and he is talking on “A Priori Biconditionals and Metaphysics”. The talk is at 4pm, on October 27, in Robertson Hall, Bowl Two at Princeton.

There doesn’t seem to be a prominent ad for the lecture as such on the “Princeton philosophy”:http://philosophy.princeton.edu/ webpage. But poking around their “events section”:http://philosophy.princeton.edu/events.html I discovered that on the same day, Steffi Lewis is doing a talk at 12.30 on “Lewis and the Christians”.

Happily, I’ll be in New Jersey that weekend, so if all goes to plan I’ll be able to go to both talks. I’m very pleased that Princeton has created a Lewis lecture, and I’m looking forward to seeing Frank deliver it.

PS: If you Google “David Lewis Lecture”, you find at least two lecture series with that title: one in classics at Oxford, and one in architecture at Carnegie Mellon. Now a philosophy lecture series to join that group.

A few things to promote while we deal with the joy from seeing another Yankees season end unsuccessfully.

* Alex Doonesbury is now attending MIT, and as “Kai von Fintel points out”:http://www.semantics-online.org/2006/10/stata-in-the-comics that means the Stata Center is now immortalised in a comic strip.

* “Brian Leiter reports”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/sixmonth_morato.html that Nous and PPR are not accepting new submissions for six months. I’m rather disappointed in this news for several reasons, but I guess we’ll just have to live with it.

* “Flinders University researchers report”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/heres-why-you-hate-mondays/2006/10/06/1159641511693.html that if you don’t sleep in on weekends, you feel better on Mondays and Tuesdays.

* If you are in the United States, the “deadlines to register to vote”:http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/10/4/172322/483 are coming up soon. Several of us around here at TAR have no voting rights at all, but it would be a shame if TAR readers were non-voters too.

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Lots of stuff happening around the internets.

Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell has created an “academic blogs wiki”:http://www.academicblogs.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page. If you think your blog should be listed, head on over there and add it. There are empty wiki pages for describing each of the blogs, so if you’d like to, say, add a description for “TAR”:http://www.academicblogs.org/wiki/index.php?title=Thoughts_Arguments_and_Rants&action=edit, you could do that too.

Richard Heck has created “a Greasemonkey script”:http://frege.brown.edu/heck/linux/programs/grease.php for altering the appearance of NDPR. If you love the NDPR content, but would like some control over how it appears, now you can have that control.

Carrie is too modest to mention it here, but some of her work has been written up in “The Australian”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20481788-12332,00.html. Apparently there have even been some radio appearances following this up. Why the media is more interested in flirting than in the details of epistemological analyses is a bit of a mystery to me.

The Guardian has a “very good obituary”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1884313,00.html for Jonathan Cohen, who died last week. (Via “Brian Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/in_memoriam_l_j.html.)

Also on my list of things to read is Matthew Jones’ “The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue”:http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780226409559&itm=2. It is about, broadly speaking, the intersection of philosophical, scientific and mathematical interests in the work of Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz. That makes it sound like it is about the impact of the new sciences on the metaphysical and epistemological views of those philosophers. And while there is some of that, the larger theme is the influence of moral considerations on their work. So this is a work that should be very interesting to philosophers.

One or two disclaimers. I of course haven’t read the book, what with my to be read pile now visible from the moon and all. But I have talked to Matt a fair bit about it, so I’m very much looking forward to reading it. There is a long discussion of Descartes’ geometry which I’m particularly interested in, and which promises to have a lot of philosophical payoffs. Matt is professionally a historian (he’s in the history department at Columbia), but I hope this work gets a lot of philosophical attention.