Posted on Facebook and reposted here with his consent and encouragement (if I understand correctly)
Dear Berit,
Thanks for this invitation. While the interest in my opinion about my colleagues is flattering, I don't feel able to participate, for three reasons.
First, as I think you know, I have signed on to the 'September Statement', which is a commitment to declining to provide volunteer work for the PGR while under Brian Leiter's control. While I'm aware that he's appointed you as a co-editor and announced an intention to step down after this year's PGR, it is unclear to me how much control he retains in his position as co-editor. And since the reason his control was relevant in the first place was his social power as a result of the general perception of his control, and the current unclarity will allow that perception to continue, I don't consider it consistent with the September Statement to participate. (Other signatories may well make contrary decisions for themselves about this point.)
Second, I remain deeply ambivalent about the PGR itself. While it unquestionably does good for many prospective philosophy students, it also, in my opinion, unquestionably does harm to the structure of the discipline of philosophy on the whole. I just haven't been able to make up my mind about whether I would support a PGR, even if totally divorced from Brian Leiter. I really don't know whether it would count as a service or as a harm to the profession; under such moral uncertainty, I'm inclined to decline to participate.
Third, I very much doubt that I would be able to provide anything like reliable judgments of philosophical quality based on the names of individuals in faculties, without spending an enormous amount of time reading people's work. Although I've been in professional philosophy for nearly ten years, and have gained at least some familiarity with a large number of philosophers, I think I know next to nothing about a large majority of the philosophers whose departments you'd be asking me to rate. At a minimum, I might be able to find and skim the CV of every member of a department in half an hour or so, but to employ any of my own philosophical skill to give anything like an expert opinion, I'd have to read and engage with people's work. Since we're talking about roughly a hundred departments, this represents a daunting task to say the least. (Even just skimming CVs, at 30 minutes per department, would take some 50 hours.) Or I could skip most departments, limiting my attention to those containing my friends and those colleagues I've interacted with enough to have an opinion about already; but I'd worry about selection bias, and even those departments are made up mostly of people I don't know. I'm just not comfortable contributing a meaningful opinion about the quality of someone's work without spending orders of magnitude more time than I could offer if I wanted to.
I'd be happy to discuss any of these considerations with you further if you're interested.
Best wishes,
Jonathan
Recent Comments