The most common type is various instances of “utilitarianism endorses doing this thing that clearly decreases utility, therefore utilitarianism is wrong.” Hard to remember specifics because this was 6 to 10 years ago. I just remember being struck by how these supposed experts had such basic misunderstandings.
Taking what you said at face value, what’s going on here, institutionally? Philosophy is a nontrivially competitive field, and Stanford professorships aren’t easy to get.
They don’t compete for jobs in “Philosophy,” they compete for jobs in a specific department which specializes in, say, deconstructionist readings of Nietzsche’s later work. (OK, I’m exaggerating slightly. But the point stands—they don’t need to know anything about Philosophy as a whole to do their research and get papers published, or even to teach most of their classes.)
This is odd. I audited/freeloaded at a perfectly mediocre university math department and they seemed careful to assign the prof who’s dissertation was in functional analysis to teach real analysis, and the prof who’s dissertation was in algebraic geometry to teach group theory. I guess I only observed in the 3rd/4th year courses case. For 1st/2nd year courses, intuitively you’d want the analysts teaching calculus and the logicians teaching discrete, perhaps something like this, but I don’t expect a disaster if they crossed the streams, in the way that I sort of think learning the basic deontology vs. utilitarianism distinction from a nietzsche expert, a deleuze or derrida expert, etc. is a disaster.
(Thankful I learned both calculus and discrete from a professor who dropped out of a high-energy particle physics PhD to do a topoi theory PhD in the math department—maybe the optimal teachers fit a description like that, interdisciplinarity and so on)
Could you give some examples?
The most common type is various instances of “utilitarianism endorses doing this thing that clearly decreases utility, therefore utilitarianism is wrong.” Hard to remember specifics because this was 6 to 10 years ago. I just remember being struck by how these supposed experts had such basic misunderstandings.
Taking what you said at face value, what’s going on here, institutionally? Philosophy is a nontrivially competitive field, and Stanford professorships aren’t easy to get.
They don’t compete for jobs in “Philosophy,” they compete for jobs in a specific department which specializes in, say, deconstructionist readings of Nietzsche’s later work. (OK, I’m exaggerating slightly. But the point stands—they don’t need to know anything about Philosophy as a whole to do their research and get papers published, or even to teach most of their classes.)
This is odd. I audited/freeloaded at a perfectly mediocre university math department and they seemed careful to assign the prof who’s dissertation was in functional analysis to teach real analysis, and the prof who’s dissertation was in algebraic geometry to teach group theory. I guess I only observed in the 3rd/4th year courses case. For 1st/2nd year courses, intuitively you’d want the analysts teaching calculus and the logicians teaching discrete, perhaps something like this, but I don’t expect a disaster if they crossed the streams, in the way that I sort of think learning the basic deontology vs. utilitarianism distinction from a nietzsche expert, a deleuze or derrida expert, etc. is a disaster.
(Thankful I learned both calculus and discrete from a professor who dropped out of a high-energy particle physics PhD to do a topoi theory PhD in the math department—maybe the optimal teachers fit a description like that, interdisciplinarity and so on)