Leiter: Philosophy Metablog retired...

A screenshot from google cache:  "Okay. So, working in a shit department, I have to do my own grading, which is pressing. So here's this week's bad poem:..."

Because I would not stop for SPEP –
It kindly stopped for me –
But ratings have no room for schools –
That think so Frenchily.

One school wants out – though there is doubt
At choosing self-deletion.
That’s self-abuse! – Don’t be obtuse,
That’s withdrawing before completion.

He held his ground – He blogged away
He charlatans disparaged.
Your program’s shit, so please exit
The übermensch’s carriage.

The board’s upset, all broken up
But perhaps he’ll make amends
The co-pilot will dispel all doubts
And serve a healing cleanse.

Read in the context of the full range of events in the world, what is this idiot defending other than the right of a spoiled child to be left alone to his games?

A letter from Leiter, to John McCumber, linked by Jon Cogburn in the original post. Mention of Cogburn here, here and here, (and another I forgot, now reposted just above). McCumber makes an appearance here.

A argument between logical sophists who need to justify their formal rhetoric as science and theologians who need to justify description as prescription and poetry as theology.

The Leiter Events page has been taken down after Leiter threatened a lawsuit. My comment from a month ago appeared finally, tossed in along with everything and now the page is dark. But since I was subscribed to the page, I got the emails.

Leiter responds to commenter naribtrelie:

You write: “It seems worth noting explicitly that, of the seven people targeted by Leiter in recent months (we are including Tom Stern), six of them were women, two of them were junior faculty (one of them very junior), one was a post-doc, and one was a graduate student.” In fact, during the exact same time period, far more men than women have come in for criticism or derision, including Eric Schliesser, Santiago Zabala, Tom Stern, Matt Drabek, Leon Wieseltier, Dirk Johnson, Ben Cohen, Ed Kazarian, Vince Vitale, William Vallicella, and Mark Oppenheimer, among others (I leave out the ‘big names’ like Zizek and Niall Ferguson). This is easily verifiable by a review of my blogs during this time period. 

He writes again:

I have posted corrections several times now over the past three weeks, and those corrections have not been approved and the defamatory factual misstatements not corrected. As a result, I have turned this matter over to my attorney.

The power claimed of philosophy is the power of prescription. As description it’s just another form of literature, and no philosopher will accept what by their own definition would be a drop in status. Philosophers want all the clarity of engineering and the license of poetry. What they end up with is the authoritarianism of the Roman Catholic Church and the metaphysics of hippies.

"Leiter’s authoritarianism is founded in insecurity, and their defense of civility is founded in fluff."