I've heard he's very nice in person.

Typical. I'm sure Mussolini's mom thought he was aces too.

Should probably point out that Leiter is the most prominent philosophy blogger, since he gossips and publishes the rankings, so gossip about Leiter is also significant to the field.

I've been curious about this field of "experimental philosophy" because it sounds a lot like social or cognitive psychology to me, though more careful in its premises.

I don't know too much about experimental philosophy, but I think it was undertaken at least partially in order to avoid philosophers' relying on their own hunches about what everyone else's hunches are. So for example, before experimental philosophy, philosophers would be happy to say things like, "here's why people find universal causal determinism to be a threat to free will", and then they'd say something. But experimental philosophers started to ask people whether they thought determinism was a threat to free will. They'd take surveys of their own students, they'd send their graduate students out with paper, pen, and clipboard asking passersby what they thought, etc. They'd also spend time in conversation with psychologists about experimental design and they would come up with situations meant to elicit people's opinions, one way or the other, about some topic like free will. They would also survey the man on the street for his opinions about the nature of knowledge, and they'd look at what psychology has to tell us about the naturalness of moral categories. These three areas--especially free will and morality--seem (to me) to be the main foci of experimental philosophy.

Oh, I should say, despite his bluster, Leiter's a very good scholar of Nietzsche and jurisprudence.

He's a prick! Perhaps this accounts for his obsession with hierarchy. How can he be a nice guy and so vindictive? Are you just saying he's well mannered and charming at cocktail parties?

Are you just saying he's well mannered and charming at cocktail parties?

Well, there's that, but he's also supposed to be extremely friendly to graduate students in person and he really supports his own graduate students (though I suppose there may be selfish reasons at work here). Also, I hear that he's quite shy in person, and loathe to start arguments.

I hear that he's quite shy in person, and loathe to start arguments

Sounds more like a punk-ass chickenshit to me.

It's possible I got testy in the last ten minutes.

Dude, you don't spend enough time around academics. That's an average day's slapfight-before-lunch.

Hmmm, now I'm in the mood for a juicy academic farce.

Actually, the psychology-philosophy split had plenty of material for academic farce. The Wikipedia version below lacks the snark of some I’ve read, but if you read between the lines you can see that it was a pretty good slapfest.

In 1892, G. Stanley Hall invited 30-some psychologists and philosophers to a meeting at Clark with the purpose of founding a new American Psychological Association (APA). The first annual meeting of the APA was held later that year, hosted by George S. Fullerton at the University of Pennsylvania. Almost immediately tension arose between the experimentally- and philosophically-inclined members of the APA. Edward Bradford Titchener and Lightner Witmer launched an attempt to either establish a separate "Section" for philosophical presentations, or to eject the philosophers altogether. After nearly a decade of debate a Western Philosophical Association was founded and held its first meeting in 1901 at the University of Nebraska. The following year (1902), an American Philosophical Association held its first meeting at Columbia University. These ultimately became the Central and Eastern Divisions of the modern American Philosophical Association.

When Jen and I were driving around SF the other day, we talked about my research into poetry in the fifties and how it was a huge cultural war between those who followed William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, and those who followed T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.

And then we marveled at a time when poetry mattered enough to people to draw those kind of battle lines.

What does a huge cultural war look like? What's the battlefield? What are the weapons? The wounded and the casualties?

What does a huge cultural war look like?

Imagine an army line of kittens facing off against another army line of kittens - their mortal enemies. Now imagine them all puffing up their fur in hissing agitation.

What's the battlefield?

Chapbooks, broadsides, academic journals, denunciations from newspapers, lectures.

What are the weapons?

Turns of phrase, character assassination, carefully marshalled arguments, extravagent gestures, pure snark, backstabbing, weak-willed appeasement.

The wounded and the casualties?

Careers may be lost, tenure may be denied, entire departments decimated (just one in ten). Your books may be remaindered and the NY Times stops calling for your opinion.