Dear Friends of the Department, 

"Professors grade the students, but who grades the professors?"  Students do, of course, through course evaluations.  And so do editors, national competitions for grants and awards, and potential students choosing where or what to study.  But what of overall evaluation of the Department in its teaching and research activities, its standing in the profession, and its long-term prospects?

You've perhaps seen the rankings of departments, colleges, and universities created and published by many sources.   These rankings each attempt to resolve questions of quality as well as quantity, and must be taken with a grain of salt.  But their differing ways of measuring can also be a help, giving a department a more varied and broad-based idea of where - approximately! - it stands. 

Perhaps the most important source of independent "quality control" of a department is the External Review process, which occurs on a cycle of about ten years.  This is a two-year-long effort in which the department spends a year gathering data and assessing itself internally, and then the Dean invites a committee of outside experts to visit the campus for three days and prepare its own report.  The external committee reports directly to the Dean, and is free to talk directly and privately to undergraduates and graduate students, junior faculty, and faculty in this Department and others.  The results of this process help guide those in the University administration who must make decisions about allocating resources and faculty positions among the departments. 

It is an extraordinary and revealing process - almost as if a corporation had to open its books and doors to its leading competitors.  When I have described this process to philosophers in a variety of other countries, they have shaken their heads with amazement, and often wished their system had anything like it.  For despite the enormous labor it represents, it is about as close to an independent peer review as one could expect to find in actual practice.

Our Department has just gone through this process, and I thought I might share some of its highlights with you.  The internal review, created by a committee led by David Velleman, was exceptionally thorough and self-analytic - it has since been used as a model by the College of LSA for other departments.  The external review committee, composed of John Cooper (Department of Philosophy, Princeton University), Catherine Wilson (Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia), Michael Smith (Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University), and George Wilson (University of California, Davis) found its conclusions largely in accord with the internal review.  Here is some of what they wrote:

"In its internal review the Department cites two recent studies (1993 and 1997) that place Philosophy at UM in the top 8, and another (2000) that places it in the top 5, departments in the US.  These rankings were based on assessments of faculty quality and/or effectiveness of graduate teaching... Internationally, only Oxford University and the University of London rank with the top five US schools.  The upshot is thus that, according to this latest study, Philosophy at UM ranks in the top 7 in the English-language world.  This view of Philosophy at UM as outstanding accords well with the opinions of the members of the committee."

This was especially rewarding, since we are at a time in Philosophy when aggressive, younger departments have displaced some familiar, famous departments at the top of the field.  Michigan is one of a small number of long-standing top departments that has held its own in this fierce competition.  The Committee also strongly endorsed our continuing efforts to continue to diversify the faculty and broaden our strengths.

What of students and junior faculty?  We were very gratified to learn that the junior faculty and graduate students expressed a high degree of contentment overall with the Department, and to read that:

"On the whole, it was our impression that the department has constructed an effective program for its undergraduates, and this impression was reinforced in our meeting with a group of about thirty current undergraduate concentrators." 

There are also, of course, challenges to be met.  Impending retirements by leading senior faculty, the need for more effective student advising, and the fact that faculty resources are stretched to the limit in covering teaching and administrative activities.  The Committee was surprised that Michigan provides more faculty participation in discussion sections in lecture courses than most peer departments, even those in some elite private universities. 

One of the chief sources of our success has been you, the students, alumni, and friends, who have made Michigan a rewarding place to teach and work, whose accomplishments in the larger world have reflected well on us, and who have often provided a vital margin of support through your generous contributions.  This very positive External Report is your "report card" as well as ours, and we hope you're pleased with the good grades!  .

Below you will read of some other highlights of the past year, the last year of Stephen Darwall's highly-successful chairmanship of Philosophy, as he takes a richly-deserved research leave.  A tough act to follow! 

Another tough act to follow was our colleague Allan Gibbard's Presidential Address to the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, which met in Chicago in April.  The text, which we are pleased to reprint below, was the talk of the convention, widely described as the sort of intellectual tour de force that only someone of Gibbard's exceptional gifts could accomplish. 

 Faculty

Continuing its remarkable recent history of success, Michigan will again be represented in the Presidency of its division of the American Philosophical Association, as Stephen Darwall followed almost immediately in the footsteps of his colleagues Larry Sklar and Allan Gibbard, and was elected incoming President by the Central Division members.  Three Presidencies over a span of a half-decade for one department may be unprecedented.  Professor Darwall also gave his inaugural lecture as John Dewey Collegiate Professor, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism in Ethics".  This brings to three the number of Collegiate Professors in our Department.

We are delighted to report that Peter Ludlow, an internationally-recognized philosopher of mind, language, and linguistics joins the Department this fall as Professor of Philosophy, adding significantly to our increasingly-impressive strength in those fields.  His work is wide-ranging and highly original, having written on self-knowledge, reference, logical form, and (even!) cyber-space ethics.  His most recent book is Semantics, Tense, and Time: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Natural Language (MIT Press 1999).  An exciting speaker and teacher, he adds remarkable erudition to his dynamic new ideas.

Also joining our department is an exciting multidisciplinary scholar who comes to Michigan as the new Director of the Institute for the Humanities, Daniel Herwitz (currently in the Department of Philosophy of the Natal in South Africa).  Professor Herwitz's intellectual biography is a virtual model for what the Institute for the Humanities seeks to achieve by way of engaging creative minds substantively across traditional disciplinary and national boundaries.  An expert in aesthetics, his appointment will be shared by Philosophy, Art History, and the School of Art; US-trained, he went to South Africa to be present for the challenging cultural, intellectual, and social transition in the wake of the ending of Apartheid.  His work ranges from 19th century aesthetics to 20th century music and modernism to 21st century questions about the role of memory and forgiveness in art, architecture, and politics.

Larry Sklar, a pre-eminent philosopher of physics, was honored in numerous ways this past year, not the least of which was his election to the highest honor of Michigan faculty, a Distinguished University Professorship.  Professor Sklar, in turn, continues to honor one of the moral philosophers whose writings and humanity helped make Michigan great, by retaining his title as William K. Frankena Professor.  Professor Sklar joins Professor Gibbard among the elite ranks of University Professors at Michigan

Important new books forthcoming from the faculty include Louis Loeb, Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise (Oxford University Press), Stephen Darwall, Welfare and Rational Care (Princeton University Press), and David Velleman, Self to Self (Cambridge University Press).

Faculty also gave dozens of invited lectures at departments and conferences around the country and the world.  Among the most notable, Allan Gibbard gave the Passmore Lecture at Australian National University, and Ken Walton gave the Romanell Phi Beta Kappa Lectures.

Michigan continues its tradition of interdisciplinary work.  Elizabeth Anderson's addressed a number of major law schools and public audiences on the subject of affirmative action, and her work will appear soon in the NYU Law Review.  Jim Joyce won a major Rackham grant for a collaborative project in statistics and scientific method with two well-known scientists, Professors Mario Mateo in Astronomy and Michael Woodruffe in Statistics.  P.J. Ivanhoe's translation of the Daodejing of Laozi as well as a revised edition of his well-known book Ethics in the Confucian Tradition both appeared this year.

Our new colleague Jason Stanley continues his blistering pace of writing, completing five major articles in his first year here - all the while maintaining a blistering pace in another domain: he is a dedicated middle-distance runner and racer.

Distinguished Visiting Faculty

The Weinberg Distinguished Visiting Professor for this past year was Martin Davies, who gave the Weinberg Lecture and taught a much-appreciated seminar in the philosophy of mind and language, attended by faculty and students alike.  Professor Davies came to us from the Australian National University thanks to the generosity of Marshall Weinberg, and we were delighted that Marshall once again was able to come to Ann Arbor for the public lecture that is associated with his distinguished visitorship.  Also coming to us from the ANU research faculty was the Nelson Philosopher-in-Residence, Philip Petit, a philosopher of amazing breadth whose seminars ranged from the surprising phenomenon of motion blindness to the age-old problem of weakness of the will.  This past year's Tanner Lecturer on Human Values was given to an audience of over 200 by the well-known art historian Michael Fried.  His discussion of formalism in art criticism was given a thorough examination in the Tanner Colloquium that followed the Lecture, and included Toril Moi (Professor of Literature, Duke), Thomas Crow (Director of the Getty Museum), and Richard Moran (Professor of Philosophy, Harvard).  It has been for me one of the privileges of being a member of this Department to participate in the planning and enjoyment of the wide-ranging, high-level intellectual feast afforded by the annual Tanner Lecture and Symposium.

Graduate Students

A number of Ph.D. dissertations were brought to fruition this year, and their variety reflects the evolving diversity of Philosophy itself: Kathleen, McShane "The Nature of Value: An Environmentalist Challenge to Ethical Theory"; Robert Mabrito, "Studies in Disagreement and Consistency"; Charles Goodman, "Ancient Dharmas, Modern Debates: Towards an Analytic Philosophy of Buddhism"; Greg Sax, "Toward a Theory of High-Grade Representation: a Taxonomy of Content Types"; and James Bell, "The Relevance of Skepticism".

Life after graduate school will include teaching philosophy for the following students, who faced a much-straitened job-market, with many one-year positions: Robert Mabrito (who will go to Tufts), James Woodbridge (William and Mary), Blain Neufeld (Stanford), Charles Goodman (Wisconsin, Milwaukee), and Kathleen McShane (tenure-track, NC State).  McShane also won the Department's John Dewey Prize to reward excellence in graduate-student teaching.  Patrick Lewtas won the Stevenson Award for an outstanding candidacy dossier.   

Every year the graduate students mount a Spring Colloquium, which continues to attract major philosophers and to generate considerable intellectual engagement in the Department - not least from those graduate students who have the daunting task of providing a public comment on the talks of the visitors.  As in the past, the visitors were impressed with the high level of the graduate commentaries.  The topic of the Colloquium was "Perspectives on Libertarianism", bringing together A. John Simmons (Virginia), David Schmidtz (Arizona), and Michael Otsuka (London).

Concentrators

Our undergraduate concentration continues to flourish and grow, despite (perhaps in part thanks to?) our reputation as a difficult, hard-grading discipline.  The annual reception for graduating concentrators was fun and heart-warming in equal proportion, as always, as proud parents and students celebrated their joint accomplishment.  The Frankena Prize for excellence in the concentration went to Seth Yalcin, a remarkable young philosopher working on recalcitrant problems in metaphysics.  A paper by Yalcin on pretense in ontology shared the Department's Haller Prize for best undergraduate paper with Ryo Kikuchi's paper on consciousness and personal identity.

Honors theses topics showed some of the philosophical concerns that are alive in our students' minds (and hearts! - given all that must be poured into the task of writing a thesis):  Rita Abro "A Biased Philosohy: Ignoring Women's Testimony in the Field of Philosophy"; Kevin Cunningham, "Nietzsche's Will to Power: Valuation for an Active Nihilism"; Bertrand Guillou, "Theses in Mathematical Explanation"; Desiree Hwang, "The Role and Importance of a Teacher in Moral Cultivation: A comparative Analysis of Xunzi and Mengzi"; Chet McCleskey, "Human Flourishing and the Ethics of Virtue"; P. Ganesh Muthappan, "Theory of Autonomy: Issues, Questions, and Proposed Answers"; Steve Sharpe, "The Worth of Basic Liberities: A Proposed Amendment to John Ralws' ‘Justice as Fairness' System"; Jenny Soble, "The Rationality of Atheism: An Examination of the Logical and Evidential Arguments from Evil"; David Weiner, "Mill's Higher Pleasures"; Nicolas Woomer, "Overcoming the Normative Predicament of Childhood: An Analusis of a Liberal and a Radical Account of the Obligations of Parents'; and Seth Yalcin, "Fictionalism".

To all 2002 Graduates, our congratulations and best wishes for the future!  And to all Alumni, Alumnae, and Friends, may you have a rich and rewarding year!

Sincerely,

Peter Railton

Chair

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