the lawsuit?
June 6, 2009
Just when it looks like the ‘leiter wars’ are starting to wind down, he goes and threatens Graham with a lawsuit.
I’m sure the courts in egypt will tremble when they see that the legendary and all powerful Brian Leiter is faxing over a lawsuit from his chicago office. As funny as this all is, it’s terribly sad that someone like this can climb the academic ranks and end up with a chair at one of the more prestigious universities in the United States. I guess enough well placed kisses on enough of the right asses can do wonders in academia.
I must say, however, that if Leiter’s lawsuit forces Graham out of house and home, he’ll have a place to stay in Scotland, as I guess it’d be ‘my fault’.
If anyone has an endless supply of money, we should take turns sending books/journals of a recent continental vein to Leiter’s office. Or maybe someone in chicago can leave a flaming bag of crap outside his door?
June 6, 2009 at 10:11 am
I’m not exactly in Chicago, but I would be more than happy to fly over there just to drop the flaming bag of crap on his door.
I might also throw in–as Steve Martin, and my father after, did–”‘I break with thee, I break with thee, I break with thee,’ and then throw dog poop on his shoes.”
This whole exchange has me feeling more antipathy for Anal-ytic philosophers than usual.
June 6, 2009 at 12:36 pm
“Or maybe someone in chicago can leave a flaming bag of crap outside his door?”
Careful, that’s incitement!
June 6, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Even in the US, the lawsuit would fail. Of course, this is but another symptom of his arrogance and bullying. (Besides, I though the “I’m going to sue because you weren’t nice to me online” threat went out of vogue sometime around 1996.) What he was very much a threat – drawing upon his position in a law school to make a legal threat to someone who does not practice law, has not studied law, and so on. This is the worst sort of abuse of authority – especially by an academic (to threaten to legally shut up an opponent). Of course, given that roughly 75% of Leiter’s own posts where he defames others at based upon un-named sources and appeals to authority (“a senior moral philosopher close to me in private correspondence reports”; “no one who knows anything would disagree with me”), it is little surprise that he would seek to use his own institutional power to silence others. All the same, what Graham said was, as they say, ‘fair comment on a matter of public interest,’ and, of course, he (like Paris Hilton) is ‘incapable of further defamation’ in the non-’analytic’ philosophy community.
June 8, 2009 at 3:59 am
Excellent idea to start posting email correspondence guys. This must be the racetrack or the beerhall or something…
…Now familiarize me, just what is the reason for posting email correspondence???
June 8, 2009 at 5:35 am
I read the linked post with Leiter’s email several times and I fail to see any threat of legal action – where exactly is Leiter threatening legal action? In his suggestion Harman consults Egyptian laws?
I have to say that posting private emails on blogs is pretty low, regardless of their content. When did it become a norm? Are you guys for real?
June 8, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Private emails? What are you talking about? It isn’t like Leiter let any private information out in the course of that email. I’m really struggling to figure out what your problem is here.
Are you just being argumentative for the sake of it? That wouldn’t be new, but it would be helpful for everyone else if you differentiated those times we should take you seriously (and they do happen) from those times you’re just being crotchety for its own sake.
June 8, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Anthony, I suppose I might be overreacting here, but my point is that, regardless of Leiter’s infamous behavior, there has to be some assumption that if I emailed you with objections about your post (again, regardless of my tone or my message, let’s imagine the worst case and I’m being a jerk), as opposed to posting a public comment, I can have some presumption of privacy, otherwise I would just post my comment openly, right?
Now I understand that if I emailed you unsolicitedly (is it a word?), you are not obligated to respond and so on, but to post an email and then to mock it – “look, what an idiot! he’s threatening me with a lawsuit” – and justify it all by saying that since Leiter does it all the time so can we is a bit disingenuous, don’t you think?
Again, being a defender of Leiter here gives me serious creeps, but I am not being argumentative for the sake of it, just asking where the line is. Privacy is not just privacy of information, but an assumption that private communication be kept private unless both parties agree to make it public, otherwise it’s just plain indecent.
June 8, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Mikhail,
In a sense, I get where you’re coming from, but in another sense, it’s not like these emails contain anything ‘private’ or ’sensitive’ information, and it’s also not like it’s somehow publically bashing someone who has otherwise carried himself in a professional and polite manner.
I’m with Anthony on this one, you often have really interesting (philosophical) things to say, but at this point, it seems like you’re reverting to a sort of argumentative contrarianism which isn’t really that productive. I think it’s pretty clear when reading through the history of this recent correspondence with Leiter, that the guy had every chance to be a civil and decent human being, but has instead insisted on being a pretentious ass time after time. It is worth noting as well that after he initially emailed me, I wrote him back and tried to engage him in actual conversation on these issues, and instead he refused to respond. I think because the tone of the emails doesn’t seem to differ too much from the tone of his blog, I didn’t think twice about it.
Also, and maybe this is going too far, I don’t feel the need to show too much ‘respect’ to someone who takes advantage of making people who died of terrible cancer look bad days after their passing. I just don’t think the guy has done anything to deserve anyone’s respect.
June 8, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Kvnod,
Also, I think if you follow the whole of the discussion, its not just a matter of posting email correspondence to be assholes.
June 8, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Michael, maybe you’re right and I’m just not getting the drift here, my simple point here is that to justify mocking/abusing someone by saying that this someone deserves it because he is doing the same to others is a position of simple payback/revenge and I can be legitimately puzzled by this because it does not really separate you from the behavior you are criticizing, does it?
In other words, if you are aiming to expose Leiter’s attitude and show others how mean/dismissing he is, it is not likely to carry much weight if you do so using the similar tactics to the ones you condemn. That’s basically all I am saying, because, being an occasional jerk myself, I find it humorous sometimes when my behavior is “exposed” by someone who is basically doing the same thing that is being criticized in the “exposing” – does it make sense?
June 8, 2009 at 7:54 pm
‘I just don’t think the guy has done anything to deserve anyone’s respect.’
Which is fair enough, I suppose – but you can’t really be too upset with people for instinctively taking the guy’s side, after four consecutive posts bashing him (and nary a comment sticking up for him). Isn’t intentional contrarianism a lot of what blog comment sections are for?
June 8, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Mikhail,
You are, once again, correct to an extent, but I still feel like Leiter qualifies as an ‘exception’ as he’s an outright bully who treats people he percieves as ‘below him’ (ie, grad students) like crap. I think it’d be different if for example, you and I had had some sort of genuine disagreement over email and I were to post the conversation. Maybe I’m wrong and these are equivocal scenarios, but I just can’t get around the fact that someone like Leiter is not only contributing to the complete marketization of academic philosophy but also encouraging a false ideology of what ‘counts’ as good philosophy. All that said, your points make perfect sense, and, just to be clear, this whole ‘letier incident’ is over as far as I’m concerned, and I doubt I would ever go about things in this way again. But, what’s done is done, and I don’t really regret handling it in the way I did.
Jeff,
You are right, intentional contrarianism is one of the hallmarks of blog comments, but one really has to be commited to contrarianism to make any serious claim supporting Leiter. The method of attack may have very well been a bit ‘too much’, but standing up for the guy himself would be fairly absurd at this point.
June 8, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Fair enough, Michael, but just to be clear, I wasn’t standing up for Leiter, I was protesting against the logic of publishing private email exchanges as a way to humiliate someone as I thought that tit-for-tat logic is somewhat flawed here. I also don’t want my comments to come across as arrogant tsk-tsking and moralizing (if they did come across that way, I apologize), I was just expressing an opinion and not trying to be disagreeable. I suppose this story sort of disturbed me a bit and made me think about blog etiquette and such:
http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/nros-ed-whelan-does-unthinkable-exposes
June 8, 2009 at 11:52 pm
M.Burns: “Kvnod,
Also, I think if you follow the whole of the discussion, its not just a matter of posting email correspondence to be assholes.”
Kvond: But “the” matter, is as far as I raised is, is that by posting the emailed correspondence of another, even a confirmed jerk, you are a bit of an “asshole”, or to put it in terms that I would use, you are a person who has no problem violating commonly assumed limits of civil behavior that go beyond the case in question. (If a scan of a letter that was sent was posted, I would have the same response.) That this is done in some sort of loose comradery with Graham Harman who not only posts email content, but also ventures further across the social line with all sorts of personal information only complicates the issue. But as an act itself, its just out of hand, “not cool” or however you want to characterize it. I understand that Leiter has a kind of cultural capital (power), and there are only a few ways of striking back at him when he attempts to bully you into silence, but there seems to be a growing and bizarre trend that people think posting email content is okay if its not either “personal” (its ALREADY personal, because email carries with it an assume privacy, and people say things in email they would not say in public), or it serves a point one is trying to make. I wouldn’t even post positive email content, let alone negative.
M. Burns: ” I still feel like Leiter qualifies as an ‘exception’ as he’s an outright bully who treats people he percieves as ‘below him’ (ie, grad students) like crap. I think it’d be different if for example, you [Mikhail] and I had had some sort of genuine disagreement over email and I were to post the conversation.”
Kvond: When you pick your exceptions by the occasion instead of presumed code of behavior, then there is very little left of decency. Take someone like Graham Harman who is a little angel of a person (I am not being sarcastic) as long as he feels that others are being civil, but as soon as disagreement in the wrong direction ensues (and I have not experienced this as directed towards myself), its some odd sort of electronic Guerrilla, no-holds-barred escalation of conflict that he feels entitled to. Mikhail knows first hand what it is like to one day be an innocent interlocutor, and the next day to be a vile miscreant. How about, lets not publish the content of emails, period (without raising it to some Categorical Imperative). Its not cool to do so and its a good way of doing blogged buisiness.
June 9, 2009 at 12:02 am
Kvond,
Just to re-align the gist here, but email is hardly “private.” If it were private, it wouldn’t be the target of hacks and such. Technically speaking, it is publicly broadcasted across the internet, but everything in between filters it out. Nothing that crosses the wasteland of the internet is either private or secure, which is why companies and such don’t like sending sensitive information via email, FTP, or the web (even secured web!). It’s much like a mobile/cell phone: everything is done by a walkie talkie that filters everything else out. It’s quite easy to get another walkie talkie that doesn’t filter things out and hear “private” conversations. With all of that said, I do agree that private communications should remain private (in general…there are exceptions to every rule).
June 9, 2009 at 3:37 am
Kvond,
Maybe it’s because I’m originally from the midwest or something, but I’ve always been a no bullshit type of guy, and I feel like too often jerks like Leiter can get away with doing whatever they want and treating others like crap because of this sort of internet code of ethics or what not. I completely get what you’re saying, and in 99% of cases would likely agree; but, I still don’t think what I did was inherently wrong in this situation.
I doubt there is any point with going back and forth on this any further, you make valid points, but I did what I did, and it’s not going to be un-done at this point. The guy is a jerk who treats people like absolute crap and hides behind the safety of the internet. His sort of cowardice is ridiculous, and maybe posting his emails to expose this to a wider audience wasn’t the best path to take, but it was something.
The good thing is, I doubt something like this will happen again. Sorry for any offense, but now we can all get back to arguing about philosophy!
best,
michael
June 9, 2009 at 5:19 am
M. Burns: “Maybe it’s because I’m originally from the midwest or something, but I’ve always been a no bullshit type of guy…”
Kvond: Is this a kind of veiled threat to sue me over my defamation of you as a bullshit kinda guy???
(insert humorous emoticon)
In any case, I’m a no-bullshit kinda guy as well and where I come from has very little to do with it, which I why I called you (and others) out on this. I’m glad you see the point, and my point wasn’t even so much to this very instance, but a general trend.
As to arguing about philosophy, it seems pretty silly to me to assert or deny the “importance” of particular on-line journals. Whether these journals are important is largely something to be determined long into the future, I suspect. As is likely the case of those commonly taken to be important in the main. I regularly hear on blogs how significant Speculative Realism is…really? People talking about how significant one’s own crowd is (whether it be the Leiter crowd, or another one) is well…non-Mid-Western.
June 9, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Kvond:
Once again, good points, and I definitley appreciate your no-bullshit attitude on all this as well. The one thing I will say though, is that I hope none of this came off too heavily as a “us v. them” sort of thing. I was in no way trying to suggest that certain continental open access journals are the only ones doing ‘real philosophy’ or are even better than open access journals more focused on anglo philosophy. My only point was that there are some journals, that are open access, that deal with issues in contemporary european philosophy, that are pretty credible. I’m actually quite interested in many aspects of anglo philosophy, and am by no means myself a ’speculative realist’, so I’m right there with you on that. If I were a part of a definite crowd, it’d likely be an insignificant one anyways.
Thanks again for the honesty on all this, it’s appreciated.
June 9, 2009 at 6:35 pm
1. kvond, you are infamous in some circles for having posted Levi Bryant’s e-mails to you last year during a similar quarrel, so you’re in no position to play the gentlemanly ethics card.
2. mikhail, the threat of a defamation lawsuit in Egypt in Leiter’s second message is so obvious to everyone else. At this point you’re simply being a contrarian toward everything I say. Your remarks are not of interest.
3. I’m with Burns on the “no bullshit Midwest” point. Leiter tries to bully people in e-mails, and he deserves to have them exposed. NO PRIVATE INFORMATION WAS REVEALED. Others have made this point on my behalf.
June 9, 2009 at 7:17 pm
At this point you’re simply being a contrarian toward everything I say.
Graham, I’d like to note for the record that I have not said a thing about you for months yet you are posting mocking comments about me (on two occasions that I can clearly recall prominently mocking what I say or dismissing my view) without any provocation on my part, period. I don’t think you have any moral higher ground to judge anyone’s behavior, especially since you mostly resort to childish “you do it to others, so I can do it to you” logic of tit-for-tat.
Person’s choice of private communication (emails, letters, phone calls etc), regardless of what he writes about, is private information that is being disclosed – why is it so difficult to understand this point? Even when you call your bank they tell you that your conversation will be recorded and might be used later and if you’re not okay with that, you don’t have to agree to it. By choosing to communicate with you in private, one must have some guarantee that you won’t go about posting and mocking one’s emails on your popular blog for everyone to read, whatever is it in, that’s why it’s called private.
Unless you heavily edited the email from Leiter about “legal threat” I don’t see how “check your local laws about defamation” and “I will sue your ass for defamation” are the same thing, unless you are paranoid and tend to read things into messages of others.
June 9, 2009 at 7:20 pm
Dr. M: I would be glad to have these posts made public, that is to have posts linked to them. I, unlike you, have maintain a full public record of my blog, which is accessible to all persons, all the time (even you, at this moment). I did not in a fit of, I don’t know what, delete my entire someonewhat questionable history of posts, many of which are now only embarassingly referenced through the eyewitnessed reports of those that remember them. (Of course, that you continue to abuse etiquette of the blog world makes assessing the quality of civility quite easy to maintain).
I DO NOT BELIEVE I have ever gotten an email from Levi Bryant ever. It is indeed true that I have emailed Levi trying to open up discussion where there is disagreement, but if I recall he failed to respond (at least with any substance). It is quite possible that I have forgotten the posts your “circle” recalls. Please though, let’s all put our cards on the table. I would be quite interested in seeing my failings made public.
What I DID do, and several times I did this, is that when Levi Bryant took my relatively neutral crticisms of his position as absurd personal accusations (apparently an paranoia you and he share), and he deleted my comments from his blog section, I was left with no recourse but to publish my comments (public comments, not excised), over at MY blog, to make the record straight.
This is for instance a perfect example of what I recall:
http://kvond.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/larval-subjects-redux/
This kind of reposting (and on first reading this is what I assumed M. Burns had done), is precisely the kind of ethical disagreement in print that should be done, for one person should not be the one the frame the debate.
There is of course the remote possibility that I remember incorrectly, and Levi did email me some substantial response that I then made public. Frankly I would be horrified and embarassed if I had made it public. Please do point it out so that I can make myself a better person.
And this is not a “gentleman’s card”. It is simply following the general way in which blogging should be done.
I have no idea why being a Midwesterner gives one license to be rude. People in the Midwest are some of the least rude persons I have met. They are, as a whole, honest and straight-shooting, if we want to appeal to a the vast stereotype; they that also are the keepers of, followers of the norms that hold us all together.
If you could be a bit more “Midwestern,” then perhaps the bloggosphere could be a bit friendlier, more intellectually inviting place.
June 9, 2009 at 7:24 pm
M. Burns,
I went over the intial points that Leiter made, as posted by you, and it seems that despite the small bit of information (and a disagreement about whether the continental journals were important ones – him saying no, you missed the point, you saying yes, his point is incorrect), his FUNDAMENTAL point is an important and maintained one. Yes the guy is, or seems to be, a jerk of the usual academic variety, but my Lord…JSTOR.
You seemed to want to point out that he was out of touch with an important development, and he seemed to feel that this was something of a drop in the institutional bucket.
June 9, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Kvond,
I really would rather not keep this argument going. I’ve said that I basically understand your critique of this, and have seen no reason to argue against you or go out of my way to ‘defend myself’, so I’m not really sure what you’d like me to say at this point. If you’re just waiting for me to say, ‘oh, yeah, you’re actually right, I was wrong, sorry about that’, it’s not going to happen. And if you’re merely trying to point out I handled this in a not-so-great way, I’ve already said that it may as well be true, but I already did it, so, there you go i guess?
Also, I’m still not sure how I missed the point of what Leiter was saying, and I also don’t see what fundamental point he made, and how it’s correct? I wasn’t trying to point out that he was out of touch, I was literally just (initially) saying ‘these are some open access journals that are interesting to those working in recent european philosophy’. He then told me these journals/figures are in fact not important to those working in recent european philosophy, this is clearly false. I tried to explain to him why this was false, and then he instead tried to present himself as ultra-credible on this area of research, and discredited me and my institution.
I really don’t think we’re going to see eye to eye on this, so I really don’t see the point of continuing this debate. You think I ‘missed the point’, I don’t think there was a point worth missing. I don’t see either of us changing our perception on this point.
June 9, 2009 at 9:55 pm
There is of course the remote possibility that I remember incorrectly, and Levi did email me some substantial response that I then made public.
Hold on there. Did you or did you now, kind Sir, post Levi’s private emails online and if you did not, then how do you explain that there are whole circles claiming that you did? Are you calling Harman a liar?
This is getting surreal.
June 9, 2009 at 11:08 pm
I suggest you follow the AUFS comment policy and close comments down. You’ll be called a Stalinist, but the comparison between sending people to labour camps and shutting down an unproductive and distracting comment thread is obscene.
June 10, 2009 at 1:43 am
M. Burns: “Kvond,
I really would rather not keep this argument going.”
Kvond: Hmmm. I didn’t think I was keeping the argument going, but following your invitation to discuss philosophy itself. I was attempting to address the origin of the argument before emails got posted. You, if I followed your right, were now saying that your (original) point was not that there is a philosophical “us” that is against a philosophical “them”, and that the “us” were doing some very important things that needed to be acknowledged (perhaps I missed your thought).
It was for this reason that I tried to return to Leiter’s initial thought, that important philosophical journals really should be open sourced. Does anyone have a quarrel with that? Your answer to Leiter that indeed important philosophical journals were open sourced, and his counter point that these were not really the kinds of journals he was talking about (they were not significant enough), really seems to be describing two people who should be agreement on just about everything else.
I mean, if the issue is NOT how important Toscano (to pick a perhaps representative name) is to Continental philosophy’s future, isn’t everyone here saying the same thing?
That is: If someone makes a complaint that there is an Institutional closure, a cutting off of access for a great many people, countering indeed that there are examples of non-closure going on, kinda deflects Leiter’s point. The BIG journals (whatever those are), need to change, and the philosophers who publish in them should really be talking about this.
APS: “I suggest you follow the AUFS comment policy and close comments down.”
Kvond; As one small voice, there is a much better way to end a line of thinking in a comments section, one that I recommended to Levi Bryant more than once. Simply ignore a post there if its point tires you. You don’t have to shut anything down, you don’t have to delete huge sections or blogs, just let it die of attrition.
As to shutting down comments altogether, perhaps this rumination of Mikhail’s over at Perverse Egalitarianism, on the subject and etymology of “Idiocy” would have some merit here.
http://pervegalit.wordpress.com/2009/06/06/random-question-%e1%bc%b4%ce%b4%ce%b9%ce%bf%cf%82/
One of the very best things about blog formats is that you get to have unexpected conversations within a public space, and others can meet and have unexpected conversations, in that space. Yes, things can get a little messy, but it is the building of a micro-community.
Mikhail: “Hold on there. Did you or did you now, kind Sir, post Levi’s private emails online and if you did not, then how do you explain that there are whole circles claiming that you did? Are you calling Harman a liar?”
Kvond: I have no idea what Graham is going on about, nor who composes his “circle”. For all I know his circle consists of conversations that he has with himself.
But I very sincerely appreciate anyone who could come up with my postings of email content over at my blog (just post a comment in the “comments” section on the appropriate post). If indeed I have crossed the line I would very much like to hear about it. I can recall just two possible examples, one from professor Chalmers and perhaps one from professor Della Rocca where I most definitely asked permission before printing the material, which I sent them in advance. And the content was of a positive nature.
June 10, 2009 at 6:16 am
Apparently while half the blogosphere is debating the issue of Publius vs Whelan, here we are still in blogging Stone Age with calls for Stalinism and passionate talking past one another…
June 11, 2009 at 4:18 am
I must say that I’ve found this set of comments very amusing. Graham Harman is clearly a paranoid nut, as the little exchange with Kvond reveals, as well as his bizarre interpretation of my e-mail to him. (Hint for Graham: you said I used words carelessly in describing your remarks as ‘defamation.’ I replied that I did not use them carelessly: your remarks are probably defamatory under American law, almost certainly under Egyptian law, which does not include a ‘public figure’ exception, as I understand it. You’d have to be insane to think anyone would actually waste time suing you, but, per evidence above…)
And I never would have guessed that Mikhail E. (and yes, I know who you are) would be the voice of reason in all this. Good for you!
June 12, 2009 at 1:21 am
And I never would have guessed that Mikhail E. (and yes, I know who you are) would be the voice of reason in all this. Good for you!
Oh boy, I’m not sure how to interpret this comment – paranoid reading: are you threatening me (“I know who you are, mister, and I know where you live”) or regular reading: are you acknowledging that you have seen my comments around and maybe even read our blog (“I know who you are, sir, nice to see you”)?
In any case, as I said before, I was defending a position on the matter, not people who might or might not hold such positions, it seemed that we all agree on some basic rules concerning privacy of emails, which is good to know as I was genuinely concerned with the issue, and not being a contrarian jerk that I usually quite gladly am.