Don't hide your lamp under a bushel!

I didn't intend to move the goalposts and I appreciate the engagement. I won't keep bothering you, but my answers would have been No and Maybe. Coming from a middle-class background, I learned more about the profession from Leiter and the PGR than I ever did from my undergrad professors.

Were none of you invited or did you just decide not to participate? I'm genuinely curious, because I would find it surprising if you had never been invited.

Just to be clear I was agreeing with you that more people should be invited.

While I imagine this is meant to be self-deprecating, it seems to me like it's just a Princeton grad making fun of NJIT. Is there context I'm missing?

Sorry if this is confusing. I tried to reply to specific comments you made but it doesn't look like my replies posted in the right way.

Is Chris Mierzewski not on your faculty? He was an evaluator. But even if he hadn't been invited, it's not clear to me that every department needs to have evaluators taking part in order for the results to be informative. 550 philosophers were invited and 239 responded. Have you ever been invited?

I don't think the PGR is perfect. Some of the specialty rankings strike me as particularly worrisome. Still, I think you're overstating this and that an overall ranking is useful. It captures something important about how many people will keep a rough general ordering of top programs in their mind.

550 invites doesn't seem particularly selective (I doubt other rankings are better on this). And there's not just one person doing the organizing. Kar and Pynes are the editors and there's a full advisory board. That said, I would also welcome more transparency and expanding the pool of evaluators.

I guess I'm just less sympathetic to many of the cons you listed and also think the transparency issue is most important. The elites will always have their de facto rankings. The PGR just let us plebs in on it. Even if imperfect, it did the field a great service and I would be very sad to see it go.

I'm assuming her response was to refer you to her divorce lawyer?

I don't really see the problem. Do you think we should get rid of the PGR? As you said, we have other rankings now. If Leiter wants to criticize them, that's his prerogative. We can take it or leave it. I suspect the real issue you have with the PGR is that it's the only *influential* ranking.

But maybe you're right. I can see the use case for a general overview of "Sidgwick's Ethics" or "Deontology" more than I can see the use for something as specific as "The Postulate of Public Right" in the Kant series. At that point it seems like we should just be reading journal articles.

They give an opinionated overview of other positions, but with an express aim of advocating for skepticism about moral desert. If you want to read about their fairly controversial views on this, why spend 60 some pages on the Element rather than just read one of their many articles on the subject?

It applies to most I've seen in my areas, though some are certainly better than others as general overviews. I wasn't thinking about ethics in particular rather than some historical figures. But to pick randomly in that subject area, take Caruso and Pereboom on "Moral Responsibility Reconsidered."

Rudy is a classic.

And here I am still trying to transition from common rational to philosophic moral cognition!

Children are closest to the transcendental unity of apperception.