When tenured philosophers attack

Brian Leiter, in comparing my two-sentence comment on Bush’s trip to Baghdad with Matthew Yglesias’ posts on the subject, comments: This, alas, confirms my general view about the relative intellectual merits of philosophy and political science: a BA in philosophy apparently puts you well ahead of a PhD in political science. Hmmm…. how to respond? ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Brian Leiter, in comparing my two-sentence comment on Bush’s trip to Baghdad with Matthew Yglesias’ posts on the subject, comments:

Brian Leiter, in comparing my two-sentence comment on Bush’s trip to Baghdad with Matthew Yglesias’ posts on the subject, comments:

This, alas, confirms my general view about the relative intellectual merits of philosophy and political science: a BA in philosophy apparently puts you well ahead of a PhD in political science.

Hmmm…. how to respond? I could fire off a one-liner about how this sentence, alas, confirms my view that law and philosophy professors remain woefully behind in understanding the perils of inductive extrapolation from one empirical observation, but that would be unfair to Leiter as well as the rest of the law and philosophy crowd. It would also commit the same error in logic that Leiter commits in his post. I’m sure that Leiter has published/posted items of value…. er, somewhere. Generalizing from that one sentence to conclude that Leiter’s entire body of work is rubbish would be wrong. And it would be even more wrong to infer that Leiter’s statement is endemic of those who study the nexus between law and philosophy. Rather, I will suggest that on this issue, Leiter is wrong on the facts and spectacularly wrong in his generalization. To be fair, however, Leiter’s comparison was based on a brief comment. Click here to see my expanded thoughts on the Bush visit and a response to Yglesias.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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