September 2003
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Actual Tenure Review May Be Coming to Harvard Law School
The Harvard Crimson reports that Harvard Law School may start having a real tenure review, thanks to Harvard President Larry Summers. As I’ve noted before, tenure standards in law schools are rather different than in the rest of the university. If Harvard Law School moves to the tenure norms of the rest of Harvard that…
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Which are the “best” philosophy journals?
UPDATE: I’m moving this to the top, because I would like to encourage more comments from philosophers (including reactions to comments recently posted). Thanks. FINAL UPDATE (9/30): There’s a new comment. More are welcome. I won’t bring this to the top after this.
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IN MEMORIAM
Edward Said (1935-2003) The Columbia University memorial notice is here, though it says next to nothing about his important political work. The New York Times obituary, which reverses the emphasis, is here. 9/30 UPDATE: this is one of the better memorials I’ve seen, courtesy of On-Line Journal. 10/1 UPDATE: Also see this site.
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Law & Economics
This isn’t my area, and I’ve only visited the site a few times, but this relatively new blog looks to be a useful resource for those interested in law and economics (and it has lots of links to other law & econ resources as well).
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Synthese
The new editor of Synthese, philosopher John Symons, asked me to post the following information, after a discussion of the outrageous price of the journal on the Weatherson site. The text of his letter follows: 9/29/2003 Dear Professor Leiter, I’ve received quite a few emails concerning the editorship and pricing of Synthese recently and am…
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Leiter Decisively Refuted at Last
My (characteristically gentle, of course) suggestion that the representation of conservatives in some disciplines some of the time might have something to do with the intellectual merits has produced much indignation, but here at last I am decisively refuted (this courtesy of my favorite group-therapy blog for Straussians): “Leiter is a famously clueless academic who…
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More on conservatives in the academy
I found this posting of interest, from the comments section at Crooked Timber: “As to why most academics are liberal, liberals believe in boring things like fact checking and peer review that are the nuts and bolts of scholarly life. Conservatives, especially, the Potemkin Intellectuals in right-wing think tanks, think that they already know the…
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More Confident Claims about Cause and Effect
Courtesy of a former colleague: “This description of countries in economic decline sounds a bit like the world of Atlas Shrugged or of the United States in the late 1970s, before Ronald Reagan turned things around” (emphasis added).
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Nietzsche Blog
Philosopher John Holbo has a Nietzsche Blog, which has some interesting discussions of questions of Nietzsche interpretation, and is also interesting pedagogically, because Professor Holbo is using it in conjunction with a class on Nietzsche. This is the first instance I’ve encountered of this use of a blog.
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American Academy of Arts & Sciences
I am periodically asked why I don’t include a criterion like membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences as a factor in the philosophy rankings. You can see a list of current philosophy fellows of the American Academy here. (Note that philosophy is lumped with religion and theology in this category, and that…
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“The less they know, the less they know it” post of the week…
…is here, where a navel-gazing recent Yale graduate of no obvious intellectual accomplishment or depth denounces the “idiocy” of, among others, Noam Chomsky, one of the major intellectual figures of the 20th-century. (And does so, oddly, on the basis of a column by Ian Buruma, which quotes [partly out of context, but that’s a different…
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“Academic Freedom Bill of Rights”
I’m reposting this, in light of the latest salvo by the right claiming a “bias” against conservatives in the academy. As usual, the possibility that conservatives are underrepresented because of intellectual or scholarly deficiencies isn’t broached (how could that topic be broached by a journalist, after all?) (Surely it is relevant to an assessment of…
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Mark Murphy from Georgetown…
is the guest of the Law & Philosophy Program today, and a 3-hour seminar on some chapters from his book manuscript on Natural Law in Jurisprudence and Politics will be beginning shortly, followed by a talk in the Philosophy Department (which means not much new posting today). An awful lot is written about natural law…
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Free Speech at Southern Methodist University
Given the facts as presented, I think Volokh is 100% right on this one. It’s a shame he wasn’t so quick to come to the defense of academic freedom when left-wing speech was at issue at Stanford. (In that case, last year, Stanford fired radical attorney Lynne Stewart from a paid short-term post as a…
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Book Censors on the March
Read about them here. Brave New World is, they charge, “pornographic” and will lead to “sexual arousal.” One suspects the critics aren’t familiar with the real thing on either count.
I would code that as “\emph{1–2 years}” — the functor on the basis of ‘conceptual not visual’ characterization, the en-dash…