December 2005
-
Philosopher Byrne To Stay at MIT, Turns Down Princeton and USC
Alex Byrne (philosophy of mind, metaphysics) at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology has turned down the tenured offers from Princeton University and the University of Southern California. That’s a good break for the small and excellent MIT department, which recently lost Joshua Cohen (political philosophy) to Stanford.
-
Friday Poem: “In the Examining Room”
In the Examining Room The Minister of Healthis down the hallin a room like this(except for me)I swing my legsfrom my table perchas omens richwith immanenceinfiltrate my mind Voices soakthrough wallboard dikesthe problems are not niceailing termstheir crowded namesrecalcitrant to tactbut no one breaksthe protocol of factwith passion torn from need An old womansmaller than…
-
Feeling Uncertain About Your Masculinity? Support the Iraq War, Buy an SUV, and Hate Gays
Ruchira Paul has the details on this recent study out of Cornell University.
-
Michigan Makes Bid for IP Expert Litman at Wayne State
Fifteen years after turning down Jessica Litman for tenure, the University of Michigan Law School has now made her a tenured offer. In the interim, Professor Litman has taught law at Wayne State University, and become recognized as a leading expert on copyright law and other aspects of intellectual property. UPDATE: Professor Litman has accepted…
-
Not much new until Monday
I’ll be travelling up to Newcastle tomorrow and then on to Edinburgh, so there won’t be much on the blog until early next week. Those posting comments on the Free Will thread, please be patient! I will check my e-mail periodically, and so will be approving comments while on the road at various intervals.
-
John Martin Fischer on Free Will and Moral Responsibility: Where the Action Is
This is the first in a series of postings I’ve commissioned by leading philosophers on "where the action is" in various subfields of the discipline. (I wrote about Nietzsche studies a couple of weeks ago.) Hopefully these short essays will be illuminating for both graduate students interested in the particular subfield and philosophers working in…
-
Philosopher/Soldier’s Suicide in Iraq
Interesting, albeit tragic, story here; an excerpt: One hot, dusty day in June, Col. Ted Westhusing was found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad airport, a single gunshot wound to the head. The Army would conclude that he committed suicide with his service pistol. At the time, he was the…
-
Excerpts from NY Times Interview with Tookie Williams
Here. Williams was executed earlier today, providing temporary satisfaction to all those with insatiable bloodlust. A number of his remarks in this interview, two weeks ago, are rather interesting: On His Years as a Crip:"I have a despicable background. I was a criminal. I was a co-founder of the Crips. I was a nihilist." On…
-
Rutgers’s Hawthorne Accepts Waynflete Chair at Oxford
John Hawthorne (metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language and mind, Leibniz) at Rutgers University at New Brunswick has accepted the offer of the Waynflete Chair in Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford University. He may still maintain some kind of visiting relationship with Rutgers, though that has not yet been formalized. This concludes a rather remarkable "recovery" for…
-
London Times: Israel Preparing for Attack on Iran
Story here; an excerpt: ISRAEL’S armed forces have been ordered by Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, to be ready by the end of March for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran, military sources have revealed. The order came after Israeli intelligence warned the government that Iran was operating enrichment facilities, believed to…
-
Vanderbilt Appoints Law & Economics Scholars Viscusi & Hersch
W. Kip Viscusi (law and economics, torts, products liability), who Directs the Empirical Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School and may be best-known outside the academy for his work on behalf of the tobacco companies in the smoking litigation, and his wife Joni Hersch, who is currently an adjunct professor at Harvard (and was…
Georgy Maksimovich pointed me to this article in Russian: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/05/25/antisovetskie-filosofskie-kontratseptsii