July 2008
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Paul Gowder has a blog…
…here. He’s someone I’ve enjoyed e-mail correspondence with over the years. He’s also making the transition from law study to grad school, so readers may have insights for him.
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Philosophers Elected to the British Academy
The list of new electees is here. Roger Scruton is the only philosopher elected among the "Ordinary Fellows," while three philosophers are elected as "Corresponding Fellows" this year: Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago), Dan Sperber (CNRS-Paris), and Bas van Fraassen (San Francisco State University).
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Congratulations to my colleague Martha Nussbaum…
…who is the only American legal academic to be elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy this year. She joins three other Chicago Law faculty to share that honor: Professor R.H. Helmholz and Senior Lecturer (and, of course, Judge) Richard Posner, as well as emeritus professor Ronald Coase. Other American law faculty who are…
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Law and Philosophy Workshop at Chicago Addendum
Two incoming students e-mailed about the Law and Philosophy Workshop (mentioned here). This is not, I’m afraid, open to 1Ls to take for credit, but students are welcome to sit in on the sessions. I hope that the Jurisprudence II course will be available as a Spring Quarter elective, and so open to 1Ls. Please…
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Experimental Philosophy and Experimental Syntax (J. Stanley)
The debate about Experimental Philosophy is usefully compared with debates elsewhere in the human sciences about intuition gathering. As it happens, in syntax, the time-honored tradition of "armchair linguistics" is facing a similar challenge, although at a considerably lower decibel rate. On this score, I’ve found this paper by Colin Phillips quite useful. Some choice…
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The “Cravath System” and Lawyer Salaries
More insightful stuff from Bill Henderson (Indiana/Bloomington).
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What Kripke Should have Said (J. Stanley)
In a recent paper, one of Kripke’s many empirical arguments against the description theory in Naming and Necessity has been challenged. This example concerns a fictional scenario in which someone named “Schmidt” in fact was the first to prove Godel’s incompleteness theorems; Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich argue that speakers in Hong Kong think that…
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My Teaching at Chicago Next Year
Some students have asked; for those who are interested, there is information here.
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Husband Sends Death Threat to Biologist Myers from Wife’s Work E-Mail Account and She Loses Her Job
Odd. Let it be a lesson, I guess, to those who send "hate" e-mails.
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Amazingly Conscientious Translator!
I received an e-mail the other day from Yasuhiko Tomida, a philosopher at Kyoto University in Japan, who is translating the last volume of Rorty’s collected papers into Japanese. A chapter in that volume discusses my introduction to The Future for Philosophy volume, in which I describe a "split," as it were, between "quietists" and…
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My Teaching at Chicago Next Year
A couple of folks have asked about my law & philosophy offerings, so here’s what’s on the agenda at this point: I’ll be doing the "Law and Philosophy Workshop" all year on the topic "Toleration and Religious Liberty." This is cross-listed between the Law School and Philosophy Department, and is open to students in either…
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Do Senior Faculty Have an Obligation to Retire at Some Point?
Regarding the possible effect of the economic downturn on the academic job market for philosophers, Thomas Carson (Loyola/Chicago) writes: This is very grim news for people who would like to enter the profession. Your observation that "a lot of faculty who might have been thinking about retirement in the coming year are going to postpone…
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Chang from Loyola/LA to Seattle
Robert Chang (immigration law, Asian-Americans and the law) at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles has accepted a tenured offer from Seattle University.
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Biologist Myers (aka Pharyngula) Under Attack from the ‘Catholic League’
Pharyngula–the wickedly funny science blog run by Minnesota biologist Paul Myers, a blog that I am happy to take some credit for promoting early on in its career (its traffic now dwarfs mine)–is under attack from the Catholic League, a quasi-fascistic group that–like its Islamic counterparts (which are more often in the news these days)–regularly…
I only just learned of Barry’s passing, and I’m enormously saddened at the news. I wrote my PhD on his…