September 2008
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Everything that is wrong with Obama’s campaign style…
…in a nutshell. There’s no excuse for losing this election, but if the Democrats do, the blame falls squarely on Barack Obama. UPDATE: More thoughts on Obama’s style here. (Thanks to Gerald Dworkin for the pointer.)
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Nagel Wins “Balzan Prize” for His Work in Moral Philosophy
The latest honor bestowed on Thomas Nagel (NYU) is the Balzan Prize, which I had not heard of previously (there are more details here), but which has been awarded since 1961: past winners include Quentin Skinner, Eric Hobsbawm, Paul Ricoeur, John Maynard Smith, Emmanuel Levinas, amd Jean Piaget, among many others. Anglophone philosophers have not…
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Yoon from Northwestern to Toronto
This a bit belated: Albert Yoon (legal profession, torts, judicial politics, corporate), previously at Northwestern University School of Law, has accepted a senior appointment on the law faculty at the University of Toronto, where he will be in residence in summer 2009. (During 2008-09, he holds a Russell Sage Visiting Scholarship in New York City.)
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A Law School Job Market Wiki…
…almost. The Philosophy job market has run a wiki the last couple of years, and it has worked decently (unfortunately, it’s now off-line).
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“Spot the Logical Fallacy” Party
Carlos Mariscal, a graduate student at Duke, wrote last Friday: While I was watching the convention this week (and last week as well, actually), it astounded me at how often the speakers would resort to obvious logical fallacies. I counted five false dichotomies and four straw men within the Sarah Palin speech alone. As a…
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Three Philosophers Win 100K “Wisdom” Grants from U of Chicago
Details here. The winners are Joshua Greene (PhD in philosophy from Princeton, who now teaches in the Psychology Dept. at Harvard), Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State University), and Valerie Tiberius (University of Minnesota).
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Police State Tactics in Minneapolis
I am surprised not to have seen more discussion of this abuse of police power and violation of the First Amendment by police in Minneapolis, esp. by the putative libertarian law professors who blog; perhaps I have missed it. Here’s an excerpt from the account by the well-known journalist Amy Goodman: Government crackdowns on journalists…
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600K for a Corporate Law Professor?
Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA) reports the rumor. It strikes me as within the realm of the possible. NYU is rumored–I emphasize rumored–to have paid 500K/year to dislodge one well-known scholar from a competitor school. (NYU Philosophy is reported–this more reliably–to have paid 300K to dislodge a philosopher from a competitor.) Non-salary compensation–housing or apartment subsidies, low-interest…
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Philosopher LeRoux Elected to Royal Society of Canada
Georges LeRoux, a specialist in ancient philosophy (especially NeoPlatonism) at the University of Quebec in Montreal, is the only philosopher to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada this year.
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SSHRC Grants to Canadian Philosophers
Richard Zach (Calgary) has compiled the list.
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Friday Poem: “Unpacking”
Unpacking I have been unpackingUnpacking my lifeSome of you have done thisYou moveThe boxes arriveUsually labeledBut when you open themThey are not quiteWhat the label promisesIn each box you findSomething you did not know you hadSomething special although unfamiliarYou suspect you should remember it You realize you have forgotten your lifeAnd somehow in the packing…
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Yahoos, Brownshirts, and Hypocrites
The spectacle in Minneapolis is generating lots of interesting e-mail from philosophers. I’ll share a few items here. The Palin nomination has unleashed a tidal wave of hypocrisy from the hypocrites who know no limits on the right, as Jon Stewart notes. Senator McCain’s speech last night was awful, even quite apart from its absurd…
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Law Schools That Made the Most Lateral Hires with Tenure (Faculty Starting During 2008-09)
WITH CORRECTIONS AS OF 5 PM ON SEPT. 5 Of course, the "most" doesn’t mean the "best." Harvard and Yale, among the very top schools, made the most senior hires in the category of "hires I most would have liked to make," while NYU probably made the fewest, but opinions will, of course, differ on…
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Ignorant Yahoo Update
So, after doing some real work last night, I watched, again on C-Span, the speech by Senator McCain’s V-P pick, Alaska Governor (and Alaska Taliban mamber) Sarah Palin. I’m sorry to report that she was an effective presenter of the speech written for her, and kept her ignorant yahoo credentials completely under wraps: no gaffes…
Georgy Maksimovich pointed me to this article in Russian: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/05/25/antisovetskie-filosofskie-kontratseptsii