December 2008
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Why Major in Philosophy?
Thoughts from a personal finance blogger.
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Tales from the American Oligarchy
New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whose main qualification has always been her willingness to stay married to the neoliberal womanizer Bill Clinton (and to keep using his brand name), will become Secretary of State, based of course on her excellent judgment and high moral standards as exemplified by her unapologetic support for the criminal war…
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Tales from the American Oligarchy: Caroline Kennedy Seeks New York Senate Seat To Be Vacated by Hillary Clinton
David Post (Temple) hits the nail on the head. Of course, academia has higher standards than politics.
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Will the Financial Crisis Affect PhD Admissions?
A student writes: I am a Ph.D. student at [an unranked PhD program], currently applying to transfer to a top program (11 of the best ethics programs, according to PGR and my own interests). I, as well as others on the application front, have started to wonder whether the economy is likely to affect admissions…
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Involving Graduate Students in Job Searches and Interviews
A philosopher at a ranked PhD program writes: Here’s a question that came up in a departmental meeting today; it might be an apt discussion question for your blog. Is there a norm in the profession about allowing graduate students to sit in on interviews conducted by their departments at the APA? In particular, is…
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Interim Dean Victor Gold Named Dean at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles
The university press release is here.
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To Those Participating in the PGR Surveys: Please Make Sure to Click “Submit Information” Every 20 Minutes or So!
If you don’t hit "submit information" periodically (every 20 minutes to be safe), the scores entered will be lost. I’m sorry about confusion on this. The system automatically logs someone out (not after 20 minutes), so even though the information on the screen remains, the system is no longer recording the data. We became aware…
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Law Schools Ranked By the Number of Corrupt Public Officials They Graduated
As usual, Yale and Harvard come out on top.
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Refutation of Richard Taylor on “Fatalism” Makes the NY Times Magazine!
It helps that the refutation was in the undergraduate thesis of the late novelist David Foster Wallace, who actually began the PhD program at Harvard, before turning to fiction writing, where he won wide acclaim. (His father is the well-known moral philosopher James Wallace, now emeritus at Illinois/Urbana-Champaign).
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Sjostrom from Northern Kentucky to Arizona
William K. Sjostrom, Jr. (corporate law, securities regulation) at Chase College of Law of Northern Kentucky University has accepted a senior offer from the University of Arizona Rogers College of Law.
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New “National Research Council” Ranking of Grad Programs Across All Fields Due Out in February
And judging from this article, it is likely to be, unlike prior iterations, much less useful, and not simply because of the lag time between data collection and publication (at least two years, maybe more). All indications are that the NRC planning committee was captured by interest groups representing smaller universities, who pushed ‘per capita’…
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Lessig from Stanford Back to Harvard
Lawrence Lessig (Cyberlaw, intellectual property, constitutional law) at Stanford Law School has accepted a senior offer from Harvard Law School, where he had taugt prior to his move to Stanford several years ago. The amazing Dean Kagan strikes again!
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“Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement in Nietzsche”
I've posted a revised version of the paper I gave at the annual NYU "History of Modern Philosophy" conference in November (which generated an excellent and very helpful discussion). This paper might interest some readers who follows debates in moral philosophy. Here is the abstract for the paper: This essay offers a new interpretation of Nietzsche's…
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Regulating Blog Comments
Since my esteemed colleague Eric Posner began posting at the "Volokh Conspiracy" blog, I've started looking at that site again, and so noticed that Orin Kerr (George Washington)–an expert in criminal law and procedure and one of the most worthwhile contributors there–has posted an updated version of their "comments policy," I assume in response to increasingly worthless comments…
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“Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement in Nietzsche”
I’ve posted a revised version of the paper I gave at the annual NYU "History of Modern Philosophy" conference in November (which generated an excellent and very helpful discussion). I hope the paper may interest moral philosophers generally, as well as Nietzsche scholars. Here is the abstract for the paper: This essay offers a new…
Georgy Maksimovich pointed me to this article in Russian: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/05/25/antisovetskie-filosofskie-kontratseptsii