April 2009
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The Upheaval in the Market for New Lawyers at the Big Law Firms: Temporary or Permanent?
Moving to the front from April 15; many readers will be interested in Professor Henderson's observations in the comment section, which were just posted today. One need only look at this extraordinary list of leading law firms pushing back the start dates of their new associates to realize that the market model of the elite law…
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Modelling a Swine Flu Pandemic in the US
Interesting material here. See also this news item.
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Peter Hacker Did Not Like Timothy Williamson’s Book
Via Weatherson, I see that the irascible (and sometimes idiosyncratic and dogmatic [cf. paragraph 7]) Peter Hacker has a rather savage and critical review of Williamson's The Philosophy of Philosophy. In the hopes of clarifying what's really at issue here, I thought I would single out a substantive criticism from Hacker's review and invite reader comments…
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Kleinbard from Government Service to Southern California
Edward D. Kleinbard (tax), currently chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation in Washington, D.C., has accepted a senior offer to john the law faculty at the University of Southern California, effective this summer.
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No May JFP This Year!
Tim O'Keefe (Georgia State) writes: Saw the following at http://www.apaonline.org/ : "The National Office has not received a sufficient number of employment ads to warrant publishing a May 2009 issue of Jobs for Philosophers, No. 182. Therefore, there will not be a JFP print issue published in May. Web only ads (if any) will continue…
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Shoemaker from Bowling Green to Tulane
David Shoemaker (ethics, metaphysics), Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, has accepted appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University (with a joint appointment in Tulane's Murphy Institute), effective this fall.
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Mark Oppenheimer and (Lack of) Journalistic Ethics
I've refrained from commenting on last year's Boston Globe story by Mark Oppenheimer about the PGR and about me, but it still occasionally generates e-mails to me seeking comment–especially since the new PGR came out. So I guess I should say a few things about it, perhaps as a warning to those who may encounter the dishonest and timorous Mr.…
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Fordham’s Matthew Diller Named Dean at Cardozo
Information on Professor Diller here.
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So who are the most important philosophers of the modern era?
By popular demand, your chance to rank order the important philosophers from the early modern era through the 20th-century. The top vote-getters in the earlier polls are included, plus Rousseau, who was wrongly left off the last poll. "Important" here means philosophically important, not "influential": as we know, Ayn Rand wins that one! Of course,…
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Philosopher Gibbard Elected to National Academy of Sciences
Allan Gibbard at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has become only the fourth philosopher to ever be elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. Other living philosophers who are Fellows are Brian Skyrms (UC Irvine) and Patrick Suppes (Emeritus, Stanford). Quine was, to my knowledge, the only other philosophy professor ever elected…
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Some Swine Flu Resources
A public health blog, which appears to be well-informed. The U.S. Center for Disease Control information page, including statistics on confirmed cases. I've not found anything comparable at the WHO site, but please feel free to add links to WHO or to other national health service sites in the comments. A BBC page with "reader reports"…
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Transforming Universities?
Several readers have e-mailed me about this piece. The author is Columbia religion professor Mark C. Taylor (yes, the Derrida apologist and postmodern "theorist"). Here's a taste of the careless rhetoric: GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates…
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There’s always a market in America…
…for juvenile stupidity. Didn't these folk see the poll results? Jeez. UPDATE: Philosopher Christopher Pynes sends along this hysterical item: There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes,…
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George Washington Dean Lawrence Responds to the US News Nonsense
Here. It's a very sensible response. The big unanswered question is how the US News decision to include the numerical credentials of part-time students will affect part-time programs. Everyone knows, of course, that the US News tail often wags the legal education dog. The part-time programs undoubtedly provide a useful service for more mature, non-traditional…
Georgy Maksimovich pointed me to this article in Russian: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/05/25/antisovetskie-filosofskie-kontratseptsii