July 2010
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Friday Poems: “Let us remember” and “Guilt”
Let us remember Let us remember The living Overlooked as we amass The dead And assign them a value Richer than dollars Shapelier than gravestones More memorable than Whatever it is We drop off to sleep Forgetting 6/30-7/4/10 Guilt How painful Not to have suffered Left in comfort…
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Dupre on “What Darwin Got Wrong” Got Wrong
MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–SEE UPDATES, COMMENTS NOW INVITED He joins the chorus. If anyone competent in the philosophical and scientific issues has had anything favorable to say about the argument of this book anywhere, please send me a link. UPDATE: A couple of readers have already flagged the review by the biologist Richard Lewontin, the…
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US News Redux
Dan's post below is predicated on a mistaken assumption: Larry Kramer didn't frame any of this in terms of being #1 in US News, it was the reporter who framed the issue that way. The only way to be #1 in US News is to out-spend Yale. End of story!
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Those Sticky US News Rankings
Staniford Law has garnered a lot of attention recently for Dean Larry Kramer's efforts to make it the nation's top law school. It all started with an article in the San Jose Mercury News in which Kramer stated his goal of creating a program "unmatchable anywhere else." What is Kramer's precise challenge? Having a great…
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Breaking News: The National Research Council Still Does Not Know When Its Report on Doctoral Programs (circa 2005) Will be Released
This is really quite amazing. But given Ned Block's devastating critique, it probably doesn't much matter.
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A new blog…
….from Jason Czarnecki (Vermont), mostly, it seems, on environmental law issues.
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Political Interference with “World Philosophy Day” in Tehran?
Story here. (Thanks to Reza Rad for the pointer.)
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U of Minnesota Prof Calls Out Regents and Administration on Budget Priorities
Lots of readers have sent me links to this video of a Classics & Near Eastern Studies professor making a forceful statement before the Board of Regents about the financial priorities of the university, administrative bloat, and other malignant signs of the times at Minnesota and elsewhere.
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Godfrey-Smith on Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini on Natural Selection
Another patient and illuminating discussion, from the LRB. (Earlier items here, here, here, and here, among other places.)
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Franks from Toronto to Yale
Paul Franks (Kant, German Idealism, Jewish philosophy, epistemology) at the University of Toronto has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Yale University, where he will start in fall 2011. This will give the Yale program very strong coverage of the history of philosophy, especially ancient, early modern, and now Kant and…
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U of Vienna’s Pauer-Studer Also Wins Major ERC Grant
Herlinde Pauer-Studer, a philosopher at the University of Vienna, has also won a major European Research Council grant for a project on "distortions of normativity" during the Third Reich. A brief description (in English) of the quite interesting project is here, and a more detailed article (in German) is here. (She and David Velleman [NYU] have a paper…
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Strawson on Free Will in the NY Times Blog
Here. It's an abbreviated version of the argument from his well-known paper "The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility," Philosophical Studies (1994). There's a reasonably interesting discussion by philosophers here. The comments at the Times site are, as usual, mostly hopeless, though my experience is that the Dunning-Kruger effect rules when it comes to who chooses to…
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“The Heidegger Song”
Amusing (in German). (Via Tim Crane.)
I only just learned of Barry’s passing, and I’m enormously saddened at the news. I wrote my PhD on his…