September 2010
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“Marty Peretz’s Emptiness and the Corruption of Harvard”
Another well-deserved "whack," this time from the political theorist Alan Gilbert (Denver).
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Philosophers (and others) on logic
A nice collection of quotations, courtesy of David Marans (St. Thomas/Miami).
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A Short Intellectual Biography of G.A. Cohen
By a longtime Oxford colleague, Michael Rosen (now at Harvard), presented at a recent memorial conference at Columbia University. It's a good read, and illuminating also for its capsule history of Marxist thought. Rosen makes a particularly useful point, I thought, about Cohen's extreme (and not very worked out) moral realism, one of many ways in…
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Updates and Corrections to the New Scholarly Impact Ranking of the “top 70” Law Faculties
When you're looking at citation data for this many faculty at this many schools, there are always errors and omissions (as I well know from experience), and Professor Sisk and his colleagues at St. Thomas have been updating the study with corrections this past week. Interested readers might want to note the updates listed at the…
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NPR Has a New Academic Blog, “Cosmos and Culture”…
…that includes philosopher Alva Noe (CUNY Grad Center).
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Columbia’s University-Bashing and Tenure-Trashing Mark Taylor Eviscerated
Here. Even if he doesn't fall silent, perhaps we may hope that the New York Times will stop giving this know-nothing a platform. (Thanks to several readers for forwarding the link.)
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Robert Paul Wolff Whacks Marty Peretz Again
And rightly so: Back in 1960, Marty was an egregious little wannabe hanger-on to the group of young proto-lefties who called ourselves "The New Left Club of Cambridge," but subsequently, he married money, bought The New Republic, and turned that fine old progressive magazine into a flack for the State of Israel. Marty has done…
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Bad Behavior by the University of Minnesota
Details here. (Thanks to C.E. Emmer for the pointer.)
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Ruth Barcan Marcus’s Philosophical Autobiography
This is a very interesting, and often entertaining, read, both for what it tells us about a distinguished philosopher's career, but also about the sociology of the profession over time: Download FINAL_RBM Dewey Lecture. It will be published in the November 2010 Proceedings and Addresses of the APA, whose editor kindly gave permission to also post it here.
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Politically Motivated Hacking and Wikileaks
Who better to comment than Peter Ludlow (Northwestern)?
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The Ultimate ‘Esoteric’ Reading of Plato: Jay Kennedy Replies to Critics
Dr. Kennedy (Manchester) has kindly prepared replies to those who commented on the thread about his research earlier in the summer: I thank the Leiter Report for making room here to respond to the many rich comments about my Apeiron paper on symbolic structures in Plato's dialogues. The stakes in this debate are high. Unravelling…
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Forbes Law School Ranking: Already Falling Apart
A Dean elsewhere forwards to me the latest communication from the sadly clueless Forbes editors trying to prepare a law school ranking; they have already met with significant unwillingness to cooperate from law schools, and rightly so given the idiotic methodology: Thank you very much for your cooperation [sic–this was sent to a Dean who was…
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THES World University Rankings for 2010
Here. Being typical journalists, who have no idea what they're doing, they've had to completely revamp the 'methodology' to fix little problems like Berkeley barely cracking the top 40 in past years. The 'methodology' basically rewards schools for strength in the hard sciences, engineering, and areas of medical research; strength in humanities and the social sciences…
I respond to this report here https://jasonstanleyantifascist.substack.com/p/on-the-philosophical-muddle-that