November 2010
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So you want to “major” in “analytic philosophy”?
Courtesy of logician Roy Cook (Minnesota). (Leave it to a logician to think analytic philosphy exists!) It requires more than a bit of knowledge of philosophy to get all the jokes here! (Thanks to Michael Lynch for the pointer.)
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American Plutocracy Redux…
…and in the NY Times again: America’s ever-widening income inequality was not an inevitable by-product of the modern megacorporation, or of globalization, or of the advent of the new tech-driven economy, or of a growing education gap….Inequality is instead the result of specific policies, including tax policies, championed by Washington Democrats and Republicans alike as…
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War Crimes Should Be Punished
Even when committed by Americans.
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Philosophy: It Doesn’t Even Have to be True
If this is what they're teaching kids, no wonder our field has PR problems. It bring to mind an observation I made in the introduction to The Future for Philosophy (OUP, 2004): Philosophy, perhaps more than any other discipline, has been plagued by debates about what the discipline is or ought to be. Partly, this…
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“Defending the Humanities”
Edward Harcourt (Oxford) comments on a recent conference on the subject at Birkbeck. (Thanks to David Wolf for the pointer.)
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Bill Moyers on the American Plutocracy
Do read this excellent (and well-written) analysis of the current desperate state of affairs in this pathological country. (Thanks to Mike Springer for the pointer.)
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Pyke’s Photos of Philosophers (Volume 1)
It's now all on-line.
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The History of Western Philosophy Diagrammed…
…based on the work of sociologist Randall Collins, diagrams courtesy of Kevin Scharp (Ohio State). The diagrams can take awhile to load, they're big!
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Corporate Attacks on Law School Clinics
Anyone interested in clinical legal education should read this. (Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)
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A Petition in Support of the Howard University Philosophy Department is…
…here. I hope readers will take a moment to sign. (Moving to front from yesterday.)
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So what do you think of the APA?
We often have occasion to discuss the APA's performance in various areas of importance to the profession, though more often than not we focus on perceived lapses, rather than achievements. So I thought it might be useful to gauge how the APA is perceived by philosophers. How would you rate the APA's performance overall in…
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“Long, frightening, but funny”
That was my colleague Michael Kremer's apt description of this segment about the circulation of misinformation inside the right-wing echo chambers. Yet another reason to be skeptical about Mill's argument in On Liberty, alas.
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What Obama Should Have Done
This seems sensible, but not, of course, to Obama and the (allegedly) prudent wing of the Ruling Class Party: The original sin of Obama's presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers. Larry Summers. Timothy Geithner. Ben Bernanke. These men had no personal commitment to the goal of…
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Retiring New Hampshire Justice Named UNH Dean
The University of New Hampshire School of Law – formerly Franklin Pierce – has named the state's outgoing Chief Justice, John Broderick, as its new dean.
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Clyde Summers, Labor and Employment Scholar, Dies
Clyde W. Summers, the Jefferson B. Fordham Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Penn Law, died October 30. He was 91. Summers began his long career at the University of Toledo in 1942, served on the Yale Law faculty for 18 years, and joined Penn in 1975.
On (4), and with the usual caveat that I’m not an expert here: The US has 400 land-based ICBMs, carrying…