December 2010
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I’m really not sure if this is a joke
I am hoping it is. An excerpt: Inverting the way we commonly talk and think about domestication, the book will explore how grasses, grains, various animals such as wolves, cows, cats, goats, and microbes, as well as technologies have conspired to domesticate human beings for their own ends. Throughout North America and other parts of…
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Law Profs Win Huge Punitive Damages Against West Publishing
Late last week, David Rudovsky, a Senior Fellow on the Penn Law faculty, and Len Sosnov, Professor of Law at Widener, won a $5 million dollar punitive damages verdict in a defamation case against West Publishing. This from the Philadelphia Inquirer: In 1991, West published their Pennsylvania Criminal Procedure: Law, Commentary and Forms. A second…
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Kant and Poker
This appears to be for real. (Thanks to Ken Feinstein for the pointer.)
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Morris Cohen, Influential Law Librarian, Dies
Morris L. Cohen, a major force in American law libraries in the twentieth century, died this weekend. He was 83. Since 1991, Cohen has been Professor Emeritus of Law and Professorial Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. He served as Professor of Law and Director of Yale Law School's Lillian Goldman Law Library from 1981…
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A great new way to waste time this holiday break: Google Book’s New Searchable Database!
Philosopher Zvi Biener (Western Michigan) writes: This might be of modest interest to some. Google has just released a tool for viewing relative word frequencies in their database of scanned books (slightly more details on the exact subset of books can be found here). I inputted the names of the Top 10 Most Significant Philosophers…
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A great new way to waste time!
I refer, of course, to Google book search, which allows you to chart references to names and topics over time. Here, for example, are references to some law bloggers (plus Frederick Schauer, for a 'control' as it were) since 1995. What does this all mean? I've no idea, but I'm sure it will make for…
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“Electro-Rorty”
Cute (thanks to Jacob Nerney [Brandeis]).
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Not Nice Referees
Reader Stephen Lavelle sends a link to this choice compendium of wicked excerpts from referee reports for a science journal; a few examples: The writing and data presentation are so bad that I had to leave work and go home early and then spend time to wonder what life is about. I suppose that I should be…
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“Smartest” Academics by Field
It's now official: "Philosophers are the smartest humanists, physicists the smartest scientists, economists the smartest social scientists."
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“Do people actually believe in objective moral truths?”
More interesting discussion at "On the Human," this time courtesy of Joshua Knobe (Yale).
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Faculty Perceptions of the Tenure Process
…of "consciously or not, [trying] to justify their preferred political outcomes" under the guise of disinterested scholarship. No comment. (OK, one comment. And do follow this exchange.) (Thanks to Peter A. for the link.) Katherine Barnes and Elizabeth Mertz have a new paper up on SSRN, Is It Fair: Law Professors' Perceptions of Tenure. The authors surveyed…
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“Smartest” Academics by Field
It's now official: "Philosophers are the smartest humanists, physicists the smartest scientists, economists the smartest social scientists." (Thanks to Peter Kail for the pointer.)
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Canadian MA Student Under Attack for Thesis Deemed “Offensive” to Jews
More precisely, it is critical of the exploitation of the Holocaust for political advantage, apparently a verboten topic in the new Canada. But like the earlier attack on the conference at York University, this is a sign of a very ugly political climate in Toronto when it comes to honest discussion of Israel. (Thanks to Moti…
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Now *this* is serious: Julian Assange Trying to Suppress Dialetheism!
The proof. (Thanks to Peter Ludlow for the pointer.)
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Notable Retirements (Recent and Prospective) That Prospective Students Should Be Aware Of
MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 15, 2010 (some more updates) Especially because we will not get a new PGR out till 2011, I thought it might be useful for students thinking about graduate school in philosophy to flag some significant recent or imminent retirements of well-known philosophers; in many cases, the affected departments have already made new appointments…
Georgy Maksimovich pointed me to this article in Russian: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/05/25/antisovetskie-filosofskie-kontratseptsii