January 2014
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Signs of the times: Albany Law School declares financial crisis…
…and is threatening to fire faculty, including possibly tenured faculty. It is not clear, however, that there really is a financial crisis there (follow the link to the Albany AAUP website). Albany did, however, suffer an S&P downgrade last year. Any firings of tenured faculty are likely to result in costly lawsuits, given the evidence…
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Berkeley Dean candidate finalists
Here; Judge Fletcher from the 9th Circuit, Professor Bagenstos from Michigan, Professor Choudhry from NYU, and Acting Dean Lester.
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New Books in January
Authors and/or publishers kindly sent me these new books this month: Essays and Reviews, 1959-2002 by Bernard Williams (Princeton University Press, 2014). Epistemic Paternalism: A Defence by Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). The Logic of Legal Requirements: Essays on Defeasibility edited by Jorrdi Ferrer Beltran & Giovanni Battista Ratti (Oxford University Press, 2012). Three Views…
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Colorado’s Philosophy Department put into a kind of receivership…
…with an external (to Philosophy) Chair taking over, in the wake of an extremely critical report by an APA Committee that the Department, to its credit, invited to come in to assess sexual harassment and other climate issues in the department. (I had heard rumors about two faculty members accused of sexual harassment last year,…
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Marx is back, part 78: Democracy is doomed, equality is doomed, as long as capitalism survives
And it's in The New York Times no less.
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What were you favorite book(s)/article(s) that appeared in 2013?
MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 21, 2013: THIS DESERVES MORE RESPONSES! Signed comments only: full name and valid e-mail address. You can name more than one, but say a couple of words about each book or article you mention, why you liked it, why it's significant, what it's contribution is to a particular literature. I'll…
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“Good Practices” for encouraging women to participate in philosophy…
…courtesy of the British Philosophical Association and SWIP. Quite a lot of information as well as suggested practices. (Thanks to several philosophers who sent this along.)
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“1,000-word philosophy”
An interesting idea; they welcome proposals for contributions.
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More factual problems for law school bashers: law students are not unhappier now than they were before the recession
Indeed, a solid majority report themselves "satisfied" with their law school experience. As with all inconvenient facts, this will have no impact on the cyber-crazies. An amusing, but related anecdote: a former student told me he tried to challenge one of the hysterical scam bloggers about his claim that "a very large percentage of alumni wind up…
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A-level philosophy under threat in the UK?
Reader Nathan Howards points me to this. Comments from readers informed about these issues?
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In defense of English Departments!
Michael Clune (Case Western) replies at 3AM to Alex Rosenberg's criticisms. Professor Clune's piece raises an interesting point: namely, what's going on in English Departments today may not be what people like Alex and myself remember from the "bad old days," like the 1980s, when English Departments were (as Princeton's A. Walton Litz put it–I…
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NYU’s Revesz to be new Director of the American Law Institute
He succeeds Columbia's Lance Liebman (another former Dean) in the role.
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The latest in idiotic journalism purportedly related to law schools
It's James Stewart's absurd New York Times piece on a former Dewey partner filing for bankruptcy; Adam Levitin (Georgetown) destroys it. At moments like this, one can only quote Karl Kraus: "No ideas and the ability to express them: that's a journalist."
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In Memoriam: Pete Seeger (1919-2014)
Not a philosopher, but a moral entrepeneur and leader, more so than most philosophers. The Times obituary is fairly informative about his long career, including his survival of political persecution. It doesn't say so directly, but it is notable to have lived more than 90 years and to have been on the right side of almost every…
These are the sort of systems that are currently used for “teaching” LLMs math and coding, as I understand it.…