March 2014
-
$3 Million to create first endowed Chair in Philosophy Dept at Rutgers
$1.5 million from an anonymous donor, $1.5 million from the Mellon Foundation. (Thanks to Jeff King for the pointer.)
-
New Books in March
Authors and/or publishers kindly sent me these new books this month: Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century: Selected Essays by Charles Parsons (Harvard University Press, 2014). Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love by Simon Blackburn (Princeton University Press, 2014). Why Law Matters by Alon Harel (Oxford University Press, 2014) [this is part…
-
Dennett on free will
Discuss. (Thanks to Michael Swanson for the pointer.)
-
Is aesthetics “underrepresented” in leading philosophy departments?
Anna Christina Ribeiro (Texas Tech) argues that it is. (Thanks to Miguel Dos Santos for the pointer.) Lots of areas of philosophy are under-represented in the leading departments, of course, in the sense that many departments have no specialists. Examples woudl include philosophy of law, mathematical logic, medieval philosophy, philosophy of religion, and 19th-century European philsophy. The latter…
-
Top U.S. research universities, 2014
Here, based on aggregation of U.S. News reputational data, for those who are interested.
-
2014 Canada Research Chairs Announced–Two Philosophers Among Recipients
The full list is here; philosophers recognized are Katherin Koslicki (Alberta) with a new Tier 1 Chair in "Epistemology and Metaphysics" and Margaret Cameron (Victoria) with renewal of her Tier 2 Chair in the "Aristotelian Tradition."
-
More on right-wing political attacks on climate science
Environmental philosopher Dale Jamieson (NYU) comments.
-
Top Research Universities in the US, 2014
I haven't done one of these in several years–this is an aggregation of reputational surveys done by U.S. News on graduate programs, which tend to give decent, if imperfect, information (based on my conversations with scholars in various fields). The fields included here are from the Social Sciences & Humanities (Economics, English, History, Political Science,…
-
Why study philosophy?
This is well-said, by Scott Samuelson, who teaches philosophy at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa: Thinking of the value of the humanities predominately in terms of earnings and employment is to miss the point. America should strive to be a society of free people deeply engaged in "the pursuit of happiness," not simply one of…
-
Is this a joke?
Vince Vitale teaches at the Center for Christian Apologetics at Oxford and is featured in this slightly ridiculous video. Is this what Christian Apologetics has become? Yikes! (Thanks to Michael Lopresto for the pointer.) UPDATE: A philosopher really at Oxford writes: Your most recent blog post is a reminder quite how subtle “Oxford” is as…
-
Rousseau on inequality…
…at The Washington Post blog.
-
Chalmers at TED
No video yet, just a written account.
Georgy Maksimovich pointed me to this article in Russian: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/05/25/antisovetskie-filosofskie-kontratseptsii