June 2014
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McMahan from Rutgers to Oxford
Jeff McMahan (ethics, applied ethics) at Rutgers University, New Brunswick has accepted the White's Chair in Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, to start this fall.
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A bit more on Hobby Lobby
I expanded my earlier posting, for those who might be interested, but let me correct a few mistakes about the decision I've been seing on social media from other philosophers: 1. The decision does not hold that corporations are people with free exercise rights. It holds that closely held corporations, e.g., the family-owned businesses who…
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New Books in June
Authors and/or publishers kindly sent me these new books in June: Aboutness by Stephen Yablo (Princeton University Press, 2014).
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The new completely meaningless Google Scholar metric making the rounds
Several readers have sent this, but since it doesn't control for frequency of publication, or the size of each volume, its results are worthless. For example, Journal of Philosophy publishes about 24 articles per year; Synthese in recent years has published 150 articles or more per year. (That Phil Studies comes in 2nd is more…
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Communists are Christians says Pope
Nietzsche would have agreed, but I don't expect the U.S. Supreme Court to. (Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)
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Shorter Hobby Lobby
Owners of a closely held corporation, like non-profit organizations, can be exempted from the requirement of paying for provision of at least four kinds of post-conception contraceptive drugs/devices as required by the Affordable Care Act if they have a sincere religious belief that life begins at conception, since the government can, in any case, just…
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Kripke Archives to CUNY Grad Center for at least the next 15 years
News release here. (Thanks to Michael Devitt for the pointer.)
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Slate business columnist: now’s the time to go to law school
A plausible analysis, consistent with other forecasts.
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When can religious believers (mainly Christians) break the law in the US?
We're about to find out tomorrow in a major decision by the super-legislature known as the U.S. Supreme Court. My colleague Geof Stone has a good explanation of what's at issue.
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Bentham on sex and sexual liberty
A brief account. UPDATE: Philosopher Piers Turner (Ohio State) writes: "In light of your post on Bentham on sexual liberty, I thought you might be interested in this often-missed entry from a diary J.S. Mill kept for a few months in 1854 (when he thought he might die soon and wanted to see 'what effect is…
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Some legal questions about Ludlow’s lawsuit
A number of readers and friends have expressed puzzlement about how Ludlow can sue a colleague and a student for defamation regarding statements they made reporting alleged sexual harassment and related wrongdoing by Ludlow. In cyberspace, I've seen a number of people assert that such statements are "privileged," and so the makers of those statements can't…
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An entertaining interview with Judge Posner
Here. An excerpt: I've changed my views a lot over the years. I'm much less reactionary than I used to be. I was opposed to homosexual marriage in my book Sex and Reason, published in 1992, which was still the dark ages regarding public opinion of homosexuality. Public opinion changed radically in the years since.…
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The category of “Cognate faculty and philosophers in other units” for PGR purposes
I realize that the earlier call for corrections should have been clearer about the meaning of this category, so let me set out more explicitly the rules for inclusion and exclusion that we've used for a number of years: 1. Cognate faculty are faculty at the university (not elsewhere) who are available to work with…
To be worth using, a detector needs not only (A) not get very many false positives, but also (B) get…