December 2015
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Demand the resignation of the Democratic National Committee Chair…
…who has been doing everything possible to make sure that no one challenges Hillary Clinton. For the first time in several decades we have a serious Presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, who challenges the neoliberal, Reaganesque status quo that has ruled through both the Clinton and Obama Administrations. By holding very few debates, and scheduling them…
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Brian Bruya fiasco (i.e., “Bruyahaha”) update #1
Philosopher David Wallace (Oxford) has officially joined the call for Metaphilosophy to retract Bruya's incompetent hatchet job on the PGR: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8561203/bruya%20letter%20to%20editor.docx. (Prof. Wallace correctly confines his attention to the methodological flaws, but, as I've noted before (see the addendum), the defamatory content will also require retraction and public apology.) Meanwhile, a young philosopher in Canada writes: Very…
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Department of sick humor: Stalin edition
This is making the rounds on Facebook. No comment.
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Arkansas Law Prof Steinbuch sues his school over his Dean’s refusal to release admissions data
Blog Emperor Caron collects the pertinent news items.
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Living up to its reputation, alas, Oberlin students set a new standard…
…for unreasonable, unethical, and illegal demands, including summary firings of tenured faculty, promotion without review of other faculty, and (best of all) a salary for Black student leaders making these demands! (Link now fixed.)
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Jerry Dworkin breaks all records at the NY Times philosophy blog
His nicely done piece on lying the other day not only had 200,000 hits (that's a good two or three weeks for me!), but his clever poll had some 10,000 respondents, so many they had to shut it down! Once Peter Capatano–the Times editor that all the philosophers I know praise for his editorial help–turns…
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Blog advertisting update
There was an explosion of purchases since the last update a few weeks ago. As of now, the top spots on both sides are booked until May, when things open up again. January is fully booked, though, as in the past, I will offer 4th from the top spots for $450 for those who have…
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What can we learn from the Brian Bruya/Metaphilosophy fiasco?
Now that David Wallace (Oxford) has destroyed the purportedly data-driven analysis in the Bruya critique of the PGR (and here), confirming with damning details the crux of my initial criticisms and adding several other important criticisms, what are the takeaways from this sorry episode? I begin by observing that anyone who actually read the first…
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Note to readers about the site-stealing ads popping up
A number of readers have reported that go.goadvs.com sometimes redirect readers from the blog to its ads. If you go "back" on your browser you can usually clear it quickly. I've notified Typepad, and we'll see what we can do to fix this in the next day or two. My apologies for these interruptions, and thanks…
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More on the battle over tenure in the University of Wisconsin System
90% of faculty surveyed said they would leave if tenure were replaced with "renewable contracts."
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The class system is alive and well at Oxbridge…
…as a new government report reveals. Are they missing something? Thoughts from readers?
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Brian Bruya’s attack on the PGR is even a bigger fraud than it first appeared to be
Philosopher David Wallace (Oxford) has expanded his analysis; I will just excerpt one of the new points he makes: Without comment, [Bruya] excludes from the survey all features of the PGR concerning the world outside the USA. Since 87 of the PGR’s 303 evaluators had current affiliations at non-US institutions, this discards a non-trivial amount of…
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Boston Review’s “top 15” articles of 2015
Here, with links. Some are ones we had occasion to note during the year, others look intriguing.
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Bruya doesn’t speak for scholars of Chinese philosophy
This should really go without saying, but no one should assume that Brian Bruya's incompetent hit piece on the PGR represents the views of all those (or even any of those) who work on Chinese philosophy (a field that I personally wish were better represented, since I have always found work in the area I've read by P.J. Ivanhoe,…
Sorry, in the *20* years since it was published.