July 2018
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New Books in July
Authors and/or publishers kindly sent me these new books this month: On Truth by Simon Blackburn (Oxford University Press, 2018). The Monarachy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at our Political Crisis by Martha C. Nussbaum (Simon & Schuster, 2018). Technic and Magic: The Reconstructino of Reality by Federico Campagna (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Sextus Empiricus: Against…
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$20 million gift to UCLA Philosophy…
…from the son of philosopher and longtime UCLA faculty member David Kaplan in honor of both his father and his mother, a clinical psychologist, also at UCLA. (The Kaplans' son made his money in real estate investing.) Apart from Johns Hopkins, this will probably make UCLA the best-endowed philosophy department in the United States. (My guess…
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Teaching “Critical Thinking” in the age of Internet falsehoods
Philosopher Jerry Dworkin comments.
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‘New Infantilism’ comes to The Nation
This is disgraceful (the abject apology, and the abuse of the language of "harm"), on a par with the misconduct towards Rebecca Tuvel by the former Associate Editors of Hypatia or the mistreatment of Tommie Shelby by the Society for Analytic Feminism. Adults would do well to remember John Gardner's comments on an earlier thread:…
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What a ‘no deal’ Brexit would look like: the case of food
This is extraordinary. On the plus side, properly prepared, Boris Johnson's carcass alone could probably feed a small village for a week.
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Great moments at the foundations of rock ‘n’ roll: Son House, “Death Letter Blues,” 1965 performance
Son House (1902-1988) was first musically active in the 1920s through the early 1940s (he was an influence on both Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters), before being rediscovered in the 1960s and returning to performing. (Here's a 1930 recording of the "Walkin' Blues.") Here's perhaps the most famous video of him from the 1960s, an…
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Applied epistemology: painting donkeys to look like zebras
Some Egyptian zookeepers have been reading Dretske. (Thanks to Nick Shackel for the pointer.)
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Edinburgh’s Michela Massimi interviewed…
…at 3AM. Another philosopher with an instructive trajectory into the field, one that testifies to the importance of the European project.
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Most pressing issues confronting the academic profession of philosophy in the US currently
MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 24–MORE COMMENTS WELCOME More than 1,000 readers voted; here were the top 9 vote getters (there was a drop-off thereafter): 1. Lack of tenure-track jobs (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices) 2. Erosion of tenure and closing of philosophy departments loses to Lack of tenure-track jobs by 469–453 3. Excessive…
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BrianLeiter.net updated
My personal page has been updated for 2018-19, with new additions under CV, talks, and former students, for anyone whose interested. Talks scheduled so far for 2018-19 will take me to Rome, Los Angeles, Boston, Stockholm, Singapore, Paris, Lund, and Genoa, among other places. If you're a reader, please introduce yourself if you are able…
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Hiring committees for 2018-19 may announce themselves…
….here, thanks to the good offices of Sarah Lawsky (Northwestern).
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Trump and Schmitt
This is an interesting analysis by legal historian Mark Weiner.
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Top 50 universities by membership in the National Academy of Sciences, 2018 (CORRECTED AGAIN)
The National Academy of Sciences is the even more selective "science only" cousin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. While it does elect faculty in the social sciences, its focus is on the natural sciences and the biological sciences, including those in and around medicine; any university with a good medical school tends…
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Trump is right that U.S. hostility to Russia is not productive
Worth remembering.
Georgy Maksimovich pointed me to this article in Russian: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/05/25/antisovetskie-filosofskie-kontratseptsii