November 2018
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New Books in November
Authors and/or publishers kindly sent me these new books this month: The Problem of War: Darwinism, Christianity, and Their Battle to Understand Human Conflict by Michael Ruse (Oxford University Press, 2019). Philosophers in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching edited by Steven M. Cahn, Alexandra Bradner & Andrew Mills (Hackett, 2018). New Critical Thinking: What Wittgenstein…
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Philosophy degrees, national trends
Undergraduate degrees awarded stabilizes (while History and English continue to decline)–analysis from philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside).
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How the Zionist thought police work
A remarkable case study. That view cannot even be expressed in America.
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In Memoriam: John Tienson (1940-2018)
A longtime member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, Professor Tienson was perhpas best-known for his work in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. There is a memorial notice from the Memphis department here.
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Law Deans at Hastings, San Diego, and UCLA ask: why is California failing more bar takers than any other state?
It's a good question. It obviously isn't because the quality of law practice is better in California than elsewhere.
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Hobbes Studies: what should be the standard edition of ‘Leviathan’?
S.A. Lloyd (USC) and A.P. Martinich (Texas) have issued the following open letter, which seems to me pretty sensible: Noel Malcolm’s recent scholarly three volume Clarendon edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan is without question an immensely valuable resource for Hobbes studies. We scholars appreciate having the English and Latin texts face to face, along with Malcolm’s…
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Philosophy grad school dropout becomes YouTube sensation taking on the weird and reactionary corners of cyberspace
That's Natalie Wynn, recently profiled in The New Yorker. She had previously been a PhD student in philosophy at Northwestern, clearly in the "Continental" side of that department judging from some of the things she says about philosophy in her videos. She is genuinely quite funny at times (her humor is very clearly not "politcally…
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On the possible need for pseudonymous publication given self-censorship in academia
A different view of the issue du jour. (Thanks to Mohan Matthen for the pointer.)
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Markus Gabriel did not like Gregg Caruso & Owen Flanagan’s edited book “Neuroexistentialism”
For our on-going series of wicked book reviews, an excerpt: Caruso and Flanagan make lots of big claims as if they expressed generally accepted and scientifically grounded facts, such as "the mind is the brain" (p. 4) or that for most ordinary folk and many members of the nonscientific academy, the idea that humans are…
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Campaign of harassment and defamation of philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) continues…
…now because of this e-mail.
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Diversity blather watch
Law professor Noah Feldman (Harvard) makes several of the points I've made previously. (Thanks to Jake Fraser for the pointer.)
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Philosophy, and boredom, in prison
Philosopher Kirstine Szifris (Manchester Metropolitan) comments.
It’s not so much that “it won’t happen here”; it might, in the sense that it might be that in…