December 2018
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Hard Stuff, “Hobo,” 1972
Guitarist John Du Cann and drummer Paul Hammond left the Atomic Rooster to form this very good, but short-lived melodic hard rock outfit, which enjoyed some modest success in the U.K. This is a great tune from their first album:
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Tilburg’s Sander Verhaegh talks about Quine and naturalism in an interview…
…at 3AM. I was amused to learn that the orignial subtitle of "Epistemology Naturalized" was "The Case for Psychologism."
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Federal judge permits plaintiffs against the Trump gangster family to proceed anonymously…
…since the monster-child is, well, a monster-child. Remarkable–not the decision, but that it is so clearly justified in this instance.
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Stephen Walt on the withdrawal of American troops from Syria
The realists were right about the Iraq War, and right about this I suspect.
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More on philosophy at Hull…
…in The Guardian.
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Yale Law School may be failing democracy, but others beg to disagree
Blog Emperor Caron collects some responses to the piece Professor Simkovic noted the other day. I'll have my own response to Professor Moyn's melodramatic piece, but probably not until the New Year.
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Mattis and the monster-child and Syria
So the last emotionally mature adult has left the monster-child's cabinet. If he left over the decision to withdraw the troops of the imperial army form Syria, then I have less sympathy for his decision. Mattis may be an adult, but he is still a victim of the ideology of his time and place. I…
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Ludlow on Stanley on “How Fascism Works”
It's fair to say that "Peter Ludlow did not like Jason Stanley's book," but I'm not sure what excerpt would be adequate to the substantive issues raised.
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“The Truth is Terrible” (Nietzsche on the aesthetic “justification” of existence)
This paper, which has been making the rounds for quite awhile is finally out in the fall issue of Journal of Nietzsche Studies, for those interested.
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More on the situation of philosophy at Hull
Philosopher Nick Zangwill, who holds the Ferens Chair in Philosophy at Hull, writes with more information: The current situation in Hull is that the final decision concerning whether or not to suspend the Single Honours Philosophy program has not yet been made, but will be made some time in the new year. Nevertheless, many of…
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A conversation with Charles Taylor…
…at Harvard, led by Michael Rosen. Taylor is one of those thinkers who enjoys a better reputation outside Anglophone philosophy, than within: partly it is a matter of his philosophical and intellectual sympathies (e.g., his interest in Hegel, his antipathy to naturalism), and partly a matter of the quality of his arguments when he engaged…
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“I fit the description…”
A college professor recounts his encounter with the police.
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Samuel Moyn (Yale): Law schools are too focused on public law to serve the public interest (Michael Simkovic)
In a thought provoking essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Samuel Moyn argues that law schools' focus on judge made law in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, is counterproductive especially when justified on ostensibly progressive grounds. Offline, Professor Moyn suggested that, to better help students understand how the legal system influences…
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Academic hierarchy watch: which will be the “top” American philosophy departments of the 2020s…
…assuming the monster-child doesn't kill us all, of course. In the 1950s, Princeton became a major presence in American philosophy, while Yale and Johns Hopkins entered periods of decline. In the 1960s, Pittsburgh and MIT arrived on the scene, and so did Rockefeller at the end of the decade. In the 1970s, Rockefeller shuttered mid-decade,…
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Northwestern merely hosts crank evolutionary psychologist as a “visiting scholar”…
…but thousands of Northwestern students still want him evicted from a campus that doesn't pay him, and merely affords him a space for research. Northwestern Provost Jonathan Holloway does not cover himself in glory here. While he states, correctly, that the crank will not be evicted from campus, he also states that Kanazawa’s “scholarship presents…
With regard to the paper, it should not be much of a surprise that my views have substantially evolved over…