December 2018
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Martha Nussbaum interviewed…
…at The New Statesman.
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UCSD’s Manuel Vargas is both a good philosopher *and* very funny
I posted Clifford Sosis's interview with Professor Vargas last week, but since I had a very hectic week, I didn't get a chance to note any excerpts. Here's a few gems. Siblings? I had a younger brother and younger sister, although they are now both much older than I am, on account of my refusal…
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$33 million gift to U of Michigan Law School
The Michigan press release here.
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2018 JHP Book Prize to Adriaenssen
Jean-Luc Solere, Book Review Editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, kindly informed me that the winner of the 2018 Book Prize from JHP is Han Thomas Adriaenssen (University of Groningen, NL), for Representation and Scepticism from Aquinas to Descartes (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
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The latest Internet mob campaign of defamation and professional destruction
This time the target is a young social scientist, Noah Carl, who was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Cambridge, which the mob now wants him to lose. I've looked into Carl a bit since I first heard about this last week. He seems a person with foolish and reprehensible political views and an…
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Freedom’s Children, “That Did It,” 1971
South African band, almost entirely unkonwn outside the homeland, they began as a psycedelic band in the late 1960s, gradually transforming into a hard rock/progressive band in the 1970s. Here's a representative tune from that period:
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The Twitter cesspool
I was amused to discover that Kant had written about Twitter in 1784: “despite the apparent wisdom of individual actions here and there, everything as a whole is made up of folly and childish vanity, and often of childish malice and destructiveness.” (OK, actually he was talking about world history.) I’m thinking of giving up…
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Columbia students embarrass themselves, shutting down comic for “offensive” jokes
Pathetic. If his jokes aren't funny, don't clap and move on. But this is what happens when "inclusivity," which is profoundly subjective, is treated as an institutional objective.
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Can machines be creative?
Philosopher and cognitive scientist Margaret Boden (Sussex) and others discuss.
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Royal Society of New Zealand awards major grant to philosopher Watene
Dr Krushil Watene, senior lecturer in philosophy at Massey University, has been awarded a 2018 Rutherford Discovery Fellowship. The fellowship is awarded in support of her research on Intergenerational Justice, in which she is looking at how New Zealand Maori narrative describes obligations and decision-making involving other generations. Dr Watene’s Rutherford Discovery Fellowship, which provides…
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Diversity blather watch: APA edition
A well-known senior philosopher elsewhere shared with me the latest fund-raising pitch from the APA, prefacing it with this: "I renewed my membership this year, but I think it will be the last. Never would I think of making a contribution." Here's the latest from the APA, below the fold (and here's an indication of…
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Universities ranked by membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS) is the somewhat less "selective" cousin of the National Academy of Sciences, which covers not only the NAS fields, but also the arts, humanities and social sciences (the latter get some representation in the NAS but not much). (The AAAS is "more selective" than the comparable academies…
I would note that there are a lot of structural reasons why senior staff might produce less research than people…