September 2019
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Sorry for the light posting this week…
….I've been in Brazil giving keynotes at various conferences. More next week!
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All fascists think alike: Hungary comes to America
Hungary shut down gender studies, now the federal government here would like to control the content of Middle East Studies. The good news is that the federal government has little direct control over higher education, which is either private or in the hands of the state; they targeted this particular program because of its dependence…
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Blast from the past: Linda Alcoff and the “Climate for Women” fraud
Still amazing after all these years.
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Cross-cultural normative philosophy…
…at the Pea Soup blog. It looks like it will be mostly about Chinese philosophy to start. As I've learned more about Chinese philosophy, I've been struck by how much of it makes the same kinds of mistakes as the mainstream of the Western tradition and has a tendency to be "ideological" in roughly the…
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Gill from Arizona to Edinburgh
Michael Gill (ethics, history of ethics), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where he will start in the 2020-21 academic year.
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Emory Law School moving to fire a tenured faculty member who mentioned the “N-word” (he didnt use it)
What a disgrace, this simply isn't a firing offense at a serious university with real commitments to tenure and academic freedom. (The use-mention-distinction.)
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Walton’s theory of fiction as “make-believe”
Animated! This is pretty well done:
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Evolution does not select for veridical perception
Nietzsche knew this, and Stephen Stich made the point decades ago; now here's an evolutionary game theoretic explanation, which is nicely done. UPDATE: Philosopher Jonathan Cohen (UC San Diego) writes: just saw that you posted a link to Hoffman's latest repackaging of the no-selection-for-veridical-perception thing he has been circulating for years. I would have left…
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St. Cloud State is moving forward with firing tenured faculty, including in philosophy
I've been assisting one faculty member in finding legal counsel, and may soon be raising funds to help with this tenured faculty member's legal remedies. (The faculty are unionized, and the union will be filing its own grievances regarding these terminations.) I'll post more when I can, probably later in the week. This is appalling…
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Robert Paul Wolff on Trump’s firing of John Bolton
This is funny: "Bolton is a genuinely dangerous man, and I am delighted to see him gone. His summary dismissal highlights the odd but welcome fact that Trump is a dove. A belligerent dove, a bullying dove, a bombastic dove, an ignorant dove, a feckless dictator-loving suck up of a dove, but a dove nonetheless.…
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Unintentional haikus of the philosophers
Eliran Haziza, a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Toronto, has written a program to strip occurrences of "unintentional haiku" from corpuses of text. When run on the philosophers of our time, the program locates various gems,which Mr. Haziza kindly gave permission to share: > Snow falls, and is white;> the falling is…
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Employment lawyer with higher ed experience in Minneapolis area?
St. Cloud State University is poised to selectively fire tenured faculty in some targeted programs, pleading financial exigency, but in violation of its own rules and policies for such cases. If any reader knows of a good employment lawyer in Minnesota, please shoot me an e-mail (bleiter@uchicago.edu): time is of the essence! Thanks. UPDATE: Many…
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America is crazy, Florida edition
Jesus Fucking Christ. Next up: arm the children.
I disagree with the perspectives described here and wrote with my co-authors on the very real catastrophic potential of AI…