December 2019
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More on the NYT fraudulent “1619 Project”: an interview with historian James McPherson
Also interesting; an excerpt: Q. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead writer and leader of the 1619 Project, includes a statement in her essay—and I would say that this is the thesis of the project—that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” A. Yes, I saw that too. It does not make very much…
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On Hume’s idea that where philosophy and argument end, psychology begins
An interview with philosophical novelist Rebecca Goldstein at IAITV.
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Blast from the past: The report on Ward Churchill’s “research misconduct”
Back in 2007. Along with the Salaita case, this ranks as one of the most outrageous attacks on academic freedom and tenure in the last twenty years.
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Twin Earth’s XYZ revealed!
Classical philosophy scholar Catherine Atherton (UCLA) writes: I must share with you a vital new discovery: Hilary Putnam was quite wrong about XYZ. Here are its real constituents (item no. 79): No wonder we have never seen anything of the inhabitants of Twin Earth—they must be incapable of walking most of the time, let alone…
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An interesting interview with Adolph Reed…
…at Current Affairs. As usual, his perspective is an important one.
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Cracks in the Section 230 firewall for Internet service providers
This is good news for those of us who think Section 230 is an unmitigated disaster, responsible for the currently depraved state of cyberspace.
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“The History of Philosophy Reveals that ‘Great’ Philosophy is Disguised Moral Advocacy: A Nietzschean Case Against the Socratic Canon in Philosophy”
This paper appeared last year in Marcel van Ackern (ed.), Proceedings of the British Academy 214: Philosophy and the Historical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 185-199; the British Academy would not permit it to be posted until a year after publication, which time period has now elapsed. Here is the abstract: Instrumentalists think…
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Marshall Cohen (USC) on his Harvard classmate Stanley Cavell…
…at the LARB. He does a very good job capturing why so many philosophers (I among them) never warmed to Cavell. An excerpt: In 1980, [Cavell's book The Claim of Reason] was the subject of a symposium at the American Philosophical Society (at which I was present); the occasion proved a fiasco for Cavell. Barry Stroud,…
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In Memoriam: David L. Shapiro (1932-2019)
A longtime member of the Harvard faculty, Professor Shapiro was a leading authority on the federal courts. The HLS memorial notice is here.
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Are “transformative gifts” really transformative?
Law.com has a list of naming gifts to law schools over the last few decades, with the majority coming in the last two decades. Here are the biggest gifts, by year: 1998: $115 million to the University of Arizona 2001: $30 million to Ohio State University 2001: $30 million…
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The neoliberal turn in British higher education and the current staff strike
This is useful. The pattern described in Britain will be familiar to any observer of "public" education in the United States since the 1980s. The main difference is that a highly competitive "private" sphere of higher education has checked some of the worst excesses of bureaucratic meddling that weighs down on British academia. (Thanks to…
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Jimmy Hoffa, union man
This is a friendly and balanced look at Hoffa's achievements on behalf of truck drivers and other working people, prompted by the Scorcese film The Irishman (which isn't bad, but it's just standard Scorcese mafia fare and does no justice to Hoffa's actual work).
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Siena philosophy professor Emanuele Castrucci is a Nazi sympathizer
What an embarrassment. I am unsure of the legal status of pro-Nazi speech in Italy, although I would not be surprised if, as in many European countries, it is illegal. In any case, it appears that academic freedom in Italy does not protect extra-mural speech. There's more here (in Italian). UPDATE: Some of this maniac's…
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A critique from the actual left of the NYT “1619 Project”
Via Samuel Moyn, I discovered this powerful critique of the "1619 Project" series at The New York Times, ; from the introduction: “The 1619 Project,” published by the New York Times as a special 100-page edition of its Sunday magazine on August 19, presents and interprets American history entirely through the prism of race and…
Nietzsche’s Ecce homo, Notebooks and Letters: 1888-1889. Translation by Daniel Fidel Ferrer. ©2023 Daniel Fidel Ferrer. All rights reserved. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs…