May 2021
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A great Bob Dylan story
Dylan turned 80 yesterday. This delightful story is courtesy of my old friend Tommy Williams, the rock musician whom I've mentioned before. He posted it on FB and gave permission to share it here: I was 9 and in the 4th grade [this would be the early 1970s]. Our local paper, Newsday, had a TV…
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25% of Americans think Trump is currently the “true President” of the U.S.
53% of Republicans believe that. On the other hand, 14% of the poll respondents aren't sure whom they voted for in the 2020 election, so go figure.
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3-week strike called at University of Liverpool…
…to protest the disgraceful behavior of the administration. (Thanks to Joe Cairns for the pointer.)
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New Infantilism meets apologists for Chinese authoritarianism
Check out the letter from a student group here at the University of Chicago protesting an invitation to Nathan Law, a democracy activist in Hong Kong, to speak. Mr. Law spoke without incident; the letter itself is a disgrace. UPDATE: The "student group" may not be an ordinary student group, it turns out.
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Nisenbaum from Boston College to Syracuse
Karin Nisenbaum (Kant, 19th & 20th-century Continental philosophy), currently an advanced Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Boston College, will become Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University this fall; she is likely to come up for tenure before long. (Frederick Beiser, a leading scholar of Kant and 19th-century German philosophy at Syracuse University, will be…
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Schechter from Indiana to Maryland
Elizabeth Schechter (philosophy of mind and psychology), Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, has accepted a tenured appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she will begin inf all 2022. This is the third tenured appointment at Maryland over the last two years…
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Helen Steward (Leeds) discusses free will and responsibility…
…with Ricardo Lopes at The Dissenter.
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Academic freedom at the University of Chicago
The situation for academic freedom at the University of Chicago is light-years better than (just to take some recent cases) the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill or the University of Toronto. At the same time, the University of Chicago has set for itself a higher bar for academic freedom than most universities. The clearest…
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The academic freedom scandal at the University of Toronto
Leslie Green (Oxford/Queen's U) comments.
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“The Dangers of Thought Experiments”
Roy Sorensen (Texas) discusses at Brain in a Vat.
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UIC John Marshall Law School to strike “John Marshall” from its name
Although the reason given is the historical John Marshall's racist views, I strongly suspect this will also have a positive effect on the school's peer evaluation scores in the USNEWS.COM rankings because of the well-known halo effect of school names on scores (better to be a law school at the "University of Illinois" than a…
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In Memoriam: Eddy Zemach (1935-2021)
MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–MORE REMEMBRANCES WELCOME A longtime member of the philosophy faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he was emeritus, Professor Zemach was well-known for contributions to aesthetics, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and other areas. I will add links to memorial notices as they appear. (Thanks to Alon Harel for informing…
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Great moments in live rock ‘n’ roll: Led Zeppelin, “How Many More Times,” 1969
Zeppelin manager Peter Grant generally kept Zeppelin off television programs, but this is rare video of a live recording for a Danish radio program of one of Zeppelin's best blues-ripoffs–complete with Jimmy Page breaking out the violin bow:
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More fallout from the attack on academic freedom and faculty autonomy at UNC-Chapel Hill
Here. I hope they can take some kind of collective action about this political interference into academic appointments. It is astonishing to see the attempts to rationalize this naked attack on faculty autonomy. The issue is not whether any particular observer thinks Hannah-Jones "deserves" this appointment; I myself have noted plenty of serious scholarly criticisms…
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Judge Spiro, at center of University of Toronto hiring scandal, found by Judicial Council to have made a “serious error” and the Judge expresses “remorse” for his error
(Earlier coverage.) From the public announcement: The Review Panel did find…that it was an error for Justice Spiro to raise such concerns [about the faculty candidate] in the manner he did. The judge properly recognized the mistakes he made and expressed remorse. The Review Panel found this error serious but that it did not warrant…
I wonder how feasible and time-intensive it would be to make it a standard policy check for undisclosed AI usage.…