June 2021
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President of Ireland gives address on academic freedom
Here. (Thanks to Mehmet Erginel for the pointer.)
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More on the COVID lab leak hypothesis
This looks to be a balanced evaluation of the evidence; bottom line is that the evidence doesn't rule out a leak from a virology lab, but the evidence is also compatible with a natural origin. (Thanks to Dr. Roger Albin for the pointer.)
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The Yale Law School spectacle continues
What an embarrassment, mostly for Yale, but there's also a fair bit of myth-making (both about Rubenfeld and to a lesser extent Chua, and, again, about Yale). I do suspect Heather Gerken's Deanship is not going to be long-lived. A couple of excerpts: Faculty members I spoke to have mixed feelings about it all. “There’s…
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Princeton classics majors no longer need to learn Latin or Greek
Bizarre. As a colleague on Facebook noted, if you want to read ancient texts only in English, you can major in philosophy or history or literature!
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The instinctive striving for “herd-organization”
The photo below reminded me of this observation of Nietzsche's (On the Genealogy of Morality III:18): "Out of a longing to shake off the dull listlessness and the feeling of weakness, all the sick, the diseased strive instinctively for herd-organization…."
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Philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) talks about her new book “Material Girls”…
…at the Brain in a Vat podcast. Unfortunately, when the podcast hosts posted the podcast link on the Teaching Philosophy Facebook page, some of the usual suspects–Rebecca Kukla (who now appears to go by "Quill" rather than Rebecca) (Georgetown), Mark Lance (Georgetown), Robin James (UNC-Charlotte), among others–protested its presence, and the page administrator Thi Nguyen…
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Interesting autobiographical interview with Amartya Sen…
…at the Harvard Gazette.
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Blast from the past: what counts as ‘service to the profession’ at your university?
A discussion, back in 2010.
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“The Stone” blog at the NY Times is dead
A reader points out that the new opinion editor at the NYT has cancelled the various special topics blogs, including the awful "Stone" blog that was ostensibly about philosophy. (For earlier coverage of the "Stone" spectacle, see here, here, here and here.) For every decent blog column it ran over the years, there must have…
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Congratulations to the University of Chicago alumni and Fellows who secured tenure-track positions this year
MOVING TO FRONT FROM APRIL 27–UPDATED This was a tough year for job seekers, with fewer schools hiring and the entire process being carried out remotely, but happily all our candidates on the market succeeded in landing tenure-track jobs, most with multiple offers. They are: Emilie Aguirre who will join the faculty at Duke…
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Great moments in live rock ‘n’ roll: Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Killing Floor,” 1969
Recorded in Stockholm, this is a pretty raw version of the blues classic, the one an unknown Jimi Hendrix played just three years before on a club stage in London, leading Eric Clapton to walk off after being upstaged:
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Blast from the past: Maintaining a personal web page while on the job market
A discussion in 2012. By now, such pages are pretty much required.
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A Marxist movement within the Democratic Socialists of America
Hard to quarrel with this: [T]he DSA is far from a mass workers’ party: our membership is dominated by the professional-managerial stratum, academics, and college-educated millennials. In too many chapters, this skewed class composition has hardened into an impenetrable middle-class subculture that reproduces the pathology and dysfunction of campus activism. The result is an aesthetically…
Don’t click the transcript – it’s a mis-transcription that makes Harvey sound unhinged. The bit of it that’s visible without…