April 2022
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Seven law professors elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences
They are: Richard Brooks (NYU), Guy-Uriel Charles (Harvard), Justin Driver (Yale), Lauren Edelman (Berkeley), Martha Fineman (Emory), Robert W. Gordon (emeritus, Yale and Stanford), and Dorothy Roberts (Penn). (I'll add as a point of personal privilege that I was pleased to see two Chicago alumni among the honorees: Professor Brooks graduated from the Law School…
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More on Russia, Ukraine and nuclear war
A propos yesterday's post, a reader sends along these quotes from "experts" about the likelihood of nuclear weapons being used–it is hardly reassuring. This scholar warns of the dangers of using Ukraine as a "proxy war" (as the U.S. has now admitted it is doing), and also suggests that ceding Donbas is one way to…
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More on Princeton’s wealth and the “reality on the ground”
A Princeton professor writes: Regarding https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2022/04/per-student-value-of-endowments-of-american-colleges-and-universities-2021.html , unfortunately you played right into the Princeton administration’s strategy of saying that life could not be better than being on faculty at Princeton. They have told me that for many years, as I struggled to make mortgage payments, to find time to advise dozens of senior theses and…
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Seven philosophers elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (CORRECTED)
MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY They are: Jeffrey Barrett (UC Irvine), Elisabeth Lloyd (Indiana), Jeff McMahan (Oxford), Nancy Sherman (Georgetown), and Linda Zagzebski (Oklahoma). UPDATE: Two non-Anglophone philosophers were also elected: Beate Roessler (Amsterdam) and M. Emanuela Scribano (Ca' Foscari). (Thanks to Stefano Bacin for catching the error of omission.)
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Per student value of endowments of American colleges and universities, 2021
The extreme inequality in resources is getting more and more dramatic. Here's some of what Princeton's gargantuan endowment (below the fold) buys for faculty: a teaching load of three courses per year; a $15,000 annual research and travel budget, but in fact faculty can get more money usually if they exhaust the budget; a semester…
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It’s really time for the U.S. and NATO to stop arming Ukraine, and cede the Donbas region to Russia, as they have already ceded Crimea
The reason is simple: we are sleepwalking into Armageddon: Putin has broken a post-Cuba taboo on threatening to go nuclear. That, in itself, puts us in new territory. Without most people being aware of it, the world is entering its most dangerous period since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The majority under the age of…
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Linguistic Society of America moves to adopt the Chicago Principles on Free Expression
Here. Will the American Philosophical Association do so? I'm skeptical, but let us see. ADDENDUM: Some of the comments that follow make clear that Linguistics is afflicted by the same mindless identity politics that afflicts philosophy:
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Some skepticsm about grouping Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch together philosophically
Philosopher Jennifer Frey (South Carolina) makes some very good points in this review essay of the recent books we have noted previously; some excerpts: On both accounts, each member of the quartet was able to reach her full potential as a philosopher because the Big Men on Campus—A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire,…
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Das from UCL to Toronto
Nilanjan Das (epistemology, Indian philosophy), currently Lecturer in Philosophy at University College London, has accepted appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Toronto was already probably the strongest program in the Anglophone world for Indian philosophy, but now there can be no doubt!
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Fugate from American U of Beirut to Florida State
Courtney D. Fugate (Kant, pre-Kantian German philosophy), currently Associate Professor of Philosophy and Civilization Studies at the American University of Beirut, has accepted a tenured appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University, where he will start in the fall.
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A change to the USNews.com ranking formula that would actually be salutary
The arbitrary adjustments to weightings and the like to one side, here's a change that would improve legal education and law school admissions: drop the median GPA as a factor. Not all GPAs are equal. A 3.9 in communications or education is inferior to a 3.5 in engineering or chemistry or philosophy or economics. Some…
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60% of the U.S. population has now had Covid
I've love to see the class breakdown on this. We all know the age breakdown, of course (my own father was an early victim of the Covid disaster in this country, which is wholly attributable to Trump and the Repugs). Recall this post from early in the pandemic. We hardly knew what was coming…
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Florida man, taking advantage of new “parental rights” law, asks school libraries to remove the Bible
Exactly right: "My objection to the Bible being in your public schools is based on the following seven points, offered for your learned consideration," Stevens wrote. Stevens proceeded to question whether the Bible is age-appropriate, pointing to its "casual" references to murder, adultery, sexual immorality, and fornication. "Do we really want to teach our youth…
Jacob Barrett, Ideal and Non- Ideal Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2026) Part of the Elements in Political Philosophy series. Permanently…