July 2022
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: The Gods, “Farthing Man,” 1968
We've featured this British band (that included Ken Hensley and Lee Kerslake in their pre-Uriah Heep days) before, but this tune, from their first album, may be my favorite:
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Reed on Black Lives Matter
Here; bracing, no-nonsense stuff as usual. An excerpt: There never was a coherent politics there; nor was there any objective reason to assume there could be—especially considering that it was always a wan replay of Black Power in its faith that a generic slogan and some, often Potemkin, street action could generate a mass movement,…
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A free online introduction to utilitarian moral theory…
…courtesy of a leading young utilitarian moral philosopher Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami). Strong endorsements for this resource, as well, from leading philosophers!
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Ireland’s experience with a constitutional abortion ban
Interesting piece at NYRB (behind their paywall, however); an excerpt: In 1985, after the Eighth Amendment [banning abortion] had passed, 3,888 Irish women were recorded as having abortions in Britain. By 1991 the number was 4,154; by 2001 it was 6,673. The numbers began to diminish somewhat thereafter, but only because Irish women were finding…
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Richard Marshall interviews Charles Travis (Porto)…
…at 3:16 AM. An interesting bit: One reason I don’t see Frege as a philosopher of language is that he explicitly says that is not his topic. It seems to me that for a long time now (probably since the Vienna Circle, but I suspect much longer than that) philosophers have tended to see too…
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A new pairwise comparison poll: specialist journals that publish the best articles in moral and/or political philosophy…
MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–SEE UPDATE …both theoretical and applied. Note that you can choose "I can't decide," and then are given several choices, such as "don't know enough about either" or "think they're both the same" etc. ADDENDUM: As some readers have poitned out, some journal names are rather similar. For example, Social Philosophy…
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Fetterman, the Democrat for Senate in Pennsylvania
You have to like a candidate whose "first" issue is a pro-union message. Fetterman is basically a social democrat, like Bernie Sanders. Fortunately, he's younger than Bernie, and he is also very social media savvy. He's also very down to earth, which probably has something to do with how this unconvential politician made it to…
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Why try to rank journals, even in this unsystematic way?
A senior philosopher with tenure expressed puzzlement (on Twitter, of course) about these rankings. A junior philosopher responded: For those of us whose professional futures depend on the snap judgments of people reading 100s of CVs, it is really important to have a rough idea of where people tend to rank different journals. Amusingly, this…
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Canadian academic freedom organization challenges mandatory “diversity” statement at McGill University
The letter here concerns a search in computer science. I don't know what the relevant law is governing the use of such statements in Canada; in the U.S., they are pretty clearly instances of unlawful viewpoint discrimination (despite the shoddy arguments of some dissemblers to the contrary!). Those knowledgeable about the relevant Canadian laws are…
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Best “general” philosophy journals, 2022
So with not quite 1,000 participants, and nearly 90,000 votes on comparisons cast, here are the top 25 (the score in parentheses reflects the odds of the journal prevailing in a comparison): 1. Philosophical Review (89) 2. Nous (87) 3. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research (86) 4. Mind (85) 5. Journal of Philosophy (84) 6. Australasian…
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Narratives that engage the emotions, not arguments, are more effective at producing charitable behavior
Interesting study, confirming what all Humeans and Nietzscheans already suspected. As Nietzsche quips (in Twilight of the Idols), "Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect." UPDATE: More thoughts, on Twitter, from philosopher Matt Lindauer (Brooklyn Coll/CUNY). (Link now fixed.)
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A new survey on the best “general” philosophy journals
The last survey was in 2018. This new survey uses the pairwise comparison method. "General" here means journals that publish in several different areas (if not all of these): e.g., value theory, metaphysics & epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of logic, history of philosophy. If this works, I'll run some more pairwise comparison surveys about…
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll, The Third Power, “Like Me Love Me,” 1970
Another heavy number from the Detroit trio we featured a few weeks ago:
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Philosophical writing with a “moral” or “political point” is now almost exclusively written for academics…
MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 20–SOME INTERESTING COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME …but that was not always so. Mill, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Marx, Aristotle et al. were not writing for other academics (in some cases, the category "other academics" did not exist). How has this changed philosophy with a moral or political point (including moral and political philosophy),…
To be worth using, a detector needs not only (A) not get very many false positives, but also (B) get…