July 2022
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Nagel on Wittgenstein’s “Private Notebooks, 1914-1916″…
..in The New Statesman. (Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)
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Blast from the past: the Ward Churchill case, the First Amendment, and academic freedom
Here (2005), here (2007), and here (2009).
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On living in the midst of “gun culture”…
…in this case in Kentucky. Quite remarkable. (It may be behind the Washington Post firewall, however.)
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The Yale historian Timothy Snyder
Many readers skeptical of the realist interpretation of events in Ukraine (which I have emphasized, since they are the correct ones, as they tend to be everywhere) have pointed me to the writings of Snyder, an historian of Central and Eastern Europe at Yale. His writings have mostly struck me as naive (treating every bit…
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GPT-3 or Daniel Dennett?
Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) and colleagues are conducting an experiment.
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PhD application advice?
A prospective graduaute student writes: As an undergraduate student who is preparing to apply for graduate programmes in the UK and US, I thank you for founding the PGR, which has been a very helpful resource in the application process. Thanks as well for your blog, which often provides professionally and philosophically interesting materials. Here…
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Los Angeles returns beachfront property to descendents of Black family from whom it was stolen a century earlier
Under capitalism, this is exactly what compensatory justice demands. Affirmative action, in its original conception was also a version of this–although not as precise in identifying the injured parties–until the super-legislature turned it into diversity blather in 1978. Next year, the super-legislature will also put the "diversity" rationale to rest.
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A poll about Covid
MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY A lot has changed since Spring 2020 in terms of the Covid disaster. Academic readers are, as a class, more careful than most. I'm curious about the experience of readers of this blog with Covid, whether you've had it and how many times. If you were sick but couldn't get…
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Still more on Russia and Ukraine
A propos this, philosopher Jozef Müller (UC Riverside) kindly gave permission to share his interesting observations(I have not seen this point elsewhere): I just read the post on your blog about the cause of Ukraine conflict (lecture by John Mearsheimer). One thing I keep somehow not seeing in the discussions, his including, is the issue…
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Incredible Hog, “To the Sea,” 1973
British hard rock trio of the early 1970s, this is a pretty good tune from their one and only album:
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Columbia removed from USNews.com college rankings after questions raised about data reported
We previously noted a Columbia math professor who raised serious doubts about the data the university reported to USNews.com for its college rankings; now USNews.com has removed Columbia from its number 2 spot last year. The real scandal here is not what Columbia did or didn't do; it's that USNews.com makes no effort to audit…
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An update on philosophy at Potsdam: some reasonably good news!
The full update is here (earlier coverage); an excerpt: Before she left the college the Dean formally recommended that the philosophy program “be removed from provisional status once curricular work outlined in the alignment plan and a merger has been accomplished.” The curricular revisions referred to are the creation of a Philosophy of Justice course…
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“The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis”
MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–UPDATED WITH AN INTERESTING RESPONSE The EUI has made available a video of a recent lecture by John Mearsheimer (Chicago), which is a good antidote to the hysterical and moralizing nonsense that dominates American and much Western coverage of and commentary on the Russian war of aggression, even that by some…
All about class.