August 2022
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Where did aspiring law teachers in the first FAR graduate law school? (And why are there so few candidates in the first FAR?)
MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM AUGUST 22–MANY INTERESTING COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME The AALS has implemented a better search engine, which allows one to identify where candidates received their JD (thus excluding LLM and SJD graduates from the picture, which makes for a cleaner comparison between schools). Here is the distribution in the first FAR for…
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Philosopher’s Annual, 2021
Editor Patrick Grim has shared the results (I've added institutional affiliations). I'll just say I'm disappointed that only one history of philosophy paper was chosen this year; some other very good ones were nominated (and not only by me, I should add): The Philosopher’s Annual volume 41 from the literature of 2021 Louis…
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When the University of Sydney philosophy department “split” apart for political reasons in the 1970s
This article (from Honi Soit) has been making the rounds on social media; I asked one of the protagonists in these events, philosopher Michael Devitt (now at the CUNY Graduate Center) for his take on the article. He kindly gave permission to share the following: This is a good article in Honi Soit, and quite…
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In Memoriam: Sherry Colb (1966-2022)
I'm very sorry to report the untimely passing of Professor Sherry Colb, a longtime member of the Cornell Law faculty, who wrote widely on criminal procedure, evidence, feminist jurisprudence, and animal rights, among other areas. There is a memorial notice from her husband, the law professor Michael Dorf, here. UPDATE: An here's a nice example…
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Pollitt on Rushdie and offending the religious…
…at The Nation; an excerpt: The idea that religion should be protected from disagreement—that’s the problem. Why should the holdings of any faith be beyond critique, satire, even mockery? Religion is not a hereditary trait. It’s a set of ideas and behaviors and social practices. Those can be changed, and have been repeatedly throughout history.…
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Sociologist Randall Collins on the “big picture”
An interesting and wide-ranging interview about the social and economic developments associated with the period of the "Great Acceleration" (roughly the post-WWII period that has brought about the climate change catastrophe); an excerpt (with some resonaces with this): [B]efore 1940, high school graduates were a small elite and a sufficient degree for management jobs; as…
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Lam from Vassar to UC Riverside
Barry Lam, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College, has accepted a tenured offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside to focus, as he describes it, on "public-facing philosophy." Lam is the creator of the popular Hi-Phi Nation podcast that we have noted before.
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Chicago alumni and fellows on the law teaching market, 2022-23
MOVING TO FRONT FROM AUGUST 18 This post is strictly for schools that expect to do hiring this year. In order to protect the privacy of our candidates, please e-mail me to get a copy of the narrative profiles of our candidates, including hyperlinks to their homepages. All these candidates are in the first FAR…
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Class is not an identity
Instructive discussion by Daniel Burnfin, a recent PhD in Philosophy and German from University of Chicago, with whom I've had the benefit of discussing many issues in Marxist economics over the last couple of years. An excerpt from the beginning: Ascriptive identity is a category that names different types of relatively immutable properties of individuals,…
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Blast from the past: Statement in defense of the academic freedom of philosophers to discuss sex and gender
Back in 2019. Since Professor Stock was drummed out of the academy, there has been less bad behavior, although I'm sure the miscreants will rise to the occasion again should the opportunity arise. The only hopeful news is that some of those miscreants have departed the academy altogether in the interim.
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Best “general” journals of philosophy, 2022, via the Condorcet method and via an average of both methods
The results of the most recent poll (with 479 votes) are below the fold. Contrary to what I had thought, however, it turns out that there are ways for sophisticated Internet users to vote multiple times in this poll, just as in the earlier pairwise poll (where it is easy to do so, but one…
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When your publisher fails to market your book
Rev. Thomas Scarborough has found the perfect solution, which he kindly shared:
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Federal judge in Florida enjoins the blatantly unconstitutional “Stop Woke” act
The opinion is here. Judge Walker was not amused by Gov. Viktor DeSantis's outrageous legislation: In the popular television series Stranger Things, the “upside down” describes a parallel dimension containing a distorted version of our world…..Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down. Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech,…
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Acadmic Freedom Alliance calls for an end to the use of mandatory “diversity” statements in hiring and promotion…
…as a violation of academic freedom. (Randall Kennedy [Harvard] was one of the drafters of the AFA statement.) We discussed this issue previously in connection with some related ABA proposals, as well as the recent AALS decision to encourage applicants to submit diversity statements.
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A Condorcet poll of the best “generalist” journals of philosophy
MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY (SUNDAY) AFTERNOON–MORE THAN 300 VOTES ALREADY(THANKS!); THE POLL WILL REMAIN OPEN UNTIL TOMORROW. The poll is here. Condorcet is much harder to game than the pairwise poll scheme, and it is also difficult to vote more than once, since it tracks IP addresses. "Generalist" journals means journals that publish in…
Jacob Barrett, Ideal and Non- Ideal Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2026) Part of the Elements in Political Philosophy series. Permanently…