May 2023
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More on American gun barbarism
According to this study, The likelihood of knowing a gun violence victim within any given personal network over a lifetime is 99.85% (99.8% to 99.9%). The likelihood among non-Hispanic white, black, Hispanic and other race Americans were 97.1%, 99.9%, 99.5% and 88.9% respectively. Email me if you've seen a similar study done for civilized countries…
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Why did Yale’s academic reputation score plunge from (tied for) 3rd to (tied for) 6th this year?
Was it because Yale led the charge on the boycott of USNews.com? Was it the accumulated effect of various embarrassing events, from judges boycotting Yale over free expression issues to the Amy Chua melodrama? Was it a reflection of a widely perceived decline in the strength of Yale's younger faculty compared to their elders? Was…
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Great moments in (extremely) obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Head Over Heels, “In My Woman,” 1971
Another fun find from reader Dave Wasser is this Michigan hard rock trio; this comes from their only album:
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In Memoriam: Thomas M. Robinson (1936-2023)
Professor Robinson, a longtime member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he was emeritus, was well-known for his work in ancient philosophy, perhaps most especially his Plato's Psychology (1970). The Toronto memorial notice is here. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Robinson or for those who…
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In Memoriam: Ian Hacking (1936-2023)
MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–SOME NICE REMEMBRANCES, MORE WELCOME Professor Hacking, who was emeritus at Toronto where he taught for more than two decades after stints at Stanford and Cambridge, was one of the most creative and influential thinkers in the history and philosophy of the sciences, broadly construed, over the last fifty years. …
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“Mass shooting tracker”
Here's a good resource for tracking how barbaric the United States is thanks to the gun craziness. A "mass shooting" is any outburst of gun violence in which four or more people are shot. The U.S. has nearly two mass shootings every day; in 2023 already, 376 people have been killed and more than 900…
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More on the new USNews.com ranking stew
Prof. Derek Muller (Iowa) breaks it down. Basically, the editors chose to downgrade the importance of "input" metrics (like LSAT and GPA), and dramatically increase the weight for output measures (like bar passage and employment), which now count for more than 50% of the overall score. In a way, this is salutary, since it will…
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Talk of eliminating or eviscerating tenure in Texas is already causing problems
From CHE: “People turn down jobs for lots of reasons, but from what these candidates told me, the uncertainty around tenure was a big factor in our failure to hire this year,” said Daniel Brinks, chair of the government department at the University of Texas at Austin. Brinks said he’d made job offers to six…
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USNews.com has outdone itself: it has made its law school rankings even more absurd than before!
There's not much to say about what is essentially a random ordering of law schools within tier groups. Any student who made a decision on the basis of small (and, in some cases, even large) ordinal differences in this year's travesty really should have a cause of action against USNews.com. (Some of the swings in…
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In Memoriam: Albert Borgmann (1937-2023)
A longtime member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Montana, Professor Borgmann established the field of philosophy of technology in the Anglophone world. There is an obituary here. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Borgmann, or who wish to comment on the signficance of his work. (Thanks to…
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America is not a civilized country
The latest easily preventable gun massacre should confirm that, at least for sapient beings. The odds, currently, of being massacred by random maniacs in America is relatively low: 1 in 16,0000. Of course, in civilized countries, the odds are more like 1 in a million. As we learn from decision theorists (they do serve a…
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Blast from the past: Beiser on Hegel
Back in 2012. The full interview is still available here.
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Timothy Williamson talks about the “philosophy of philosophy”…
…at Parker's Pensees. (Thanks to Aaron Preston for the pointer.)
We haven’t discussed this in our department (lower ranked PGR but tend to get highly competitive/very large applicant pool) but…