November 2023
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Crowdsourced “cancellation insurance”…
…for the "cancel culture" kind. This appears to be real!
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How “open access” turned into a cash cow for publishers
Oy veh! (Thanks to David Velleman for the pointer.)
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Philosophers in The Daily Mail?!?
And not for a social media brouhaha, but for a philosophical book on immortality (by Stephen Cave and John Martin Fischer)!
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Harvard Law Review on-line pulls article expressing “incorrect” views about Israel/Palestine conflict
Not a good look for Harvard!
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Speaking of the Wokerati…
…even broken clocks are right twice a day: It’s become increasingly evident to me that American adolescence and young adulthood — especially for those who wind up at elite schools — now happen within a specific kind of ideological atmosphere. It centers on a hard-edged ideological framework that has been spreading in high school and…
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Blast from the past: “Generation Wuss”
Back in 2014, in the early days of the "Great Awokening."
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Middle East Center at Penn prevented from showing film sponsored by progressive Jewish student group
More signs of the times. Penn has been under pressure from rich alumni to suppress speech critical of Israel. (This is not, strictly, an issue of academic freedom, but free expression. Only those with a scholarly discipline have academic freedom claims, and student affinity/political groups do not represent a scholarly discipline.)
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Those who know Trump best endorse him for President!
Obviously not. But we are living in America at an odd moment, to put it mildly. There are only two viable political parties in the U.S. One of them is so attached to power they will support a psychologically unbalanced, vaguely senile, Mafia Don, no matter what. This is one of those moments when American…
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“Pragmatist quietism” in metaethics
Philosopher Andrew Sepielli offers a kind of precis of his book on the subject. He writes: Morality is objective, but it neither requires nor admits of a foundation. It just kind of floats there, along with the evaluative realm more generally, unsupported by anything else. Parts of it can be explained by other parts, but the…
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Blast from the past: Oxford DPhil or American PhD?
A reader discussion back in 2013.
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Israel/Gaza links for November 27
This Al Jazeera columnist certainly hates Israel, but his observations are not without substantial elements of truth. Details are emerging about conditions for the hostages during their captivity by Hamas. Peter Beinart on "anti-Palestinian" bigotry. Gender-based violence as a "weapon of war" in the Hamas attack of October 7, from Physicians for Human Rights. The Israeli woman…
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Power-hungry philosophers: a puzzle
From today's Guardian, due to logician Joel Hamkins (Notre Dame).
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John Martin Fischer on the latest scientist’s foray into free will
Here; an excerpt with a couple of interspersed comments: The view that causal determinism is true is not new, nor is the view that this entails no free will or moral responsibility, but Sapolsky collates and marshals the evidence (some of it recent and cutting-edge) as it bears on these issues. The cumulative effect of…
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Billionaire anti-semite files frivolous lawsuit against media watchdog that points out the obvious
Story here. The only question, I suspect, is whether he and the lawyers get sanctioned for filing this lawsuit. I note that his regular lawyer, Alex Spiro of Quinn Emmanuel, had nothing to do with this lawsuit, probably for a reason!
Yale isn’t running an admissions cycle this year but we’ll be thinking about how to do things next year, and…