May 2024
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Trump, a lifelong de facto criminal, now a de jure one
Thank goodness the New York prosecutors knew what they were doing, and secured a conviction against the monster child, now making him officially a convicted felon. A quick jury verdict is almost always a finding of guilty, and this case was no different. The monster child will appeal, and who knows, the conviction might be…
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Cambridge University Press now asking authors whether they want to license their publications for LLMs
Curious to hear what readers think about this development. A law professor elsewhere (who published a book with CUP a few years back) shared the email he received from the press: Following developments in artificial intelligence (AI) during 2022 and 2023, Cambridge University Press has begun to receive content licensing requests from providers of generative…
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Miranda Fricker’s Whitehead Lectures at Harvard…
…on "Bernard Williams's Historical Self-Consciousness" are available here and here. Professor Fricker's talk at the Williams conference in Lund several years ago was excellent.
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Why are philosophy departments so good about disclosing job placement of PhD graduates?
I told this story back in 2008, but some recent chatter on Twitter made me think it's worth repeating: Colleagues in other fields are often impressed by how much information about job placement philosophy departments now make available on their web sites. It was not always that way, alas. About six years ago [i.e., before…
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Job prospects are bad in academic philosophy, but they’re terrible in academic German
This is an anecdote, but the data I've seen confirms it. A German PhD graduate from here from awhile back, now in the private sector, told me there were only four German jobs in the U.S. last year. Two of them were for what this graduate called "Afro-Deutsch," a "field" I did not know existed…
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Harvard to adopt Chicago’s Kalven Report, after getting burned by pontificating administrators this past fall
That's the good news. The bad news is that two Harvard professors (including philosopher Alison Simmons) felt the need to try to pretend what their committee recommended was different from the Kalven Report. Just reading the latter makes clear how inapt their characterization of it is–it stood for a lot more than "neutrality." It was…
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“Beat AI” from PhilPapers
Philosopher David Bourget writes: I'm writing to invite you to check out Beat AI, an online game for philosophers that I just released with the PhilPapers team. Our aim with this game is to collect data that will allow us to train philosophy-aware AI models, which will allow us to improve search on PhilPapers. You…
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Another journal that can’t follow its own procedures: the case of “The New Bioethics”
I had never heard of this journal previously, and I can't imagine anyone wanting to submit to it (unless the article is utterly anodyne) in light of its recent misconduct. Briefly: Dr. Perry Hendricks, a recent PhD in philosophy from Purdue University, submitted a paper to a special issue on the end of Roe v. Wade;…
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Diversity and viewpoint diversity: from Weber to Haidt
This CHE essay was quite interesting; an excerpt: Where did viewpoint diversity come from? In the 2010s, American social psychologists began to argue over how to deal with the fact that most of them were liberals (in the American sense) and looked at human social behavior and cognition through that ideological lens. The quarrel had…
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Blast from the past: Three cultures of Facebook
Back in 2016, with reader discussion.
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APA election results
Here. The VP elections (who will be next year's "President" of a division) are quite respectable (Harry Brighouse, Susan Brison, John Carriero), even in the dysfunctional Eastern Division. As I wrote more than a decade ago: The Eastern Division represents the extreme of [interest group capture], with the result that many philosophers no longer participate…
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, “Sure ‘Nuff ‘n’ Yes, I do,” 1967
The lead number on the eccentric Captain Beefheart's debut album, I find it quite a bit more likable than anything from the 1969 album for which he is "famous" (at least among diehard fans of the period), Trout Mask Replica: Feel free to add links to your favorite Captain Beefheart performances/songs.
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Who are the current members of the Oxford University Press Board of Delegates?
This seems to be a closely guarded secret, but maybe it is online somewhere. Any ideas?
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Quantum physics, free will, and determinism…
…at Scientific American, with contributions by philosophers Eddy Keming Chen (UCSD), Emily Adlam (Chapman), Alastair Wilson (Leeds), and David Wallace (Pittsburgh). More discussion welcome.
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“Transgender politics and academic witchhunts”
A video of the recent event at Cornell with philosophers Kathleen Stock and Rebecca Tuvel (earlier [link fixed]).
Giovanni Molteni Tagliabue (Italy) Rationalized and Extended Democracy – The REDemo Project. Foreword by Gilberto Corbellini. Firenze University Press 2023.…