October 2024
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In Memoriam: Ted Honderich (1933-2024)
MOVING TO FRONT FROM SATURDAY (10/19/24) Emeritus Grote Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London, where he spent most of his career, Professor Honderich wrote widely on consciousness, free will and determinism, punishment, and other topics, and achieved particular notoriety late in life with his work on the justification of terrorism. …
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“On becoming an historian of philosophy”
Reflections from Margaret Atherton in her APA "Dewey Lecture" (this is from 2017, but still interesting!).
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NY law firm drops client, Columbia lawprof Katherine Franke, when her views attract public criticism…
…and the partner who was representing Professor Franke quits the firm, while Profesor Frank has filed an ethics complaint with the NY Bar. Pretty slimy way to treat a client!
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Trump and the rhetoric of fascists
Some useful examples (although Stalin was a tyrant, he was not a fascist, but the author has a bee in her bonnett on that subject).
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Another state flagship faces a budget crisis, and philosophy is on the “chopping block”
CHE has details; an excerpt: Christopher Vials, an English professor at UConn’s flagship campus in Storrs and president of its American Association of University Professors chapter, said 70 majors were identified as having failed to meet a threshold of 100 student completions over the last five years…. “It is anticipated that the end result for…
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10 most-cited Legal History faculty in U.S. law schools, 2019-2023 (2nd CORRECTION)
Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the ten most-cited U.S. law faculty writing on legal history for the period 2019-2023 (inclusive) (remember that the data was collected in late May/early June of 2024, and that the pre-2024 database did expand a bit since then). Numbers are rounded to the nearest ten. Faculty for…
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Great moments in rock ‘n’ roll (and blues) covers of traditional American folk songs: “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad”
From the pre-rock era, here's Woody Guthrie's rendition of something more like the "traditional" folk version: Of course, the song was also a favorite of blues guitarists and singers; here's my favorite, the instrumental version by the great Piedmont blues guitarist Etta Baker, in which you can hear inklings of the later blues rock versions:…
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When even Mitch McConnell thinks you’re “despicable”…
…you probably are.
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AI is “dumber than a cat”
MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 16–LOTS OF COMMENTS WORTH READING! VERY INSTRUCTIVE! So says this "AI pioneer," Yann LeCun: "LeCun thinks that today’s AI models, while useful, are far from rivaling the intelligence of our pets, let alone us. When I ask whether we should be afraid that AIs will soon grow so powerful that…
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David Lewis on his approach to philosophy, on his education, and other topics (link fixed now)
A very entertaining lecture from 1991 [click on the PDF button] (which I learned about via Phillip Bricker's recent review of materials from Lewis's Nachlass). The lecture contains a crisp statement of Lewis's "conservativism" in philosophy, which is characteristic of most of the Anglophone discipline: I am a conservative philosopher. Fear not, I don’t mean…
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The “marketability” of philosophy, once again
The Cardiff approach. One of the ironies is that the UK, with an almost entirely "public" university sector has adopted far more than the U.S. a market-based approach to higher education. (Thanks to Panos Paris for the pointer.)
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Bentham in defense of sexual pleasure
A nice video from UCL (Bentham's ideas inspired its establishment): a ADDENDUM: A reader points out the amusing, but unintended, implication of the parenthetical, above, so let me make clear that it was not Bentham's ideas about sexual pleasure in particular that inspired the establishment of UCL!
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If the monster child wins….
…this will be why. From economic historian Adam Tooze: "If we focus only on food and energy, the price shock of 2021-2 was worse than that in 1973. It is second only to the Iran-crisis shock of 1979, the crisis that put paid to what little chance Jimmy Carter had of reelection in 1980." The…
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Another PGR update
Professor Pynes tells me some more invitations will be going out for the surveys–this includes "bounced emails" from the first round, and some others that for various reasons weren't part of the invitations sent out last week.
Thomas Grundmann’s Expert Authority and the Limits of Critical Thinking https://academic.oup.com/book/62490 Saul Smilanksy’s Paradoxical Ethics https://academic.oup.com/book/62721