December 2024
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Projecting next year’s USNews.com law school rankings
Derek Muller offers another prognosis, based on the existing formula and the public data. Fluctuations in reputation scores, which do occur, will change the final results. One thing we know from the past is that the "overall" rankings starts to influence the reputational survey rankings. Will this start to affect schools like Columbia and NYU…
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Specialty rankings, and how to use them
Two rules of thumb: (1) Do not think of them as ordinal rankings, even rough ordinal rankings: think of them as a list of programs that are worth investigating. You should certainly look at the rounded mean, the median, and the modes, but I wouldn't treat differences between groupings as particularly significant, unless it appears…
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The risks of neurotechnology
Philosopher Karina Vold and colleagues comment.
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The quiet bloodbath developing at Portland State University
Despite having a "feminist philosopher," Ann Cudd, at the helm, philosophers and other humanities scholars at Portland State University are not faring well. An academic there writes: Three long-term NTTF [non-tenure-track faculty] philosophers at Portland State University were notified on Friday that their contracts would not be renewed at the end of the current academic…
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Neurodiversity among philosophers
Philosopher Thomas Nadelhoffer writes: My collaborators and I are conducting research on neurodiversity in professional philosophers (and those training to be philosophers) and in the general population. Neurodiversity encompasses the varied neurological makeup of all individuals, but it is frequently associated with autism and other neurological or developmental traits like ADHD. Our plan is to…
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College Cost Reduction Act, coming soon
Here's a summary of the legislation's provisions, which originate from Representative Foxx's committee in the House of Representatives. Because the Congressional Research Service estimates the legislation will save nearly $200 billion over the next decade, it is sure to get through in a Republican Congress eager to extend tax cuts elsewhere. The savings will come…
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What should be done?
Adolph Reed comments in the wake of the electoral disaster: To the extent that the totality of politics, including among those who see themselves as the “left” or even advocates of a working-class agenda, has reduced to winning this election or preparing to win the next one, there’s no impetus to break with what passes…
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What’s happened to Pitt’s Philosophy of Science archive?
Philosopher Jeffrey Ketland points out to me that the URL, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/,  has turned into something else (the Aphasiology Archive!). Did the domain name registration expire? Anyone know?
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Amy Wax threatens to sue Penn if the sanctions are not lifted
Here's the lawyer's letter. The breach of contract claim is straightforward, and she should prevail on it given the AAUP principles to which the university has committed itself: as I've noted before, the University has made clear they are punishing her for her lawful but offensive extramural speech. The letter's claim of race discrimination strikes…
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Moving from at-home writing assignments to in-class writing assignments to prevent AI cheating
MOVING TO FRONT FROM FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16–FINAL RESULTS, PRETTY REMARKABLE! A philosophy friend on Facebook remarked that they were thinking of entirely replacing writing assignments that students would complete outside class with in-class writing assignments (essay exams, quizzes etc.). Many others chimed in that they had already done exactly that. Here's a poll for those…
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What happened to the Trump threat to democracy?
Interesting observations from political theorist Corey Robin: One fascinating phenomenon that I’ve been noticing in the last couple of weeks is how, despite Trump’s winning the election, a fair amount of both reporting and commentary in the media, including on the left, has not only fallen silent on the question of his authoritarianism and/or fascism…
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Gun, “Race with the Devil,” 1968
This British band had a top ten hit in the U.K. with this number, their only brief success–the Gurvitz brothers, the core of Gun, later formed Three Man Army, and then later in the 1970s teamed up with ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker to form the Baker Gurvitz Army. Feel free to add links to any…
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Links to earlier PGRs are currently not working…
…but that will get fixed. The priority for the editors was to get the full results of the reputational surveys out, given that some programs have mid-December application deadlines.
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Blast from the past: The five most common objections to the PGR
Back in 2012, but they still circulate, remarkably–no doubt because the critics aren't really concerned with methodological or epistemic reliability. Self-deception is remarkable.
I’m not sure whether an interactive, online logic textbook counts as an open-access philosophy book, but for those who might…