December 2025
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Philosophers who died, 2025 edition
Memorial notices for the following philosophers were included on the blog this past year: Barry Allen, Karl Ameriks, George Bealer, Tom Beauchamp, Paul Benacerraf, Margaret Boden, Harry Deutsch, Michael Friedman, Paul Kalligas, David Keyt, Jonathan Lear, Andrew Lugg, Alasdair MacIntyre, George Pappas, John Searle, Krister Segerberg, Lawrence Sklar, Joseph Ullian, Robert Paul Wolff. Memorial notices,…
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Mick Abrahams (1943-2025) memorial edition
Mick Abrahams was the original guitarist for Jethro Tull, but left after their first album, This Was, in 1968 because Abrahams wanted to push the band in a more blues rock direction, and Ian Anderson did not. On that first album, Abrahams did the arrangements for the instrumental “Cat’s Squirrel,” perhaps his most memorable contribution…
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Elise Stefanik: Good riddance!
A humorous farewell to a despicable politician.
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Most cited Anglophone philosophy books on Nietzsche according to Google Scholar
Only books with at least 600 citations are listed; citations are rounded to the nearest hundred, as before.
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Here’s the CBS episode on deportees to El Salvador…
…that Trump’s water girl Bari Weiss didn’t want you to see.
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“Grumpy Chinese Guy”
Somehow I fell upon this guy on FB (the link is to his YouTube page). He does sensible class-based analysis of various topics in the news, and he’s pretty good! Some readers may enjoy this.
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Here’s a little holiday cheer: really wicked book reviews!
Quite a collection.
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What we (i.e., University of Chicago Law faculty) are reading
Others may find this longstanding feature of interest.
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Most cited Anglophone books on Kant according to Google Scholar (CORRECTED)
I list only those books with at least 1,000 citations.
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Public service announcement
Discovered this on FB:
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APA announces Fall 2025 prizes…
…including the Barwise Prize, the Gittler Award, the Book Prize, and the Dewey Lecturers, among others.
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The allergy to “fascism” among some intellectuals posing as “sane” analysts of the contemporary situation
This is a good example, relying on an historian who apparently thinks that Mussolini was a fascist, but no one else really was. Here’s a different and more perceptive historian, Robert Paxton: Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity,…
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Most cited books of Anglophone moral philosophy in the last two hundred years (CORRECTED)
Once again, this is according to Google Scholar, rounded to the nearest 100. Email me with corrections and omissions. I list only those with at least 3,000 citations, and exclude works of applied ethics. I could not find any results for Harman’s The Nature of Morality on Google Scholar, but I imagine it would make…
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Most cited books in philosophy of science of the last century, according to Google Scholar (CORRECTED)
I list only those books with 3,000 or more citations. Please notify me of omissions or corrections.
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Struggling with addiction
In the wake of the horrible murder of Rob Reiner and his wife by, it appears, their son who had spent half his life struggling with drug addictions, the NYT runs a story about families dealing with addictions in their children. Predictably, one of the parents explains that addiction “is a disease.” Except it isn’t…
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