February 2026
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Profiles in real courage: Sophie Scholl (and the “White Rose” student movement)
These young people paid with their lives for opposing the monster Hitler and the Nazis. She and her brother are really quite remarkable.
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Colin McGinn on philosophers throughout history
He’s a mysterian about philosophy itself it appears. ADDENDUM: Perhaps not!
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Hey “guys,” get a load of this!
Sent out by a senior philosopher at a major department in the UK to TAs: What I don’t understand is why this senior professor didn’t just tell the student that “guys” in colloquial spech is not gender specific.
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Texas war on academic freedom: University of Texas edition
Regents approve new policy “requiring its universities to ensure students can graduate without studying ‘unnecessary controversial subjects’….The rule also requires faculty to disclose in their syllabi the topics they plan to cover and adhere to the plan, and says that when courses include controversial issues, instructors must ensure a ‘broad and balanced approach’ to the discussion.”…
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Johnathan Bi interviews Rachana Kamtekar…
…about Plato and living well.
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In Memoriam: Malcolm Budd (1941-2026)
Professor Budd, who was the emeritus Grote Professor at University College London, was best-known for his work in aesthetics, but had wide-ranging philosophical interests, ranging from philosophy of mind to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. There is a bit more about his work and career at the British Academy page. I never met Professor Budd, but was…
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More on recent “grounding” formulations of legal positivism that exclude Hans Kelsen
Scott Shapiro did the most to popularize a misleading way of describing legal positivism. (The mistake derives from Greenberg and Gideon Rosen, but Shapiro’s 2011 book helped make it common among American legal philosophers, most of whom are not burdened by knowing anything about the history of the subject and, in many cases, have never…
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This is what the rule of law looks like
Federal judge in West Virginia blasts ICE tactics: Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without…
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Today in Trump’s violations of international law and human rights
What they’re doing to Cuba and its people probably qualifies.
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Deputy AG in New Jersey acknowledges the federal government violated more than 50 court orders!
She claims the violations were inadvertent. She’ll probably be fired for acknowledging the truth. Until a federal court starts putting some Trump administration officials in jail for contempt, this lawlessness will continue.
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Korsgaard’s 2022 Dewey Lecture now available…
…at the APA website.
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State Rep. James Talarico, candidate for Senate in Texas, on the Colbert show
CBS didn’t air it, over fear of persecution by the FCC, which has all of a sudden discovered the “fairness” doctrine again. But the show is on YouTube: Talarico is way too religious for my taste, but this schtick may work in Texas. And generally, he articulates the Bernie Sanders line about what ails the…
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Frithjof Bergmann and “New Work”
When I was applying to PhD programs as an undergraduate at Princeton, with an interest in German philosophy, especially Nietzsche, my very kind senior thesis advisor T.M. Scanlon told me that the late Walter Kaufmann’s favorite student was Frithjof Bergmann at Michigan. Raymond Geuss, from whom I was taking a course on “Marx, Nietzsche, Freud,”…
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“The finance industry is a grift”
(MOVING TO FRONT, THIS MAY NOT HAVE PUBLISHED PROPERLY THE FIRST TIME) It’s not every day that the NYT publishes an article by an economist arguing that one of the main industries in NYC is a “grift.” Since many law professors study this “grift,” I’m curious to hear why the author is wrong or right.…
The irony here is that both Ben and Paul are fighting the wrong battle — like dinosaurs before the meteor…