March 2026
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Deciding Between Admissions Offers: The Importance of Visiting/Talking With Current Students
MOVING TO FRONT FROM LAST YEAR (SINCE TIMELY AGAIN–originally posted March 6, 2009) Applicants to PhD and MA programs are now receiving offers of admission and, if they are lucky, are beginning to weigh choices between different departments. I want to reiterate a point made in the PGR, namely, that students are well-advised to talk to current students at…
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Radzik from Texas A&M to Binghamton
Linda Radzik (ethics, philosophy of law), Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Tony Reeves, the Chair at Binghamton, tells me that their “Philosophy, Politics and Law” program has 564 majors currently, which is remarkable! (There are…
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LLMs and graduate education in philosophy
A philosopher elsewhere (who does more formal work) writes: [S]ince publicly available LLMs significantly reduce a lot of mechanical writing labor (great example: those who write in LaTeX needn’t spend hours and hours trying to code a complicated diagram, since even the medium-grade LLMs do it quickly and, with minimal back and forth, fairly accurately),…
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Tucker “I’m a Nazi, are you?” Carlson comes clean
Seriously, could one be any clearer? What a scumbag (that’s a technical term for those who flirt with Nazism). The much harder question here is how scary is this. Combined with the rise of the Hispanic Nazi scumbag Nick Fuentes, I’m beginning to think it is very scary.
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NYU Abu Dhabi closes its campus (for the time being I assume)
This is dramatic, but seems sensible given the war of aggression by the U.S. against Iran. Information from faculty or students there is welcome (please use a real email address, but otherwise you may post anonymously). Are people leaving the country, merely staying off campus, or something else?
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Today in Trump’s threats to commit war crimes
What a disgrace to humanity this man is.
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Chinese philosophers publishing in Anglophone journals in 2025
Philosopher Jinze Liu (刘金泽), who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Baoji University of Arts and Sciences, has compiled lists on his influential WeChat platform here and here. (Some of these Chinese scholars are now working in the U.S.)
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More on “left” moralizing
A propos last week’s post, this remark from Jake McNulty’s very good book on Marcuse (in my Routledge Philosophers series) is also apt: A final observation: Marcuse’s profound investment in psychoanalytic thought appears to have no parallel among the analytic critical theorists [e.g., Haslanger, Manne, Stanley]. In leftist thought and practice, psychoanalysis has often served…
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Texas A&M Law “on the move”
I’m not talking about its much-improved USNews.com rank, which may help with student recruitment, but doesn’t mean anything. I’m talking about the faculty hiring bonanza that has seen the recruitment in recent years of William Sage (health law) from UT Austin, Neil Siegel (constitutional law) from Duke and, most recently, Larry Solum (constitutional law &…
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Fraser on Habermas
Interesting, and a useful synoptic overview. I, of course, agree with her that Habermas is the one who finished off Critical Theory. She does not comment on the fact that discourse ethics was always predicated on a highly implausible theory of meaning and language use. UPDATE: A reader points out, fairly, that this comment by…
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Twitter redux
Since I changed blog platforms, I’ve been back on the Twitter/X platform to try to get the word out about the new URL for the blog. This has reminded me, alas, of my prior observations about Twitter, all of which remain true unfortunately. Interacting with the members of the Strauss cult in recent days brought…
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Law professors write to the dishonorable Brendon Carr…
…the FTC Chair who is neither a public servant nor a good faith actor, or this letter would not be necessary.
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Blast from the past: A tough poll question to answer
Back in 2009, but timely again.
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Advertising update
After a slow start to the new blog site, traffic has returned to about 275,000 page views per month, which is almost back to the levels of the old blog site. (The counter on WordPress is different than what I used at Typepad, which seems to have picked up more bots, but I’m unsure). Thanks…
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The rapier wit of members of the Strauss cult: Alex Priou edition (UPDATED)
The Strauss cult may be mostly dead in political science departments, but it lives on on Twitter/X. Predictably, my saying out loud what philosophers always say about the “master” riled up the faithful on social media. A highlight was someone named Alex Priou, who teaches at the University of Austin (not the real university in…
You’re right, that’s my mistake. Because the two incidents occurred a couple of months apart, I guess they often get…