April 2026
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The Texas war on academic freedom: Texas Tech University system edition
An outright ban on any teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity! As philosopher Alex Byrne observed on Twitter: Want to write your thesis on the fraternal birth order effect? (Gay men tend to have more older brothers.) Nope. “Graduate theses and dissertations may only center on SOGI topics as a strictly temporary teach-out exception,…
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Louis Michael Seidman and Mark Tushnet have a podcast!
They disagree more than you might expect!
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Social science papers may lean “liberal”…
…but they do not lean “left,” and it would be nice if journalists were a little more careful about this. One entire social science discipline leans anti-left (i.e., pro-capitalist), while others may, at best, tend to be liberal in the parochial American sense. If only the social sciences really leaned left, we’d learn a lot…
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Three philosophers receive 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships
They are: Alan Baker (Swarthmore), Kate Manne (Cornell) and Gina Schouten (Harvard). (Thanks to a couple of readers who noted my inadvertent omission of Professor Baker when I first posted this.)
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The increasing risk of nuclear war
What’s wrong with this analysis, if anything?
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Chemero from Cincinnati to Vanderbilt
Tony Chemero (philosophy of mind and cognitive science), University Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Cincinnati, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Profesor Chemero’s work has been quite influential, so this is a major appointment for Vanderbilt.
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The Pope is “weak on crime”
No comment. But I do hope the malevolent buffoon in Washington DC continues attacking major religious leaders.
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A new “International Society for Moral Psychology”
Membership is currently free!
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Does AI degrade human comprehension and reasoning?
Law professors at the University of Minnesota investigated, and came up with a somewhat more optimistic answer than a lot of research–although careful structuring of how and when it’s used is probably needed to avoid negative effects. Comments from readers who actually read the paper are welcome.
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Viktor Orban is more psychologically mature than Donald Trump…
…which isn’t saying much, but at least he has conceded, and perhaps Hungary can have a humane future now. Let us hope the U.S. can.
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Peterson from Texas A&M to Southern Methodist University
Martin Peterson (normative ethics, decision theory), will be leaving his endowed professorship in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University, to take up a University Professorship at Southern Methodist University, with an endowed chair in “Ethics in Artificial Intelligence.” That’s a big loss for Texas A&M (and the second senior loss this year), but…
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deRossett from Vermont to Notre Dame
Louis deRossett (metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
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Economists (i.e., adherents of the failed empirical science of neoclassical economics) “once dismissed the AI job threat”…
…but now they don’t. As ideologists for capitalism, they, of course, had to resist the idea that AI would expose how little interest capitalist modes of production have in wage laborers–blue collar workers learned this decades ago, but now white collar workers are being lined up at the firing line. As I said in a…
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What is it like to be a philosopher? Felipe de Brigard edition
Here, courtesy of Clifford Sosis.
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It’s a good thing Ross Douthat doesn’t know any philosophy…
…or he wouldn’t have been able to write this silly book full of bad arguments for religious belief. It’s as though Hume, Darwin, Lyell, David Strauss etc. never existed with these folks.
As an international student, I honestly don’t know how good an indicator the GRE is, at least for students whose…