June 2026
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More criticisms of the “Boghossian Report” on the state of the humanities
This time from philosopher Richard Moran (Harvard), who makes some interesting points. Those following the debates about the report should read this.
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The super-legislature’s reign of terror
Too many awful decisions since last week, it’s hard to know which one to single out, but Michael Dorf at Cornell is good on today’s decision gutting independent federal agencies and “empower[ing]…a corrupt, vindictive narcissist whose preferred replacements for subject-area experts are sycophantic ignoramuses.”
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An interview with philosopher Rebecca Tuvel at CHE
Here, almost a decade on from the defamatory harassment of her orchestrated by the “usual suspects” in academic philosophy (Alcoff, Trott, Winnubst, et al. [see] . We first wrote about this misconduct here, and quite a bit thereafter. An amusing bit from the interview: Goldstein: Two hallmarks of the Hypatia crisis strike me as relevant…
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Lateral moves/retirements since the 2024 Philosophical Gourmet Report: 2025-26 edition
In addition to the separate posts announcing (generally tenured) faculty moves, I will keep a running list of all lateral moves (and retirements and deaths) not reflected in the faculty lists for the 2024 PGR (some moves that took place after the 2024 PGR were reflected in the faculty list, because the editors knew of…
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2026 Tang Prize in the “Rule of Law” awarded to…
…Professor Bruce Ackerman at Yale–an appropriate choice!
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Lazar from ANU to Johns Hopkins School of Government and Policy
Seth Lazar (applied ethics, philosophy and AI), currently Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, has accepted a senior offer form the new School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University (which is in Washington, DC, rather than Balitmore, where most of the university is located), where he will start this fall.
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Today in Trumpian authoritarianism: Syracuse edition
One story, how many others?
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Why AI companies are hiring philosophers
Amusing piece in The Economist. It would be nice if we had some actual figures on the number of philosophers being hired. Luciano Floridi “describes the scale of departures from philosophy departments as a ‘haemorrhaging,’” which is obviously nonsense: there are still far more philosophy PhDs than there are jobs, even if a handful are…
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UK higher education watch: Exeter threatening to cut 150 academic staff
So reports the BBC. I reached out to the well-known philosopher of science and biology, John Dupre, at Exter, who tells me he has received a possible redundancy notice, although he is already 80% retired. He adds: I expect I’ll go quietly to relieve the pressure slightly on people who need their jobs. I’m certainly…
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First there was the “Boghossian Report,” now there is the “Spode Report”
And it doesn’t mince words. In this case, the task was assigned to EJ Spode, “who assembled the following crack team of elite scholars to work as a totally independent group to address the issues raised in the charge: Somerset Maugham, Edmund Burke Junior, Joseph de Maistre, and Thomas Carlyle. Fortuitously, at the time the…
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An English professor responds to the Boghossian Report
Jonathan Kramnick, a philosophically-minded English professor at Yale, has an interesting response to the “Boghossian Report” which is worth reading. Professor Kramnick agrees with the Report that, “When scholarship becomes subordinated to extra-scholarly ends — when a field decides in advance what its findings must be and bends its methods accordingly — it ceases to…
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Trump’s “rolling coup”
Everyone should read this. Although Trump is a colossal screw up whose support is collapsing thanks to his incompetence, he has laid the foundation for massive political repression, for which the midterm elections seem the likely trigger given that the Republicans will lose in a free and fair election. UPDATE: A scenario for how the…
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Major ERC Grant to philosopher Alyssa Ney (LMU-Munich) for a project on…
…“The Nature of Quantum Reality.”
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“Law professors as plaintiffs”
A compilation, although it omits some well-known cases (such as Mullenix v. Texas, and Carson v. Texas).
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The demand for “philosophy of AI” in job ads is as huge as you thought it was
Based on this analysis by philosopher Charles Lassiter, more than 20% of job ads now mention AI. This is going to result in a lot of weak appointments, given how few philosophers really have expertise in this area.
I would note that there are a lot of structural reasons why senior staff might produce less research than people…