June 2026
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Philosophy at Dundee slated for elimination
There’s a petition in support of the program here. (Thanks to Don Sudduth for the pointer.)
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On the occasion of the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in my neighborhood
A different take on Obama, that makes some fair critical points. He was no progressive, alas. The way he has enriched himself non-stop post-Presidency has been particularly gross.
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll covers of blues songs: Budgie, “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” 1973
Budgie, the late great Welsh heavy metal trio, gets credit for (among other things) the best cover (to my taste) of the Big Joe Williams song from 1935:
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First the “book club” scam, now the scam of fake editors seeking to learn about your work (UPDATED with another example targeting a philosopher)
AI clearly generates many of the fake “book club” solicitations to authors of new books, and now there’s a new scam: fake editors of actual publishing houses (or impersonating actual academics) soliciting information about an author’s work. One giveaway in the cases noted: the “editors” used gmail and outlook email addresses, rather than university or…
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Boghossian Report, Appiah, and relativism, redux (UPDATED with reply by Boghossian, and responses from Leiter and Stanley)
A CHE editor asked me to redo this post as a “letter to the editor” which they have published here, and which I reprint below: To the Editor: In the interview with four authors of the “Report on the State of the Humanities and Humanistic Social Science” (hereafter “the Report”), New York University philosopher Paul…
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APA announces Spring prizes…
….including the Dewey Lecturers (Kittay, Sober), Rescher Prize (K. Fine), Romanell Lecture (Ismael), Sanders Lecture (G. Rosen), and Sosa Prize (Kornblith), among others.
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If Plato had written a dialogue about the New Infantilists and Wokerati in philosophy
As the reader who sent this to me observed, this amusing piece seems inspired by “that other philosophy blog and how it reflects some troubling trends in the profession.”
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Don’t mess with philosophy professors!
“Car thief dies after philosophy professor puts him in headlock“
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A weak response to the “Boghossian Report” by the AAUP chapters at Wash U/St. Louis and Vanderbilt (whose Chancellors comissioned the report)
The response is here. It states that, Historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists are singled out for caricature while the authors fail to acknowledge their own public biases against scholarship performed in the name of social justice. No evidence is adduced that scholars in these fields were caricatured, so we are left wondering why we should…
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A fair summary of the “Boghossian Report” by one of its co-authors (a sociologist)
Here. An excerpt: It was on #3 that the Report, unnecessarily, overclaimed, even though it’s clearly true that some scholars treat skepticism about objectivity as licensing careless or overtly politicized scholarship. 1, 2 and 4 all have clear instantiations across the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
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How is the New School selecting tenured faculty for termination…
…given its budget crisis? As this petition notes (I have signed it), only one tenured economics professor has been fired, and he was an outspoken critic of the administration and its financial mismanagement. That is, to put it gently, highly suspicious, and I hope Professor Reddy takes legal action. There is another petition in support…
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Apparently Anthony Appiah has not read Carnap (or Thomas Nagel’s “The Last Word”)
Two editors at CHE have interviewed four of the authors of the “Boghossian Report” (including the NYU philosophers Paul Boghossian and Anthony Appiah). Professor Boghossian says in the interview, “We say how we are taking the term ‘relativism’ to mean the very narrow view that epistemic values are always relative to nonepistemic values, to moral…
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The Lukács archive and research center re-opens in Budapest…
…now that the authoritarian Orban is gone. (My own view is that no one did more philosophical damage to Marxism in the 20th-century than Lukács, but there should obviously be a Lukács archive in the city that was his home for so long.) (Thanks to J.P. Loo for the pointer.)
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Lawyers behaving badly…with AI…
…on both sides of a case! All were sanctioned by the court. And one of them is a repeat offender who has been sanctioned before for this in another court. Oy veh.
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Some hopeful trends in America
The Financial Times has always represented the prudent wing of the capitalist class, unlike the imprudent wing that has overwhelmed the Republican Party in America. This piece by one of its regular opinion columnists (who is quite scathing about Trump et al., but knows which class he represents) is revealing: When they go low, we…
I would note that there are a lot of structural reasons why senior staff might produce less research than people…