July 2026
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In Memoriam: David Berman (1942-2026)
Professor Berman, who spent his career at Trinity College Dublin, was well-known for his work on Berkeley and also on Schopenhauer, and also wrote widely on Irish philosophy. The TCD memorial notice is here. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Berman or for those who wish to comment on the significance…
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In Memoriam: Alan Soble (1947-2025)
Professor Soble, emeritus at the University of New Orleans, died last year. Philosopher Raja Halwani at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago kindly shared this lovely tribute to his friend and collaborator: A Tribute to Alan Soble Raja Halwani Alan Soble died on March 5, 2025. I didn’t know that he had…
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Trump may kill us all even without nuclear war
Ships stuck because of the Strait of Hormuz blockage are breeding grounds for biological disaster.
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In Memoriam: Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (1937-2026) (MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 22–READERS WHO MISSED IT MAY ENJOY THE SPLENDID TRIBUTES TO PROFESSOR HILL IN THE COMMENTS)
Professor Hill was a leading moral philosopher, known especially for his work on Kantian ethics. He was emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he taught from 1984 until his retirement in 2017 (he taught at UCLA from 1968 until his move to Chapel Hill). Comments are open for remembrances from…
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Illinois Institute of Technology declares “financial exigency” and begins firing faculty, including tenured faculty
Up to one-third of the faculty may be terminated, although in the law school, Chicago-Kent, it appears the number is lower (maybe one-fifth by some accounts). If readers have more details, please email me. The main source of the budgetary crisis is the decline in the enrollment of international students, no doubt due to Trump…
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Graduate admissions in the age of AI, redux
Last January, we had a thread about how to protect the integrity of philosophy graduate admissions given the possibility that applicants might be using LLMs to generate some or all of their writing samples. I thought it would be useful to have a follow-up thread to see what worked and what didn’t. For those new…
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Another UK academic staff “bloodbath” in the works: U of Lincoln proposes making 140 faculty “redundant”
Oy veh. This comes on the heels of cuts in prior years at Lincoln. This round of cuts will affect philosophy, among many other units. The British university system is in serious crisis (although not because of “market ideology” [as the preceding piece says], but because of an unstable halfway house between “market ideology” and…
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“Philosophy in 3D”
Wittgenstein and Kant. Pretty weird! Has anyone tried these? Are they any good? (Thanks to Guy Elgat for the pointer.)
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Hopkins from NYU to Oxford
Robert Hopkins (aesthetics, philosophy of mind), Professor of Philosophy at New York University, will take up a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford University in October 2026.
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Who were the invited guests at Alfred North Whitehead’s 70th birthday party in 1931?
There’s a website that answers this pressing question! It’s an interesting snapshot of philosophy and elite intellectual culture at the time. Among the guests was the logician Henry Sheffer, about whom we learn: Henry Maurice Sheffer (1882–1964) was born in Odessa, Russia (now Ukraine) later becoming a naturalized citizen of the United States (1904). He…
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Law schools with placement in the “best” law teaching jobs (2006)
A propos this, another old study from 2006: This study examined which schools are most successful at placing their graduates in “top” law school teaching positions. “Top” law schools for this purpose meant schools that either (1) are ranked in the top 50 by U.S. News with some frequency, or (2) are ranked in the…
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Interview with philosopher Alex Byrne…
…in CHE. What happened to his wife, the evolutionary biologist Carol Hooven, is really awful, and should perhaps remind the zealots that there are human costs to their sanctimonious crusades. Byrne does not come off, per the article’s title, as a “smug dickhead” (unlike the pathetic Twitter pest Jonathan Weisberg who called him that!).
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Statement by British Academy President on the UK “higher education crisis”…
…and its disproportionate effect on the humanities and social sciences. I was sad to see that she felt the need to say this early on: “Important skills and capabilities – qualities we know employers value and the economy needs – are being lost.” So much for the Humboldt ideal that universities teach knowledge and skills…
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Open access philosophy books, a thread: Part IV (moving to front from May 28)
The last thread had fewer entries than earlier ones, but several months have past, perhaps readers can supply some new links. The instructions, as before: In light of the growing number of these volumes, I am going to run a thread periodically in which I invite authors or readers to share links to philosophical works…
On reviewing this thread I realize there is a deeper point that is usually missed. Consider the behavior of a…