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In Memoriam: William McBride (1938-2026)
Profesor McBride, who was emeritus at Purdue University, was especially well-known for his work on Sartre, as well as on Marxist theory and on topics in social and political philosophy as well. There is an obituary here. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor McBride or for those who would like to…
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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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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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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.
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I’ll be at Princeton next Tuesday to give a public lecture on academic freedom…
…thanks to a kind invitation from the philosophy majors. Hope to see some readers there. I got my BA in philosophy from Princeton in 1984, and the only faculty member I had a class with who remains is Mark Johnston (he had just started in Spring 1984, and was quite tolerant of my irresponsibly missing…
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Empedocles finally publishes something new!
Well, not exactly, but an old manuscript has been newly discovered. (Thanks to Peter Kail for the pointer.)
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The persistent myth that Williams was significantly influenced by Nietzsche
(Moving to front from yesterday–file link fixed) I usually like Jane O’Grady’s work, but this popular piece is quite misleading. There are some superficial similarities between Williams and Nietzsche, but the differences are far more profound, including in their completely different understanding of the Greeks. Williams’s critique of morality is also quite tepid by comparison…
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A profile of “Goebbels” as a college student…
…at Duke. He was a sick weirdo then, too!
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Blast from the past: it was almost a decade ago that the usual suspects went after Rebecca Tuvel for a peer-reviewed article
What a disgrace, which, thankfully, many philosophers condemned at the time. Professor Tuvel, fortunately, did get tenure, despite this unhinged attack. Alas, it’s not clear any of the miscreants (or their apologists) suffered any repercussions for their bad behavior.
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AI cheating and pangram redux
Philosopher Stefan Sciaraffa at McMaster in Canada writes: I read the Unherd piece…I align with its general spirit. However there is one key claim that I’m not so sure about. I’ve been using Pangram. It has a vanishingly small false positive rate. Folks at the business school at your university have verified this. I’ve run…
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Will the U.S. military follow orders to commit war crimes?
This is a useful discussion of the legal issues, and that was before Trump threatened to commit genocide. “Unhinged” barely does justice to this vicious, fascist rhetoric. Even some of his maniac followers are turning on him! If these war crimes are committed, they belong to the Republican Party, not just Trump, as Mr. Cohen…
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“A Debate about Hyperintensionalism”
A transcript of a debate between Kit Fine and Timothy Williamson at Oxford. This is about as good as contemporary analytic philosophy gets, although how one interprets that fact may vary! But if you want to see what the best are doing, here it is.
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“AI will destroy universities”
That’s political theorist Paul Sagar’s not implausible assessment; an excerpt: I…teach political philosophy in a British university, so I have had to wrestle with the impact of large language models (LLMs) in one small domain: higher education. And here, my conclusion is simple. The threat they pose is existential…. Specifically, students who use LLMs to…
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Most cited Anglophone books on Hegel according to Google Scholar (CORRECTED)
I list every book with at least 700 citations (since numbers drop off here pretty quick).
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Most cited Anglophone philosophical books on Marx since WWII (according to Google Scholar) (CORRECTED)
I focus on English-language books mainly by philosophers, or that are obviously philosophically-minded. Totals are rounded to the nearest 100, and only books with at least 500 citations are listed. I could not find on Google Scholar Allen Wood’s Karl Marx in the Routledge “Arguments of the Philosophers” series, which would surely have made the…
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Dear People of the World:
I am sorry that the President of my country is a pathologically dishonest, narcissistic imbecile. I hope you and we all survive it. UPDATE: Longtime reader Henry Cohen writes: I am sorry that the congressional Republicans refuse to stop him, even though they could. I blame them more than I do him, because he is…
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More on PhD admissions: waiting lists etc.
Some apt advice from philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel.
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Edwards & Leiter, Marx book, redux
I learned from Routledge that in a little over a year, the book has now sold about 1,900 copies, including over 1,700 in paperback. The latter number is especially gratifying, since hardly any reviews have yet appeared (the most visible one was Choice), which suggests word-of-mouth has been favorable. Thank you to all readers!
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Declining Admissions Offers in a Timely Way
MOVING TO FRONT, SINCE RELEVANT AGAIN (originally posted 2011) ============================================ Keith DeRose (Yale) writes: Since prospective graduate students read your blog for information and advice on applying to graduate programs, I was wondering whether it might be a good idea for you to run a short post on an important way that applicants can help…
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Universities are a lot more complex than academic critiques of their “wokeness” or “neoliberal” character would suggest
I commend to your attention this very nicely written piece by by my philosophy colleague Maya Krishnan. She gives a charitable (and interesting) explanation of what is behind this endless grousing about universities. My less charitable explanation is that academics, aggrieved by, but irrelevant to, the state of the world at large, take out their…
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Consciousness, computation, and animal minds
Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith discusses.
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Schopenhauer on the will
Philosopher David Bather Woods offers an account of this sometimes elusive and confusing concept that is central for Schopenhauer.
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Danks from UC San Diego to Virginia
David Danks (philosophy of science and cognitive science, machine learning, ethics of AI), previously a tenured professor at the University of California at San Diego, started at the University of Virginia this past January, with tenured appointments in the Department of Philosophy and School of Data Science. I would not be surprised if that appointment…
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Nietzsche on Plato
From The Twilight of the Idols (“What I Owe to the Ancients,” section 2): I am a complete skeptic about Plato….In the end, my distrust of Plato goes deep: he represents such an aberration from all the basic instinct of the Hellene, is so moralistic, so pre-existently Christian–he already takes the concept “good” for the…
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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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News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.
I haven’t read The Doomsday Machine, but wasn’t Ellsberg’s experience in the 50s and 60s? When Eisenhower was writing pre-delegation…
On point 4, in The Doomsday Machine, which is based on the author’s personal experience as a RAND consultant advising…
What’s wrong with it is it’s so terrifying I don’t want to read it
In theory, the US retains a launch-on-warning *capacity* for the ICBMs. But I’m pretty sure they’re not on an actual…
On (4), and with the usual caveat that I’m not an expert here: The US has 400 land-based ICBMs, carrying…
In itself, not much. (A few quibbles: the estimates of deployed warheads are implausibly precise; the assessment of nuclear winter…
Yes, Ellsberg’s experience was in the 50s and 60s. I don’t know enough about these issues to have anything meaningful…