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2020 Hiett Prize in Humanities goes to a philosopher, Zena Hitz (St. John’s, Maryland)
Announcement here. Nice to see Professor Hitz, a fierce champion for the humanities and philosophy, recognized. (Thanks to Scott Newstock for the pointer.)
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Climate change by county in the U.S.
Fascinating maps and data, by U.S. county. Crudely, the South and the Southwest are in for trouble, the Midwest and Great Plains will fare better over the next 25-50 years.
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Philosophers on Twitter lists
Amusing, although those who are sadly deceased (like Hubert Dreyfus and Roger Scruton) should be dropped.
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Columbia Marching Band trolls the NY Times
Amazing. The NYT will come to regret running this story, I suspect.
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Student-maintained Philosophy admissions for 2020-21 spread sheet…
…here. (Thanks to Linds Whitaker for the pointner.)
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TAs, resident advisors at Michigan strike over health and safety issues…
…including Michigan's stunning failure to do adequate testing. The University Administration is, foolishly, playing hardball, asking a court for a preliminary injunction against the strikers, which could in theory bankrupt the union and worse. President Mark Schlissel at Michigan is about to go down in academic infamy if he keeps going down this route. (As…
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English Department at University of Chicago embarrasses itself
IHE has a story, and UChicago biologist Jerry Coyne also comments. Departments do have the right to choose what fields to emphasize in graduate admissions, but to limit admissions to a single subfield (is it even a subfield in English?) to make a political statement is irresponsible and is another data point for those skeptical…
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Byrne’s reply to controversial Dembroff paper in Phil Studies rejected
In June, philosopher Stewart Cohen (Arizona) resigned as editor of Philosophical Studies in protest after the journal published a paper by Robin Dembroff (Yale) containing personal attacks on Alex Byrne (MIT) (journal policy forbids such attacks), the author to whom Professor Dembroff was responding. (Earlier coverage here, here, and here.) Even by the standards of…
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Evangelicals and climate denial
Philosopher Adrian Bardon (Wake Forest) comments.
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Why the right needs to pretend the “left” is more powerful than it really is
Political philosopher Lea Ypi (LSE) comments. Her point about the Gramscian pedigree of the right's rhetorical strategy is amusing. (Her focus is Britain, but most of the points apply in the U.S. too.)
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Hume and Edinburgh, once again
A propos this, longtime reader Roger Albin (Medicine, Michigan) writes with apt observations that he kindly gave permission to share: This would be the second time Hume is rejected by the University of Edinburgh. Hume was denied a Chair at Edinburgh by some of the ideologically “woke” of his time, conservative clergy who suspected Hume…
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Dianoia Institute of Philosophy/Australian Catholic University now accepting applications for MPhil and PhD
There are more details here; note that the deadline is in October, and the term starts in February 2021. Because all the faculty at the Institute hold research appointments, there are no courses, so this is degree by individual faculty supervision. The faculty is quite narrow in its strengths (e.g., there is no history of…
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How to evaluate history’s heroes
Sensible comments from philosopher Steven Hales (Bloomsburg), and timely again given the Hume fiasco at Edinburgh. From the concluding paragraphs of the essay: Newton wrote to Robert Hooke that if he saw further than others it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. That was a medieval metaphor that went back to before…
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Does morality need metaphysics?
Philosopher Simon Blackburn and others discuss.
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Let’s out-woke “the woke”: from now on David Hume will be known as “40 George Square”
A propos this: "As 40 George Square argues in the Treatise…" "Kant was awoken from his dogmatic slumber by reading 40 George Square…" "Did you know that 40 George Square was not opposed to slavery?" "According to the 40 George Squarean theory of motivation…" (Thanks to my colleague Agnes Callard for the idea.) UPDATE: Courtesy…
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David Hume has now been “cancelled” at the University of Edinburgh
When I first saw this on social media, I thought it was a joke. It's not. If members of the Edinburgh philosophy department don't raise hell about this (some members are, alas, confirmed knuckleheads), then let's cancel them too! Indeed, let's cancel the University of Edinburgh! What's bizarre about the mass delusion now gripping the…
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Fuzzy Duck, “Just Look Around You,” 1971
British progressive/hard rock band in the vein of Uriah Heep and Atomic Rooster, this comes from their only album:
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Coming soon: faculty updates for non-American programs ranked in 2017
Thanks to the work of reader Mitchell Barrington, I will be able to offer soon a report on changes to the faculties at the ranked programs in the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand that were ranked in 2017, similar to what I've done for the U.S. programs. Hopefully this will be ready in the…
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There’s a serious problem at USC’s Business School…
…and it has nothing to do with the professor who was vilified for using a Chinese word that sounds like an English derogatory epithet. In a normal academic environment, the Dean of the Business School would now be relieved of his duties for violating the academic freedom of one of his instructors and for poor…
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The end of the Chicago Palmer House hotel?
In olden times, the Central Division of the APA often held meetings at the Palmer House here in Chicago. But the pandemic may have finished off the historic site. Perhaps another hotel chain will acquire the property, but that seems unlikely under current circumstances.
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Tasioulas from King’s College London to Oxford
John Tasioulas (moral, political & legal philosophy), currently a Professor and Director of the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy & Law in the law school at King's College London, has accepted appointment as Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy on the philosophy faculty at Oxford University and director of the new Ethics of…
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“How the evangelical movement became Trump’s ‘bitch’”
Philosopher Michael Rea (Notre Dame) offers a plausible explanation. (He also alludes in the article to an earlier incident involving Richard Swinburne at a Society of Christian Philosophers event that we noted here.) It's worth emphasizing that evangelical (indeed Republican) support for Trump is not instrumentally irrational. He has, in fact, delivered on standard Republican…
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Evangelical university, Taylor U in Indiana, fires tenured philosophy professor…
…for what is clearly lawful, extramural speech that could not be sanctioned at any school with normal tenure and academic freedom standards. (A bit more detail here.) But Taylor's rules provide that a tenured faculty member can be terminated for "[f]ailure to meet professional, moral, philosophical and/or spiritual standards for faculty.” These standards are set…
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Richard Marshall interviews John Carriero (UCLA)…
…at 3:16 AM. It's a nice synoptic overview of his revisionary understanding of Descartes.
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“Reasonably polarized”
Thoughts from philosopher Kevin Dorst (Oxford/Pittsburgh). He writes: "The series will be the first pass at a book I've been working on for awhile, arguing that we should see polarization as due to largely rational processes. Basically, the claim is that we're all caught in a big epistemic tragedy of the commons where epistemically rational…
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In Memoriam: Philippe Mongin (1950-2020)
A distinguished French economist, Professor Mongin served as an editor of Economics & Philosophy, and did work well-known to those doing decision theoretic and other formal work in philosophy. There is a memorial from the Society for the History of Economics here and in the journal Social Choice & Welfare here. (Thanks to Jake Nebel…
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Best books on Nietzsche, an addendum…
…over at the Five Books website, and with thanks to Nigel Warburton for suggesting it.
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Republicans are the primary threat to democracy in America
Of course, all sapient people already suspected this, but here it is documented quite alarmingly by Larry Bartels (of Democracy for Realists fame): Most Republicans in a January 2020 survey agreed that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” More than 40%…
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Ibram Kendi eviscerated
This is a somewhat wild polemic, alternately perceptive and then baffling, but quite amusing as well. An excerpt: Ibram Kendi reasons through conservative ideologies such as Evangelical Christianity and Afrocentrism. His theories are a confused kaleidoscope of sociological nonsense and unverifiable historical claims. His assertions have no resonance in the long history of antiracism scholarship, research,…
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In Memoriam: Michael Redhead (1929-2020)
A distinguished philosopher of physics, Professor Rehead taught for many years in the History and Philosophy of Science program at Cambridge University and then, after his retirement from Cambridge, at the London School of Economics. I will add links to memorial notices as they appear. (Thanks to Brad Wray for the informtion.)
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Duke University doing rather well with COVID to date
And better than neighbors at UNC/Chapel Hill and North Carolina State. Extensive testing plus better student behavior seem to be key factors.
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Best of the summer blog
For those who are just returning to blog reading, here were some of the highlights of the summer (I only blogged a couple of times in July): Nietzsche's rules for warfare…and the question of race and class (June) In Memoriam: Maurice Leiter (1933-2020) (June) Phil Studies and the Dembroff-Byrne debate: here, here, and here. (June)…
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Fraser from Hong Kong to Toronto
Chris Fraser (classical Chinese philosophy, comparative philosophy), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, has accepted a new Chair in Chinese Thought & Culture at the University of Toronto, where he will have appointments in both Philosophy and East Asian Studies. He starts in July 2021. With earlier appointments of specialists in Indian…
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: The Gods, “Towards the Skies,” 1968
Before he made it big with Uriah Heep, Ken Hensley fronted this British band, which recorded one album, Genesis, that leads with this song:
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“Herd immunity”: what it is and isn’t
This is an informative interview.
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“Team reasoning”
Philosopher David Papineau (KCL, CUNY) comments.
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Kenan Malik on “white privilege” and class
Sensible, as usual (he is responding to Chris "I make things up" Bertram: in this case, Bertram invented a straw man position that no one holds, as Malik rightly notes).
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Anti-racism is not what’s needed in America
Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels take another stab at countering the mass delusion that has gripped the nominal "left" in America over the last few months; as they argue (correctly), " because racism is not the principal source of inequality today, antiracism functions more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for…
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An online set of essays about the 1973 film of Strawson and Evans discussing truth
Put together by Huw Price (Cambridge) and hosted at 3:16 AM.
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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.
To be worth using, a detector needs not only (A) not get very many false positives, but also (B) get…
Everything you say is true, but what is the alternative? I don’t think people are advocating a return to in-class…
The discussion here assumes an institutional context where returning to supervised in-person assessment is at least theoretically feasible, a reasonable…
Cyber security professional here -reliably determining when a computational artifact (file, etc.) was created is *hard*. This is sorta why…
Agreed with the other commentator. It is extremely unlikely that Pangram’s success is due to its cheating by reading metadata.
I see this question as a bit naïve. There is metadata on every document created by a modern word processor…
I first met Professor Hoy when I returned to UC Santa Cruz in Fall of ’92 to finish my undergraduate…