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Blast from the past: when philosopher Dan Hicks lost his mind
Last year. Hopefully he's recovered!
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All about a COVID-19 vaccine
Informative discussion with Dr. Paul Offit (Penn), a vaccine expert. He thinks there will be a vaccine by the "first quarter" of 2021; he explains why we are able to produce this vaccine so quickly (basically, government is assuming all the risks); and other topics. One interesting data point: if a vaccine is 75% effective,…
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“Democratic Socialists of America” is not a Marxist organization…
…as the recent Reed Affair showed. (Earlier coverage.) Even so, DSA should do better.
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1.5 million euro grant from the European Research Council for a “knowledge-first” approach to social epistemology…
…awarded to philosopher Mona Simion at the University of Glasgow and her "KnowledgeLab" project. (Thanks to David Bain for the pointer.)
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Wide-ranging interview with Noam Chomsky…
…by Fabian Corver. (Thanks to Mark Pavlick for the pointer.)
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“Legal Positivism as a Realist Theory of Law”
The penultimate version is now online; main change was in the final section, discussing the "Service Conception."
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CNN says the F-word…
…with help from philosopher Jason Stanley (Yale).
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Barbara Partee profiled…
…here. A distinguished linguist whose work is well-known to philosophers of language, she taught for many years at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in both linguistics and philosophy. The story of her first meeting with Chomsky as a prospective PhD student is charming!
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Another university handling COVID effectively: U of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign
They're testing students twice per week, using saliva-based tests the university itself developed. Impressive, let's hope it does the trick.
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Blast from the past: Most important Anglophone philosophers, 1945-2000
Back in 2015. Only three are still alive today!
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$250,000 grant from the McDonnell Foundation to philosopher Santiago Amaya (U of Los Andes, Colombia) to study moral problem-solving
Details of the grant and the interesting project here.
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Advertising update
September, October, and November are now fully booked, except for 4th from the top spots ($450), which I have started to sell again due to demand. There are still spots in December (including one top spot), as well as in subsequent months. E-mail me for details.
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New open-access journal: Philosophy of Medicine
Details here.
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American autocracy on display at the Repug convention
Apt comparison from a former Ambassador to Russia.
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COVID cases at Arizona State University
Many years ago, my father quipped that, "Farmers hope for rain, journalists hope for floods," because disaster is more newsworthy. So too with some of the COVID reporting, as in this piece from Phoenix. It's headline reports that cases have "tripled" in a matter of days ("flood"!), but if you read the article, you see…
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Informative piece on the history of police unions in the U.S….
…in The New Yorker. I did not know that it was the victory of the teachers' union in the early 1960s in NYC that paved the way for the police to finally unionize effectively. But I was particularly struck by this observation (which brought to mind something written a few years ago): According to Paul…
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Northwestern University makes the wrong COVID choice
Colleges should certainly reduce the number of students in campus dorms, but they shouldn't exclude freshmen, who are new to the college experience: they should prioritize those new to college life, and those who have to be on campus for their work (e.g., labs).
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Bang, “Questions,” 1971
Philadelphia-based hard rock/proto-metal band, this single actually cracked the Billboard top 100! It's a great number!
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In Memoriam: Nicholas L. Sturgeon (1942-2020)
MOVING TO FRONT FROM AUGUST 25–UPDATED Professor Sturgeon, who joined the Cornell faculty in 1967 and taught there until his retirement, was best-known for his naturalist moral realism and his contributions to the debate about "moral explanations" in the 1980s and 1990s. I will add links to memorial notices when they appear. ADDENDUM: Philosopher John…
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The actual platform of Trump’s Repugs
This seems about right.
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Parker from Durham to Virginia Tech
Wendy Parker (philosophy of science & climate science), previously at the University of Durham, is now Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, which continues to have a notable terminal MA program. (They've also made a good number of strong junior hires as well.)
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Templeton extends funding for the “Geography of Philosophy” project…
…directed by philosophers Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh) and Stephen Stich (Rutgers), along with anthropologist Clark Barrett (UCLA).
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87 Reasons to Vote…
…the monster-child out of office, plus lots of useful resources and links (including how to register to vote, get absentee ballots etc.).
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The case for aersol transmission of COVID (with a useful analogy to cigarette smoke)
Here. I guess I'm persuaded it's clearly a factor (much more than fomites), but it's not that easy, as the author explains via helpful analogy: [I]t is useful to use cigarette or vaping smoke (which is also an aerosol) as an analog. Imagine sharing a home with a smoker: if you stood close to the…
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In Memoriam: Gerald (“Jerry”) Gaus (1952-2020)
MOVING TO FRONT, UPDATED–ORIGINALLY POSTED AUGUST 20 I'm very sorry to report that Professor Gaus, a distinguished political philosopher, died unexpectedly yesterday. Since 2006, he was part of the powerhouse political philosophy program at the University of Arizona. Before that, he taught at Tulane University and the University of Minnesota at Duluth, and held research…
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“Consciousness Live”
A podcast hosted by philosopher Richard Brown (CUNY), in which Professor Brown talks with philosophers, scientists, and artists.
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Kim Kardashian meets Kierkegaard
Yikes. (Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)
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A poll for regular readers regarding Twitter use (if any)
Please take the poll! UPDATE: So with about 400 votes since this morning, about 60% of respondents do not have Twitter accounts, while 40% do. I expect that overstates the percentage of readers with Twitter accounts, since older readers tend to participate less in the polls, and they are also less likely to use Twitter…
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Even when Trump loses the election, November to January is going to be crazy…
…given the nature of the monster-child and the Repugs, no doubt encouraged by the Fascist Fox network. It's a chilling read, but worth being informed about.
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$4.4 million from Templeton Foundation for the “Honesty Project”…
…to be run by philosopher Christian Miller (Wake Forest) and psychologists at both Wake Forest and Carnegie-Mellon.
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Rosati from Arizona to Texas
Connie Rosati (ethics, philosophy of law), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, has joined the department of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin this fall. With the recent addition of Julia Driver from Wash U/St. Louis, Texas now has the two current editors of the journal Ethics, as well as the…
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“COVID immune responses explained”
This is informative; an excerpt: Our immune system consists of two different layers. The first layer is the innate immune system, which acts within minutes of infection to provide kind of a rapid response. This doesn't require any specificity; it is engaged after any kind of infection. But this innate activation is important to triggering…
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In Memoriam: Joseph D. Sneed (1938-2020)
I only just learned that the philosopher of science Joseph Sneed, a longtime member of the faculty at the Colorado School of Mines, passed away earlier this year. Philosopher Franz-Peter Griesmaier (Wyoming), who called this to my attention, noted that Professor Sneed was "largely responsible for a particular form of scientific structuralism, which applies the…
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Bobby Fuller Four, “Misirlou,” 1965 (live)
Bobby Fuller was famous for "I Fought the Law," but I'd never heard his live version of that 60s staple "Misrlou," which sounds more like 1968 acid rock in his rendering: (Thanks to Tom Carson for the pointer.)
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Alabama Governor spearheads a serious public health effort aimed at opening universities
Interesting. I hope it works! An aside: some academics on social media seem to mainly hope these efforts fail, so they can then say, "I told you so!" Grocery stores and hospitals, among other facilities, have been operating without massive outbreaks; universities present more challenges in some respects, less [than hospitals] in others. What's disappointing…
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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…