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The obstacles to ethical vaccine challenge studies
Bioethicist Carl Elliott (Minnesota) comments. (Thanks to Mark Pavlick for the pointer.)
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COVID-19 planning for higher education
A detailed set of recommendations from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
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The self-destruction of the American press
Very amusing and mostly right too! (Thanks to Mark Couch for the pointer).
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“Contemporary Legal Realism”
A special journal issue of solicited contributions at Iuris Dictio, a law journal from Ecuador. Some, but not all, of the essays are in English. Besides my own essay, there are contributions by the leading figures in contemporary Italian and French legal realism (Riccardo Guastini and Michel Troper, respectively).
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Cheap and widely available steroid drug cuts mortality in patients seriously ill with COVID
A welcome bit of news: For patients on ventilators, it cut the risk of death from 40% to 28%. For patients needing oxygen, it cut the risk of death from 25% to 20%. Chief investigator Prof Peter Horby said: "This is the only drug so far that has been shown to reduce mortality – and…
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Statement by Alex Byrne (MIT) regarding the debate with Professor Dembroff
It is here (background here). I would especially call readers' attention to his point #4, which sheds further light on Professor Dembroff's ongoing attempts to distract and deflect.
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Cedric Johnson on “Black Lives Matter”
This is worth reading; an excerpt: While a slim majority of Americans now believe police are more likely to use excessive force against blacks than other groups, millions more do not share the most militant calls to defund or dismantle police departments voiced by some activists.1 Most Americans are upset by police killings, but they…
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Still more on Phil Studies and the Dembroff-Byrne debate
Just a recap from last week: 1. Philosophical Studies (hereafter "PS") published a paper by philosopher Robin Dembroff (Yale) critiquing an earlier paper in PS by philosopher Alex Byrne (MIT). 2. The Dembroff paper contained, as the former EIC Stewart Cohen put it, "unprofessional personal attacks" on Byrne (e.g., claiming that Byrne's paper was really…
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Big victory for LGBT rights at the Supreme Court
The Court finds that the 1964 law barring "sex discrimination" includes discrimination based on sexual orientation or transgender status. Roberts and Gorsuch joined the more liberal justices on this–I haven't had a chance to read the decision, but they are textualists in matters of statutory interpretation, so were no doubt persuaded that what members of…
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Thinking in quarantine
Philosopher Zena Hitz (St. John's, Annapolis) comments.
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys, “Good Old Rock and Roll,” 1969
This band was actually produced by Jimi Hendrix, and even had one top 40 hit, this medley of 50s rock songs:
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Stewart Cohen (Arizona) resigns as editor of “Philosophical Studies” after 25 years (UPDATED)
MOVING TO FRONT FROM JUNE 7 (ORIGINALLY POSTED JUNE 5)–ADDITIONAL COMMENTS FROM PROFESSOR COHEN AT THE END Professor Cohen asked me to share his full explanation for this decision, which I am happy to do: Download Stewart Cohen resignation. This is a real shame, but Professor Cohen is to be congratulated for editing the journal…
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Shoemaker from Tulane to Cornell
David Shoemaker (philosophy of action, moral psychology), Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Cornell University, effective fall 2021. He will join John Doris and Shaun Nichols in moral psychology, and Derk Pereboom in philosophy of action, making Cornell one of the top programs in…
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Informative U Arizona article about Prof. Cohen’s resigntion as EIC of Phil Studies
All student newspaper articles should be as professionally done as this one.
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Kosch from Cornell to Johns Hopkins
Michelle Kosch, Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University and a leading scholar of Kant and post-Kantian Continental philosophy (especially Fichte and Kierkegaard), has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, which is already a major center for work on 19th-century German philosophy. She will start for the 2020-21 academic…
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Robert Paul Wolff’s “Apologia Pro Vita Sua’
This is charming.
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In Memoriam: Maurice Leiter (1933-2020)
My father Maurice Leiter was born January 16, 1933 in Brooklyn and died June 8, 2020 in Chicago from complications due to COVID-19. He is survived by me, his son Brian, and daughter-in-law Sheila, and his grandchildren Samuel, William, and Celia, all of Chicago; and his son David and daughter-in-law Jessica, of New York City…
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COVID reproduction number, by state
This is a useful resource.
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The risks of COVID transmission from indoor teaching
A useful thread of sources and evidence (some noted here in the past) compiled by philosopher Michael Otsuka (LSE).
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Another one bites the dust at the NYT…
…James Bennet, the opinion page editor responsible for Senator Cotton's now notorious "bring in the troops" op-ed, but who should have been fired long ago for other crimes against intellectual decency and literary good taste.
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Edgar Broughton Band, “Call Me a Liar,” 1971
One of the stranger acts to emerge from British psychedelia and blues rock (that we last featured back in 2016), Broughton's Captain Beefheart-like vocals make them always recognizable; this was the B-side of a 1971 single, and the better side in my view:
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“Defund the police” doesn’t actually mean defund the police…
…as a couple of readers pointed out to me; see for example, this interview: That slogan ("Defund the police") really embodies this idea that we’re not going to fix the police, but instead we have to reduce them in every way we possibly can and replace them with democratic, public, non-police solutions. That's sensible, but…
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Nietzsche’s rules for warfare…and the question of race and class
A longtime reader sent me the following e-mail: As I wrote you once before, you do follow Nietzsche's rules for warfare (Ecce Homo, Why I am so wise, 7) Kaufmann translation. "First: I only attack causes that are victorious; I may even wait until they become victorious. Second: I only attack causes against which…
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The sociology of police violence (racism isn’t the real problem)
This is informative (much more so than the "cops are racist" blather on social media), from the always insightful Randall Collins (Penn); it sheds lights on both why people dislike the police, and the situational and social variables that incline the police towards violence. Some excerpts: [3] Police dislike defiance. Jonathan Rubinstein (1973), a sociologist…
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Australian universities in financial crisis due to pandemic and loss of international students
To make matters worse, the government excluded the universities from financial assistance meant to preserve jobs. Remember that Australian universities are currently in session; we may seem similar effects for some U.S. universities from the loss of foreign students come the fall. (Thanks to Matt Lister for the pointer.)
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An online set of essays about the 1973 film of Strawson and Evans discussing truth
Here; see the essay by Huw Price (Cambridge) for details.
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Another good anti-Trump ad from the “Lincoln Project”…
…a group of anti-Trump Republicans who believe in quaint ideas like the rule of law and constitutional limits; their ads target conservative voters: You can support their efforts here.
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More on Sweden’s failed COVID strategy: a mea culpa from the architect
Here; as the article notes: At 43 deaths per 100,000, Sweden’s mortality rate is among the highest globally and far exceeds that of neighboring Denmark and Norway, which imposed much tougher lockdowns at the onset of the pandemic.
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A recent collection on fictionalism
This was a really good review, by philosopher Zoltan Szabo (Yale): instructive, crisply written, giving a nice sense of the positions staked out in the volume.
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General Mattis, the former Secretary of Defense, finally condemns Trump
I hope this means he is going to be more vocal; an excerpt: When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their…
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Richard Marshall interviews Miriam Solomon (Temple)…
…at 3:16 AM. Philosophy of medicine is likely to become a more important topic because of the pandemic, and it is certainly a very interesting one that Professor Solomon discusses (among other topics).
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Blast from the past: best Anglophone philosophers of art since 1945?
A poll back in 2016.
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Small Belgian study of 154 elderly patients finds benefits from use of statins…
…and possible benefits from use of blood pressure meds (ARBs and ACEIs). Particularly striking (but too small a sample to inspire confidence) was that 6 of the 8 elderly patients taking both statins and blood pressure medications were asymptomatic despite testing positive for COVID (and only 1 of the 8 got seriously ill)–much lower than…
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Incompetent COVID reporting, NY Times edition
This from yesterday: In the weeks since America began reopening on a large scale, the coronavirus has persisted on a stubborn but uneven path, with meaningful progress in some cities and alarming new outbreaks in others. A snapshot of the country on a single day last week revealed sharply divergent realities. As the United States…
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A call for police to take “collective responsibility” for police misconduct…
…from a former career police officer who also has a PhD in philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center. (Thanks to Jonathan Gilmore for the pointer.)
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Liberal democracy is doomed, part 492: deepfake images and videos…
…will render what's left of the public sphere meaningless, unless the use of such technology is banned and criminalized.
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Racial disparity does NOT help make sense of patterns of police violence
Unfortunately, this essay by Adolph Reed is timely again. "Black Lives Matter," as I've noted before, identified a real phenomenon–police violence–and then consistently misdiagnosed it, as Reed demonstrates: Available data (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/?tid=a_inl) indicate, to the surprise of no one who isn’t in willful denial, that in this country black people make up a percentage of those…
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Public health measures and “freedom”
Les Green (Oxford & Queen's U) comments (amusingly and aptly); an excerpt: Admittedly, there are disagreements about freedom. Some philosophers say these turn on people having different ‘concepts’ of freedom; others say that we have various ‘conceptions of the concept’ of freedom. (It can only be a matter of time before someone says that we…
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More antibody testing results: 3% of people in Indiana have been exposed to the new coronavirus…
…and 45% had no symptoms from it. As the article notes based on Indiana and other antibody studies, the infection fatality rate seems to be between .5 and 1%, which is still pretty awful, but not as awful as some of the very early figures tossed around.
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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…