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Say goodbye to New York, Miami, Shanghai, and Sydney…
…within a century or so.
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Why do women leave philosophy at the undergraduate level?
A new study. (Thanks to several different readers for sending this along.)
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What “philosophy” looks like when it ceases to be a Wissenschaft…
…and becomes a set of sophomoric slogans and confusions. Quite amazing, as we've had occasion to note before.
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Fitelson from Rutgers to Northeastern (with visiting posts as well at Munich and Amsterdam)
Branden Fitelson (formal epistemology, logic, decision theory, philosophy of science), formerly Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, has accepted appointment as Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University, along with Visiting Professor posts at both the University of Munich and the University of Amsterdam.
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The rise of philosophy of race
In talking with the CHE reporter for the article about Penn State, one question that came up was how seriously philosophy of race was taken at top PhD programs. (This did not make it into the article, alas, but it is perhaps of interest, since Penn State churning out PhDs in the area is not…
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Still more on the AAUP report on the abuse of Title IX
There is an interesting, mostly substantive, but, alas, quite misleading post about the recent AAUP report over at the FP blog which deserves some comment. The author is not a lawyer, and this shows in the one glaring mistake, which someone not reading carefully might not realize is not a point made either by Catherine…
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A nice piece on empirically-informed philosophy
Here. (Link fixed now.)
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Marquette University is also a disgrace…
….though for different reasons than the U of Califorrnia! The University, which has been persecuting a political science professor for his lawful extramural speech, decided not to fire him, but only to suspend him for awhile, but also demanding that he do a mea culpa. That is simply bizarre. Why not demand that he wear…
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“Five Books on Nietzsche”
A reader recently wrote to ask some questions about this interview from a few years back, and since, on re-reading it, I still agree with it, I thought I'd post it again for interested readers.
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Ruth Marcus would have been livid…
…if she had lived to see this. Ruth told me years ago that Butler had great difficulty passing the logic requirement in the Yale PhD program in philosophy, and finally, Ruth took pity, and gave her a pass. I had the sense she later regretted that. On Butler, Martha Nussbaum got it right many years…
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CHE article on Penn State’s efforts to recruit and graduate African-American philosophers, especially women
The article is here. As often happens, it doesn't quite record what I said accurately. I pointed out that a lot of scholarship has been done on the racism of the canonical philosophers, but the value of doing that, which is clear, is a different issue from whether an undergraduate class should spend time on…
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Many thanks to Darlene Deas and Christopher Pynes for guest-blogging last week!
You can visit their contributions by clicking on their "guest blogger" links, below. I've given them both an open invitation to continue posting when they have the opportunity.
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Average salaries by field…
…from IHE. Philosophy, as usual, is lumped with religious studies, but still does somewhat better than other humanities fields.
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AAUP issues critical draft report on the current abuse of Title IX by the Dept of Education’s OCR since 2011
The full document is available here, though the Executive Summary is quite accurate as to the contents. Apart from a largely irrelevant fixation on the "corporate university," it's an informative report, one that makes clear how the Assistant Secretaries for Civil Rights in the Department of Education have badly overreached their authority since 2011. The…
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“What is a liberal?”
Robert Paul Wolff comments.
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The University of California is a disgrace
Even the New York Times, a usually reliable apologist for the double standards that govern discourse about Israel in America, has to report that what the UC system has done is suspect. It's enough to make one a full supporter of the BDS movement.
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Happy Easter…
…from the Antichrist.
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Funny NY Times column on the crazies running for the Republican nomination for President
From Gail Collins: One thing that all these guys have in common is a desire to put themselves in charge of the reproductive rights of the entire female half of the country. Trump used to be pro-choice, but he “evolved” at some undisclosed point in the 21st century. Ted Cruz opposes abortion even in cases…
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The latest in religious right ugliness: transgender people and bathrooms
Appropriately scathing commentary from law professor Tobias Wolff (Penn).
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Comedy Central’s complete Trump v. Sanders debate
At last! (Thanks to Theo Nyreröd for the pointer.)
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In Memoriam: Justin Leiber (1938-2016)
At the time of his death, he was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Florida State University, and also taught for many years at the University of Houston. There is more information about his work here. (Thanks to John Schwenkler for the information and links.)
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This is funny…
…but strictly for "mature" readers with an adolescent sense of humor.
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Have you been bullied or harassed by Mark Lance (Georgetown) on social media?
I don't plan on getting into the habit of following the lead of the APA, but I've heard now from several graduate students and junior faculty that they've been bullied and harassed by philosopher Mark Lance (Georgetown) on various social media platforms, especially Facebook, that I thought it was time to raise the issue in…
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A shrewd diagnosis of the pathologies of the juvenile “left” in universities from a young person committed to its objectives
Here; an excerpt: I used to endorse a particular brand of politics that is prevalent at McGill and in Montreal more widely. It is a fusion of a certain kind of anti-oppressive politics and a certain kind of radical leftist politics. This particular brand of politics begins with good intentions and noble causes, but metastasizes…
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An interview with CUNY’s Jesse Prinz
Here, and it's very interesting along a number of dimensions. One excerpt: Almost everything that I do involves the idea that experience can transform human minds. We are, by nature, unnatural. I am wary of biophilia—that is, of uncritical efforts to explain human universals and differences by appeal to fixed biological traits. Experience shapes all…
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Academic philosophy is very white…
…but this seems to me an unlikely explanation, because it isn't how work is actually evaluated (at least not in the fields I've worked in over the years). Armchair speculation like this, unhinged from actual evidence, and especially when circulated in the popular media which thrives on nonsense like this, doesn't seem very helpful for…
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The rich get richer, 2016 edition: the 30 richest research universities in terms of the “per student” value of their endowments (at end of 2015)
Here are the 30 richest research universities (i.e., schools with PhD programs in multiple fields) in term of the "per student" value of their endowments; the per student value follows in parentheses (rounded to the nearest thousand). 1. Princeton University ($2,809,000) 2. Yale University ($2,073,000) 3. Harvard University ($1,736,000) 4. Stanford University ($1,323,000) 5. Massachussetts Institute of…
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Half of women in U.S. now have “very unfavorable” view of Trump…
…up from 40% not long ago. That's a hopeful development. Now all we need is a constitutional amendment to disenfranchise white men, and we can stop worrying.
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Moral philosophy and empirical psychology
Tamsin Shaw (whose fine work on Nietzsche I've written about here and here) had an essay in the NYRB that discussed recent work in moral psychology by psychologists (some of it spectacularly and notoriously confused, like Joshua Greene's stuff) and the involvement of Martin Seligman and the "Positive Psychology" movement in the CIA's torture program. This…
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The Economist’s “top ten” global risks includes…
…Trump being elected President.
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Georgetown’s Jason Brennan sticks his hand back in the adjunct hornet’s nest
Story at IHE. The responses quoted in the story there are a bit feeble, I'm sure philosophers can do better. Head over to the comments!
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In Memoriam: Hilary Putnam (1926-2016)
MOVING TO FRONT FROM MARCH 13–UPDATED One of the great figures of post-WWII "analytic" philosophy, Professor Putnam made seminal contributions to the philosophies of science, mathematics, language, and mind. He earned his PhD at UCLA with Hans Reichenbach, and taught at Northwestern, Princeton, MIT and for most of his career at Harvard, where he was emeritus. …
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“Moralities are a Sign-Language of the Affects”
This paper appeared in Social Philosophy & Policy over two years ago, but I'm now able to make it available on-line. Here's the abstract: This essay offers an interpretation and partial defense of Nietzsche's idea that moralities and moral judgments are “sign-languages” or “symptoms” of our affects, that is, of our emotions or feelings. According to…
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Nietzsche’s Ecce homo, Notebooks and Letters: 1888-1889. Translation by Daniel Fidel Ferrer. ©2023 Daniel Fidel Ferrer. All rights reserved. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs…
I only just learned of Barry’s passing, and I’m enormously saddened at the news. I wrote my PhD on his…
I am reading 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗼𝗴𝗵𝗼𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 with mixed feelings. It is, in various ways, moderate and careful, and it certainly…
I respond to this report here https://jasonstanleyantifascist.substack.com/p/on-the-philosophical-muddle-that
For what it’s worth, I agree. I have, with some trepidation, given it a bunch of my papers and asked…
Looking at some of the AI-amplified cranks on philpeople, it is hard to agree with the assessment of this article.…
Free Robot Labour: Marx, Automation, and the Future of AI by Jamie Terence Kelly https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-26782-5 Palgrave Macmillan, 2026 Permanently Open…