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In case anyone needed a reminder that the right-wing in America is always wrong…
…this may help. UPDATE: And more.
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Langton and Dupre try to unconfuse journalists about minds, brains, and gender
A nice short letter in The Guardian. UPDATE: Rae Langton tells me that The Guardian omitted a reference to Cordelia Fine's work; here is Langton and Dupre's full letter: Your headline reads ‘Male and female brains wired differently, scans reveal‘ (2 December 2013). What do scans reveal? ‘Maps of neural circuitry show women’s brains are…
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What happens after we die?
This could be a short interview, but John Martin Fischer (UC Riverside) has more to say.
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The death of Nelson Mandela
Robert Paul Wolff, as I had hoped, provides some useful commentary. Let us not forget that, during his long career, Mandela was an advocate of what would now be called "terrorism" against the South African state, and correctly so. He survived a quarter-century of unjust imprisonment, and yet, remarkably, assumed the mantle of political power without…
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Undergraduate student debt
This informative website allows you to look up average debt by school.
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“The Joy of Logic”
A BBC4 documentary! (For those outside the UK, you may need to view it here.) (Thanks to Michael Bramley for the pointer.)
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How many letters of recommendation should a job seeker have?
A senior philosopher elsewhere writes: Over the years dossiers for applicants for junior positions have gotten larger and larger. Some dossiers we have received for our current search number more than 80 pages, One thing that is particularly striking to me is the number of letters of recommendation that each dossier contains. Back in the…
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Free will blogging
Washington State's Joe Campbell is at Flickers of Freedom this month.
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Are there any legitimate on-line degree programs for philosophy?
I get this question all the time; here's the most recent version: I’ve been attending a community college for a few years now, and I’ll be earning my AA in Philosophy in a couple of semesters. I’ve been checking out some of the local universities, but nobody offers a philosophy degree achievable by night classes…
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Yale’s Stephen Darwall interviewed…
MOVING TO FRONT–LINK NOW WORKING …at 3AM.
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Spiros’s advice to the spouses of academic job seekers
He's reposted it, since it is timely again.
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Bigger government, bigger social safety net, happier people
This is hardly surprising, but it's nice to see it featured at CNN: We are entirely capable of knowing what policies best contribute to people leading positive and rewarding lives. In recent decades, social scientists have been studying human happiness in the same way we study any other human attribute. Vast new multidisciplinary research has…
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More on women in philosophy
Following up on Jo Wolff's piece, philosopher Mary Midgley (one of those mentioned by Wolff) writes to The Guardian: As a survivor from the wartime group [at Oxford], I can only say: sorry, but the reason was indeed that there were fewer men about then. The trouble is not, of course, men as such –…
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What happiness (or at least “wretched contentment”!) looks like
Philosopher Dan Haybron (Saint Louis) comments.
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Classical music and today’s bourgeoisie
Interesting piece from Jacobin. (Its partial target is Mark Oppenheimer, one of the scummier journalists I've encountered, but the piece is of interest independent of the easy mark. Adorno even makes an appearance!)
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200KGBP AHRC Grant for “Normativity: Epistemic and Practical”…
…at the University of Southampton.
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New Books in November
Authors and/or publishers kindly sent me these new books this month: Portraits of American Philosophy edited by Steven M. Cahn (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) (intellectual autobiographies by, among others, J.B. Schneewind, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and Harry Frankfurt). Hegel's Thought in Europe: Currents, Crosscurrents and Undercurrents edited by Lisa Herzog (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
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Help sought for a biography of Richard Montague
Professor Ivano Caponigro, a linguist at UC San Diego, asked me to share the following: I'm working on a biography of Richard Montague (1930-1971) that aims to reconstruct his intellectual and personal life, his contributions, and his legacy. Please contact me if you knew him personally (or just met him a few times) or have…
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Arthur Danto remembered
Gayle Greene, a professor of English at Scripps College, who took her PhD in English at Columbia, shared this charming story about her experiences with Professor Danto: “Julius Caesar!” He looked up with genuine astonishment. He was a philosopher. Why on earth would anyone ask him to read a dissertation about Julius Caesar? “Shakespeare’s Julius…
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“the most important questions facing us”
I was struck by this from a short Times piece about Appiah, in which he mentions "the most important questions facing us — gender, the environment, animal rights." Are those the "most important questions facing us"? Discuss.
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Either don’t live near pythons…
…or don't get drunk, you can't have it both ways. UPDATE: I was afraid this was too "good" to be true! (Thanks to Alex Parrish for the pointer.)
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For philosophers of perception…
…UCL's Michael Martin interviewed by the student philosophy journal at Oslo.
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Pope Francis, Marxist?
Not really, superficial similarities notwithstanding. When he endorses the theory of ideology and non-teleological historical materialism, that will be different. Right now he's at the moralizing utopion socialist stage.
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The “aristocracy of sex” in philosophy
Jonathan Wolff (UCL) comments. At the end of the column, he runs together two issues that should be kept separate: the combative nature of philosophy and how one should treat students. Professor Ishiguro's approach on the latter seems the right one, but that is independent of whether philosophy as practiced among peers should, or should not…
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Appiah from Princeton to NYU
Anthony Appiah (ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of race) at Princeton University has accepted a senior offer from New York University, to start in 2014. According to the university press release, "He will spend half the year in New York teaching in the Department of Philosophy and School of Law; the other half of the year…
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Darby from Kansas to Michigan
Derrick Darby (social & political philosophy, African-American philosophy), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he will start in fall 2014. With Darby and Elizabeth Anderson, Michigan will now be one of the very top choices…
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Wash U’s John Heil to be inaugural editor of JAPA…
…which will be published by Cambridge University Press. That's a very good choice, though the inaugural editorial board is yet to be announced, and that will tell us more about interest group "capture" and about whether JAPA will be like the Eastern Division program or a consistently high quality professional journal. (Thanks to Joe Hatfield…
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Putting drafts of work on-line?
A graduate student writes: What do people think of grad students making their work available online early in their careers? It seems pretty common for students still doing coursework to post paper drafts on Academia.edu, even when the drafts are far from publishable, and I'm not sure if the potential advantages outweigh the potential costs.…
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The criminal underclass is scary…
…almost as scary as the criminal over-class.
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Plutocracy watch: one-party state edition
This is apt: In the past, the U.S. has sometimes been described sardonically — but not inaccurately — as a one-party state: the business party, with two factions called Democrats and Republicans. That is no longer true. The U.S. is still a one-party state, the business party. But it only has one faction: moderate Republicans,…
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“Salt of the Earth,” a blacklisted 1954 movie…
…though apparently well-known in other parts of the world. Based on an actual strike by Mexican-American workers against a zinc mining company, it is set in New Mexico, and uses actual mineworkers and their families in most of the main roles (including the male lead, Juan Chacon–his wife was played by a professional actress, however). The…
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JFK: Worse than Obama
Longtime reader Ruchira Paul calls my attention to these reasonable observations by Professor Chomsky.
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Evans from Michigan to Texas
Matt Evans (ancient philosophy, ethics), currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, to begin next fall. That's a significant boost for ancient philosophy at Texas, which should help re-establish it as among…
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The fetishism of procedures: on filibusters and voting
Mark Lance (Georgetown) comments.
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The American right and the shadow of slavery
Interesting piece by Michigan's Elizabeth Anderson.
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Religious exemptions to the law
A short opinion piece at the new Al Jazeera America site, drawing on some themes from my book.
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Famous philosophical, mathematical, and scientific ideas…
…in 60 seconds. (Thanks to David Livingstone Smith for the pointer.)
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Ludlow from Northwestern to Rutgers
Peter Ludlow (philosophy of language, mind, cognitive science, & linguistics), Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where he will also have an appointment in and serve as Director of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. (No word on whether his avatar…
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The FBI files on Sartre and Camus
Your secret police at work.
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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.…
Perhaps a useful distinction here is between replacing philosophers and changing the conditions under which philosophical work gets done. LLMs…
Conditional on the hypothesis that journal editors sometimes desk reject high-quality papers written and commended by world experts on a…
Some users seem to have conflicting impressions about the (absolute level of) abilities of current iterations of the LLMs. But…
I only just learned of Barry’s passing, and I’m enormously saddened at the news. I wrote my PhD on his…