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The American Bar Association needs to investigate Texas Tech Law School for violating the First Amendment rights of a student
A Texas Tech Law alum writes: Texas Tech, as you might know, is in the forefront of demolishing any semblance of academic freedom. Their new system Chancellor (Brandon Creighton) is the former state legislator who authored SB17, the legislation that outlawed DEI, requires Regent review of syllabi, and loosens tenure protections. A Texas Tech School…
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No more Marx or Spinoza in the secondary school philosophy curriculum in Italy…
…but students will read Gentile, the philosopher of fascism.
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“The end of the road for Dr. Disgrace”
That’s Dr. Jeremy Faust’s take on Senator Bill Cassidy’s defeat in the Republican primary yesterday in Louisiana. It was Senator Cassidy’s craven vote for the imbecile Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services that enabled the imbecile’s war on public health. As Dr. Faust writes: Cassidy will go down as a…
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“Great” moment in (definitely) obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Holy Rockin’ Band, “Clouds,” 1980 or 1981
The saga of the Leiter-Williams “basement tapes” continues with this gentler number, “Clouds.” As usual, Tommy did a great job with the arrangement (and the vocals), including additional guitars and keyboards.
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Philosopher Ann Cudd’s rampage at Portland State continues
52 positions (including 4 in philosophy) are on the chopping block. As this informative post explains, the mischief originates with the Orwellian “University Innovation Alliance”: The UIA’s theory of institutional change rests on a set of identifiable assumptions: that transformation requires centralized administrative authority; that academic programs should be evaluated primarily through data analytics and…
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Kirk-Giannini from Rutgers/Newark to Southern California
Cameron Kirk-Giannini (philosophy of language, philosophy of AI, social philosophy, philosophy of religion), Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, Newark, has accepted appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, effective fall 2027. (Thanks to Samuel Elgin for the pointer to the social media announcement.)
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Another blow for American universities trying to recruit and enroll foreign students
From CHE: The [new Trump Administratin] guidance, which is expected to be released any day, would make visas valid for four years or the anticipated length of a student’s degree — whichever is shorter. Students in longer programs like doctorates would have to apply for an extension to finish their studies. It’s a shift from…
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AI prefers to hire resumes written by AI
Oy veh. Pretty pathetic.
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The historian Sven Beckert appears to be confused about “capitalism”
That’s the upshot of this long and interesting review of Beckert’s most recent book by the political theorist Corey Robin. I’ve not read Beckert’s book, but welcome comments from those who know more about this topic. Please do not comment unless you have read Beckert’s book or read Robin’s review.
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Meanwhile, faculty and students at Ghent are still conspiring to get Cofnas fired
This document was sent out to encourage philosophers to file complaints about the fact that Dr. Cofnas was appointed to a post-doc: Note that it evens supplies text to use in filing a complaint! Let me observe that this is not only an attack on Dr. Cofnas’s academic freedom, but also on the academic freedom…
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Cambridge’s violation of the academic freedom rights of Nathan Cofnas (and its own free speech policies)
Dr. Cofnas reviews the gory details. It’s particularly shocking that Cambridge Philosophy hired a not very competent lawyer to review the academic merits of his research rather than scholars in his field: that would be a fatal due process violation in the U.S. under AAUP standards. (Earlier coverage here and here.)
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Plato and Nietzsche
Philosopher Mark Anderson discusses (and outs himself as a Platonist). His story of his path into philosophy at the start is interesting.
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Most cited legal philosophers by D-Index according to research.com (CORRECTED & UPDATED)
We’ve noted the “D-index” (an h-index for discipline-specific journals) calculated by research.com previously. (Their rankings of universities in law are pretty silly, since the faculty lists include deceasd faculty, retired faculty, and faculty who are not law professors.) They clearly don’t count law reviews for D-index, only faculty-edited journals, which is appropriate for legal philosophy.…
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“Mind is Matter”
The film, featuring Ned Block, David Papineau and others.
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What is analytic philosophy?
I came across this chart on FB, and it’s not a bad description of analytic philosophy when it existed (except, of course, the image next to Kripke is not Kripke!):
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“Great” moments in (definitely) obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Holy Rockin’ Band, “Bourgeois Goodies,” 1979 or 1980
Another track from the Leiter-Williams “basement tapes” recorded on just 4 tracks back in 1979 or 1980. Another apt song for the latest “affordability crisis” afflicting the ordinary citizens of capitalist America, this was always my personal favorite. (Have no fear, there are only a few more songs I will share on the blog!)
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How is your school responding to the “Canvas” security breach by hackers?
Most academic readers will have heard of this fiasco. How is it affecting grades, finals, etc.? Is your administration expecting instructors to carry on as though nothing happened? You can post anonymously, but please include a valid university email address (which will not appear).
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Frequency of fabricated references (probably AI generated) in biomedical papers over a three-year period
From The Lancet: Among 97·1 million verified references [across 2.5 million papers], we identified 4046 fabricated references across 2810 papers (illustrative examples are shown in the appendix p 5–6). In 2023, approximately one in 2828 papers contained at least one fabricated reference. By 2025, this had risen to one in 458 and in the first 7…
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A philosopher takes on the “pedagogy experts”
Paul Schofield (Bates) makes the case against them at CHE. (Thanks to Brian Skyrms for the pointer.) UPDATE: Philosopher Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin writes: As both a tenured philosophy professor and director of a teaching and learning center, I read Paul Schofield’s recent CHE piece, “Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong,” with great interest when I saw it…
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The imbecile strikes again! RFK Jr’s Health Department suppresses research…
…finding that the Covid and shingles vaccines are safe.
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“Ryle’s War”
We now know about J.L. Austin’s important work as a D-Day intelligence officer during WWII, but what about his fellow ordinary language philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford beginning in 1944. Philosopher Jack Copeland writes: What did Ryle do in the Second World War? Little was known—he was discreet about his life.…
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A blueprint for how Trump will try to steal the 2026 midterm elections
Here: In an April 29 essay in The Washington Spectator, “Emergency Planning: The President Is Preparing to Challenge 2026 Midterms. The Country Can Still Act to Protect Them,” Jonathan Winer, a former U.S. special envoy for Libya and a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement during the Clinton presidency, described the following…
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Another casualty of the Texas war on academic freedom
Philosopher Christy Mag Uidhir, whose earlier objections to the new intrusive policies we noted, writes: I have notified the University of Houston that I will be resigning my position as Professor of Philosophy effective June 1st, 2026. Not sure what I’ll be doing next, but I do know that whatever it is, I won’t be…
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“Oligarch watch”
Grimly amusing, and also informative about these dangerous people.
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Reduced summer blogging schedule
Although most Northern Hemisphere readers are already done with the academic year, at Chicago (on the quarter system) we still have teaching and grading, the latter into early June. I’ll be reducing the frequency of posting starting now, to help me have the time for the latter obligations. But I will continue to post through…
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“Great” moments in (definitely) obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Holy Rockin’ Band, “World on Fire,” 1980 or 1981
Like last week’s trip back to the “basement tapes” by Leiter and Williams, this is another song whose lyric is still very timely (“Liars, liars, you’ll set this world on fire”). My favorite bit is the slide guitar that Tommy added in the arrangement.
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The United States was not really a country in which votes counted for most of its history…
…since many people couldn’t vote, but now its about to go back to that totally due to gerry-mandering. Everyone can thank the super-legislature.
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How to write a philosophy paper: 25 rules for undergraduates
These guides proliferate, of course, but this one is very detailed (maybe too detailed for the average undergraduate) and instructive for a student who wants to put in the time. (The author is Jazlyn Cartaya, a PhD student at Princeton.)
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Neuro-psychologist seeking advice on studying logic
Longtime reader Kyle Noll, an Associate Professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, writes about his interest in online opportunities for learning more about logic: For background, I majored in philosophy and completed a couple of undergraduate courses in FOL and ZF set theory (by your old colleagues at UT in the…
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Of all the malign actions of the right-wing super-legislature posing as a court…
…gutting the Voting Rights Act–one of the most decent and successful pieces of legislation aimed at counteracting the sorry history of American apartheid–on the basis of a “race neutrality” detached from reality may be among the worst. Justice Kagan’s dissent makes a lot of the correct points. What a disgrace. UPDATE: A useful critique by…
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Todd Blanche disbarment watch: the new Comey indictment
Even the Fox “News” [sic] legal commentator thinks it is absurd.
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Collapse of academic freedom in the U.S.
The 2026 Academic Freedom Index documents it clearly: Of course, there are differences between private and public universities in the U.S. in terms of the collapse of academic freedom, and also differences among public schools depending on whether they are in “blue” or “red” states. One might quibble with aspects of how the report characterizes…
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On the perils of comparing per capita GDP: the case of Canada and the U.S.
Capitalist ideologists love per capita GDP, and it inevitably comes up in discussions of the economies of Canada and the U.S. This essay makes some important points (including that most of the higher per capita GDP in the U.S. is due to greater wealth inequality and to Americans having to work about three weeks more…
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Arizona State using AI to chop up and repackage faculty lectures
Bizarre and pretty outrageous: Arizona State University rolled out a platform called Atomic that creates AI-generated modules based on lectures taken from ASU faculty by cutting long videos down to very short clips then generating text and sections based on those clips. Faculty and scholars I spoke to whose lectures are included in Atomic are…
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Kant’s women
An interesting, albeit lengthy, account of Kant’s social and romantic interests. (The essay starts, not aptly, with a famous line of Nietzsche’s from Beyond Good and Evil: “Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been – namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary…
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Profiles in real courage: Andrée de Jongh
She helped hundreds of downed airmen escape from Nazi-controlled territory, and even survived Nazi capture herself.
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The Republican war on academic freedom and freedom of expression: a survey of faculty
From CHE: Academic researchers’ self-censorship occurred across nearly all disciplines, the survey found. Twenty-nine percent of respondents who lived in states with a [prohibition on] “divisive concepts” law said they had altered their research, and 10 percent said they were looking for a job in a different state because of the political climate. Researchers in…
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The absurd indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center by Trump’s corrupt DOJ
A solid explanation of how beyond the pale this is. Todd Blanche, the acting AG, should be disbarred.
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Statement by the DC shooter
Here. It is surprisingly cogent, considering that his actions were not.
Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog
News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.
Boghossian writes: “What we need to do is to restore a conception of the justification of scholarly claims that is…
When I teach legal philosophy, I am teaching it to law students and graduate students (and an occasional undergraduate student).…
The way I read this is that Professor Boghossian is trying to ease the waters a little bit by removing…
Dr. Leiter, this is my critique of the report. I linked to your piece more clearly in the draft, but…
I’d do it for free, since I want users to get better answers when they ask philosophical questions. The reasons…
I’m an English PhD from a strong program. It certainly seems true that the prototypical straight, white male pool of…
In accusing me of a fondness for ad hominem arguments, Prof. Boghossian confuses a few distinct matters. There is nothing…