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Statement by the DC shooter
Here. It is surprisingly cogent, considering that his actions were not.
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“Great” moments in (what is definitely extremely) obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Holy Rockin’ Band, “Guns,” 1981
Continuing last week’s journey down (my) memory lane, I wrote this song after the murder of John Lennon and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. It’s lyrical content is still relevant, given America, alas. (I still haven’t heard anyone say: “ban all guns.”) (As noted in the earlier post, this is a 4-track recording, literally…
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Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law, volume 6 will be published…
…in May 2026 (not January 2027 as the website still says), with new essays by Hasan Dindjer (Oxford), Amanda Greene (UC Santa Barbara), Gabe Mendlow (Michigan), Sophia Moreau (NYU), James Penner (NUS), Ralf Poscher (Freiburg), Sabine Tsuruda (Toronto), and Daniel Viehoff (Berkeley), and covering a wide range of topics in general and normative (or specific)…
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Spacetime does not exist
Philosopher Sam Baron (Melbourne) discusses. As always, I’m interested to hear what the philosophers of physics make of a bold claim like this.
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8 philosophers elected to the American Academy of (each other’s friends in the) Arts & Sciences
They are: Julia Driver (UT Austin), Melissa Lane (Politics, Princeton), Jane Maienschein (Arizona State), Paolo Mancosu (Berkeley), James Weatherall (UC Irvine), David Wong (Duke), Gideon Yaffe (Law, Yale), and Lea Ypi (LSE).
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Maybe Borat was right after all about that part of the world?
Unbelievable. (Borat reference.)
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What an embarrassment: Harvard raising money to hire faculty who contribute to “viewpoint diversity” which is not an academic value
Pathetic. Public universities can’t do anything when their legislatures create institutes and schools for the purpose of hiring right-wing faculty. But Harvard departments will need to stand firm in what looks to be massive push for affirmative action for faculty with the right “politics” but not the right scholarly bona fides to be appointed on…
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A useful catalogue of the casualties of Trump’s reign of malevolent buffoonery
Here. Mr. Edsall notes many lives that have been or will be loss because of his policies, without even mentioning the many victims of his reckless use of U.S. military power, most recently, in Iran. UPDATE: And more on the most corrupt President in the history of the U.S.
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USC’s Andrew Bacon turns down the Wykeham Professorship in Logic at Oxford
That’s a notable retention for USC! Offering it to Professor Bacon does reflect a pattern with many of the Oxford chairs, which have been offered to younger philosophers (e.g., Ofra Magidor, Amia Srinivasan) rather than more established senior figures (there are exceptions, of course: e.g., David Owens for the White’s Professorship and Mike Martin for…
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The problem for parents in America is that “America hates people”
Yes, indeed, a nice takedown of a bit of sociological idealism in the NYT: The article mentioned that policymakers need to focus on supporting parents, but in equal weight, if not more so, was the argument that America’s culture of parenting was the problem. Having raised kids for 18 years in the United States and…
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Why prefer “beautiful” theories?
Scientific anti-realists have long raised the question. Philosopher Jane Forsey poses it here.
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More on faculty fleeing Texas due to the war on academic freedom and free expression
Story at IHE. (Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)
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Virtual APA, redux
Pacific APA Program Chair Colin Marshall reflects on the recent virtual APA, which may prove to be the last. Curious what readers who attend APA meetings more than I do think about all this.
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Greene on Guerrero on “lottocracy”
We’ve noted philosopher Alex Guerrero’s striking work on lottocracy in the past. I want to commend to interested readers the very informative and nuanced review by Amanda Greene. She makes one of the most interesting criticisms of lottocracy, one I had not seen elsewhere: Guerrero admits that it might seem that lottocratic institutions offer citizens…
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Someone once described SCOTUS as a “super-legislature”…
…and the recent NYT expose about the origin of SCOTUS’s “shadow docket” suggests he was right. As one reader put it to me in an email about the NYT article: Ultimate vindication of your “super legislature” moniker. Nothing in the story is particularly surprising, but it does establish that what we call the “shadow docket”…
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(Maybe) Great Moments in (what is definitely extremely) obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Holy Rockin’ Band, “Feel All Right” and “Who Am I?” (circa 1979-1980)
I mentioned a few years back that as a teenager, I used to write songs, and with my friend Tommy Williams, a real musician, we recorded them on a 4-track tape recorder owned by a friend, the late Richard Hegeman (who was our engineer, as it were–we recorded them in the basement of his house).…
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In Memoriam: Dale Dorsey (1976-2026)
Professor Dorsey, who moved a couple of years ago from the University of Kansas to Oxford University, was perhaps best-known for his work in moral philosophy. Philosopher Aaron Garrett writes: It is with great shock and sadness that I report the sudden passing of Dale Dorsey. Dale recently moved to Somerville College Oxford after having…
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“Distinguished” Yale professors write report that indicts Yale for the public hostility towards higher education
The report is here. Many of the authors are, to my knowledge, distinguished in their field. Remarkably, the report never mentions the massive right-wing media propaganda campaign to discredit universities over the last 25 years–no mention of Fox, Tucker Carlson, The Daily Caller, etc. The positive proposals are mostly fine (universities exist to produce and…
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Open letter in support of Texas State philosophy professor wrongfully fired for his lawful political speech
Here (earlier coverage of this case).
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Schwenkler from Illinois/Urbana to UT Austin
John Schwenkler (philosophy of action & mind, ethics & moral psychology), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has accepted a senior appointment as Professor of Philosophy in the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin, where he will also hold a zero-time appointment in the Department of…
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Canadian Journal of Philosophy is going “open access”
CJP has always been a very reputable generalist journal (on the edge of the “top ten”), but this development should increase its appeal to prospective authors!
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In Memoriam: William McBride (1938-2026)
Profesor McBride, who was emeritus at Purdue University, was especially well-known for his work on Sartre, as well as on Marxist theory and on topics in social and political philosophy as well. There is an obituary here. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor McBride or for those who would like to…
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The Texas war on academic freedom: Texas Tech University system edition
An outright ban on any teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity! As philosopher Alex Byrne observed on Twitter: Want to write your thesis on the fraternal birth order effect? (Gay men tend to have more older brothers.) Nope. “Graduate theses and dissertations may only center on SOGI topics as a strictly temporary teach-out exception,…
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Social science papers may lean “liberal”…
…but they do not lean “left,” and it would be nice if journalists were a little more careful about this. One entire social science discipline leans anti-left (i.e., pro-capitalist), while others may, at best, tend to be liberal in the parochial American sense. If only the social sciences really leaned left, we’d learn a lot…
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Three philosophers receive 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships
They are: Alan Baker (Swarthmore), Kate Manne (Cornell) and Gina Schouten (Harvard). (Thanks to a couple of readers who noted my inadvertent omission of Professor Baker when I first posted this.)
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The increasing risk of nuclear war
What’s wrong with this analysis, if anything?
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Chemero from Cincinnati to Vanderbilt
Tony Chemero (philosophy of mind and cognitive science), University Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Cincinnati, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Profesor Chemero’s work has been quite influential, so this is a major appointment for Vanderbilt.
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The Pope is “weak on crime”
No comment. But I do hope the malevolent buffoon in Washington DC continues attacking major religious leaders.
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A new “International Society for Moral Psychology”
Membership is currently free!
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Does AI degrade human comprehension and reasoning?
Law professors at the University of Minnesota investigated, and came up with a somewhat more optimistic answer than a lot of research–although careful structuring of how and when it’s used is probably needed to avoid negative effects. Comments from readers who actually read the paper are welcome.
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Viktor Orban is more psychologically mature than Donald Trump…
…which isn’t saying much, but at least he has conceded, and perhaps Hungary can have a humane future now. Let us hope the U.S. can.
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Peterson from Texas A&M to Southern Methodist University
Martin Peterson (normative ethics, decision theory), will be leaving his endowed professorship in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University, to take up a University Professorship at Southern Methodist University, with an endowed chair in “Ethics in Artificial Intelligence.” That’s a big loss for Texas A&M (and the second senior loss this year), but…
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deRossett from Vermont to Notre Dame
Louis deRossett (metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
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Economists (i.e., adherents of the failed empirical science of neoclassical economics) “once dismissed the AI job threat”…
…but now they don’t. As ideologists for capitalism, they, of course, had to resist the idea that AI would expose how little interest capitalist modes of production have in wage laborers–blue collar workers learned this decades ago, but now white collar workers are being lined up at the firing line. As I said in a…
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What is it like to be a philosopher? Felipe de Brigard edition
Here, courtesy of Clifford Sosis.
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It’s a good thing Ross Douthat doesn’t know any philosophy…
…or he wouldn’t have been able to write this silly book full of bad arguments for religious belief. It’s as though Hume, Darwin, Lyell, David Strauss etc. never existed with these folks.
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I’ll be at Princeton next Tuesday to give a public lecture on academic freedom…
…thanks to a kind invitation from the philosophy majors. Hope to see some readers there. I got my BA in philosophy from Princeton in 1984, and the only faculty member I had a class with who remains is Mark Johnston (he had just started in Spring 1984, and was quite tolerant of my irresponsibly missing…
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Empedocles finally publishes something new!
Well, not exactly, but an old manuscript has been newly discovered. (Thanks to Peter Kail for the pointer.)
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The persistent myth that Williams was significantly influenced by Nietzsche
(Moving to front from yesterday–file link fixed) I usually like Jane O’Grady’s work, but this popular piece is quite misleading. There are some superficial similarities between Williams and Nietzsche, but the differences are far more profound, including in their completely different understanding of the Greeks. Williams’s critique of morality is also quite tepid by comparison…
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