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Who “Owns” the Pseudo-Nobel Prize in Economics?
It’s not entirely clear…read this and then read this.
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the “No Bullshit Approach”
Another reader (something of a “hot shot” on the law teaching market this year) writes: “I confess that one of the joys of your blog is its no bullshit approach.” That’s gratifying, but the approach is not universally admired. Alas, it would take me too long to link to all the sites that are evidence…
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More on Conservatives and Law School Hiring
A well-known young law professor at a major law school writes with the following amusing observation: “Delightful latest post on law school hiring and political bias. As someone who tends to lean right-of-center, I think you’re quite right about the seige mentality among conservatives in academia. The way I see it, being a right-of-center academic…
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Not All Law Profs Are Right-Wingers…
…though you might get that impression if you only knew about law schools via blogs like Volokh or Reynolds or Bainbridge or the USD blog. Anyway, here’s some evidence otherwise, involving my esteemed colleague Tom McGarity, who is truly one of the good guys (and a great scholar).
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The Pseudo-Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to…
economists at New York University and the University of California at San Diego. More information is here. For more on the Pseudo-Nobel in Economics, see the several entries here.
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Nobel Prize in Chemistry…
goes to two professors, one at Johns Hopkins University Medical School and one at Rockefeller University in New York. More information is here.
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Law School Hiring and Political Bias
I am learning a lot about hiring practices at UCLA, thanks to Steve Bainbridge’s informative posts. I am particularly struck by his posting on “the anti-conservative bias [in law school hiring] as institutional phenomenon.” I am inclined to agree that law school hiring is more politically driven than hiring elsewhere in the academy, but Professor…
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Finnish anyone?
I’d love to know what this blogger said: Tuomari tulee ja tuomari tuom… eipäs kun bloggaa. Lawrence Lessig, Brian Leiter, Eugene Volokh ja Stephen Bainbridge. No okei, yksikään noista ei ole tuomari vaan lakitieteen professori, mutta halusin olla vitsikäs. Varsinkin Leiter (kas kun ei Felix Leiter) on aika tyly, ja tekee esimerkiksi blogissaan saman huomion…
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University of Illinois Picks Up Its 2nd Nobel Prize in as Many Days!
The Physics prize, announced today, is to be shared by a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the prize in Physiology and Medicine, announced yesterday, was also shared by a professor at Illinois. But as any astute reader of U.S. News knows, the University of Virginia is really a much better university. Really.
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Epistemology comes to Law School
A generation ago the primary point of contact between legal theory and philosophy was through moral and political philosophy; now it is more often through epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language, which has much to do with developments like this. (Needless to say, we’re excited here in Austin about this development!)
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Fame in the Blogosphere: A Blog Devoted to Monitoring Your Blog?
Erin O’Connor, an English professor at Penn, who monitors “politically correct” assaults on academic and political freedom in universities (and, who more recently, was a major contributor to the conservative self-pity fest inspired by the David Brooks column on alleged bias against conservatives in academia), has achieved an unparalelled distinction for an academic blogger: there…
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Two Libertarians on Edward Said
One here, and one here. Who is the hypocrite?
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The culture of “documented facts” in journalism
Good article. And an excellent complement to the preceding from Asia Times: “The more commercial television news you watch, the more wrong you are likely to be about key elements of the Iraq War and its aftermath, according to a major new study released in Washington on Thursday.” False consciousness, anyone?
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2003 MacCarthur Fellows
The MacCarthur Foundation has announced the 2003 winners of what has come to be known as its “genius” grants–5 years worth of money, unrestricted in how it is to be used. My father, who forwarded the NY Times article about the awards, prefaced it with the following: “The ranks of ‘genius’ are thinning. Reads more…
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Splendid Parody of Leo Strauss
There is a splendid parody of Strauss in the comments section at Crooked Timber on the Strauss thread noted here. The poster of the parody is responding to one “Robert Schwartz,” who, singlehandedly, is a powerful argument for not having a Comments section on any blog (his repeated “the less they know, the less they…
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Timely (as always) Nietzsche Observation
“Where has the last feeling of decency and self-respect gone when even our statesmen, an otherwise quite unembarrassed type of man, anti-Christians through and through in their deeds, still call themselves Christians today and attend communion?” —The Antichrist, sec. 38.
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Yet More on the Nobel Prize in Economics
Thanks to James DeRossitt for the following additional information: “I was surprised to learn that, strictly speaking, there really is not a Nobel Prize in Economics. The prize was created by the Bank of Sweden in 1968, long after the other prizes were endowed (in 1901). The official name of the prize is ‘The Bank…
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Minnesota (!?!) Taliban
…are on the march against science too.
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Immortality in Legal Philosophy
Larry Solum’s remarks on questions of philosophical immortality also include some reflections on immortality in legal theory and philosophy of law, broadly construed. Solum’s list of candidates for immortality: O.W. Holmes, Karl Llewellyn, Hans Kelsen, H.L.A. Hart, N. Luhmann, Ronald Coase, Richard Posner, Joseph Raz, Ronald Dworkin. I agree on Holmes, Kelsen, Hart, and Llewellyn;…
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More on Economics and Science
Responding to my post asking why a Nobel Prize is awarded in economics, a young philosopher at a top department writes with the following interesting remarks: “Now, this business about Economics not being a science. The difficulty with philsophers who comment on this sort of thing…is that they tend to suffer from the same myopia…
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“Austin is so not Texas”
So says Sports Illustrated, and I believe they’re correct. Secession from the state is out, though, since the legislature meets here… UPDATE: More on the “myth of Texas” from the Curmudgeonly Clerk.
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More Strauss Bashing
Someone else doesn’t think too highly of old Leo’s misreadings.
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Paul Krugman (future Nobel Laureate?) in the Guardian
Interesting short profile–note especially the bit about the death threats he gets, no doubt from really, really smart, could’ve-been-top-flight-academics-except-for-liberal-bias right-wingers.
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J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize in Literature
From the Swedish Academy’s statement on Coetzee: “he is a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilisation.” This will no doubt lead to his being derided in the blogosphere. UPDATE: Coetzee is also a UT-Austin graduate alumnus. UPDATE 10/05: As predicted, the derision begins.
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The motto of the blogosphere?
“A lie can travel around the world while the truth is just putting on its shoes.” –Mark Twain
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Why is there a Nobel Prize in Economics?
Next week, the Swedish Academy starts handing out Nobel Prizes, which guarantees for the recipients a wave of international publicity and attention. Since the late 1960s, economics has been included among the fields for which the Prize is given. And without a doubt, the field of economics has gotten a lot of mileage out of…
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A Rapprochement Between Philosophy and English Departments?
Philosophers are used to thinking of literature departments as the repositories for all the world’s bad philosophy, but there are indications that that is now starting to change. It’s not only that Derrida is increasingly out of fashion, but that literary scholars are getting interested in philosophical issues about the mind, mental representation, the nature…
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Blog Stats
Number of page views in a single day topped 500 yesterday for the first time, more than two-thirds having visited previously. 9387 page views for September, same percentage repeat visitors. Other breakdowns: 12% of page views were by high IQ libertarians. 2% of page views were by high IQ conservatives. 14% of page views were…
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Actual Tenure Review May Be Coming to Harvard Law School
The Harvard Crimson reports that Harvard Law School may start having a real tenure review, thanks to Harvard President Larry Summers. As I’ve noted before, tenure standards in law schools are rather different than in the rest of the university. If Harvard Law School moves to the tenure norms of the rest of Harvard that…
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Which are the “best” philosophy journals?
UPDATE: I’m moving this to the top, because I would like to encourage more comments from philosophers (including reactions to comments recently posted). Thanks. FINAL UPDATE (9/30): There’s a new comment. More are welcome. I won’t bring this to the top after this.
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IN MEMORIAM
Edward Said (1935-2003) The Columbia University memorial notice is here, though it says next to nothing about his important political work. The New York Times obituary, which reverses the emphasis, is here. 9/30 UPDATE: this is one of the better memorials I’ve seen, courtesy of On-Line Journal. 10/1 UPDATE: Also see this site.
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Law & Economics
This isn’t my area, and I’ve only visited the site a few times, but this relatively new blog looks to be a useful resource for those interested in law and economics (and it has lots of links to other law & econ resources as well).
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Synthese
The new editor of Synthese, philosopher John Symons, asked me to post the following information, after a discussion of the outrageous price of the journal on the Weatherson site. The text of his letter follows: 9/29/2003 Dear Professor Leiter, I’ve received quite a few emails concerning the editorship and pricing of Synthese recently and am…
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Leiter Decisively Refuted at Last
My (characteristically gentle, of course) suggestion that the representation of conservatives in some disciplines some of the time might have something to do with the intellectual merits has produced much indignation, but here at last I am decisively refuted (this courtesy of my favorite group-therapy blog for Straussians): “Leiter is a famously clueless academic who…
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More on conservatives in the academy
I found this posting of interest, from the comments section at Crooked Timber: “As to why most academics are liberal, liberals believe in boring things like fact checking and peer review that are the nuts and bolts of scholarly life. Conservatives, especially, the Potemkin Intellectuals in right-wing think tanks, think that they already know the…
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More Confident Claims about Cause and Effect
Courtesy of a former colleague: “This description of countries in economic decline sounds a bit like the world of Atlas Shrugged or of the United States in the late 1970s, before Ronald Reagan turned things around” (emphasis added).
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Nietzsche Blog
Philosopher John Holbo has a Nietzsche Blog, which has some interesting discussions of questions of Nietzsche interpretation, and is also interesting pedagogically, because Professor Holbo is using it in conjunction with a class on Nietzsche. This is the first instance I’ve encountered of this use of a blog.
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American Academy of Arts & Sciences
I am periodically asked why I don’t include a criterion like membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences as a factor in the philosophy rankings. You can see a list of current philosophy fellows of the American Academy here. (Note that philosophy is lumped with religion and theology in this category, and that…
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“The less they know, the less they know it” post of the week…
…is here, where a navel-gazing recent Yale graduate of no obvious intellectual accomplishment or depth denounces the “idiocy” of, among others, Noam Chomsky, one of the major intellectual figures of the 20th-century. (And does so, oddly, on the basis of a column by Ian Buruma, which quotes [partly out of context, but that’s a different…
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.
He has also written a book on Descartes’ Discourse.
He is a Kant scholar and a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at University of Tehran. He has…
Yes, he has three books, all in Farsi, and all about Kant: One is on *Kant’s Philosophy of Mathematics*. Another…
Professor David Weberman was one of my advisors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and I was fortunate to know him…
It saddens my heart to hear of Dagfinn’s passing. I believe I was the last PhD student at Stanford to…
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