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Debating Intelligent Design
[Note: a first version of this posting disappeared from the site, for reasons I don’t understand…This is my attempt to recreate it.] Some readers have remarked on my recommendation of Michael Rea’s book World Without Design, a stimulating critique of philosophical naturalism that suggests, ultimately, that ours may be a “world with design.” At the…
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Christian Philosophers and Creationism
Keith DeRose—famed philosopher at Yale, valued member of the PGR Advisory Board, and creator of the Epistemology Page (highly recommended!)—writes with the following comments on one of my earlier posts about the attack on biology textbooks in Texas: ”Regarding your recent post on the treatment of evolution in textbooks by the ‘Texas Taliban’: Since you…
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Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them–Intelligent Design round 3
Francis Beckwith, Associate Professor of Church-State Studies at Baylor University, owner of a “.com” homepage (!), and a frequent poster boy for the Discovery [sic] Institute, is the “new face” of the Intelligent Design scam run by the Institute. Quite presentable, he almost sounds reasonable, though he turns out to be as big a liar…
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More PGR Feedback
In today’s in-box, a graduate student at a top 50 department writes: “I should also pass along my thanks to you for all your work on the Report. Naturally, as a student at [a program not ranked more highly], I’m somewhat disgruntled about the rankings. Nevertheless, I have found the Report extremely informative and helpful,…
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“Some Philosophers Are Really Strange”
Professor Brad DeLong, noting one of Professor Heck’s arguments, describes it, from the viewpoint of economics, as being “completely, ludicrously, laughably false.” From the viewpoint of philosophy, too, I assure you.
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Yet Another Student “Harmed” by the PGR
Now they’re really coming out of the woodworks–another “victim” of the PGR speaks out here.
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More Students “Harmed” by the PGR
Add Juan Comesana, a recent PhD graduate of Brown, and his wife Carolina Sartorio (PhD, MIT), to the purportedly long, but so far invisible, list of students “harmed” by the PGR. Comesana and Sartorio were two of the top candidates on the philosophy job market last year, and have now accepted tenure-track posts at the…
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Leo Strauss Redux and How Others See Philosophy
My introduction to the blogosphere came as a result of my May 5th posting to the Update Service, commenting on the tiresome fact that the media continue to portray Leo Strauss and his acolytes as though they’re serious thinkers, when, as philosophers know, they’re just the right-wing versions of Judith Butler: intellectual poseurs and frauds,…
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Pathological liars at the Discovery [sic] Institute Caught Red-Handed
Here’s a nice example of the chronic and pathological dishonesty of the Intelligent Design proponents at the Orwellian “Discovery [sic] Institute.” John West from the Institute (“John West, Ph.D.”, as he’s always keen to list himself–by the way, I’m “Brian Leiter, Ph.D., J.D.”–don’t you feel more confident already in what I have to say?) had…
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Petition in support of sound science in biology textbooks
Many thanks to Jonathan Ichikawa, a recent graduate of Rice University, who has put together a petition aimed at Holt, Rinehart, the publisher of biology textbooks that appears to be caving to political pressure from anti-Darwinians, as I discussed here. The on-line petition is available here. I hope many readers will sign the petition, and…
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More on Citations to Philosophers
Brian Weatherson, a philosopher at Brown University, writes with the following additional data on cites to philosophers at the SEP cite: “If you do a search for David Lewis you get 80 mentions in 44 entries. It’s hard to know how to compare this to other rankings, but here’s some other searches for full names…
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Norms of the Blogosphere
One week and 1300 visitors later, I’m learning a few things about the norms of the blogosphere. An important one is you don’t put your e-mail address on your blog, or you get spammed to death. Another is that if you link to only a few blogs (I had linked to exactly three), rather than…
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Most Cited Philosophers?
In law, as in many social and natural science disciplines, extensive use is made of citation studies as a measure of the impact and importance of scholarship. Such approaches have their drawbacks (those in law are discussed here). The drawbacks are even greater, I expect, in philosophy. But out of curiosity, I decided to take…
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More on the Heckling Campaign
One correspondent asks: “Since the arguments on the Heck site are pretty bad, why do you think philosophers signed the letter? Is it all the Baker reason?” I think Baker hit the nail on the head about something important. But I do think there is another important factor, that is discussed briefly in my reply…
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Iraq
Noam Chomsky is that rare philosopher who actually has something substantial to say about the world beyond philosophy (contrast: Hilary Putnam or Richard Rorty, significant philosophers who are politically and morally trivial). For a typically trenchant and provocative set of comments, that cut through the usual sanctimonious bullshit, see this recent short essay on Iraq.…
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Biology textbooks under attack
Texas is the second largest buyer of school textbooks in the US and, unfortunately for the nation, the power to approve and reject textbooks is vested in the hands of a small State Board of Education, which is dominated by the Texas Taliban, that frightening brand of Texas politicos who are committed to making the…
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Two Important Recent Books
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has recently published two informative reviews of two important recent works of philosophy; I recommend both books (though I disagree, in the end, quite strongly with one of them). The books are: (1) John Doris’s Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (CUP, 2002), which is informatively reviewed by Lawrence Blum.…
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Whatever Became of the Heckling Campaign?
I periodically receive correspondence inquiring, in one form or another, “Whatever became of the Heckling campaign?” In the hopes of satisfying the curiosity of other users of the PGR with the same question, and thus saving myself a lot of individual correspondence, let me give an extended answer to this query: So what became of…
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News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.
Hear hear
I agree with all of this. The threat is really that stark. The only solution is indeed in-class essay exams,…
I’m not sure I’d yet go so far as to call LLMs an existential threat to universities. But I do…
My big problem with LLMs at the present time, apart from being potentially the epitome of Foucault’s panopticon & Big…
I’m also at a British university (in a law school) and my sentiments largely align with the author’s. I see…
If one is genuinely uninterested in engaging with non-human interlocutors, it is unclear why one continues to do so—especially while…
I’d like to pose a question. Let’s be pessimistic for the moment, and assume AI *does* destroy the university, at…