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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.
This is an awful loss, I’m crushed by it. Dale was one of my most important mentors, philosophical interlocutors, and…
(I won’t use my name or email address as this post is critical of other philosophers.) Bill was one of…
Although I didn’t know Dale well, I had the good fortune to meet and interact with him during graduate school…
I am shell shocked. Dale was an exemplary and creative moral philosophy, rigorously engaged with the most foundational issues across…
This is sharply at variance with my understanding of the situation. The general consensus for some while has been that…
This is shocking and tragic news. I’ve known Dale since we tried to hire him at Bowling Green State way…
This is incorrect. The incident involving Petrov occured on September 26, 1983. Petrov judged that the Oko early warning system’s…