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I’m falling behind on email…
…and will probably not be able to respond to everyone. It’s a very busy quarter for me, with a lot of new preparation (for both my seminar and my Jurisprudence II course). My apologies to those who do not get replies. I still welcome, of course, emails with information and/or links.
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Henry Clarke to be the new OUP Philosophy editor based in Oxford
Clarke took his PhD in philosophy at University College London. I’ve enjoyed working with him on Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law in the past, and wish him success in his new role. He can be reached at henry-dot-clarke-at-oup-dot-com.
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The *real* reason Texas A&M did not want that bit of Plato taught
At last the truth comes out about the A&M academic freedom scandal; a scholar of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy elsewhere writes: If you have given much thought to Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium, you can see why Texas wanted to step in to remove it from the curriculum. 1) It reinforces the oppressive gender…
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Evangelical Christian organization, World Relief, condemns Trump persecution of refugees in Minnesota
Let’s hope the monster child loses the support of evangelicals: This weekend, federal immigration agents detained dozens of lawfully present refugees in Minnesota, including children. The agents, some dressed in plain clothes, lured refugees out of their homes where they were transported to holding facilities and then, in many cases, out of the state. Individuals who have followed every rule and submitted their Green Card applications, as allowed and required one year after their resettlement, are now detained and fear being returned to situations of persecution. World Relief categorically condemns the aggressive tactics ICE agents…
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2025 in review, 4th quarter: October, November, December (moving to front from Dec. 31 for those who may have missed it)
October On dreading the AI future Journals that publish symposia on recent books? Still more on the authoritarianism unfolding daily Williamson “the bullet-biter” The U.S. “Insurrection Act” is our “Enabling Act” “Bloodless pedantry“ H1-B visas and the $100,000 fee: the latest November What is the University of Chicago’s “Committee on Social Thought”? Most cited living…
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Texas launches portal for the public to lodge complaints against colleges
This should do wonders for the already fragile state of academic freedom in this benighted state. (Thanks to Jason Stanley for the pointer.)
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Profiles in real courage: Franca Viola
She defied Sicilian custom, and refused to marry her rapist, instead taking him to court, changing both Italian mores and law.
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My top 50 songs of 2025 according to Spotify, #3: Foghat, “She’s Gone,” 1973
Foghat, which came out of the British blues rock band Savoy Brown, is best-remembered for mid-70s “classic” rock standards like “Fool for the City” and “Slow Ride,” but this song from their second album was always my favorite. Here’s the studio version: And here’s a live version, where “Lonesome” Dave Peverett is having some trouble…
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We’re just two weeks into 2026, and already the monster child and his minions…
That’s just in two weeks. God knows what horrors are coming.
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2025 in review, 3rd quarter: July, August, September (moving to front from Dec. 30 for those who may have missed it)
July The SCOTUS decision on nationwide (or “universal”) injunctions Let’s remember some facts, the propaganda barrage of the Trumpistas notwithstanding The worst President in the history of the U.S. has now ruled for six months (a list of his malfeasance) Does your university/college have a faculty hiring freeze? August It did happen here The University…
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This is what authoritarianism looks like: the “siege of Minnesota”
This editorial from the centrist Minnesota newspaper is worth reading; an excerpt: Minnesota has endured unrest before. What the state is now experiencing looks and feels different. Battalions of armed federal agents are moving through neighborhoods, transit hubs, malls and parking lots and staging near churches, mosques and schools. Strangers with guns have metastasized in spaces where…
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Babies have an innate sense for numbers
Philosophers Jake Beck and Sam Clarke discuss the evidence (with reference to Plato, of course).
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Profiles in real courage: Frank and Beatrice Lumpkin
This is an inspiring read about an interracial, working class couple, united by politics and love, who spent the bulk of their activist careers in and around Chicago.
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Joe Rogan compares ICE tactics to the “Gestapo”
That’s actually important, given his influence. Given recent events, the comparison is also apt. UPDATE: Reader Chris Byron points out to me that the full Rogan clip is full of the idiocy one usually associates with him. Fortunately, what’s being widely reported is the Gestapo comment.
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“Why a U.S. attack on Iran would backfire”
This seems right, but the monster child seems headed in that direction. Curious if well-informed readers have a different view and, if so, why?
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2025 in review, 2nd quarter: April, May, June (MOVING TO FRONT FROM DEC. 29 FOR THOSE WHO MAY HAVE MISSED IT)
April OUP’s policies on providing books for review An interview in the Shanghai Review of Books Information on the European job market? Getting ChatGPT to take a stand The Trump war on universities Another journal, this time in math, abandons Wiley Suitably scathing assessment of the first two months of Trump War on the universities,…
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Texas A&M Interim President: Plato is not banned, it’s being taught (except in that one course…)
While it’s true that many a click-bait headline about the story we broke last week said the university was “banning Plato” (or similarly) one might think this reply by the Interim President does’t really come to terms with the actual academic freedom issue: I want to address recent reports that we’re banning Plato altogether at…
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APA returning to in-person divisional meetings
The APA sets out the reasons here. In brief: online meetings attracted much lower rates of submissions and participation, and many who participated in them said they would not do so again.
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The Trump threat to Canada remains
As this article notes, [W]ith Greenland, Trump and his advisers are seeking control — even raising the possibility of military action — of a territory that is democratic, strategically located in the Arctic, and part of NATO. Canada is all of those things, too. Greenland and Canada also have substantial natural resources (Canada has far more). But Greenland is a…
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Most cited Anglophone books in philosophy of law over the last century
I list all those with at least 1,500 citations (rounded to nearest 100 as usual), since numbers drop off more quickly here (philosophy of law is a lower citation field than political philosophy).
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JHP Article Prize for 2025
Philospoher Deborah Boyle, editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, kindly shared this news: The Journal of the History of Philosophy has awarded its 2025 article prize to Joe Stratmann (Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville) for his paper “Autonomy without Compromise: Wolff, Kant, and the Grounds of Moral Laws” (JHP 63.1…
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2025 in review, 1st quarter: January, February, March (moving to front from Dec. 26, for those who may have missed it)
January What articles in general jurisprudence form the first quarter of the 21st-century should you read? PGR in the real world, an ongoing saga The monster child’s first day with political power Should book authors consent to have generative AI train on their work? Tonight we’ll learn something about the next four years in America…
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Academic freedom in Hong Kong
As I mentioned a few weeks back, I was in Hong Kong in December for, among other things, a conference on “Academic Freedom in Asia.” There I met Professor Cora Chan, a public law scholar at Hong Kong University, who kindly sent me her bracing paper on “Scholarship in Times of Constitutional Transformation: A View…
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Graduate school admissions in the age of AI
This is going to become a very serious issue. PhD and MA admissions depend very importantly on the writing sample. What do programs do when they later come to suspect the admitted student used AI to produce the writing sample? I think all graduate programs need to adopt an absolutely draconian rule, namely, automatic expulsion…
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What it’s like having the ICE thugs in your neighborhood
This account comes from an elderly woman, Diane Graham-Raff, who lives in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota; I reprint her account in full: We live in a tidy 1950s suburb of St. Paul, the smaller, more practical twin city. We are a pretty sedate community, nothing ICE should be interested in if it weren’t…
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Philosopher Jason Stanley (now at U of Toronto) urges Canadians not to send their kids to U.S. universities
Stanley, who decamped from Yale to Toronto after just a few months of Trump’s reign of lawlessness, advises Canadians not to send their children to U.S. universities. An excerpt: I have heard Canadians hope their children might attend university in the U.S., apparently unaware that they would be plunged into an unfree society and subject…
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My top 50 of 2025 according to Spotify, #2: Santana, “Everybody’s Everything,” 1971
Early in the year, I started listening to some Santana, which I had not done in a number of years. Those first three Santana albums are gems, a fusion of blues rock and Latin musical styles. This song, which I apparently listened to more than any other, comes from Santana III in 1971: Feel free…
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Professor Peterson at Texas A&M revises his syllabus.
A propos the story we broke a few days ago, Professor Peterson kindly shared the new syllabus: https://leiterreports.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Syllabus-PHIL-111-S-2026-_-Peterson_censored.pdf He wrote to his Chair, Professor Sweet, as follows: Dr. Sweet, As you may have noticed, I believe it is important to document that philosophy professors at Texas A&M University are not permitted to teach Plato at…
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ICE killing of protester Renee Good in Minneapolis (UPDATED)
It’s easy enough to find the videos of this horrible event. The ICE officer who fired the fatal shots is Jonathan Ross. It is quite clear he was not firing in self-defense. What seems to me to have transpired is that he was “firing for failure to comply with an order,” which isn’t lawful. But…
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“The Lost Generation,” i.e., white guys who couldn’t get jobs they once might have gotten, starting around 2014
Several readers sent this article which clearly describes a real phenomenon, although I’m skeptical 2014 is the relevant start date, although the “Great Awokening” circa 2011 certainly accelerated an existing trend (2014 was also, perhaps not coincidentally, the year the online philosophy profession went crazy). But the article does adduce some striking numbers: White men…
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Tennessee university will pay $500,000 to professor wrongfully fired over Charlie Kirk comments
Thank goodness for lawyers, who are sometimes successful at holding these miscreants to account. (Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)
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“Great Stories in Bioethics”…
…from philosopher Gregory Pence.
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Blast from the past: Five favorite Americans of the 20th-century?
Back in 2018–with my views and those of readers.
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Texas A&M University is no longer a real university
Martin Peterson, a very prominent philosopher at Texas A&M (an expert in decision theory and cognate topics), is slated to teach “Contemporary Moral Issues,” a standard undergraduate course. Here is his syllabus: Texas A&M, engaging in a kind of anticipatory obedience in response to laws enacted by the Texas Taliban in the legislature and executive…
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The mainstream media reacts predictably to Trump’s latest violation of domestic and international law…
…as the World Socialist Website aptly notices. Meanwhile, Trump’s chief fascist theoretician, Stephen Miller, echoes Thucydides (but without noticing what happened to the Athenian empire): “We live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the…
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Federal appeals court agrees that the change to indirect funding by the NIH was unlawful.
CHE has the story. Like so much that the Trumpistas do, this was done in a blatantly illegal way. Unfortunately for universities, they could change the funding formula lawfully, but that will take longer. But unless these gangsters are removed from power in Washington, universities will have to plan for a massive reduction in federal…
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Does “consciousness” require more than computation?
Sean Carroll discusses with philosopher Ned Block.
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What can philosophy contribute to the effort to make AI helpful in the empirical sciences and mathematics?
Reader Matteo Bianchetti writes: Thanks very much for your list of the most cited books in the philosophy of empirical sciences. Reading that list made me think of the following. Several prominent AI companies are promoting the use of AI to advance the empirical sciences and mathematics. This is an example. These companies collaborate with…
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.
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…