July 2014
Bentham Trashes the Declaration of Independence
So you’ve had your long weekend and your fireworks, but now it is time for a Monday morning beat down, USA, courtesy of Jeremy Bentham:
The opinions of the modern Americans on Government, like those of their good ancestors on witchcraft, would be too ridiculous to deserve any notice, if like them too, contemptible and extravagant as they be, they had not led to the ..
A Non-Academic Use for those Powers of Deduction
Like a modern Sherlock Holmes, he uses unconventional techniques to unravel the mysteries of corruption, kidnapping and drug trafficking.
Eduardo Salcedo was a philosophy student in Colombia who now employs his deductive skills as a consulting detective. Among other things, he has “uncovered rampant corruption at even the highest levels of Colombia’s intelligence a..
Criticism of Colorado’s Proposed “Best Practices”
Spencer Case, a PhD student at the University of Colorado, writing in the National Review, describes and criticizes some of the practices his department is adopting in the wake of the site visit by the APA Committee on the Status of Women.
Update: Some people have asked why I have posted a link to this article. Let me say first that as a general rule, my linking to..
Friday Night Tunes… from a Philosophy PhD Student
Tom Krell, a PhD student at DePaul, records pop music under the name How To Dress Well. His latest release, What is This Heart, was just favorably reviewed in The New York Times. I’m enjoying it right now, and you can, too, right here.
Co-Authorship and Voice in Philosophy
Necessarily, it seems to me, a co-authored work, growing… out of collaborative discussion and intellectual exchange, cannot have an authentic and distinctive voice. Inevitably, unless one author completely dominates the others, it will be written in the flat, correct, acceptable one-dimensional language of the Academy. There will be no dark recesses or ironic ov..
Gideon Rosen on the Humanities’ PR Problem
Any educated person can rattle off a list of the great achievements of science and technology in the past 50 years: the Big Bang, cloning, the Internet, etc. People who have no idea what the Higgs boson is or why it matters still can tell you that it was discovered in July 2013 by a heroic team of scientists and that the discovery reveals something deep about the un..
Heap of Links
1. Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins makes some personal resolutions about how to treat other philosophers.
2. Students prefer administering painful electric shocks to themselves rather than just sitting and thinking.
3. On the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website you can view 142 works of art with “philosopher” in their title and 149 with “philosophy“. (I haven’t checked wh..
The APA Responds to the New York Times
The New York Times recently published an article on a study about the relative difference in earnings between majors, particularly how much a recession affects the earning potential of different majors. Its conclusion was that “For high-earning majors, graduating into a recession increases their earnings advantage, and for low-earning ones, it increases their disadv..
Philosophy Tag
In the last round, University of British Columbia’s Roberta Ballarin tagged University of Georgia’s Anthony Shiver, and man, he is a fast it. Let’s see who he has tagged.
“A whole is nothing over and above its parts.” Taken at face value, this claim seems to imply that some individuals (i.e., complex wholes) are several things. But this is puzzling: how can w..
The Value of a Liberal Arts Education
It obviously would not have counted as the survival of, say, Plato’s Academy if, at some point in the waning of Athens’s golden cultural era it had taken up the training of military leaders, or merchants, or rhetoricians. Nor would it count as the survival of a Franciscan monastery if it responded to a decline in religious enthusiasm by filling its vacant rooms with..
Official Word on Ludlow from Rutgers
Following up on an earlier post, according to an official spokesperson at Rutgers, Peter Ludlow will not be joining the Rutgers faculty.
“When Rutgers learned of allegations against Professor Ludlow at Northwestern, the university requested relevant information from Professor Ludlow and his attorney,” spokesman Greg Trevor said in a statement. “This information w..
Insults and Obnoxiousness
On the second day of this blog’s existence, I wrote a post answering some questions I had received from readers, including this:
Is this blog an attack on Brian Leiter? Nope. Like many in philosophy, I have a sincere appreciation for Professor Leiter’s efforts over the years to disseminate information about the profession that had typically been known to and control..
Philosophize… Like a Boss
Bruce Springsteen was photographed reading a book about philosophers lately, and one result has been a jump in sales for the book, Examined Lives by James Miller (New School). Now if I could only get Beyoncé to read my manuscript… in public…
APA Creates Code of Conduct Task Force
In response to a petition received earlier in the year asking it to develop a professional code of conduct for philosophers, the American Philosophical Association has created a task force the aim of which is to “explore whether such a code of conduct is warranted and, if so, to develop one for board approval.” The task force was appointed by Chesire Calhoun (Arizon..
Philosophy with the Public
The widespread perception is that most faculty members do not engage with the public—either because they don’t want to or because they know they won’t be rewarded for it.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, historian David M. Perry (Dominican University) discusses obstacles to public engagement by academics. This is something that should be of concern to philosoph..
New Site for Philosophical Interviews
The Center for Cognition and Neuroethics, a joint venture between the Philosophy Department at the University of Michigan-Flint and the Insight Institute of Neurosurgery and Neuroscience (IINN), has launched a new site called Philosophical Profiles, which features interviews of philosophers (video and written transcript). So far they’ve interviewed Elizabeth Anderso..
Immortality Project Grant Winners Announced
The Immortality Project at UC Riverside, headed up by John Martin Fischer, has announced the winners of grants totaling $1.5 million. The winners include a number of philosophers working on a variety of projects.
Philosophers among the winners include Yuval Avnur (Scripps), Christopher Belshaw (Open University), Stephan Blatti (Memphis), Ben Bradley (Syracuse), Mik..