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Jonardon Ganeri, one of the leading figures internationally working on classical Indian philosophy, has moved from a Chair at the University of Liverpool to one at the University of Sussex. Ganeri also works in epistemology, philosophical logic, and philosophy of mind.
This is a bit belated, but still worth noting: A.D. (David) Smith (phenomenology, philosophy of mind) has moved from a Professorial post at the University of Sussex to one at the University of Warwick. He joins Stephen Houlgate, Peter Poellner and others in solidifying Warwick's position as one of the top places (maybe the top place) for work on post-Kantian Continental philosophy in Britain.
Comforted Not Free
(Valery)
Vague amnesty of fact or fate
The knowledge of some deep mistake
When blood danced at soul's accession
Though moon-eyed whining murky woe
Still wheedles for propitiation
I kneel to memory's truncheon
Rehearse my clammy exculpation
Thoughts recover me of one
Whose passion craved to lie with sense
To marry act and consciousness
His history a slow agility
So luculent with avid reason
Entwining love's frail glitter
This cache uncovered in the mull
Drenches my cairn of pain in light
I burn for youth's high giddy flight
And fevered blazoning upon the sun
It leaves me comforted not free
5/16-8/25/94, 4/19/07, 7/22/07
Copyright 1994, 2007 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.
Philip Percival (metaphysics, philosophical logic, epistemology), Reader in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, has accepted a position as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, adding to Nottingham's already significant strengths in metaphysics and cognate fields. (David Armstrong, the famed Australian philosopher, will also join Nottingham for six months in 2007-08 as Professor of Metaphysics.)
Michael Detlefsen (logic, history and philosophy of mathematics) at the University of Notre Dame has been awarded a multi-year million-dollar research grant by the French National Research Agency. Details here.
Professor Finkelstein has posted the text of a letter from the AAUP calling on the DePaul Administration to permit, consistent with established procedures, an appeal of the adverse tenure decision. Such an appeal has also been endorsed by the Faculty Council at DePaul.
MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM APRIL 27, 2007, now that the University of Colorado Board of Regents has voted to fire Professor Churchill, a sanction recommended by only one of the five members of the Committee that prepared the report on Professor Churchill's research misconduct. The punishment is so plainly disproporionate to the actual offenses that one imagines Professor Churchill's prospects in court--where he will argue that his offensive speech is the real reason the university is punishing him, in violation of the First Amendment--will be good.
======================================
The University of Colorado at Boulder's witchhunt against Ward Churchill--about which we we have written before--is apparently drawing to a close, with his firing for purported "research misconduct" apparently likely. This article is still the most sensible item I've seen regarding the report charging Ward Churchill with "research misconduct." The report is extremely long and detailed, but it's quite clear that most of those on the right clucking with pleasure about the destruction of the career of someone whose political views they despise have read mainly the "summary" of findings, which gives very little sense as to the particulars that underlie the apparently dramatic findings. But the particulars are a rather different matter, and here John Wilson's comments are closer to the mark:
Churchill is guilty of occasionally shoddy scholarship and the dubious practice of ghostwriting, and perhaps even more. But we should be alarmed by the investigative committee’s report, and not merely because the committee exists only because of a concerted effort to fire Churchill for his obnoxious and idiotic comments about 9/11 victims.
By stretching the meaning of “research misconduct” far beyond its true definition, and by supporting the suspension and even dismissal of a tenured professor for his use of footnotes, the Colorado committee is opening the door to a vast new right-wing witch hunt on college campuses that conservatives could easily exploit across the country.
If you don’t like a professor’s politics, simply file a complaint of “research misconduct.” According to the Colorado committee, if you can find a factual error made by the professor with a footnote that fails to prove the contention, that scholar is guilty of “research misconduct” and can be suspended or fired.
This may soft-peddle Churchill's shoddy scholarly practices a bit, but it is far closer to the mark than the absurd contention that Churchill's "falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism...are substantial." In fact, only one plagiarism charge was deemed substantiated in the report, with most of the best-known early allegations dissolving on examination. And the plagiarism at issue in the Churchill case seems quite slight by comparison to some better-known cases in recent years that did not result in anyone's termination.
A statement by the Colorado/Boulder chapter of the AAUP about the investigation, its findings and recommendations, is also revealing:
The hostile climate posed serious problems for the Churchill investigation and surely contributed to the absence on the sub-committee of scholarly peers in Professor Churchill's field. For example, one faculty member was pressured to resign from the Committee on Research Misconduct because he had signed the February 2005 faculty petition supporting academic freedom in general at CU, and thus was viewed by some as supportive of Churchill himself. In addition, the two Native American historians originally asked to serve on the Investigatory Committee were so intimidated by the "toxic" atmosphere at CU and
so pressured by outsiders that both resigned almost upon appointment.
Some scholars argue that the standards of research misconduct used in Professor Churchill's case were elastic and that they were applied to his work with special stringency. Others consider the recommended punishment disproportionate. From a record of more than twenty books and hundreds of articles, chapters, speeches, and electronic communications, the committee investigating Churchill's work isolated six pages, in which they claimed to find examples of plagiarism and one example of fabrication. If these charges are justified, they certainly show that Professor Churchill sometimes failed to adhere to the most rigorous standards of scholarship, but they seem relatively small in light of Churchill's vast opus. All scholars have points of view, and even distinguished scholars make occasional mistakes; however, it is highly unusual for the discovery of such errors to end in dismissal.
The investigation into Professor Churchill's work has been undertaken in the context of extensive well-organized and well-funded activity to discredit scholarship by faculty members perceived as liberal or left-leaning and to undermine the autonomy of institutions of higher education across the country. The University of Colorado has been a special target of such efforts, and scholars around the country are watching carefully to see what happens here. Insofar as the investigation inappropriately casts aspersions on Professor
Churchill's controversial conclusions regarding relationships between Native Americans and the United States, it also will weaken academic freedom across the United States. The freedom of faculty to interpret their own data, regardless of these interpretations' conformity to conventional wisdom, lies at the heart of the scholarly enterprise.
In these circumstances, it is vital for the University of Colorado to defend not only the integrity of scholarly research but also the interlinked principles of academic freedom for its faculty and autonomy for itself. Failure to do this will be extremely damaging to the University of Colorado. It will injure faculty morale, diminish the University's ability to recruit qualified faculty, especially in disciplines where controversies over interpretation are commonplace, impugn the University's scholarly reputation, and reduce our ability to represent the best of scholarly work in research, the classroom and the community at large.
For these reasons, CU-B chapter of AAUP calls on the University of Colorado's administration to reverse the decision to dismiss Professor Churchill. The problems that beset the Churchill inquiry, especially its highly politicized origin and context, bring into question both the objectivity of the inquiry and the proportionality of the recommended penalty. We recognize the possibility that lesser sanctions may be justified for some specific acts described in the report.
The threatened punishment is disproportional to the actual scholarly failures for reasons that are, alas, plain to all. If, in fact, the university takes the ill-advised step of terminating Professor Churchill, one should expect this matter to end up, correctly, in court.
JULY 25 UPDATE: John Protevi (Louisiana State) calls to my attention this critical analysis of the plagiarism charges.
ANOTHER: Via Professor Protevi, I learn of this article quoting the one member of the Board of Regents who voted (obviously correctly, on the record) against firing Churchill:
Regent Cindy Carlisle, who cast the sole vote against termination, said Wednesday she felt the Regents should have accepted the advice of the last faculty committee to review the case, which recommended suspending Churchill for a year without pay and demoting him.
She also said the panel, the Privilege and Tenure Committee, had raised questions about three of the seven specific allegations against Churchill.
Asked whether she felt firing Churchill was unfair, she said: “I’m not going to characterize that. My vote speaks pretty strongly. I thought we should defer to the active faculty (the Privilege and Tenure Committee) for their recommendations for sanctions.”
The Virtua Stoa is on the case, with photos and commentary.
UPDATE: It's a bad situation in Britain. Good wishes to all my U.K. friends affected by this weather fiasco!
A couple of years ago Simon Critchley, who teaches philosophy at the New School in New York and (part-time) at the University of Essex in Britain, sent me a copy of his book Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. That was nice of him, as we had not had any prior interaction that I can recall. It is not, alas, a book that I could recommend to others and it was also, unfortunately, consistent with my first impression of him when I was asked a number of years ago to referee the Routledge book on New British Philosophers, which featured interviews with various youngish British philosophers. Critchley was one of the designated representatives of "Continental philosophy," for which the editors seemed to have gone out of their way to find the weakest representatives, notwithstanding the many excellent UK-based scholars working in that field. The interview with Critchley was really quite extraordinary for the superficial character of his understanding. He stated, for example, that:
The goal of philosophy in the continental tradition is emancipation, whether individual or societal,
which must mean, among other things, that phenomenology is not part of the Continental traditions. (There is also, of course, no "continental tradition" of philosophy, but, again, one would have to actually know something to know how crass such a characterization of two hundred years of post-Kantian philosophy on the European Continent is.)
Critchley went on in this interview to suggest that one can understand "the continental tradition" as emerging out of a way of reading Kant's Third Critique:
It was felt by post-Kantians like Maimon and Jacobi, and by the German idealists, that Kant had established a series of dualisms in the Third Critique--pure reason and practical reason, nature and freedom, epistemology and ethics--but had failed to provide a single unifying principle which would bring those dualisms together. German idealism, then, can be seen as a series of attempts to provide this principle. So you get the Subject in Fichte, Spirit in Hegel, art in the early Schelling, and then in later nineteenth and early twentieth century German philosophy, Will to Power in Nietzsche, Praxis in Marx and Being in Heidegger. These are all attempts to answer this question.
I assume in a normal PhD program, a graduate student who submitted a statement like this as part of a prospectus would be expelled from the program, but apparently such sophomoric blather is thought to constitute scholarly insight in some circles. Overcoming the dualisms of the Third Critique surely was an animating concern (among others) for some of the German Idealists, but it obviously was not for Nietzsche or for Marx. Hegel was a dead issue in German philosophy by the 1850s, as materialists, on the one hand, and NeoKantians, on the other, rose to prominence, and Schopenhauer's anti-Hegelian polemics informed a generation's perception of the mad system builder of Jena. What role "will to power" actually plays in Nietzsche's philosophy is, unbeknownst apparently to Critchley, actually a hotly debated scholarly topic, but there is no significant account of it on which it constitutes an "attempt" by Nietzsche to provide a "unifying principle" for the dualisms of the Third Critique. Assimilating Marx to this just-so story is even weirder, given Marx's spectacular hostility to the questions of metaphysics and epistemology that animated German Idealism, a hostility encapuslated in the 2nd Thesis on Feuerbach, where Marx deemed all questions "isolated from practice" to be merely "scholastic" questions. This was no "attempt" to "bring those dualisms together," but an attempt to push them off the table as questions worth anyone's intellectual energy. (In this respect, Daniel Brudney's learned book on Marx's Attempt to Leave Philosophy [Harvard University Press, 1996] is quite aptly titled, though I disagree with aspects of his account of Marx's motivations for abandoning metaphysics and epistemology.)
Critchley's fairly crude understanding of Continental philosophy appears positively sophisticated, though, when compared to his views about "analytic" philosophy. After claiming, obviously falsely, that "another thing which is distinctive about the continental tradition...[is that] philosophical questions have to be linked to non-philosophical discourses," he continues that,
What I dislike most about [analytic] philosophers is the idea that they think because they are smart as philosophers they have nothing to learn from anybody else. You find this repeatedly. I'd argue that they've got lots to learn, not just from cognitive scientists, but from lawyers, historians, anthropologists and sundry others. If philosophy isolates itself from other disciplines and from the culture at large it will die....
One must have simply no idea of anything that has gone on in Anglophone philosophy in the last thirty years or so to make a statement like this, since English-speaking philosophy is now the most richly interdisciplinary of all the humanities, interacting with, and often contributing to, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, law, and biology, among other fields. It is those in the "Continental ghetto," like Critchley, who have isolated themselves from almost all other intellectual fields, certain segments of English and Comparative Literature Departments excepted.
In any case, I recommended to Routledge that the interview with Critchley be dropped from the volume. Perhaps he found out about this, I don't know.
Now fast-forward to the present, and the Cardozo Law Review, a student-edited publication at the Cardozo Law School in New York City, which has some quite able people on its faculty (including some trained philosophers like Edward Stein and Martin Stone), but also some frauds and intellectual voyeurs who dabble in a lot of stuff they plainly don't understand. This is obviously an environment in which someone like Critchley fits in nicely, so he was invited to write about Derrida, a recurring topic of bad articles in the Cardozo Law Review. It turns out that Critchley was agitated by my remarks at the time of Derrida's passing, and for good reason, since to the extent Critchley has a "reputation" in certain corners of the academy it is due to his work on Derrida. In any case, Critchley wrote:
In the days following Derrida's death, there was a extraordinarily ill-informed discussion on [Leiter's] blog about the ruckus caused by the New York Times obituary, at the end of which Leiter wrote:
If he [i.e. Derrida] had become a football player as he had apparently hoped, or taken up honest work of some other kind, then we might simply remember him as a 'good man.' But he devoted his professional life to obfuscation and increasing the amount of ignorance in the world: by 'teaching' legions of earnest individuals how to read badly and think carelessly. He may have been a morally decent man, but he led a bad life, and his legacy is one of shame for the humanities.
Such breathtaking moralistic stupidity leaves me speechless, and I cannot bring myself to comment on it.
Oh goodness! Alas, immediately after saying he wouldn't "comment" on it, he did:
I would cite Proposition VII of Wittgenstein's Tractatus in my defense, if that did not risk concealing such muck under sweeter smelling blooms. But that is not all. Not only did Derrida lead a bad life and apparently single-handedly undermine the humanities (quite an achievement, all things considered), he is also the efficient cause of Reaganism and a fortiori of Bushism (I guess Leiter would know, living in Texas).
But I did not say that Derrida was "the efficient cause of Reaganism," though I suppose such spectacular misreadings should be expected from a partisan of Derrida. What I did suggest--read what I wrote--is that it is probably not coincidental "that the total corruption of public discourse and language" that began with Reagan's triumph "coincided with the collapse of careful reading and the responsible use of language in one of the central humanities disciplines," namely literary studies. The question, of course, is what broader socio-economic developments explain the coincidence? (By the way, unlike Simon Critchley, I am an actual New Yorker, but one need not live in New York or Texas to be struck by the parallels between the intellectual collapse in both the public sphere and parts of the academic sphere that occurred at the same time--indeed, David Bromwich has written a book on the subject.)
In any case, having just misrepresented what I wrote, Critchley goes on to quote it:
Warming to his theme, Leiter continues, and I assure the reader that I am not making this up,
Was it entirely an accident that at the same time that deconstruction became the rage in literary studies (namely, the 1980s), American politics went off the rails with the Great Prevaricator, Ronald Reagan? Is it simply coincidental that the total corruption of public discourse and language--which we may only hope has reached its peak at the present moment--coincided with the collapse of careful reading and the responsible use of language in one of the central humanities disciplines? These are important questions, and I wonder whether they have been, or will be, addressed. [FN7]
These are not important questions; they are extremely silly speculations and Leiter should simply be ashamed of himself for equating the interest in deconstruction with the rise of American neo-conservatism. Once again, it might help if Leiter had actually taken the trouble to read Derrida's work before offering philosopher king-like judgments on its merits. And to think that a person that has the arrogance to publish such stupidities sits in judgment on the quality of graduate programs in philosophy and considers himself an authority in Continental philosophy. It is painfully laughable.
I am surprised that the student editors at the Cardozo Law Review did not ask for some citation in support of Critchley's false statement that I had not "read Derrida's work"; I have read rather more of it than is worth reading. How could Critchley, in any case, possibly know what I have read? As I noted at the start, we have never met, and he never bothered to ask. Perhaps what this silly man is thinking is that anyone who had read Derrida would have come away as enamored of the late deconstructionist as Critchley? That probably is a reasonable inference if one assumes that all readers have Critchley's level of philosophical competence.
Michael Rosen (Harvard) and I recently finished up The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, which includes contributions by twenty distinguished scholars interested in aspects of the Continental traditions in philosophy (some of whom, I should add, have a higher opinion of Derrida than I do). Critchley, alas, represents that "other" kind of academic too often attracted to Continental philosophy, the intellectual lightweight and philosophical tourist who can't read a text carefully or follow a philosophical argument. One of our hopes is that The Oxford Handbook, by treating post-Kantian Continental figures as philosophers--and not as museum pieces from the history of ideas--will increase the number of intellectually and philosophically serious scholars drawn to their study. But until that happens, I fear, philosophical used car salesmen like Critchley will, too often, pose as spokesman for non-Anglophone traditions in philosophy.
Stuart Rachels, a moral philosopher at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, has prepared an informative website about his father, the late moral philosopher James Rachels. The site includes downloadable articles by James Rachels, and the full text of his 1986 book The End of Life, among other items likely to be of interest to philosophers.
Very Well, I Will Be Forgotten
Very well, I will be forgotten, have already been by most.
Why, I'll probably forget myself as I've forgotten earlier selves, moments,
emotions.
And the words I write-and too quickly forget-will last perhaps a
generation
Before the clutter of books records papers will bury them out of sight.
For a time, some there are who will remember, even with feeling, well-
meaning. I will be briefly missed.
But, then, these others, dear people, in order to bear their present, will
move beyond me as I moved beyond so many, earlier,
With only an occasional glance at the complexity that was theirs.
How, now, shall I excuse them in advance, who struggle against chance
and time, parcels of joy and sorrow arrayed before them?
How shall I caress their innocence in my silence, my necessary silence,
fearful of startling them?
I pay my homage to past and future, to the dead, to the young, my own
memory a paltry offering, my few words, trinkets of my journey.
I am embarrassed to raise too many questions, to speak of love, to describe
the pleasure I have been given.
Perhaps it is proper to please briefly, to be savored now and for a time in
memory, then to fade softly leaving the future to find its place.
12/24/01, 6/15/02
Copyright 2002 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.
Crispin Wright (philosophy of language, math and logic; epistemology) at the University of St. Andrews has accepted the full-time, senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at New York University, to start in fall 2008. He will, however, continue to be involved with the Arche Centre at St. Andrews.
This is the third senior appointment for NYU this year; the other two were Samuel Scheffler (moral and political philosophy) from Berkeley and Ted Sider (metaphysics) from Rutgers.
The British Academy has announced its new members. Philosophers elected are Harvey Brown (philosophy of physics) at Oxford University and (as a Corresponding Fellow) David Kaplan (philosophy of language, logic) at the University of California, Los Angeles.
I am talking currently to a couple of presses about either exclusive or non-exclusive options for advertising their philosophy products (books, journals etc.) on the blog. By clicking on the site meter icon, lower left, you can get an idea what the traffic looks like over the course of a year (right now it is at a low; in the Spring it was running over 5,000 hits per day). The blog has, as I wrote a few months back, returned to its original focus on matters philosophical. Any other presses interested in exploring the possibility of advertising here, please contact me. Thanks.
This story about efforts by the University of California to get more funds for faculty salaries are indicative of issues confronting all state university systems (and bear in mind that California may still have the best-funded system of higher education in the country); I have bolded a few especially notable bits:
University of California administrators want to spend an estimated $70 million over the next four years to boost the salaries of professors whose pay is not deemed competitive in the academic job market....
If eventually adopted by the regents, the change in pay scales would increase the baseline salaries by about 10 percent. They now range from $48,000 for a starting assistant professor to $133,500 for a full professor with the most experience....
In recent years...UC has needed to offer salaries above scale to attract and retain the best candidates for teaching positions. Those already paid above scale would not get the large bump, just merit increases and annual cost-of-living increases.
"We were concerned by the rising tide of (over-scale) salaries," [UC spokesman] Hume said.
That has created an unequal system, in which 75 percent of UC's professors are paid over scale, and has undermined a peer review system, in which individual faculty members are evaluated by their colleagues for raises.
Over-scale salaries are largely going to new hires and to people who are at risk of being recruited by other institutions, said UCLA law Professor Susan French, a member of the group working on the salary scale issue.
"There is resentment and tension, particularly as more recent hires are paid more than faculty who have been at UC longer," said French, who was speaking for herself and not for the Academic Senate.
The university has about 9,200 tenure-track professors in fields outside of medicine. They have traditionally moved up the salary scale through merit pay raises granted under the university's peer review system.
But with the UC salary scale lagging so far behind other major universities, Hume said, higher salaries are needed to attract and retain top faculty. At UC Merced, where new faculty was hired to open the campus a couple of years ago, 87 percent of the faculty is paid over scale. The other campuses range from 58 percent over scale at UC Riverside to 71 percent at UC Berkeley and 87 percent at UC Davis.
"It would be healthier to get the great majority of faculty back into the peer review process," said John Oakley, chairman of the UC Academic Senate, which represents faculty.
The pay scales do not include other perks that many professors get, such as housing subsidies and paid sabbaticals. However, UC officials have noted that professors at other universities also get those perks and that UC has to provide them to be competitive....
"There is concern about the time it is taking to bring back salaries to competitive levels. Every year that we delay bringing the scales back to competitive levels, the problem gets worse," French said.
Story here (subscriber access only):
The Shochat Committee's proposals include doubling the higher-education budget, to $2.5-billion; providing $225-million in new research funds; doubling the budget of Israel's National Science Foundation, to $120-million; providing special undergraduate scholarships in the humanities; and rewarding outstanding researchers and academics in an effort to stop an Israeli "brain drain" to the United States....
[T]he most controversial aspect of the proposals was the recommendation to raise undergraduate tuition from about $2,000 to $3,500 a year.
Mr. Shochat said that most of the fee for each student should be absorbed by a long-term loan, which would only become repayable a year after graduation, and then only if the student was earning a wage comparable to a high-school teacher. He said students would actually pay less while studying, enabling everyone in Israeli society to attend college "irrespective of their socioeconomic status or the financial situation of their parents."
Students declined an invitation to sit on the committee, and ended a crippling 41-day strike in May with a promise from the government that they would be consulted before any of the proposals were adopted. On Monday they appeared to be poised to reject the reform program.
"We will not accept loans. We will not allow this farcical reform to go ahead," said Itai Shonshein, chairman of the National Union of Israeli Students....
I am curious to hear from Israeli philosophers about what they make of this proposal and what its impact might be, both on higher education and on students. Please post only once, and be patient; comments may take awhile to appear.
Richard Zach (Calgary) has the details.
Perfect Dead
You are improving
as you die
you will be
perfect dead
Rimbaud's life
by contrast
flowered early on
wilted and went wanting
while live enough
to rue it
each man his
own invention
each season
has her fugue
Descendants
eye us passing
as we push on
up the hill
look to us
for meaning
and we to them
for meaning
as buffaloed
as they
on our way
to dying
on their way
to rue
12/27/94-1/18/95, 1/20/96
Copyright 1995, 1996 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.
Via a philosophy list-serve in the UK, I learn that Professor Sprigge, who held the Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh for many years, has died. There is more about his philosophical career and work here.
In the current The American Scholar, William Deresiewicz (English, Yale), revisits Plato's Symposium, in light of recent depictions of humanities professors on the screen. (Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer)
I have not generally tried to "do philosophy" on the blog, though I have often linked to philosophical work by myself and others. But, as an experiment, I've created a new blog in which I'm going to work through some issues in legal philosophy. The posts will not be aimed at a generalist audience, but at specialists (students or scholars) in jurisprudence. The first substantive post discusses Brian Simpson's well-known paper on "The Common Law and Legal Theory." If writing up my thoughts or the comments on them proves instructive, I'll probably keep this up.
Dean Zimmerman (metaphysics, philosophy of religion) at Rutgers University, New Brunswick has declined the senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University.
The Arche Research Centre at the University of St. Andrews has made four new part-time Professorial Fellowship appointments. They are: Francois Recanati (from the Jean Nicod Center in Paris), Jonathan Schaffer (from the Australian National University), Jason Stanley (from Rutgers), and Brian Weatherson (from Rutgers). They commence in 2007-08, are quarter-time positions, and run for a (renewable) five-year term. (These are in addition to the current part-time Professorial Fellows, Graham Priest and Stewart Shapiro.) Crispin Wright reports that he will be making a decision about the NYU offer shortly, but will, in any scenario, have "a substantial continuing connection with Arché."
The Royal Society's press release is here. The new Fellows are Francoise Baylis (bioethics) at Dalhousie University and James Robert Brown (philosophy of science) at the University of Toronto.
Keith Hossack (metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of math), currently at King's College, London, has accepted appointment as Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he starts this fall. Birkbeck has made a major investment in these areas in recent years, with appointments of, among others, Fraser MacBride and Ian Rumfitt.
A group of philosophy grad students in China is unhappy about Santa, and has posted an online petition to protest the Western/North Polar axis of cultural imperialism. The petition is titled "Out of Cultural Collective Unconsciousness, Strengthen Chinese Cultural Dominance."
A "philosopher's stone" is supposed to work near-miracles, like transmuting base metals into gold, or imparting immortality. Not inconceivable, maybe not even impossible in our world. An Irish company called Steorn is making an even bigger claim for a gizmo it calls Orbo:
Orbo produces free, clean and constant energy - that is our claim. By free we mean that the energy produced is done so without recourse to external source. By clean we mean that during operation the technology produces no emissions. By constant we mean that with the exception of mechanical failure the technology will continue to operate indefinitely.
The sum of these claims for our Orbo technology is a violation of the principle of conservation of energy, perhaps the most fundamental of scientific principles. The principle of the conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created or destroyed, it can only change form.
Wow. Can we see? Yes! Steorn is now demo-ing Orbo in London at the Kinetica Museum, complete with webcams. But, for the moment, Steorn confesses:
We are experiencing some technical difficulties with the demo unit in London. Our initial assessment indicates that this is probably due to the intense heat from the camera lighting.
Hm. Yeah, it's probably only that intense light. Update: Duncan Watson points out an article that appeared in the Guardian last year detailing the problems that Steorn has had in patenting the Orbo. Duncan writes, "Of particular interest to me was the following:
The UK Patent Office notes that you cannot get a patent on 'articles or processes alleged to operate in a manner clearly contrary to well-established physical laws' as they are 'regarded as not having industrial application'."
He adds: "It seems somewhat redundant to prohibit people from patenting something which is physically impossible, and one would assume that something which did break the laws of physics could well have quite significant industrial application."
Here, including one more senior appointment we had not previously announced: Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (metaphysics), who moved from Oxford to the University of Nottingham and a new private university in Argentina just a little over two years ago, is now returning to Oxford full-time as a CUF Lecturer.
According to The Washington Post:
At the nadir of his presidency, George W. Bush is looking for answers. One at a time or in small groups, he summons leading authors, historians, philosophers and theologians to the White House to join him in the search.
Over sodas and sparkling water, he asks his questions: What is the nature of good and evil in the post-Sept. 11 world? What lessons does history have for a president facing the turmoil I'm facing? How will history judge what we've done? Why does the rest of the world seem to hate America? Or is it just me they hate?
Bearing in mind that the media use the term "philosophers" rather loosely (so, e.g., Leo Strauss and Jacques Derrida are deemed "philosophers"), who in the world could he be consulting? And if any of the leading philosophers he has consulted are readers, please give us your impressions!
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