Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Tenure-track and post-doc hiring of philosophy PhDs, 2012-13

MOVING TO FRONT ONE MORE TIME, SINCE THERE WERE SOME LATE HIRES REPORTED SINCE MAY 19--ORIGINALLY POSTED FEBRUARY 15, 2013 (Please note the spam filter mysteriously ate several postings, which I've now restored.  Because I am on the road, please wait at least 72 hours after posting before contacting me about missing information.  I will continue to check the spam filter regularly.)

It's that time of year again...I am opening comments on this thread for people to post news about junior, tenure-track hires in philosophy departments or of philosophy PhDs, i.e., hires made during this year of new assistant professors who will be starting in summer or fall 2013 (or thereafter). (For schools outside the US, please list new Lecturers who are on presumptively permanent appointments--not temporary lecturers.) As in prior years, you may also post information about post-doc appointments, since there are an increasing number of those in philosophy, many quite attractive. No anonymous posts will be allowed. (Please e-mail me about any errors.)

The format of the postings should be as follows: candidate's name (name of PhD-granting school) hired by [name of school]. AOS: ________; any prior positions (e.g., a postdoc, a lectureship, a visiting asst prof position). In the case of a post-doc, it should say not 'hired by' but 'post-doc at' [name of school].

Here's a fictional example:

Jane M. Jones (Rutgers) hired by University of California, Santa Barbara. AOS: Philosophy of Language.  Previously a post-doc at Yale.  

"Hired by" means a tenure-track or permanent position; a post-doc should be listed as "John Smith (Harvard) post-doc at University of Michigan."

Remember: tenure-track jobs and postdocs only. Please submit information only once; postings should appear within 24 hours.

THE ONLY PERSONS ELIGIBLE TO POST INFORMATION ARE: the candidates themselves; the chair of the hiring department; or the placement chair of the candidate's department. Three years ago, however, a placement chair jumped the gun in posting, so please, placement chairs, make sure it is OK with your students that the information appear!

Will a quota of at least 20% women on the syllabus...

...affect undergraduate enrollments?  I guess I'm skeptical that will make any difference, but thanks to folks at Georgia State, we may find out!

Miami's Amie Thomasson interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Some widely cited journal articles...

...according to Web of Science (and courtesy of Brian Weatherson [Michigan]).

Does the Internet cause political polarization?

No, according to some research (convincing to my mind) by an economist here at the University of Chicago.  I was invited to participate in the discussion, I surmise, because (1) I have a blog, and (2) I am a big fan of political polarization!  (At least #1 was relevant.)

I've now got...

...an academic room, which seems to be attracting a number of philosophers who haven't used academia.edu.  Any reason to prefer one to the other?  Curious what people's experience has been of one or both.

More political "diversity" mischief, this time in Colorado

IHE has the story.  If "conservative students" feel "besieged" because they believe, inter alia, that human activities don't contribute to global warming, God created the world 10,000 years ago, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is "only a theory," or that Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan was a serious attempt to balance the budget--all things that that benighted cohort of American "conservatives" often profess to believe these days--then they should feel besieged because they live in darkness, and it is the job of universities to bring enlightenment.  Truth and knowledge is not evenly distributed across the political spectrum, and the modern Republican Party in the U.S. has claim to precious little of either these days.  If students are "besieged" because they do not have a fair opportunity to defend their views with arguments and evidence, then they have a legitimate complaint.  End of story. 

Bill Wimsatt honored with the Hull Prize from International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology

A richly deserved recognition!  An excerpt from the prize announcement:

The International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology awards the David L. Hull Prize biennially to honor the life and legacy of David L. Hull (1935-2010). It is awarded to an individual who has made extraordinary contributions to scholarship and service in ways that promote interdisciplinary connections between history, philosophy, social studies, and biology and that foster the careers of younger scholars. These are strengths that reflect the contributions of David Hull to our professions and to our society.

The inaugural recipient of the David L. Hull prize in 2011 was William B. Provine, the Andrew H. and James L. Tisch Distinguished University Professor at Cornell University. The 2013 recipient is William C. Wimsatt, Winton Professor in the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota, and a fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. Wimsatt is also the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Philosophy and Evolutionary Biology (Emeritus) at the University of Chicago, to which he has devoted most of his career since starting as a post-doc in 1969-70 with Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins and then as an assistant professor in 1971.

Bill Wimsatt’s creative research, generous mentorship of young scholars, innovative teaching, and broad ambassadorship for interdisciplinarity in general and philosophy of biology in particular exemplify the values of our society and of David L. Hull. Like David Hull, Bill Wimsatt is equally regarded as a philosopher and as a theoretical biologist. In 1977, Bill was a faculty member in the Council for Philosophical Studies Summer Institute on "Biological and Social Perspectives on Human Nature" in Colorado, where the first stirrings began that led to ISHPSSB. He has been an active part of ISHPSSB since its founding.

Wimsatt was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006 and has served on, and chaired, the nominating committee of Section L. He has served on program committees for the Philosophy of Science Association and the American Philosophical Association. He has served as a member of the governing boards for the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and the Philosophy of Science Association. He has given over 400 invited lectures, seminars, and workshops at professional meetings, special institutes, and universities in the US, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Australia, China, England, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Spain, France, Israel, Turkey, Austria, and Germany to audiences of philosophers, historians, scientists, and computer users.

And still more philosophy citations...

...this time from Andrew Higgins, a PhD student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  Particularly amusing, I thought, is the picture showing where philosophers who took the PhilPapers survey are relative to each other.   I am pleased to be an outlier in the correct part of the picture!

Rutgers' Jeff McMahan brings the "ethics of war" to West Point

Video here.

(The original story was taken down, but I've added a link to a video about the program.)

Another poll: the best (highest quality) philosophy journals, without regard to area

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--300 VOTES SO FAR, LET'S GET ANOTHER 300!

Here.  The results may just track the distribution of areas of expertise in the profession, we'll see.  But all the talk about citation networks based on four leading "general" (or fairly general) journals made me wonder how journals like Nous etc. would fare when up against Ethics, Journal of the History of Philosophy, etc.

UPDATE:  As invariably happens, readers identify journals that could have been reasonably included:  for example, Phronesis, Hypatia, and Dialectica.  While I doubt any of those would have come close to the top 20 (judging from how the results are developing), it's certainly right that they warranted inclusion given the ones that are there.

Not a good week for Justice Scalia

His siding with the majority in the Voting Rights Act case is impossible to reconcile with his dissent in the decision striking down DOMA, with its sermon about the court's role.  All of which brings to mind a post from a decade ago, when the blog was young and fresh and only slightly read.  That hypothesis, amusing as it is, is no doubt too simple, but such manifest inconsistency in the space of a couple of days cries out for some kind of explanation.

More on citation networks in philosophy

Here.

On sexism in philosophy (and the McGinn case)...

...at The Independent.

Mellon Foundation grant for "social epistemology" at Northwestern

Details here.  I'm looking forward to this!

Jonathan Bain interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Why the Republican Party Needs to be Destroyed, Reminder #142

Here.

MOOCs in perspective: university lectures have survived video and audio tapes

Jonathan Wolff (UCL) comments.

"Lessons of the Snowden Revelations"

An interesting piece from Counterpunch, perhaps correct (though it romanticizes the Internet).  And comments from Chomsky.

A bare majority of the super-legislature known as the U.S. Supreme Court votes to repeal a crucial portion of the Voting Rights Act...

...that the actual legislature evaluated and extended in 2006.  They do so based on the finding of five members of the super-legislature that the portion of the Act at issue is no longer necessary, contrary to the view, apparently, of the actual legislature seven years earlier.

Chomsky slams the empty "posturing" of Zizek and Derrida...

...rightly so.

"Philosophy Talk" recognized at New York's International Radio Competition

Rightly so!

The UK's New "Citizenship" Test

Thom Brooks (Durham) continues to tear it to pieces, and the UK press is eating it up--he collects various links here (and scroll down).

Libel in the U.S.

Colin McGinn (Miami) implies that he may pursue certain individuals for libel.  While the UK is at one extreme on libel (very friendly to victims of alleged libel), the US is at another (very friendly to those who allegedly libel, indeed, to those who would be found liable for libel in almost every other Western democracy).  When it comes to "public" figures like McGinn, it is not enough that the claims be false and damaging to reputation (though they must be at least that), they must also be made "maliciously," that is, with reckless disregard for whether or not they are true.  That is a quite difficult evidentiary burden to meet, which is why "public" figures (a capacious category, as it happens) in the U.S. usually have no meaningful legal remedies for pernicious false statements of fact about them.  And since truth is a defense, any libel action also opens the door for the defendant to engage in wide-ranging intrusions into any part of the plaintiff's life possibly relevant to the truth of the statement.  There may be actionable statements about McGinn out there, but the likelihood of that is low, given American law.

UPDATE:  Bill Edmundson, a lawyer/philosopher at Georgia State writes:  "If McGinn is classified as a public figure (as I agree he probably would be), then under Philadelphia Newspapers v Hepps he has the burden of proving falsity -- in the US it is no longer the defendant's burden to prove truth (as is the
case with affirmative defenses generally).  ).  This, on top of having to prove actual malice by clear and convincing evidence."  Professor Edmundson adds:  "One wrinkle has to do with whether Hepps applies to matters not 'of'public concern': but what's been said about McGinn is presumably of public concern. (Despite dictum suggesting the contrary, the status of the defendant as "media" or "non-media" is probably not of constitutional significance (cf. Citizens United).)"

ANOTHER:  Just to clarify in response to some reader e-mails:  Opinions, even if damaging, are not actionable.  So, e.g., the judgment, "Graham Harman is not very good at philosophy" might damage his reputation, but it would not constitute defamation, since it is "merely" the expression of an opinion (libel is written defamation, slander spoken).   "Graham Harman is a bully" is a harder case:  on the one hand, the accusation of bullying seems to imply something factual about the individual's actual conduct, but, on the other hand, in our era of cyber-cry-babies, the label "bullying" is so widely abused (for reasons usefully elucidated here) that it increasingly looks like an opinion ("I don't like that Graham Harman is mean to me"), not a shorthand for a factual statement about conduct.  Finally, "Graham Harman is a convicted felon" would be libel per se (i.e., one would not even have to prove damage), on the assumption (which as far as I know is correct) that it is a false statement. 

Citation networks in philosophy: 1993-2013

The Duke sociologist Kieran Healy looked at four journals--Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Nous and Mind--for the indicated period; this started making the rounds last week, but now Professor Healy has finished various corrections and revisions.

The original Co-Citation Network post: 

http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/18/a-co-citation-network-for-philosophy/

The dynamic visualization accompanying the post: 

http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/18/a-co-citation-network-for-philosophy/

A static snapshot of the network: 

http://kieranhealy.org/files/misc/philcites-static.png

Citations to David Lewis and to women, with information on gender patterns in citations:

http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/19/lewis-and-the-women/

And here are "poster" versions, with the pictures and information on both the overall graph and the gender stuff, both a (large) PNG file suitable for linking or embedding on a webpage: 

http://kieranhealy.org/files/misc/philosophy-citation-poster.png

and a PDF of the same thing, suitable for printing into an actual poster, 

http://kieranhealy.org/files/misc/philosophy-citation-poster.pdf

It would be interesting to see how the results, especially for gender, would be affected by adding Ethics or Journal of the History of Philosophy or Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy to the mix.

Bad philosophy by economists: the case of Greg Mankiw

Philosopher Chris Bertram (Bristol) writes:

I wonder whether readers of your blog wouldn't be interested in reading the Chair of the Harvard Economics Department's laughably sophomoric attempt at political philosophy:

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/defending-one-percent.html

It is surely a great embarrassment to the economics profession that one of their leading journals publishes such a piece. Not only is the standard of argument lamentable, but the failure to reference Nozick might be considered an academic offence if this were an undergraduate essay (and would certainly draw adverse comment from a competent teacher).

David Bakhurst (Queen's Univ/Canada) interviewed...

...at 3AM.

(Link now fixed.)

Plato in grammar school?

A nice idea, though a shame it seems to be mxied up with religious indoctrination in many cases.

(Thanks to Mark Couch for the pointer.)

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker speaks out in defense of Colin McGinn

Here.

UPDATE:  Longtime reader Roger Albin (Michigan) writes:

A fairly good example of inconsistency.  In his Better Angels book, Pinker celebrates Norbert Elias’ Civilizing Process thesis that increased emphasis on etiquette and formal propriety played an important role in taming the casual violence of European societies.  Elias’ arguments (an earlier and much more thoughtful version of James Wilson’s Broken Windows hypothesis about crime prevalence) easily justify rigid standards about sexual harassment.  You can’t accept Elias’ arguments as valid and then turn around and excuse McGinn’s behavior.  Pretty thoughtless. 

On David Publishing, Once Again--and the Philosopher's Index

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JUNE 18--UPDATED

A propos our earlier item, philosopher Christopher Pynes (Western Illinois) writes:

I want to bring to your attention, and the broader philosophical community, a scam journal Philosophy Study and predatory publisher David Publishing: http://www.davidpublishing.org/.

In July of 2011, I was contacted by a new journal Philosophy Study to submit a paper I had recently presented at a conference.  The paper was under review at another journal, so I didn’t submit it. But the request also included a call for reviewers and board members.  The journal wanted to build its editorial board and get a new editor in the near future.  Since the journal claimed to be published by an Illinois company and I wanted to do some review work, I sent my CV and said I would be willing.  What happened next was shocking to me.

First, let me say that they want ALL reviews done in two weeks.  I accepted the first job and rejected the paper.  It was bad, it got the philosophical problem it was trying to solve wrong, and I wrote what I thought was a decent report for the journal.  I will come back to this paper shortly.

I then received two papers that were not in any condition for review.  They were clearly written by non-native English speakers.  They had no business being sent to a reviewer, and I said as much to the staff person, Karen Garcia who I no longer believe is a real person, but the name all the people at David Publishing use when they send out emails.

I was then asked to review again the paper I already rejected.  The author had made a few changes, but it was still not worth publishing.  I then used Google to search for the paper.  I found that the paper had been published in an online journal type thing published by an institute run by the author.  I alerted Karen Garcia about the fact that the paper had been previously published.  She wrote back that Philosophy Study didn’t care and they were going to publish it anyway.  I know now this is because they wanted the publishing fees.

I was irritated.  I got one more paper to review, and I rejected it as unacceptable.  The English was so bad that I couldn’t even make sense of it.  I was then taken off the website as part of the editorial board and was only contacted when they said their website had been hacked.

I have since gotten solicitations from them every time I present a paper at a conference: The Society for Exact Philosophy and both the Florida and Illinois Philosophical Association meetings.  The most recent of these solicitations said that the journal was indexed in the Philosopher’s Index.   This is when I knew I had to act.  I submitted two notes via the PI’s website in November of 2012.  Here is what I wrote to them:

“I would like to provide some information about the newly indexed journal Philosophy Study.  This journal is not reputable, and I believe it should not be indexed in the Philosopher's Index.  I don't want to write a long letter here, but I am more than willing to share my story with you.  I volunteered as an editor for the journal and was shocked at what I experienced.  The journal is basically a vanity press exploiting the open access model.  In fact, David Publishing is on Beall's list of predatory publishers, which you can find here: http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/.  I am happy to explain even more, but I suggest you look into this publisher and remove them from the index.  I should let you know that I have contemplated contacting Dr. Leiter to let him run a story on his blog, the Leiter Reports, on this journal.  I didn't learn it was being indexed with the Philosopher's Index until today (12 November 2012).  I think it is even more important to let people know that this is not a reputable journal, and they should stay away from it.”

The second note read:

“Here is another story about David Publishing that you might want to read when considering my last note about removing them.”

http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/02/29/david-publishing-flipping-its-model/

A few months ago, I got an email from Karen Garcia to review a paper from them.  I was a bit surprised since I hadn’t had any contact with them in months.  I was able to identify the author through a Google search of the paper title (it was presented at a conference) and warned the author about where they had submitted.  I told the author that if they didn’t believe me, they could research the journal to make sure it was where they wanted to publish.  This paper was too good to be in this vanity journal.  I felt like I had to warn this person.  Moreover, other sources suggest that there is a large fee to publish with the journal.  I can’t verify the amount, but give the fact that Beall has put David Publishing on his list of predatory publishers, Beall’s List, there should be real concern.

So, I ask that you share this with your readers.  I believe that the Philosopher’s Index should not be indexing this journal.   It gives it credibility it doesn’t deserve.  I know there are lots of people who want to support Open Access, and I think the Philosophers’ Imprint, is awesome, but this isn’t what is going on here.  Philosophy Study is some kind of scam, and it needs to be known that papers in it are not what people think they are.  It is a vanity press, and the publishers are predatory.

If people want me to explain even more why I know this journal is a scam, I can, but I suggest checking out the other blogs I have linked to above and look at David Publishing’s website.  Another oddity is that they have David Publishing email addresses, but they also use a Yahoo address for the journal.  All of this should have warned me early on about the unprofessional nature of the journal, but I was willing to give them a chance and help make them better.  That was a poor assumption on my part.  Everyone in philosophy should be warned of this journal and avoid it.  And the Philosopher’s Index should stop indexing it.

UPDATE:  Neil Easterbrook, an English professor at Texas Christian University, writes:

I read several of the abstracts for papers in their "Journal of Literature and Art Studies," focusing on literature (my area of competence), and I found all of them seriously flawed. They ranged from uninteresting to incoherent; all were littered with grammatical errors and contained fragmented, incomplete expression of their own arguments. Several did not seem to have an argument.

That the journal is published monthly; that its topic is *everything* in the arts; that the essays all seem to be seven or eight pages long; and that the publication cost of the journal is almost 500 USD a year seems diagnostic: this is a vanity publisher, and not just in philosophy.

Wisconsin's Steven Nadler interviewed...

...at 3AM.

No more MOOCs, bring on the MOOAs!

Here.

(Thanks to Tad Brennan for the pointer.)

Broadie & Voorhoeve on Foot

Here.

(Thanks to Dirk Felleman for the pointer.)

JAPA?

Spiros has doubts too.

QS apparently uses legal threats to silence critics of its rankings

This is charming, from Prof. Simon Marginson (Melbourne), a leading critic of the QS rankings:

The THE [Times Higher Education, which also produces rankings] is committed to a free and liberal discussion about ranking, and tolerates differences of opinion. The same has not been true of QS. [Ben] Sowter [of QS] does not mention that his company has twice threatened publications with legal action when publishing my bona fide criticisms of QS. One was The Australian: in that case QS prevented my criticisms from being aired. The other case was University World News, which refused to pull my remarks from its website when threatened by QS with legal action.

If Sowter and QS would address the points of criticism of their ranking and their infamous star system (best described as 'rent a reputation'), rather than attacking their critics, we might all be able to progress towards better rankings. That is my sole goal in this matter. As long as the QS ranking remains deficient in terms of social science, I will continue to criticise it, and I expect others will also continue to do so.

I have not received any legal threats from QS, happily, though I will be sure to publish them if I do.  (My guess is they realize that, even under UK libel law, they don't have a case, and, in any case, no British libel judgment would be enforceable in the U.S.)

Why Do These People Just Make Things Up?

An item several months ago from the blog of Graham Harman (who teaches philosophy at the American University in Cairo) is illustrative--it is an alleged "reader e-mail" which Mr. Harman saw fit to post:

[W]hat’s become a more interesting story is the way that [Leiter has] also become a medium for a very specific model of anglophone philosophy that is dismissive of all forms of history of philosophy, metaphysics, pragmatism, continental philosophy, philosophy of art, etc. i imagine there must be major grumblings in other subfields”

The "more interesting story" it seems to me is how Party-Line Continentals like Mr. Harman and his "reader" are simply unconstrained by any facts about what I actually write, teach or believe in ascribing views to me about "philosophy" which I obviously don't hold.   Even the PGR gives extensive coverage to "history of philosophy, metaphysics, pragmatism, continental philosophy, philosophy of art" and even "etc," if by that one means the rest of philosophy from logic to medieval philosophy to applied ethics.  Harman et al. are a bit like the Tea Party when it comes to Obama:  they simply project on to the object of their ire all their paranoid obsessions, the facts be damned.

UPDATE:  Harman is apparently associated with a make-believe philosophical "movement" that calls itself "speculative realism," and which is described by Ray Brassiers (who teaches philosophy at the American University in Beirut) quite amusingly as follows:

The ‘speculative realist movement’ exists only in the imaginations of a group of bloggers promoting an agenda for which I have no sympathy whatsoever: actor-network theory spiced with pan-psychist metaphysics and morsels of process philosophy. I don’t believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate; nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical movement online by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiasm of impressionable graduate students. I agree with Deleuze’s remark that ultimately the most basic task of philosophy is to impede stupidity, so I see little philosophical merit in a ‘movement’ whose most signal achievement thus far is to have generated an online orgy of stupidity.

We, in fact, had a brief encounter with one part of this "online orgy of stupidity" awhile back (you have to read into the  comments to get the full flavor of the sophomoric confusions at work here).

AND ANOTHER:  This won't really be news, I guess, but Jon Cogburn (Louisiana State) really is clueless, not only about the quality of philosophical work and about SPEP, but even about the department where he was an undergraduate, UT Austin (the "rapprochement" between some of the awful SPEP-types there at that time like Louis Mackey and Kelly Oliver and the idiosyncratic Bergmannians like Allaire and Hochberg, exists only in his imagination).  Most remarkable, though, is the non-reply by this silly Graham Harman person (to which Cogburn, given his lack of judgment, links), who writes as though the issue is that I'm unaware of the ressentiment of his ilk (and conservative Chrsitians, and Randians and all the rest), as opposed to the fact that he posted a series of fabrications about me.  Mr. Harman is apparently well-known for his "passive-aggressive" blogging style, and this, as well as the original item, certainly fits the pattern.  Tiresome.

Cogburn writes, "I just don't understand why we can't do our own projects without having to define ourselves so much in terms of what we don't like."  I just don't understand why Cogburn thinks this  has anything to do with my complaints about Party-Line Continentalism and SPEP.  How hard is it to understand that some crap is pernicious crap and deserves to be adjudged as such, for the sake of students and for those not familiar with it?  Why can't Cogburn just say he doesn't share my judgment (of course, he wouldn't), instead of attributing to me fake purposes?  Just "stop it," Jon.  I have no intention of withdrawing my (correct) assessment of the largely pernicious effect SPEP has on the perception of the Continental traditions in post-Kantian philosophy in Europe.  Perhaps because you're an outsider to so much of this work, you don't realize the nature of the problem.

Italian Glamour magazine covers the "influence" of Hegel on contemporary American fiction

Unusual, to say the least.

(Thanks to Peter Ludlow for the pointer.)

"What is morality?"

A podcast with John Martin Fischer (UC Riverside).

Yet more doubts about the QS Rankings

A reader in the UK writes:

THES DID drop QS for methodological reasons. The best explanation is here: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/03/15/baty

But there may have been more to it? Clearly QS's business practices leave an awful lot to be desired. See: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280094547/Quacquarelli-Symonds-pays-80000-for-using-unlicensed-software

Also I understand that the "S" from QS -- Matt Symonds -- walked out on the company due to exasperation with the business practices.  He has been airbrushed from QS history, but can be foud at:  https://twitter.com/SymondsGSB

And as for the reputation survey, there was also this case of blantant manipulation: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/08/irish-university-tries-recruit-voters-improve-its-international-ranking

And of course there's the high-pressure sales: http://www.theinternationalstudentrecruiter.com/how-to-become-a-top-500-university/

And the highly lucrative "consultancy" to help universities rise up the rankings: http://www.iu.qs.com/projects-and-services/consulting/

There are "opportunities" for branding -- a snip at just $80,000 -- with QS Showcase: http://qsshowcase.com/main/branding-opportunities/

Or what about some relaxing massage, or a tenis tournament and networking with the staff who compile the rankings: http://www.qsworldclass.com/6thqsworldclass/

Perhaps most distribing of all is the selling of dubious Star ratings: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/world/europe/31iht-educlede31.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Keep up the good work. Its an excellent blog.

The BBC on high school philosophy in France

Here.

Women in philosophy: when do they get 'driven' out?

An NPR piece reporting on research by two MA students at Georgia State University working with Eddy Nahmias.  (Thanks to the many readers who sent this along.)

Colorado's Rupert to take up .20 appointment at Edinburgh for next three years

Rob Rupert (philosophy of mind and cognitive science), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has accepted a three-year part-time appointment as Professorial Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.  He writes:  "I will be in residence during much of
the next four summers, and I will be available to supervise graduate students."

Video interview with USC's Scott Soames...

...conducted by Professor Eduardo Villanueva of the Catholic University of Peru.

Philosophers (and hackers) against the fascist state

Peter Ludlow (Northwestern) comments.  (I usually don't link to The Stone, which is mostly awful, but I'll make an exception for this.)

Plutocracy Watch: Social Security Edition

There is no crisis.  The shortfall twenty years off is easily solvable by making rich folks like me pay social security tax on more of our income.  End of story in a rational country.

Santiago Zabala is not a competent philosopher

Jason Brennan baited me awhile back on Facebook with this piece of nonsense from the man who may well be the least competent and most ignorant "professional philosopher" in the Western world, Santiago Zabala.  And he's recently done it again!  No further comment necessary.

"How America Became Orwellian"

A useful timeline from historian Juan Cole (Michigan).

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

Who's afraid of metadata?

Everyone should be.

(Thanks to Ben Bronner for the pointer.)

Events in Turkey

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JUNE 3, IN VIEW OF CONTINUING BRUTALITY BY THE GOVERNMENT--NEW LINKS WELCOME IN THE COMMENTS

I've heard from several philosophers in Turkey about the events unfolding there.  One writes:

I would appreciate it if you could link to the following websites, which are more accurately and comprehensively covering what's going on in Turkey than most media:

http://occupygezipics.tumblr.com/

http://turkishpolice.wordpress.com/

http://delilimvar.tumblr.com/

I'm here in Turkey, and things are awful, much more awful than is being portrayed in the media, as these pictures and videos attest to. Your blog would give more exposure to what's going on. Your readers could call their nearest Turkish embassies to complain or their congressperson and ask them to put pressure on the Turkish government to show restraint.

Another writes:

There's an ongoing, very strong resistance in Turkey against the despotic rule of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Mr. Erdogan is no more representing the Turkish people. We'll do everything to oust this worthless dictator from power. Please kindly let all philosophers following your highly influential reports to the following (reasonably independent) link:

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com

The e-mail address of the Turkish embassy in Washington DC is:  [email protected].

I'm opening comments for readers to post additional information, links, or anything else relevant.

UPDATE:  In the third comment (see below), a useful link to a website with a template letter to the U.N. has been posted.  Scroll down to the third comment for more information.

On Nadler on Descartes...

...in IHE.

(Thanks to Mark Couch for the pointer.)