Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Blast from the past: Hume's personal ad

Back in 2003.

Blast from the past: Nietzsche's personal ad

Here.

Blast from the past: Kant's personal ad

Here.

Blast from the past: Indexicals, children, and Kant

Back in 2004.

Blast from the past: on criticizing students, why is academic law so different than academic philosophy?

Back in 2015.

Blast from the past: the defamation of Rebecca Tuvel

Less than two years ago.  A shameful but revealing moment about a segment of the profession, the same segment that is now on a crusade to shut down feminist philosophers, scholars and activists who raise questions about the gender self-ID law.

Blast from the past: Malcolm Gladwell exposed

Back in 2012.

Blast from the past: Olberding on Tuvel

Never forget.

Blast from the past: Biology textbooks under attack in Texas

Way back in August 2003.

Blast from the past: John Yoo and academic freedom

Back in 2009.

Poetry from the past: "Recidivism"

Back in 2011.  A reader kindly called this to my attention as a poem he particularly liked.  My father was 78 when he wrote that poem, and will turn 86 next week.

Blast from the past: what is philosophy, again (Peter Hacker's take, with discussion)

Back in 2013.  (Vide Ken Taylor's reaction.)

Blast from the past: recommenders should probably include explicit comparisons in their letters

Back in 2010.

Blast from the past: philosophers on their conception of "philosophy"

Back in 2010.

Blast from the past: Gutting on the "analytic" and "Continental"

Back in 2012.

Blast from the past: 2014, the year the philosophy profession went mad

Four years ago.   One salutary development in the interim--perhaps due to the public outrage in 2017 over the abuse of Rebecca Tuvel by the usual suspects--is increasingly visible and vocal resistance to the "bloodthirsty mob of wacko philosophy profs" by other members of the profession.

Blast from the past: "What is an 'area of competence'?"

Back in 2007.

Blast from the past: the REAL "pluralist" guide to PhD programs

Back in 2013.  We miss you Spiros!

Blast from the past: these philosophers didn't take the "kindness" pledge

Back in 2014.

Blast from the past: Robert Paul Wolff on Harvard Philosophy in the 1950s

Back in 2010.

Blast from the past: More Nonsense Rankings

Back in 2014, but, remarkably, some people continue to produce similarly misleading "information."  Why are some people so indifferent to the well-being of undergraduate students?  (And see this and this.)

Blast from the past: Thomas Nagel jumps the shark

Way back in 2009.

Blast from the past: George W. Bush's second inaugural address

Back in 2005.  Seems almost sane now!  How much further can American sink?

Blast from the past: Some Thoughts on Nietzsche and Foucault

Back in 2004.  And for more on Foucault, see this.  (If someone is interested in publishing 'officially' this paper from a decade ago, let me know!)

Blast from the past: "'Be nice' is truly the new slogan of the vindictive and intolerant"

As true then as it is now.

Blast from the past: the Marquette case, in the beginning

Back in early 2015, long before the lawsuit and the professor's academic freedom rights were vindicated by the courts. 

Blast from the past: Schopenhauer on anonymity

Back in 2005, but as relevant today.  I've discovered there's nothing that upsets the twitterabble more than the prospect that one of their abusive kin is about to be exposed.

Blast from the past: the failed 2014 attempt to take down the PGR

Coming up on the fourth anniversary of that absurd episode.

Blast from the past: what can we learn from the Brian Bruya/Metaphilosophy fiasco?

Back in 2015.

Blast from the past: Fish v. Boghossian on 'Does Philosophy Matter?'

Back in 2011, with reader comments.

Best of the summer blog

For those returning to blog reading, here are some highlights from the summer you might enjoy:

June

"Important"=expresses the "correct" view

UK academics protest ongoing defamation of 'A Woman's Place UK' by some trans activists

Blaming the victim is apparently OK when the accused is a feminist literary theorist (the post that started it all)

This isn't the first time 'theory' professors tried to bully a school out of punishing sexual harassment:  Derrida did it too!

In Memoriam:  Stanley Cavell

Nietzsche:  The Truth is Terrible, at TLS

University of Chicago Law Review podcast on Title IX issues

July

Claremont Graduate University shuts its philosophy department, terminates two tenured faculty

Self-help Nietzsche?

Wisconsin Supreme Court sides with Marquette professor whose contractual right to academic freedom was violated

Philosopher Yitzhak Melamed victim of anti-semitic attack in Bonn--and then a victim of police brutality

Most pressing issues confronting the academic profession of philosophy in the US currently

'New Infantilism' comes to The Nation

$20 million gift to UCLA Philosophy

August

Marx, "cultural Marxism," identity politics, our capitalist future

Blast from the past: can this book live up to its blurb?

Back in 2016.

Blast from the past: the failed 2014 attempt to take down the Philosophical Gourmet Report

The comments make interesting reading several years later, now that Carrie Jenkins, Alan Richardson et al. have been exposed.

Blast from the past: on an irony about the evolution of 'standpoint' epistemology

Back in 2016 (and also).

Blast from the past: the most important philosophers of the past two hundred years

Back in 2009;  the top ten:  Wittgenstein, Frege, Russell, Mill, Quine, Hegel, Kripke, Nietzsche, Marx, Kierkegaard.  The ordinal listing aside, a plausible "top ten."

Blast from the past: the sociology of English academia in the 1980s and 1990s, and Philosophy academia today

Back in 2016.

Blast from the past: Shorter APA Code of Conduct

Back in 2016.

Blast from the past: What is an 'area of competence'?

Back in 2007.  Opening comments here, in case readers think anything has changed in the interim.

Blast from the past: the APA's irresponsible 'statement' on 'bullying and harassment'

Back in 2016.  The statement's only impact has been to confirm the APA's dismal reputation.

Blast from the past: the favorite slogan of the vindictive and intolerant (at least in academic philosophy)

Back in 2014.

Blast from the past: the eating habits of philosophers, and their ethical reflections on them

Back in 2012.

Blast from the past: Alan Dershowitz, serial enemy of academic freedom

Since the "blowhard and buffoon" Alan Dershowitz (I here quote one of my liberal, Jewish, very pro-Israel law colleagues!) is back in the news because of his shilling for Trump--the explanation is transparent, since Dershowitz has only one criterion for any position he takes (namely, is it good for Likud)--it's worth recalling that Dershowitz has been a resolute opponent of academic freedom and freedom of expression, most notoriously in the tenure case of Norman Finkelstein at DePaul.

Blast from the past: the first five laws of cyber-dynamics

From 2015. As true today as then.

Blast from the past: Perspective on the PGR from a PhD student

Back in 2014, but as timely as ever.

Blast from the past: Most cited Anglophone philosophy books since WWII

Here.

Blast from the past: 25 most important Anglophone epistemologists since 1945

From two years ago.

Blast from the past: Best Anglophone philosophers of language since 1945

From a poll over two years ago.

Blast from the past: Society for Analytic Feminism humiliates invited speaker by issuing an "apology" after his talk

Back in 2016.  This was before the Hypatia fiasco involving Prof. Tuvel, but many of the same people were involved in both.

ADDENDUM:  By the way, SAF never did apologize to Prof. Shelby for their unprofessional treatment of him. 

Blast from the past: best Anglophone philosophers of art since 1945

Here.

Blast from the past: the best Anglophone moral philosophers since 1945

Here.