Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

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Here's what ICE operations look like "on the ground"

4 days ago | leiterreports.typepad.com | Brian Leiter

© All materials from 2003 to the present are copyrighted by Brian Leiter. All rights are reserved.
Speaking of Marx, here's a video of a "book talk" event at UChicago's Stone Center on Inequality...

4 days ago | leiterreports.typepad.com | Brian Leiter

...hosted by Professor Steven Durlauf (an economist in the Harris School of Public Policy here), with remarks by myself and Jaime Edwards, and commentary by Professor Durlauf and Professor Geoffrey Wodtke (UChicago Sociology). It was a lot of fun and quite interesting (although I think Professor Wodtke was mistaken about the need for the labor theory of value to explain why classes have conflicts in material interests).
Edwards & Leiter's "Marx" volume now a "bestseller"...

5 days ago | leiterreports.typepad.com | Brian Leiter

...at least by academic standards; Routledge tells me the book has sold 1500 copies in just eight months! Thank you readers!
A message to international students and faculty

5 days ago | leiterreports.typepad.com | Brian Leiter

Philosopher Gregory Fried kindly gave permission to share this very apt message about the lastest Trump stupidity he sent to students and colleagues; I endorse its sentiments fully! Dear Students, Colleagues, Friends, I am writing to students and colleagues I have taught or worked with this year, plus students at Boston College I believe to be foreign nationals, as well as friends and colleagues elsewhere who may understand the urgency of the moment, to express my personal horror, disgust,...
RFK Jr's plan to kill us all: bird flu edition

5 days ago | leiterreports.typepad.com | Brian Leiter

Unbelievable: The Trump administration has delivered its latest blow to vaccines, canceling a nearly $600-million contract to the drugmaker Moderna that was intended to develop a shot for humans against bird flu. The decision also forfeited the U.S. government’s right to purchase doses ahead of a pandemic, and canceled an agreement set up by the Biden administration in January to prepare the nation for a potential bird flu pandemic.
Great moments in obscure blues that Led Zeppelin "borrowed": Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy, "When the Levee Breaks," 1929

1 week ago | leiterreports.typepad.com | Brian Leiter

While poets, according to Harold Bloom, suffered from the anxiety attending the influence of earlier poets, Led Zeppelin suffered nothing similar, borrowing rather freely (and sometimes without attribution) from the American blues canon. The originals are often forgotten.
Apt remarks by economist Glenn Loury on the universities and their critics (like the imbecile Christopher Rufo)

1 week ago | leiterreports.typepad.com | Brian Leiter

Here: [T]hese universities, and Harvard is at the pinnacle of an exquisite system of intellectual production, are places of real mastery. That’s true in the sciences, the social sciences, and in the humanities. The people who get tenure at these institutions are custodians of the legacy of intellectual reflection and the production of ideas that goes back centuries. They are responsible for curating, transmitting, and augmenting our understanding of the problems of existence.
Harvard strips tenure from and fired embattled HBS psychologist Francesca Gino

1 week ago | leiterreports.typepad.com | Brian Leiter

Here. At one time, she was one of the five highest paid faculty at Harvard, earning one million dollars a year (business school professors are very good at ratcheting their salaries up!). I suppose so much money, which no doubt resulted from outside offers, could create a bad motive for producing striking experimental results no matter the evidence. (Regarding her earlier defamation claim, which was dismissed, see this.)
Can there be a "theory of everything"?

1 week ago | leiterreports.typepad.com | Brian Leiter

© All materials from 2003 to the present are copyrighted by Brian Leiter. All rights are reserved.
Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

1 week ago | leiterreports.typepad.com | Brian Leiter

The NYT put together a video about three Yale professors--two historians and philosopher Jason Stanley--who are leaving Trump's America to go to the University of Toronto. I had repeatedly urged Jason to take the Toronto job, because of the direction this country is going, and because he himself had elicited abuse from Trump's "communications" hatchet man Steve Cheung, a rather bad sign).