Unfortunately life is keeping me too busy right now for blogging, or really much else. But I just thought I would weigh in on the State of the Humanities Report that has been generating discussion . I really don't have the time or capacity to do much in depth thinking or reading about this so genuine apologies if I am missing something obvious or already covered in the report. I just want to have…
For a long time I resisted the label "analytic philosopher" for myself. I had done a fair bit of metaphilosophy reading on this and come to agree with Glock's perspective wherein analytic philosophy is a sort of vague cluster concept defined by sufficient similarity along metrics of prose-style, historical-influences, kinds-of-problems-you-care-about, how seriously you take certain common sense…
Briefly, towards the end of another post long ago, I indicated that I felt some affinity to humanism. And in conversation comrade philosophers have expressed some surprise at my self-identification as a humanist. A going interest for me is how we formal philosophers relate to other parts of the field, so in the spirit of using one's blog for self-indulgent musings that one can pretend have wider…
What follows is not quite something I believe, nor even something I fear. It is something I fear I believe, my worst tendencies as a thinker and person. I share them in the hope it will be purgative, and also hoping that maybe others who are afflicted with similar thoughts might at least feel some camaraderie. Here is how society seems to me when I am at my worst. The very top echelons of our…
My friend and comrade Jonathan Birch has gifted me with another guest post. The first of his, which I also enjoyed, can be found here . I really appreciate his honest and frank look into the emotional and social stakes of his own work on animal rights. Without further ado over to Birch! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Liberalism and animal rights sit…
In recent times my online sphere has had a fair few people make the claim that, in some sense, the culture has moved on from Woke. The dates I see often given for the heights of this supposed social phenomenon are 2014-2020, and the thought is there's been a general tapering off since the pandemic of whatever woke was. I actually also feel like I can sense a vibe-shift, but then maybe that's just…
For most of my life I have lived in the UK, but for six years I lived in the United States of America. Somewhat erratic and unpleasant political fortunes on both sides of the Atlantic have me thinking about the differing social models in the two countries, and I am just going to collate some of my impressions here. I will be appealing to various facts and figures but also just my own…
I recently read and enjoyed this dialogue on philosophy grad school and why we have it by Barry Lam . While I enjoyed it and learned from it, I thought I had a slightly different take, so I decided to write my own dialogue on the matter! The two character are called "Grádwuma", pronounced GRAH-dwoo-mah, and "Ɔdɔfírinne", pronounced AW-daw-FEER-in-yeh.…
Josh Habgood-Coote recently asked on BlueSky if there's any way of finding the most cited articles in philosophy overall. He noted that a recent informative Weatherson post , who was looking at a slightly different thing - citation networks within philosophy journals. What Habgood-Coote ended up doing was extracting the ten most cited papers from the 2019-2023 period using google scholar, and…
Back when I was in grad school I kept a previous blog that I ended up replacing with this one. The other day I wanted to share Reichenbach's soliloquy that I had previously posted there, so I searched through my old archives to repost it. Along the way I found this old piece, which considering that I was a first or second year grad student when I posted it kind of shocked me by its effrontery. I…
Here's a dynamic that I think shapes a lot of politics in the West right now, though I am going to focus on here in the UK. I think this dynamic arises from the interplay of two facts about widespread voter preferences, and then another fact about the world more broadly. I suspect this dynamic is basically perennial, and it has just become more salient to me because it appeared much more salient…
This is another in the series of "things I often find myself saying so I want there to just be one blog I can point to rather than repeat myself" posts. This one is prompted by the University of Sussex facing a (to my mind) ludicrous fine from a government organisation for failing to protect free speech whose head is, at the same time, lecturing universities on the need to "stimulate debate on…
Hamlet - Absolute time would exist in a causal structure for which the concept "indeterminate as to time" order lends to a unique simultaneity, i.e., for which there is no finite interval of time between the departure and return of a first-signal... So the Logical Positivists are some of my favourite philosophers. Those involved in the movement were also very much involved in artistic movements of…
Today's post is a bit of a ramble on a topic that I often think about yet have no firm opinion regarding. The issue is the tendency to treat leftists as in some sense more agential than right wingers. We see this in articles that frame behaviour from right wingers as an inevitable response to leftist excess. A particularly shocking example of this became somewhat infamous on Twitter: But you can…
I have been somewhat pessimistic about analytic philosophy (including my own specifically ) on this blog. While I have hosted other voices , at least in my own meta-philosophical musings the tone has been somewhat doomerish. Well, I wouldn't want to let it be said that I am in any way consistent, and in any case it's been a bit too long since I posted on here so thought I would throw out a low…
Some time back there was some hubbub about an APA blog post piece posing the question " Should we continue to read and honour immoral philosophers? " The answer, it was widely thought, is so obviously "yes" that it is a sign of the moral decay of philosophy - dare I say western civilisation more broadly! - that this is now in doubt. Unfortunately for those of us seeking a fun day out on the…
A conversation with a colleague the other day prompts me to explain in more detail why I think myself and most of those like me are wasting our lives. I have already explained that I think analytic philosophy is a degenerative research programme building shoddy structures from inadequate material. But the sunny optimism of Daniel Stoljar's engaging book has given me the tools to explain in…
Recently I read this post -- " Behavioural Science Needs to Return to the Basics " -- and I didn't like it. In this blog post I am going to complain about it. To be clear my complaints are not going to dispute that there are lots of tiresome prigs in academia, that given the general demeanour of academics tiresome moralists tend to be of the liberal left variety, and even less that in work (both…
So I decided to rank the races. In particular, I wanted to see just how many more white philosophers there are on the list of the 376 Most Cited Recent Philosophers in the Stanford Encyclopaedia compiled by Eric Schwitzgabel. I didn't have any way of telling more sophisticated than using my background knowledge plus google images search to examine the exact shape of people's brows to work out…
This is literally happening right now at universities across the world. Exactly this. There has been another round of discussion online about evil humanities professors disordering our political life by spreading pernicious relativism about truth and objectivity. I remain convinced that this is a distraction, that in fact none of our disputes in political and social life are actually about the…
The American educational system teaches children to distinguish between "facts" and "opinions". A recent paper in Misinformation Review has even made mastery of this distinction a marker of civic political competence. Per this paper facts are those statements that "can be proved or disproved with objective evidence" whereas opinions are those statements that "depend on personal values and…
Starting the year off right with a reactionary screed. One thing that regularly causes internet squabbles is casting of fantasy and sci-fi characters with non-white actors/actresses. There was a bit of that for the Lord of the Rings show on Amazon, a bit of that when Boyega was cast as Finn in Star Wars, and even (ok it's not really fantasy but whatever) with a recent adaptation of the Famous…
A recent Matt Yglesias post contained some discussion of concerns people have about the contemporary humanities. For those not subscribed he included a screenshot of the discussion in a recent tweet . The basic idea is that there are some core values underlying American society (the context from which he writes, but I think we can fairly generalise this to at least other liberal democracies) and…
I wrote a piece before explaining why I do not endorse liberal politics or philosophy. One thing that came out of that was lots of people requesting I say something more positive. If I am not a liberal then what am I? Well I think the answer is Marxist, so I will take some time here to explain what I mean by that. Initially I thought this would also involve arguments for my view but this is…
One thing that is supposed to be distinctive of analytic philosophy is the dedication to providing rigorous argumentation in favour of clearly stated theses. Arguments here being understood as articulated premises whose joint plausibility, and demonstrated logical relationship to the conclusion, significantly raises the plausibility of that conclusion -- ideally deductively entailing it. Let's set…