Today sees yet another round of stories about a claim to have discovered the real author of Shakespeare’s plays. Today’s candidate is Sir Henry Neville. A book claiming he is the author is about to be released by Brenda James and William Rubinstein.
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Brian
Ted Barlow has just sent along word that he’s gotten out of Houston safely, and is now with his fiancee and dog in Washington, D.C.
I’m very pleased to hear that Ted is OK, and I hope everyone that everyone here knows will be just as safe in the days ahead.
I agree entirely with Henry that blogging can be extremely useful for an young academic career, although perhaps not for exactly the same reasons.
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Brad DeLong has two posts up defending Richard Layard’s defence of Benthamism against criticism from Fontana Labs and Will Wilkinson. I think Brad is misinterpreting Bentham, so while his defence might be a defence of something interesting (say, preference utilitarianism) it isn’t much of a defence of Bentham.
The President of Cornell, Jeffrey Lehman, resigned in somewhat mysterious circumstances at the weekend. Lehman was the first Cornell alum to be President, and it had seemed like he was treating this as a job for life. But after just two years he has jumped off the ship, in his words because the “Board of Trustees and [he] have different approaches to how the university can best realize its long-term vision.” This isn’t maximally plausible. The best story on the background to Lehman’s departure is by Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed. I suspect there is still a bit more to this story to come out.
For some unknown reason my browser ended up pointed at Right Reason earlier, and I saw a post by Dan Bonevac on Ann Coulter. Well, I thought to myself, if there are going to be any sensible conservatives in blogtropolis, Bonevac, who is a pretty fine philosopher, should be among them. If someone is going to be able to show what is valuable in contemporary conservatism by distinguishing it from what Ann Coulter does, it should be him. Sadly, that wasn’t to be.
Josh is entirely right that Sen John Conryn’s statements in the Senate today about violence against judges are utterly unacceptable. Saying that judges are somehow to blame for violence against judges and courtworkers should be enough to get you kicked out of any ethically responsible caucus. This being the contemporary GOP, I’m not holding my breath.
From the New York Times article on the Pope’s Death as of 3.25pm East Coast time.
Even as his own voice faded away, his views on the sanctity of all human life echoed unambiguously among Catholics and Christian evangelicals in the United States on issues from abortion to the end of life.need some quote from supporter
John Paul II’s admirers were as passionate as his detractors, for whom his long illness served as a symbol for what they said was a decrepit, tradition-bound papacy in need of rejuvenation and a bolder connection with modern life.
Somehow I don’t think the middle paragraph was meant to be there. And I would like to see those masses of Christian Evangelicals among whom the Pope’s views on the death penalty were echoing. I thought some of them were arguing we were too restrictive in our killing practices.
Sadly I can’t link to it directly because it’s in an annoying popup, but the discussion of the best college basketball players of the year on ESPN.com, featured an hilarous quote from Andy Katz about Australian Andrew Bogut.
Bogut is a unique foreign player. He has a toughness that contradicts the stereotype of foreign big men and has helped him become a force in the paint.
I’ve heard of German stereotypes and American stereotypes and Australian stereotypes and so on, but the idea of there being a stereotype for foreigners, i.e. non-Americans, as such is astounding. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so other in my life.
Seriously though, were Australians in the NBA perceived of as weaklings? I wasn’t following American sports when Luc Longley was with the Bulls, so for all I know he’s responsible for Americans thinking of us foreigners as people who can be blown over with a puff of wind.
As an alien who will presumably have to apply for residence in the US one of these days, I found this post at TalkLeft somewhat disturbing.
Homeland Security is requiring immigrants in 8 cities who are in the process of applying for residency to wear electronic monitoring ankle bracelets 24/7.
These people have never been accused of a crime. There are 1,700 of them to date. Homeland Security says monitoring will prevent those ordered deported from running and hiding. But, a 2003 Justice Department report (pdf) blamed inadequate record keeping by immigration officials as the reason for problems deporting non-detained aliens.
I’m ever so glad the GOP is such a strong supporter of small government and individual liberty.
More seriously, it’s times like this that I think Adam Morton may be right – our complacency about the morality of institutions of citizenship and borders could very well look like a serious moral shortcoming when history casts its judgment on our era.
Recently Scott Soames wrote two books on the history of philosophy from 1900 to 1970. Richard Rorty’s review of these books in the LRB has attracted quite a bit of attention among philosophers. A reply by Soames has been printed, but apparently it was cut down quite a bit for space reasons. So a full version of Soames’s reply (warning: PDF) has been put on the web. I expected I’d be rather sympathetic to Soames’s side of this debate, but actually I thought Rorty got in some surprisingly good points, the most central of which were about my primary area of research, vagueness.
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There is a philosophical tradition, most prominently associated with Quine, that includes among its core commitments the following two claims.
- The things that best scientific theory quantifies over exist
- Among the things that exist, there do not exist spooks or souls or certainly not imaginary friends
So it would be a little troubling if best scientific theory started quantifying over imaginary friends. But some say that’s what will happen. The Quineans will have to find some way to paraphrase away the imaginary friends without paraphrasing away the benefits, should the benefits be genuine.
Karen Bennett (Philosophy, Princeton) reports that Harry Frankfurt is scheduled to be on The Daily Show, presumably promoting his book On Bullshit. The date is now set to be March 14, though that doesn’t seem to be absolutely certain. Non-philosophers should feel free to be less overjoyed with excitement at a philosopher getting this much attention, but I think it’s rather fun, and that episode won’t end up being one of the Daily Shows that I miss – or fastforward through the interview.
UPDATE: Scott McLemee has a nice review of On Bullshit, together with a discussion of Gerry Cohen’s reply, at Inside Higher Ed.
Like Ted, I sometimes worry about whether the blogging medium is being used to its full potential. Then I stumble across uses for the medium that reaffirm my faith in it. 1000 Bars is, as the name suggests, the story of one drinker’s quest to drink at 1000 different bars in 12 months. He is well on the way, with 189 in the first 41 days of the year. I’ll be following his progress, and the pithy summaries of the decor, crowd and ambience of various fine drinking establishments. When taken in large quantities the bar reports all start to sound the same, and they have a pleasing relaxing effect, which is a marked contrast to some political blogs I used to know.
One of the striking things about the tsunami coverage here in Melbourne has been how much of it has focussed on religion. The recent op-eds in The Age have been full of people arguing about how, or whether, religious views can accommodate tragedies such as we’ve seen in south Asia. Since I’ll be teaching the Problem of Evil as part of philosophy 101 this spring (using God, Freedom and Evil as the primary text), I’ve been following these discussions with some interest. I was surprised to find one of the responses I always dismissed as absurd actually has a little more bite to it when I actually tried thinking about it.