"You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone." -James Baldwin

'Philosophy is the most productive force ever discovered by human beings and we are responsible for modernity. Philosophy is the great gear deep in the heart of the world, and when that gear moves, the Earth trembles.'

Thoughtful and informative piece about the problems at the University of Austin. It's too bad. There should be more institutional experimentation in higher education.

10/10.

From an email to one of our faculty members.... Not even Plato can escape censorship at Texas A&M!

I'm not much of a Marxist, but I found Mistaken Identity to be a stimulating book, and was sorry to learn of Asad Haider's passing. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/u...

Good news.

I was invited to talk about philosophy on a YouTube podcast called Like an Old Friend, which I enjoyed doing.

Body count.

I wrote a journal article defending transracialism. PhilPapers version (no paywall): philpapers.org/rec/LAMRTH-2

The Case for a Global Ban on Industrial Animal Agriculture by 2050 verfassungsblog.de/global-ban-o...

'Once we have properly accounted for indirect effects, such as the role that our policies play in shaping moral attitudes and behavior . . . we can see that consequentialism may converge with animal rights theory significantly, even if not entirely.'

‘According to the philosophical account Taylor draws on, the articulations of poetry are as fully capable of disclosing the existential significance of human life as the words of philosophers or saints.’ Stephen Mulhall on Charles Taylor’s ‘Cosmic Connections’: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Judith Norman is a philosophy professor at Trinity University. In this interview, she shares her experience of being cleared of all allegations following two Title VI investigations into six complaints. She discusses how these policies and procedures can be weaponized to silence faculty voices.

I had the pleasure of speaking about my paper, 'Migration Justice in Indigenous Borderlands" at the Legal Research Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Tijuana last month. Video has a bit of Spanish to start, then English. www.youtube.com/live/dKsovWE...

New from me: an article on the libertarianism of Robert Nozick, and the surprisingly robust resources it provides to a theory of indigenous rights. Non-paywalled version: philpapers.org/rec/LAMLSF

'Chatbots of the dead are chatbots designed to converse in ways that resemble specific dead people. We argue that chatbots of the dead are continuous with representations found in art, like memoir and theater, and function as props that mandate and prompt imaginal interactions with the deceased.'

Now on the Oxford University Press website, complete with cover: Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka's Animals and the Right to Politics, the long-awaited sequel to 2011's Zoopolis. An expected release date of 11 December. Just in time for Christmas! global.oup.com/academic/pro...

AI has been a disaster for uni. teaching, bring on the reliable detectors! An encouraging study on their effectiveness: 'Most commercial AI detectors perform remarkably well, with Pangram in particular achieving a near zero [false positive rate] and [false negative rate] within our set of stimuli'.

Nice piece on new omnivorism, an argument for meat eating based on animal protection that I identified and criticized in my book Duty and the Beast.

Jeff McMahan (Oxford) on Gaza: 'This article . . . challenges the assertion that Hamas’s having wrongly initiated the conflict absolves Israel of responsibility for the harms its military action has caused to civilians.'

Attack data show the vibe shift has officially arrived on campus. open.substack.com/pub/heterodo...

The opinion is here, with merits analysis beginning on p. 92 2/ naacpldf.org/wp-content/upl…

Interesting new book alert. Death in a Shallow Pond press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Tenure is good for academic freedom.

Professor watch lists are bad for academic freedom.

Interesting interview with Mark Pennington, author of Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom reason.com/podcasts/the...

Revealed: Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publication www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Cambridge Elements are free to download until 7/25-check out my little book How To Study Animal Minds. I had fun writing this one, and I'll never forget how nervous I was in front of a bunch of scientist friends, including Sara Shettleworth, hearing their thoughts on the draft! tinyurl.com/3yy6a52c

The documentary is about the Palestinian journalists, over two hundred of whom have been killed by Israel since the war began. jacobin.com/2025/07/robe...

A philosophy professor was assaulted and abducted by ICE while protesting the agency's raid on a farm near his university.

Yesterday, one of our union leaders was arrested during an ICE raid in Camarillo, CA, while he was lawfully observing immigration enforcement activities. www.calfac.org/statement-condemning-the-abduction-and-disappearance-of-cfa-members-in-camarillo/

EP28: Is it Okay to be a Moderate? (On Marcus Arvan’s “Why it’s OK to Be a Moderate”) - Academic Edgelords www.academicedgelords.com/2025/07/08/e...

Your home is not a school: The limits of homeschooling as a political practice - Sonia Maria Pavel, Jeremy Kingston Cynamon, 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

' If we are right, there is not even a general obligation that performers only take roles that correspond to their own social identity.' Acting Out brill.com/view/journal...

'Many of his political positions align today not with Reagan but with Trump . . . Buckley would certainly have approved of putting universities into government receivership and purging the leftists. That’s what he had urged in “God and Man at Yale.”'

It's too bad this piece had to use Kennedy's crankiness as a hook, as it has some interesting nuggets. 1/x archive.ph/D4Nvw#select... Opinion | What RFK Jr. Got Right About Academic Publishing

'Among the most tantalizing ancient works of uncertain authenticity is a series of 13 letters supposedly written by Plato. . . . [They] offer a first-person glimpse of his life and thoughts. The problem is that they have mostly been considered fake.' www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

Informative post by Joe Heath (Toronto) on left-wing climate disinformation.

"Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was released Friday from federal immigration detention, freed after three months by a judge’s ruling after becoming a symbol of President Donald Trump ’s clampdown on campus protests." huge W apnews.com/article/mahm...

'Most people believe that animal agriculture for food production is permissible. At the same time, bestiality enjoys neither widespread social endorsement nor practice. It would be surprising, then, if it turned out that a commitment to the permissibility of one implied . . . ' 1/x

I don't agree with every point here, but overall it's a strong critique of the American Association of University Professors' stance on academic freedom. If the AAUP were a person, it would be a detached scholar who degenerated into a partisan street fighter (sadly, paywalled).

'This paper defends traditional political philosophy against the challenges Gaus leverages against it in The Open Society and Its Complexities. Granting Gaus that consensus on the principles of political philosophy is not forthcoming . . .' 1/x.

'Táíwò takes it for granted that the problems with actually existing identity politics begin and end with “elite capture.” He seems to regard the merits of an uncaptured version of left-identitarianism as too obvious to require much of a defense.' 1/x.

A peer-reviewed article—on Indigenous dance in Palestine and Native North America as resistance to genocide—was formally accepted then rejected by the editors of The Journal of Somaesthetics, citing fear of criticizing Israel’s genocide. mondoweiss.net/2025/06/acad... #Palestine #Israel

"Being told to tremble at the wrath to be unleashed if one’s hegemony fails is not an invitation to dialogue." Philosopher Kieran Setiya reviews A Social History of Analytical Philosophy (Verso), by Christoph Schuringa.

Interesting new paper: Smartphones: Parts of Our Minds? Or Parasites? By Rachael Brown & Robert Brooks Smartphones are often assumed to be obvious examples of cognitive extension. We offer reasons to reject this assessment . . . 1/x.