I like this cover, but I'm not sure the math at the bottom checks out. archive.org/details/vali...

All the takes about fake LLM citations reminded me of this very good paper, "Academic urban legends" about how "a decimal point error appears to have misled millions into believing that spinach is a good nutritional source of iron." journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Help this is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen I can’t stop watching Kyrie Irving vs the robot 😭😭😭

I think academics should start doing availability reports for conference attendees: -- X is questionable for the 5:30 (17:30) keynote due to jet lag. -- Y is out for the 8:30 session due to hangover. -- Z is probable for the 12:30 symposium due to tentative lunch plans with senior scholar.

A+ local advertising. Amazing synergy. No notes.

Also, before the unofficial groveling, you could have official interviews in that very same giant room earlier in the day with a bunch of other people also interviewing at nearby tables.

Shawn Tinghao Wang argues that angry blame is counterproductive not because it's inherently bad, but because it faces a tension. To achieve its protest function it must not the target as a peer, and this undermines its dialogue function. journals.publishing.umich.edu/phimp/articl...

QUERY: Oxford Wykeham Professorship in Logic

Still compiling my bibs manually over here. If you read a Franco, know that you're getting a bespoke bib lovingly matched by sight to the journal's house style right before submitting.

“An instructor's freedom to teach includes the right to assess student academic performance. We are gravely concerned that a climate of escalating authoritarian assaults on academic freedom is normalizing politicized interference in classroom teaching & learning.” — Todd Wolfson, AAUP President

Say what you will about historical scholarship as this review does, but it would be neat if analytic philosophy were just a 45 year struggle (bookended by Moore's "Defence" and Kripke's "Naming & Necessity") to accept as necessarily true Nixon couldn't have been a robot. ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-...

I didn't mention it in my bit on this story from earlier this week, but one of the most dispiriting things about this, beyond how predictable it was, is that all these elected officials care much more about doing shit like this than they do about the University of Oklahoma continuing to exist.

I almost exclusively use Spotify to listen to Nobuo Uematsu's original soundtrack for Final Fantasy VI when I have to grade for hours straight or this excellent playlist of Lowrider Oldies when I would like to groove on a Sunday afternoon. open.spotify.com/playlist/2BT...

This is a terrible story--both because of the trap that was set (either in advance or ret-conned to seize a moment) for this graduate student but also because the student's department failed her. The 1st problem is easy to see, but I want to explain the 2nd one. 1/x

REPEAT AFTER ME: it is not our place to assess how a TA graded an essay for a class whose syllabus you haven’t seen, that you didn’t attend, and when you haven’t seen how they applied the rubric to other essays, especially when the complaint comes by way of TPUSA/right wing grievance network

If a Psych prof assigns students an essay response paper with explicit guidelines and then flunks a student for turning in a paper that ignores those guidelines but instead makes vague gestures to "the Bible" then THAT IS NOT A VIOLATION OF THE STUDENT'S RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.

Excellent advice!

All these fired college football coaches are giving me hope that if I get low enough teaching and peer evaluations that my dean will remove me from the classroom while still paying me my relatively modest salary.

Look, every single “deal” reached by a university with the Trump administration is a moral stain that will be seen with deep embarrassment once we’re through this. But for Northwestern to do this now, when the administration is visibly weakened, is even more shameful and inexcusable.

My research aims to show that Plato's claim that all knowledge is recollection is equivalent to the view that knowing is a lifelong mining process in which the soul solves hashes in order to uncover existing bits of knowledge thereby adding to the soul's blockchain for recovery upon transmigration.

Just failed at carving a turkey at its joints so don't know why metaphysicians think they can do it for nature.

One might be misled by language into thinking that being a tío and being an unc are the same thing, but it seems to me that not all tíos are uncs and maybe even fewer uncs are tíos?

QUERY: Oxford Wykeham Professorship in Logic

CONTINGENT PHILOSOPHERS! (Contractually, not metaphysically). I’ve been a big fan of @contingent-mag.bsky.social for a while. This year they’re letting philosophy piggyback one of their institutions: the year-end list of books and articles written by non tenured/permanent academics in that year.

all pies are good. simply do not say to me that any pies are bad. i do not even want to know about the kind of life that would so warp a person as to think any pie is bad

Philosophy used to be so much cooler. archive.org/details/bim_...

If you're a stranger sending me a reminder about something I didn't do, treat me like an adult and don't make it "friendly." First of all, I'm not your friend. Second of all, I know you're mad at me for not doing the thing you originally asked me to do. Drop the act, buddy.

Spinoza (1677).

Dover really knew how to make philosophy paperback covers.

Interviewer: Can you explain this five year gap in your resume? Me: I did Kant's silent decade in half the time.

ICYMI: A philosopher withdrew from a recent tenure-track appointment at Texas A&M and wrote about it in the Chronicle on October 9th. www.chronicle.com/article/why-...

Fodor and Carnap are in the Epstein files (albeit mentioned by Noam Chomsky).

Wittgenstein is in the Epstein files.

Mary Hesse on "the political aspect of...the Vienna Circle" and why analytic philosophers had "lost the urgency" of epistemological questions given that they "divorced their philosophy from ideological and practical interests" (1980, xiii). archive.org/details/revo...

A survey of North American grad students in history of science in 1970-1971 asked: "'Are there any works which are models, methodologically, of the kind of scholarship you would like to do?" www.jstor.org/stable/284483

D.J. O'Connor in 1959 on "The danger of the now fashionable 'Let's not be beastly to metaphysics' movement." www.jstor.org/stable/3748624

Thought maybe I needed to figure out microfilm, but the Internet Archive is a modern marvel that makes it possible to find issues of The Listener from 1951 in which Michael Polyani criticizes Stephen Toulmin's interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics. archive.org/details/list...

Was it history or philosophy of science that had to make alimony payments after the divorce? Did they ever discuss staying together for the kids, Indy and Pitt? Who got to stay friends with Stephen Toulmin? Too many unanswered questions in HOHAPOS.

I lied. The actual best part is that once you have all the individual chapters combined, you then have to delete the JSTOR title page that is at the beginning of all the individual chapters.

The best part of doing research is having to download individual chapters of works on JSTOR or OxfordOnline or whatevs and combining them into a PDF. (Note: I understand I can go to the stacks for a physical copy in which chapters are bound together between two covers in something called a "book".)

BREAKING: Quad cherry blossom trees also nice in Fall.

<THREAD> I’m now hearing this meme that says speech acts have to be things we do with words and can't be pictures, middle fingers, sandwiches, etc. Guys. It’s time for some speech act theory.

Lord, give me the strength to not make a 6-7 reference in my lecture for college students today.

If you have grad students working on climate change and global justice, please share with them this call for abstracts for a conference put on by grad students in the University of Washington's philosophy department. philevents.org/event/show/1...

I hope my Cartesian wife will read the Ethics and be moved by what I was moved by and convert to Spinozism already.

Feigl, to existentialists who despair and fall into irrational action: "Skill issue."

One of my favorite recurring things in 20th century philosophy is a philosopher, in this case Feigl, being open to the existence of phenomena like extrasensory perception and "mediumism."