Paul L. Franco

Oklahoma college student’s failing grade on gender essay dropped amid outcry A University of Oklahoma student alleged religious discrimination after receiving a zero on an essay that rejected the concept of multiple genders.

“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

The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy Volume 3: The Struggle for Modality It was a struggle, but commonsense won out. That’s not my verdict on Scott Soames’ The Struggle for Modality.[1] That’s his verdict on...

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.

PhilJobs: Jobs for Philosophers Princeton DeCenter Postdoctoral Fellowships: Center for the Decentralization of Power Through Blockchain Technology

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

Publications by Non-Tenure-Track Historians Since we began publishing in 2019, Contingent has published end-of-year lists of books and articles by non-tenure-track historians released in the past calendar year. To submit something for inclusion...

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

A philosophical endeavour towards the defence of the being of witches ... 1666 : Glanvill, Joseph : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive A philosophical endeavour towards the defence of the being of witches ... 1666..Digitized from IA40310711-10.Previous issue:...

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).

Cover of book: Leibniz in red type. Underneath is author byline in all caps: Herbert Wilson Carr. Underneath that is a circle made up of individual squares with rounded corners (so not technically squares, but don't be a dick). Half of the squares are red. The other half is this neat greenish color. The squares recall Leibniz's monads, though there's not a chief monad to be found in the image (as far as I can tell).

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.

Opinion | Why I Withdrew From My Dream Job At Texas A&M, politicians, not professors, decide what is taught in classrooms.

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.

Is it this one by Kai Milanovich?

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The revival of metaphysical realism after decades of positivism is one of the most remarkable features of current analytic philosophy. It may perhaps be traced to a fundamental difference of interest between analytic philosophers of the present generation and those who founded the positivist schools of epistemology. The difference may briefly be expressed by saying that the latter were concerned with what we can now to be true and wished to repudiate metaphysical claims to knowledge, specially because these tended to be associated with Hegelian tradition not only in philosophy but also in authoritarian religion and politcs. Liberalism and social democracy, the Vienna positivists though, were better defended in association with naturalistic knowledge. Modern analytic philosophers...have generally divorced their philosophical from their ideological and practical interests, and have therefore lost the urgency of the question 'How can we know?'

Her reference: "R.S. Cohen, 'Neurath, Otto'...It is remarkable how little of the political aspect of the thought of the Vienna Circle was mentioned in connection with its philosophical history until recently." She tells the reader to contrast the articles in The legacy of logical positivism with Janik and Toulmin's Wittgenstein's Vienna.

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...

We also tried to examine the range of interests and approaches by asking, 'Are there any works which are models, methodologically, of the kind of scholarship you would like to do? (These can be papers, books, dissertations, etc. and need not necessarily be works in history of science.)' We suspect that people listed books they liked as often, or more often, than books whose approach they wished to emulate. About one-third of the respondents (twenty- five) did not reply to this question. Of those who did, thirteen cited the works of Thomas Kuhn, who was mentioned far more frequently than any other scholar except Alexandre Koyre, who was cited five times. Kuhn was cited primarily for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, although his Copernican Revolution and his paper on energy conservation were also mentioned.6 Scholars whose works were cited by at least three respondents included: Ernst Cassirer, Robert Merton, George Rosen, A. I. Sabra, Max Weber, and Lynn White. Scholars mentioned by two students were: Stillman Drake, Charles Gillispie, Mary Hesse, A. 0. Lovejoy, J. T. Merz, Derek Price, and Frances Yates

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

The danger of the now fashionable "Let's not be beastly to metaphysics" movement is that it encourages the growth of irrationalism in philosophy. Philosophy is nothing if it is not an exercise of reason. It is not a matter for "sensitivity" or "imagination" or any of the other nebulous and euphemistic disguises for intellectual muzziness. The philosophers who wrote these essays are far too able and clear-headed to ignore this. But a sympathetic nostalgia for metaphysics coupled with an admission of its logical bankruptcy may encourage less able writers to believe that anything goes in philosophy. So too may their habit of decorating their essays with quotations from Donne, Eliot, Leopardi, Proust, Mrs. V. Woolf and the rest of the cultural circus of the day. As models of philosophical writing, Aquinas, Spinoza, Russell or Carnap are perhaps a little austere for present tastes. But at least they give no encouragement to confuse philosophy with belles lettres.

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

Sir. I agree with Mr Toulmin in his talk published in the Listener of March 8, that we should not worry about the running-down of the universe--for I think we have not enough evidence for it--but I am disturbed by the methods of his argument. Mr Toulmin suggests that there is a logical impossibility involved in applying the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the universe, and he illustrates this by the impossibility of weight fire. He ascribes this impossibility to the fact that in our present system of chemical classification, the word 'fire' does not figure as the name of a stuff'. But surely, whatever limitations are imposed on the verbal context in which we may use the word 'fire' are derived from our knowledge of fire, and it is therefore wholly circular to derive any knowledge about fire from the way the word 'fire' may be used. In playing with 'fire' Mr Toulmin is playing with fire; his linguistic critique, bent on casting out verbalism, lets it in with a vengeance." Polanyi continues to note the half a dozen formulations of the second law of thermodynamics.

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...