Academia

Always nice to discover something close to home that you were previously unaware of, in this case Nunney Castle, built around 1370 and destroyed nearly 300 years later during the Civil Wars.

There is a kind of relentless contrarian that is very smart, has voracious reading habits, is funny, and ends up in race science and eugenics. You are familiar with the type. Luckily, analytic philosophy also generates different contrarians about its own methods and projects that try to develop more promising (new) paths than these. Contemporary classics in […]

Last year, I wrote a couple of posts defending historical presentism, that is, the view that we should examine events and actors in history (at least in modern history) in the light of our current concerns, rather than treating them as exempt from any standards except those that prevailed (in the dominant class) at the […]

Harry mentioned the politics of the second-best in comments to his post on higher education the other day. I guess it falls into something of the same space as non-ideal theory or realism, as opposed to moralism. The basic idea is that we shouldn’t hold out for purity if doing so gets in the way […]

I had promised you a series on “The Little Things That Restore Your Faith in Humanity,” but then failed to deliver for months after the first item. It wasn’t because I forgot about it, got too busy or distracted, or saw no reason for optimism around me. It’s rather because the things that have caught […]

I sometimes employ an undergraduate to observe my teaching, and criticize what I do. I’ve learned a lot from them over the years, but I really employ them, these days, to hold me accountable to the standards I set myself and to tell me what is happening in the room (this is especially valuable in […]

While we are on the subject of universities, it’s worth noting the likely acquisition of the so-called University of Phoenix by the University of Arkansas System. After a string of similar acquisitions, closures and conversion to non-profit status, this is pretty much the end of explicitly for-profit university education in the US. It’s a striking […]

Apologies for the brief photo hiatus. Stuff going on. Anyway, here are some cranes.