In the spooky way that he has, Brian Leiter announces two pieces of philosophy faculty news involving the Cambridge scene, seemingly before the mere thought had even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing the principal’s minds [*]:
bq. Philosophers Langton & Holton moving from Edinburgh to MIT
Rae Langton (Kant, feminist philosophy, moral and political philosophy, metaphysics), the Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and Richard Holton (ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of action, philosophy of language, philosophy of law), also at Edinburgh, have accepted senior offers from MIT. That’s a setback for Edinburgh, which recently lured Andy Clark from Indiana/Bloomington to the Chair in Logic and Metaphysics. It’s also, of course, a significant addition for the small, but strong MIT Department and, among many other things, will make MIT the leading center of feminist philosophy in the United States (Langton will join Sally Haslanger at MIT).
Harvard Junior Faculty in Philosophy Being Pursued: Gillies Going, Siegel with Offer
Anthony Gillies (epistemology, philosophy of language, decision theory), currently on tenure-track at Harvard, has accepted a tenure-track offer from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In addition, the University of Arizona has made a tenure-track offer to Susanna Siegel (philosophy of mind and language), also on tenure-track currently at Harvard.
While I am happy that my colleagues in the philosophy section were able to successfully recruit Rae and Richard, I am devastated that Thony is leaving town. His year here was very enjoyable for me — we have been meeting weekly at Burdick’s to chat about matters modal and related issues, which has recently resulted in nascent work on epistemic modals and distributed knowledge.
[] Yes, I am in a “Douglas Adams”:http://douglasadams.com/ frame of mind [*]. The “movie”:http://douglasadams.com/movie/ of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has started shooting. The BBC has “an interview”:http://h2g2.com/A2257599 with the director and producer team.
[**] This being a weblog, it’s OK to digress once in a while. See David Beaver’s “definitive entry on the topic”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000132.html.
Congratulations to all those who have their merits acknowledged.
But, I find the labels strange. How can true philosophy be feminist, marxist, conservative or ‘tonyist’?
Years ago, Chomsky, in one of his lectures, said that he did not like words such as ‘marxism’, for there is no such thing as ‘einsteinism’ in Physics, for neither Marx nor Einstein were gods.
What should a philosopical thesis on racial prejudice in the USA be called? Black Philosophy? Africanist Philosophy? And if we think of prejudices against people of Mexican origin? Do we get Mexicanist Philosophy?
I would suggest that one should use more informative descriptions of what these Philosopher’s ideas are, rather than generic labels.
OFF TOPIC: Talking about Philosophy, Greg Restall has written an interesting paper on Fitch’s (1963) Knowability Paradox.
http://consequently.org/writing/notevery/
ABOUT PHILOSOPHY AND LOGIC
Greg Restall has written a very good review of the the works, ideas and contributions of the greatest logicians of the XIXth and XXth centuries, some of them being still among us.
It is a worthwhile reading!
http://consequently.org/writing/logicians/