We continue awaiting the decision of a grand jury on whether or not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, exactly 15 weeks ago today on a suburban street in Ferguson, Missouri. News reporters from across the globe have been camped out in Ferguson for…
Read MoreMuch to my own embarrassment, I’ve neglected to post here on the Steven Salaita controversy thus far, an affair with far-reaching implications not only for how we determine what constitutes both the civic and academic limits to the “right to free speech,” but also for a number of hiring-and-firing practices that are customary within the Academy but…
Read MoreIf the current results of Brian Leiter’s poll (which asks whether or not he should continue producing the Philosophical Gourmet Report) are any indication– it’s 1709 to 1118 in favor of “No” votes as I write this– and if Leiter intends to take those poll results as some sort of mandate, then Philosophy may very well…
Read MoreHow we ought to understand the terms “civility” and “collegiality” and to what extent they can be enforced as professional norms are dominating discussions in academic journalism and the academic blogosphere right now. (So much so, in fact, that it’s practically impossible for me to select among the literally hundreds of recent articles/posts and provide…
Read MoreThis is just to let readers know that I continue to update the Archive of The Meltdown daily. I’m trying to catch everything substantive that shows up in re the recent events surrounding Leiter, the PGR and the September Statement– and I’m aiming to avoid redundancy as much as possible– but there has been a…
Read MoreJustice tempered by Mercy Because I’m maintaining an Archive of (what I’ve called) The Meltdown here on this blog, I think I’ve read most, if not all, of what professional philosophers have said publicly in the last several days’ scrum regarding Brian Leiter’s objectionable behaviors (or “civility” more generally) as well as the merits and demerits…
Read MoreAs readers know, I have maintained an Archive on this blog with links to most (if not all) of the public essays, statements and posts regarding the recent controversy surrounding Brian Leiter and the Philosophical Gourmet Report. A lot as been said over the last few weeks and, if you’re interested, you can trudge through…
Read MoreIt’s been a busy (in fact, record-breakingly busy) month here on RMWMTMBM, so I wanted to take a momentary break from the Leiter/PGR/SeptemberStatement brouhaha–about which this blog has more or less unfortunately become something akin to professional Philosophy’s version of TMZ— and instead remark upon an initiative as important to our discipline as, and not wholly…
Read MoreThis has been a strange month for academic Philosophy, for professional philosophers and, as a more or less direct consequence, for this blog. A little less than four weeks ago, on September 24, I began collecting various posts, essays and articles related to what I then anticipated was going to be, at the very least,…
Read MoreLast year’s meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) was the first such conference, as far as I’m aware, that was live-tweeted by a significant-enough number of participants to be noteworthy. I was one of the SPEP Twitterati last year in Eugene, and I wrote a post about that experience after I…
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