Kieran Healy

Zizek and Badiou, Where are You

Today I was wondering whether it was worth buying Slavoj Zizek’s new book, The Parallax View and reading it, even in a spirit of ironic detachment or what have you. Reasons to Buy: 1. Some smart people I know like him. Selected Reason Not to Buy: 1. Life’s too short to deal with bullshit, even […]

Nearly Doing the Right Thing

Raw material for a short paper in moral philosophy, to be written by someone who is actually a moral philosopher.

Case 1. A woman loses her expensive camera while on holiday in Hawaii. Some time later:
I got a call from an excited park ranger in Hawaii that “a nice Canadian couple reported that they found your […]

University Wealth and Philosophical Reputation

I’ve been looking again at data from the Philosophical Gourmet Report, Brian Leiter’s reputational survey of philosophers. Here are a couple of scatterplots showing the relationship between the size of a University’s endowment and the reputation of its philosophy department, as measured by the PGR, broken out by Private and Public universities. The red […]

Serendipity

A few years ago, way back in the days before Crooked Timber, I wrote a post about Princeton’s old library-borrowing cards. A snippet:
When I was a grad student at Princeton, someone told me that (just like most libraries before computers) the books in Firestone library used to have a pocket inside the cover where the […]

Ideology and Integrity

Via Tim Lambert, some evidence that these two properties might still be orthogonal. Tim reproduces an email exchange between John Donohue and a representative of the Federalist Society’s chapter at University of Chicago. They are trying to organize a debate between Donohue and the awful John Lott, but they fail through a sequence of scheduling […]

The Moor by a Length

Via Gillian Russell I see that the results of the BBC’s “Greatest Philosopher” poll are in. The winner—with 28 percent of the vote, more than twice the share of the philosopher in second-place—was Karl Marx. David Hume is next (just over 12 percent) and Wittgenstein third (6.8 percent). If you are upset that your favorite […]