Eric Kaplan, who overlapped with me in grad school at Berkeley but who is now much more famous as a comedy writer for Big Bang Theory, Futurama, and several other shows, has been cooking up weird philosophical-comical blog posts since March at his WordPress blog here. Check it out!

from Thane Rosembaum, professor of law at NYU, here. [Update:  Rosenbaum's status at NYU is unclear.  See comments below.]  He argues that Gaza civilians aren't really innocent civilians because they elected Hamas. Isn't this the same argument that Osama bin Laden made for the legitimacy of 9/11? Rosembaum goes on to say: " children whose parents are…

This is the third and last of a brief sequnce of posts widely dispersed over time on three major texts, which I taught during the academic year that has just passed. The first was on the Essays of Montaigne  and the second was on Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. These are rather different cases, so that wit Montaigne it is…

(or at least I'd like to think he's a regular NewAPPS reader…)

At last I reach the end of a series of a posts responding to a few requests to expand on a post criticising the more centalisimg-homogonising aspects of the construction of the European polity, and Habermas' association with that attitude. I suppose those who made the requests now have an idea of why I did…

of Brazil here.

for winning the 2013 Philosophy of Science Association prizes for best essay by, respectively, a Graduate Student and a recent PhD.  More details here.   Welcome to the club!  :)  

Jason Mitchell, a Harvard social neuroscientist, gives an argument against scientific replication, and a defense of unreplicated science, here.   His argument, in a nutshell, is that all we ever learn from the failure to replicate an experiment is that the attempted replicator is a lousy experimenter.  Quoting Mitchell:  Recent hand-wringing over failed replications in social…

The biggest policy issue of the moment is the Euro, which it can be said without much controversy  needs some form of fiscal integrationism, or federalism, to stabilise it. That means Eurobank bonds and a stronger Eurobank. There is no chance of the UK being part of the setup without a very big change in attitude,…

Discussing the ideal policies of the European Union raises a kind of controversy not so apparent when discussing the idea of Europe and political structures, since people who agree on these may have very divergent views on the relative merits of capitalist and socialist economics, social liberalism and conservatism, and so on. In any case,…