Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog
Brian Leiter
News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.
July 2026
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All posts (178)
He’s now threatening to cut off trade with any country that maintains a trade imbalance, unless he gets his way on interest rates. He doesn’t understand the causes of trade imbalances. Trump’s extraordinary ignorance, his extraordinary narcissism, and his Mafia mentality explain almost everything he does. Even the...
Via Alex Guerrero on FB, I came across this well-done “welcome” address by Rutgers President William Tate (it’s called “My Hopes for You,” September 8, in case it gets displaced by other “community messages” on the linked page). He even works in Dolly Parton, and in a nice way. Anyone starting college should read it.
Reader Howard Berman called my attention awhile ago to this fascinating essay by sociologist Randall Collins, which I recommend to everyone looking for some informed “big picture” analyses of what we face. He makes many astute observations: for example, that LLMs produce “not a human-like intelligence at all but a...
Karen Nisenbaum (Kant, German Idealism, Jewish philosophy), Associate Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University, has accepted appointment at the University of California at Berkeley, effective January 1, 2027, as an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department and the Eda Pell and Moses David Kuflik...
Linguist Geoffrey Pullum (Edinburgh) shares another: The WAMC scam is aimed at tempting authors to think they have a publicity opportunity. A recent novel version of it involves an independently established website rather than one filched from some other organization. Yet it is just as much of a fraud. I recently...
A central forecast of Marx’s was that capitalism would produce technological innovations that would displace human labor, gradually immiserating those who have only their labor power to sell. Marx thought this would happen much sooner than it actually has, but it has started to happen. We discussed this in Chapter...
Julian Nyarko took a look. From his summation of his findings (using Pangram, whose reliability he describes): In 2025, AI use was rare: 9 out of 273 articles (3.3%) have any AI signal, with 5 articles (1.8%) containing an estimated share of AI-generated words exceeding 5%. The estimated share of AI written words...
…who wrote the screenplays for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, among other movies. Philosopher Cheyney Ryan kindly shared this description of the plot (spoilers!): The film centers on John Jorrisen, played by Jack Huston, a respected philosophy professor at a liberal-arts college. He teaches philosophy as though it can...
Professor Alexy, who was emeritus at the University of Kiel in Germany (where he spent most of his academic career), was better-known and quite influential throughout the civil law world (and especially in South America) for his formal theory of proportionality and balancing in constitutional adjudication. He was...
Useful about how these scams work. As this radio station notes, you can report these emails to the Federal Trade Commission: reportfraud.ftc.gov. I assume you should just forward the scammer’s email. (Thanks to Sebastian Greve for the pointer.)
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