Digressions&Impressions

On JPP, Wiley, Prestige Production, and Game Theoretic Modeling

[I will phase out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at ] As Leiterreports (and here; here) and...

How to Fix the Referee Crisis in Professional Philosophy

It has come to the point that the most suitable referee(s) for a paper are almost never available. It takes us so long to find reviewers, sometimes a month, six weeks or more (this situation is also exacerbated by the fact that many pe...

On Plumbing for Capitalism; or, on Indirect Public Philosophy

I have always demanded, wisely or not, my autonomous creative space away from my professional commitments. It may be that I do not in fact have a right to such a space. After all, when you become a diplomat, say, or a priest or a sup...

On Benevolent Despots; or what philosophers can learn from the foundations of Public Choice

One of the most exciting intellectual moments of my career was my 1948 discovery of Knut Wicksell's unknown and untranslated dissertation, Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen, buried in the dusty stacks of Chicago's old Harper Library. O...

On Rare Phoenixes in Philosophy (Seneca, Socrates, and Spinoza)

For one of the first class ["good men" [vir bonus]]] perhaps springs into existence, like the phoenix, only once in five hundred years. And it is not surprising, either, that greatness develops only at long intervals; Fortune often bri...

Teaching the history of philosophy (and a bit more)

One deflationary but non-trivial way to understand the role of historians of philosophy in the profession is as teachers that recruit the next generation of students by teaching some of the most enjoyable and exciting bits of philosophy ...

21 March 1979: Foucault Diagnoses American Analytic Philosophy (XXXI)

The second interesting use of these neo-liberal analyses is that the economic grid will or should make it possible to test governmental action, gauge its validity, and to object to activities of the public authorities on the grounds of...

Ideals and Illusions, and the forgotten history of analytic political philosophy

[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at ] Ideals and Illusions, Susan Stebbing's (1941) ...

On the Modernity and Popularity of Public Philosophy by Academic Philosophers, and some Foucault on Kant

I sometimes suspect that advocates of public philosophy by academic philosophers [sometimes: PPAP] are (tacitly) are committed to at least two of the following three following propositions. PPAP is a relatively recent invention. Publ...

Adam Smith, Plutarch and The 1001 Nights

When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition. These last too enjoy their share of all that it produces. In what constitutes the re...