The Sooty Empiric

For most of my life I have lived in the UK, but for six years I lived in the United States of America. Somewhat erratic and unpleasant political fortunes on both sides of the Atlantic have me thinking about the differing social models in the two countries, and I am just going to collate some of my impressions here. I will be appealing to various facts and figures but also just my own impressionistic sense of things. The big picture view is that I think that in some ways the USA is in a worse state than the UK, but I would be more optimistic about the USA's future despite that. So the major difference that has basically defined my whole experience of adult life is that since 2008 the British economy has more or less been stagnating when not actually declining. Source . It's not that there's been no growth, it's just been on the whole pretty slow. This is unlike the USA, which has actually experienced periods of sustained economic growth in that time: And, like, you can f...

I recently read and enjoyed  this  dialogue on philosophy grad school and why we have it by Barry Lam . While I enjoyed it and learned from it, I thought I had a slightly different take, so I decided to write my own dialogue on the matter! The two character are called "Grádwuma", pronounced GRAH-dwoo-mah, and "Ɔdɔfírinne", pronounced AW-daw-FEER-in-yeh. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ɔdɔfírinne: They’re trying to defund us, would you believe it!?
 Grádwuma: I would, trusting sort that I am, but all the same I’d feel better if you’d tell me who they are and what they mean to defund.
 Ɔ: Oh, cute — at least when we’re all unemployed you’ll have your career as a comedian to fall back on. G: Working on my tight-five. Ɔ: Well in the meantime, I just got back from faculty senate where I was told that in light of...

Josh Habgood-Coote  recently asked on BlueSky if there's any way of finding the most cited articles in philosophy overall. He noted that a recent informative Weatherson post , who was looking at a slightly different thing - citation networks within philosophy journals. What Habgood-Coote ended up doing was extracting the ten most cited papers from the 2019-2023 period using google scholar, and linked them here . Using my blog to brag a bit, I am happy to see Vindicating Methodological Triangulation there! But I decided I would like to look at something slightly different while we are here having this conversation. I wanted to see what topics philosophers are writing on that are actually getting attention. What are the areas of interest that drive conversation in or through our field, where is it that our work seems to get recognition and uptake, or at least spark conversation? That I thought I could do by looking at some of the highly cited philosophy journals and lookin...

Back when I was in grad school I kept a previous blog that I ended up replacing with this one. The other day I wanted to share Reichenbach's soliloquy that I had previously posted there, so I searched through my old archives to repost it. Along the way I found this old piece, which considering that I was a first or second year grad student when I posted it kind of shocked me by its effrontery. I reproduce below, then follow up with some reflections on what I now think of young me's presuming to give methodological advice to a field he'd made precisely 0 contributions to. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The humanities are often attacked for fairly silly reasons. People don't really understand what goes on therein and they say ignorant things about the scholarship that workers in the humanities produce. What is m...

Here's a dynamic that I think shapes a lot of politics in the West right now, though I am going to focus on here in the UK. I think this dynamic arises from the interplay of two facts about widespread voter preferences, and then another fact about the world more broadly. I suspect this dynamic is basically perennial, and it has just become more salient to me because it appeared much more salient later on in my life - I came of age in the high-growth-and-expectations thereof world of Britain in the late 90s through the crash, which suppresses this dynamic to a considerable extent. But I can't prove that so will just focus on the present. Finally, more generally, I won't be able to prove any of these points here, but I will try and provide links to indicate the sort of stuff that makes me think as I do. Obviously in something as far reaching as this I am far from expert on any particular element, so if I am wrong mea culpa, but you will at least see why I think as I do. Ok e...

This is another in the series of "things I often find myself saying so I want there to just be one blog I can point to rather than repeat myself" posts. This one is prompted by the University of Sussex facing a (to my mind) ludicrous fine  from a government organisation for failing to protect free speech whose head is, at the same time, lecturing universities on the need to "stimulate debate on contentious topics". These two aims - protect free speech, foster debate in universities - seem complementary and laudatory. But I think they are being interpreted in a way that puts them fundamentally at odds. And, what's more, the way they are being implemented at the moment creates an incentive system which will get us little open debate while punishing speech. Cards on the table: I am closer to the "free speech purist" end of things than most. I am, for instance, pretty cynical about speech codes when they are made parts of organisational codes of conduct. ...