The Sooty Empiric

Unfortunately life is keeping me too busy right now for blogging, or really much else. But I just thought I would weigh in on the State of the Humanities Report  that has been generating discussion . I really don't have the time or capacity to do much in depth thinking or reading about this so genuine apologies if I am missing something obvious or already covered in the report. I just want to have publicly stated something that I think of as the default or null hypothesis of sorts in this realm. Most academic work is bad. ( My own work included .) Most academics are left-wing. ( Myself included .) Nothing about being left-wing especially prevents you from doing bad work or elevates your work's average level of quality. So most of the bad work in academia is done by left-wing people with a left-wing slant. We could change that such that people would be more facially politically neutral or have a more right wing slant or have a variety of political slants in their work. That mig...

For a long time I resisted the label "analytic philosopher" for myself. I had done a fair bit of metaphilosophy reading on this and come to agree with Glock's perspective wherein analytic philosophy is a sort of vague cluster concept defined by sufficient similarity along metrics of prose-style, historical-influences, kinds-of-problems-you-care-about, how seriously you take certain common sense intuitions, and so on. If you are enough like the other analytics on enough of these metrics you count firmly in, and the more dissimilar you are to paradigm analytics on the more of those metrics you are you become increasingly less clearly analytic. So Timothy Williamson is very thoroughly an analytic, Wittgenstein is fairly analytic but a bit less centrally so, Reza Negarestani is probably not an analytic philosopher but isn't maximally distinct, and Hegel is definitely not an analytic philosopher. Why did I count myself out? Well I basically thought that on prose style I...