Prof. Ron McClamrock's vaguely academic web home

The Noam Chomsky Show

Like the Jerry Springer Show, but as hosted by Noam Chomsky (via Leiter).

Quasi-solipsism in real life

Dead grandmothers

I’d lost track of this paper, but Eszter Hargittai at Crooked Timber just linked to it, so here it is: The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall Of American Society.

Students: Do not use “grandma/grandpa died” as your made-up excuse. Not only is it unseemly, but it is the paradigmatic false excuse, and we all know it.

Science in the media

New poll: 10 "Most Important" Early Modern Philosophers

Another of the polls from Leiter: The 10 “Most Important” Philosophers of the Early Modern Period. Not bad, although I gotta put Descartes over Hume, myself:

1. Immanuel Kant (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)
2. David Hume loses to Immanuel Kant by 421–232
3. Rene Descartes loses to Immanuel Kant by 443–201, loses to David Hume by 335–314
4. John Locke loses to Immanuel Kant by 576–85, loses to Rene Descartes by 508–136
5. Gottfried Leibniz loses to Immanuel Kant by 586–76, loses to John Locke by 351–272
6. Thomas Hobbes loses to Immanuel Kant by 596–64, loses to Gottfried Leibniz by 371–247
7. Baruch Spinoza loses to Immanuel Kant by 589–70, loses to Thomas Hobbes by 321–292
8. George Berkeley loses to Immanuel Kant by 625–31, loses to Baruch Spinoza by 377–230
9. Adam Smith loses to Immanuel Kant by 612–32, loses to George Berkeley by 337–247
10. Francis Bacon loses to Immanuel Kant by 603–39, loses to Adam Smith by 302–252

I laughed harder than I should have

Just kidding. Really.

Time travel cheat sheet

Just in case you get thrown back into the past by a time machine:

"The End of Philosophy" in the NYTimes

Chaospet gives David Brooks a well-deserved spanking on “The end of philosophy”

Collective unconscious

xkcd reaches into our collective unconscious:

Philosophy Top 40

Brian Leiter’s “So who is the most important philosopher of the the past 200 years?” poll is done now.  600 people filled out the (long) ballot.  See the full results here.  Wittgenstein won, followed by Frege and Russell.  Kripke is the only living top 10.   All that is fine.  But Kierkegaard at #10 seems crazy — like David Bowie making #7 on VH1’s Top 100 Rock Acts list. And as I’m teaching Phenomenology this semester, it seems especially bad that he beats all of those guys, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre.