Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Brian Leiter has made the point that there are three distinct models of doctoral education in philosophy, with regard to the English-speaking world. He calls them by their most distinguished representatives: Princeton, MIT, Pittsburgh. They are distinguished from one another by how they regard the history of the field. Is the history of philosophy itself a matter of doing philosophy?  On the Princeton model, history is treated as important, but distinct.  The department will incorporate courses on the great historical schools and interests.  There will be other course, though, about contemporary hot topics in Anglophone/analytic philosophy.  This two-track model is dominant in the US, and it has exemplars elsewhere, as at Oxford and Toronto. On the MIT model, Leiter continues, "the focus is almost entirely on contemporary research in analytic philosophy, with one or no lines set aside for history of philosophy." Finally, on the Pittsburgh model, "the history o...

Sunday and again yesterday I wrote posts here about the biomedical world.   Yesterday's, you may recall, I summarized a paper by Andrew Lo and two other scholars, proposing a new system for the private financing of biomedical research. Today I'd like to say something about another recent paper by Lo [well, not so recent -- I'm behind the curve -- this goes back to 2011], that is the other sign of the coin of Lo's own versatility. The paper offers a neuroscientific look at the impulses of traders and investors. In both cases, the paper I summarized yesterday and this one , Lo occupies the borderland between biology and finance. But he faces in opposite directions: in the one case discussing the best ways to finance biology, in the other case discussing the biological bases of finance. Now: isn't that a neat symmetry? So who is Lo? He's the possessor of a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University (1984). He has been on the MIT finance faculty since ...

I expect that if I don't say something about this subject I will soon be the only regular blogger in the northeastern United States who hasn't. My sympathies of course to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, the dead and the injured and the families of both. The death of someone as young as Martin Richard is always especially heartbreaking. But you don't come here for the usual hearts and flowers dear reader. Let's see if we can say something not already said.  We can do so if we turn our attention to the manhunt, which began in earnest Thursday evening with another crime, the murder of a security officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Late Thursday evening, Sean Collier, responding to a disturbance, was shot and killed. That set off a wild 24-hour period that ended with one of Collier's murderers dead and the other in custody. Perhaps this is something of a take-away. We're often told that government is necessary to keep people ...