I wonder whether the university made any use of its research centre with specific expertise on the ethics of cultural heritage:

A world which recently had no idea South College (est. 2020) existed now knows it as the epicentre of the latest story about student cancel culture, and amidst the fallout a letter’s floating around in which the colleges’ JCR presidents collectively demand a greater say for students—over whom colleges invite. (I thought that was what Cuth’s …

Springer aren’t wrong that their new journal looks germane to my interests, but this is a curious way of bringing its existence to my attention:

I can well believe that whatever is in store for higher education will be carnage (I’m especially wondering what recruitment caps for ‘low value’ subjects would mean for cross-subsidy), but I’m wondering what to make of this:

Thanks, Doctor Irvine. Now I get to spend the rest of the day speculating about who this was.

Apparently I stand to be blacklisted. I wrote a piece for Quillette once, before it became famous, that was actually a qualified defence of the concept of cultural appropriation.

Reports are circulating (seemingly sourced from a paywalled Telegraph article) about the Oxford Philosophy Dept.’s attempts to bolster female confidence by manipulating reading lists, e.g. converting ‘G.E.M. Anscombe’ into ‘Elizabeth Anscombe’. Having once had a (female) tutee who thought Martha Nussbaum was a ‘he’, I’m not sure whether it’s optimism or pessimism Oxford has in excess.

I interviewed Tony Milligan (K.C.L.) about the ethics of space exploration for Pod Academy. It was his work on cultural value in space I built on/responded to in my piece for Commercial Space Exploration: Ethics, Policy and Governance, and as things turned out we were co-contributors to that volume, so it was particularly interesting to have …

Yes. Well. I’m glad the most I generally have to deal with is whether one may write ‘indigenous’ without capitalisation.

Despite our both having links to Durham’s Philosophy Dept. I’ve never met Thom Brooks, who I think came to Durham shortly before I stopped being physically there. Occasionally he makes waves I notice: once some students contacted me hoping I could advise on getting a critical response published to something he’d written (they were into polyamory …

As I understand it (from some distance), the story so far goes something like this: (1) The students’ union at the School of Oriental and African Studies urges that its philosophy-related courses should teach mostly African and Asian thinkers (not in itself startling given the name of the institution), and insofar as white philosophers must be …

A while back I was contracted to write a chapter for a textbook in philosophy of technology, on the theme of video games and virtual reality. Owing to publishing lead times, the book is due out next April, but my chapter has been drafted and revised already, back when it was clear I ought to mention …

I recently got the editorial board’s comments on a textbook chapter. It seems somebody named James Petrik had fun with the draft:

One of the reasons why scholarly self-publication is supposed to be dubious or bad, and self-archiving only a supplementary good, is that material posted to one’s personal website lasts until one stops paying the server bills, having died or vanished in foreign jungles or simply lost interest. One online repository of scholarly articles which seems unlikely …

There were only a couple of times when I spotted plagiarism during teaching/marking stints, though no doubt there were others I missed. Both students had been apparently optimistic that so long as a source was listed in the bibliography, lifting from it would be given the benefit of the doubt; one even found an essay answering …