Monthly Archives: February 2007

Three cheers for Piers

Posted on February 26, 2007

It’s a familiar fact of academic life that you can go to hear a talk with great expectations of something arresting from someone who you have read with admiration, and then be bored or even irritated by a banal recycling … Continue reading →

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Vice-chancellors, please note

Posted on February 19, 2007

Moscow university in the 1820s, a place of dissent and a reputed ‘hot-bed of depravity’. The Tsar appoints Prince Golitsyn Director to impose order. Herzen writes: ‘Golitsyn was an astonishing person. It was a long time before he could accustom … Continue reading →

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So what’s it all about then?

Posted on February 11, 2007

The photographer Steven Pyke has produced another set of photos of great and not-so-great living philosophers. The style is, as with his earlier set published as a book, dramatically black-and-white, distinctly pretentious — and so, of course, in some cases … Continue reading →

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Two talks: Autonomy and positive sets

Posted on February 9, 2007

I went this week to the Moral Sciences Club for the first time in a while. I don’t entirely know why, but I don’t find the format or atmosphere of MSC meetings at all congenial. But the speaker this week … Continue reading →

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For Mac geeks …

Posted on February 5, 2007

I’ve just become a real convert to DevonThink, which seems to be by far the best solution for organizing a whole collection of downloaded PDFs of articles, stored emails, lecture notes and the like. I haven’t yet begun to explore … Continue reading →

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