February 2025

Here’s a bunch of announcements I’ve been meaning to post for awhile. Going forward, I’m going to try to post a collection of these each month, ideally toward the beginning of the month. Yet another New Year’s Resolution for 2025–let’s see how long it lasts. I’ve already missed January!

Reason Papers published its Fiftieth Anniversary issue this past fall. Issue 44:2 contains a fifty-year retrospective on the journal itself, a symposium on David Schmidtz’s Living Together: Inventing Moral Science (Oxford, 2023), and another symposium on Andrew I. Cohen’s Apologies and Moral Repair: Rights, Duties, and Corrective Justice (Routledge, 2020). Here’s the link for the Archives page where you can access articles individually. Here’s a link to a big PDF that goes to the issue as a whole. Highly recommend. Congrats to Shawn Klein and Carrie-Ann Biondi, who put the issue together.

My friend Brandon Christensen edits Isonomia Quarterly, now in its second year of publication. Here’s the latest issue. Brandon tells me he’s looking for material for upcoming issues. The journal focuses on “equality under the law” and “global federalism,” ideas it sees as inspired by Hayek’s work. But IQ welcomes a wide variety of stuff; there’s no Hayekian (or other) party line there. Worth looking into. Here’s the About page.

Speaking of Hayek, here’s a post by my friend Eric Kramer at the blog Angry Bear, on re-reading Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” inspired by a discussion we’re having about it next week at our monthly discussion group.

On a totally different topic, I’ll be giving a couple of presentations in the near-future on “institutional neutrality,” the academic buzz word du jour, drawn from the argument of the famous (or notorious) Kalven Committee Report of November 1967. The first presentation is at the conference of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics in Norfolk, Virginia in a few weeks; the second is at Heterodox Academy’s conference this June in Brooklyn (Tuesday, June 24th, 8:30 am). I’m hoping to do an additional presentation at Penn, and maybe one at Princeton. The paper is called “Kalven’s Complicit Executioners,” and believe me, there’s nothing “neutral” about it.

On a related note, I was gratified to see that my defense of divestment from weapons manufacturers made it to the print version of Princeton Alumni Weekly (Feb. 2025, pp. 4,6). I’d previously mentioned it here in a post back in December.