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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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After a quick google, it looks like my intuitions about the number of philosophy professors there are were massively off, and I made a mistake adding so many significant digits. I should have just stuck with your 99%, as that was sufficient to make my point anyway.

I think it's way below 99%, too. As an exercise, I picked a random semi wellknown uni, picked a random phil professor off their list of professors (an asst. professor), and checked if they'd written a book - they had (The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality - Paperback).

I then picked a smaller local university, and checked a few of their professors. They, too, had each written a book.

Writing a book is, for a phil or humanities professor, a very common activity. Not a rarity at all.

Writing a book that gets a lot of attention, yes, that's a rarity.

Interesting. As you say, there's certainly not that many philosophy books a year that get teh type of attention Byrne seems to be going for; I was under the impression that physical publishing is doing really poorly as an industry right now, and expected that nothing would get published if it didn't have wide appeal. I guess there are other publishing channels for small academic stuff that's never intended to break big, which makes sense, I just wasn't thinking about it.

Thanks for the info!