“Brian Leiter reports”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/001136.html that Rae Langton and Richard Holton are moving from Edinburgh to MIT. Bad news for Edinburgh, but great news for this side of the pond.

My evaluations are even more biased than usual on this one because when I started grad school Richard was my original supervisor and Rae was also on the faculty, so I have a little old school bias. But I think it’s a great addition for MIT. Rae and Richard are both first-rate philosophers, and wonderful people to have around the department, so I suspect everyone at MIT will be thrilled with the news.

As Brian notes, this makes MIT a leading school for feminist philosophy, but that’s hardly the only benefit. When “you’re a small department”:http://semantics-online.org/blog/2004/04/if_youre_lance_armstrong_.php, you’ve got to hire people with diverse interests to make up for a possible lack of breadth. I think this hire fits the bill, because Rae’s areas of specialisation include metaphysics, Kant and feminism, while Richard has a somewhat broader range of philosophical interests than me. He’s starting to diverge from the one paper per topic pattern he used to work by though, so maybe that’s slowly changing!