The other day I posted “a letter about the threatened closure”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004227.html of “the HPS department at Eötvös Loránd University”:http://hps.elte.hu/, along with a “petition you can sign protesting the closure”:http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?hpselte&1. This got a little buried in the APA discussions, so I thought I’d bump it to the top, along with providing some information about the department I was given by my colleague Zoltan Szabo.

bq. If I understand the situation correctly, the chair of the HPS department at the Faculty of Sciences (Professor Kampis) was asked to specify who in his department should lose his job, which he refused to do. As a reaction, the deans decided to dissolve the department. By law, they had to do that by March 1 if they want anyone to be fired by September 1. So, there is a chance that the decision is a bluff: they just want the chair to back down, and once he consents to firing a few people the department will be reinstated. But nobody really knows.

So it’s possible that a loud show of support for the department will help save some philosophers’ jobs.

The department’s “website”:http://hps.elte.hu/ is in English so you can get a sense of who is involved and what kind of work they do. Many of the pages on the “faculty list”:http://hps.elte.hu/dept/faculty.html link to pages where the philosophers list their work. The members of the department have published in the top philosophy of science journals, as well as in scientific journals that I believe are well regarded, such as _Foundations of Physics_, _Philosophy of Science_, _British Journal for the Philosophy of Science_, and so on. So there are some good philosophers here who are being threatened.

If you could “sign the petition”:http://www.petitiononline.com/hpselte/petition.html protesting the closure, it would be a small gesture that might prevent this department being closed.

Thanks to Elizabeth Lee for letting me know about this, and to Zoltan Szabo for getting more information about what is happening.