April, 2014 - Daily Nous

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April 2014

Philosopher Gets Google Doodle Treatment

The 888th birthday of Spanish Muslim philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd) is celebrated with a Google Doodle today, but not everywhere. Check out Google Spain to see it (today only).

New Report on Adjunct Faculty

A new study on contingent or adjunct faculty has been released. The New York Times comments on it, and then itself comes in for some criticism for being a little late with the news: “The issue isn’t that they’re ‘treated almost like transient workers’ but that they’reactually transient workers. “

The Philosopher-Politician Reflects

We all think we can teach politics, but there is some almost tragic sense in which it can only be learned… by the mistakes you make…. You can go to any number of lectures about what politics is like but it doesn’t survive contact with the enemy…. It’s not a seminar room. It’s not an exercise in persuasion…. Politics is an alternative to war, but you live it ..

What Is Philosophical Progress?

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (previously) argues that philosophy is making progress, and argues for a particular conception of what philosophical progress is: increased coherence.

Nicholas of Cusa on the Radio

2014 is the 550th anniversity of the death of 15th Century German philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (aka Nicolaus Cusanus), and you are probably asking yourself what the folks at Australian public radio are doing about it. I don’t know why you are asking yourself this, as the answer is pretty obviously a radio program. Dermot Moran (University College Dublin) and others ..

What is Happiness?

Everyone thinks happiness is at least sometimes good, but what is it? Dan Haybron (St. Louis University) takes on some traditional accounts and defends the “emotional-state” view in the most recent edition of the The Stone.

2. Professors, you’ve been rated by your students, but have you been drawn?

3. Article on author Lucy Eyre, her philosophically-informed novel, If Minds Had Toes, and the value of teenagers studying philosophy (free registration required).

4. Raising a moral child.

5. An Italian philosopher who had been jailed for nine years fo..

Same Old Song and Dance?

Maybe you’ve always thought there was something off about Ayn Rand, but I bet you weren’t thinking off-Broadway. Well this May, The Anthem, a theater production inspired by Rand’s short novel Anthem, will open at the Lynn Redgrave Theater in NYC—and it is a musical. Sources have yet to reveal whether Rush has agreed to be the pit band. Perhaps The Anthem is meant ..

Political Theory Conference as Preparation for Lawsuit

The Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT) hosts several events in political philosophy and theory, including a large annual conference each fall, the MANCEPT Workshops. One of the panels at the upcoming conference is entitled “No Reparation, Without Preparation!” and aims to provide preparatory assistance for the plaintiffs in a proposed lawsuit against t..

Good Philosophical Comic Strips (Friday Fun)

Let’s get a list of good philosophical comic strips going. Post one you like. If it is online, great; list a brief description along with the web address, like so:

Dinosaur Comics on philosophical progress – http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=787.

If you just have a hard copy, take a photo of it and post it somewhere online. Or, if you can’t do that, send the p..

Are Sperm Donors Deadbeat Dads?

“I… think that donor conception is irresponsible. I sometimes compare it to ‘deadbeat dads’: men who abandon their wives and children and don’t provide for them. I think a sperm donor is a kind of deadbeat dad who creates children and then doesn’t care for them.”

So says David Velleman in a brief interview in The Irish Times, in which he is also asked about the no..

Free Porn Studies

The inaugural issue of the academic journal Porn Studies is out, and it’s a big one, by which I mean it is a double issue. Not that size matters. The publisher, Taylor & Francis, has made the entire contents free to download, and after a cursory inspection I can report two things my readership probably wants to know: (1) it seems to be entirely SFW, and (2) it seems..

Philosopher May Hold Record For Most Letters To The Editor

Felicia Nimue Ackerman, a philosopher at Brown, has had over 200 letters to the editor published in the New York Times, The New Yorker reports. “She responds to articles on a variety of topics—ageism, fatism, ‘society’s tendency to medicalize virtually everything’—but her underlying interest is in personal freedom.” She was also profiled in an earlier article in the..

Philosophers Among the 2014 ACLS Fellows

The 2014 Fellows of the American Council of Learned Societies have been announced, and the winners include five people working in philosophy: Michael Brownstein (New Jersey Institute of Technology), Alyssa DeBlasio (Dickinson College), Richard Moran (Harvard), William Newman (Indiana), and Anat Schechtman (Chicago). The fellowships include 6-12 months of salary repl..

A Philosophical Look at Zoos

Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University) has a post at OUPblog in which she makes use of the recent giraffe and lion killings at the Copenhagen Zoo as a launching point for some brief reflections on the ethics of zoos.

Mark LeBar (Ohio University) to Florida State

Mark LeBar, currently professor of philosophy at Ohio University, has accepted a senior appointment at Florida State University, beginning January 2015. Professor LeBar works in moral, social, and political philosophy, as well as ancient philosophy.

Raiders of the Lost Death Mask

For the past few years philosopher Sean Kelly (Harvard) has been on a quest to locate the missing “death mask” of Blaise Pascal. You didn’t even know it existed, let alone that it was missing, did you? The news story does not say that Kelly will be making use of the death mask in a bizarre cult ceremony in a secret temple located beneath Emerson Hall. But it doesn’t..

Comedians on Philosophers

Modern Day Philosophers is a series of podcasts of comedians talking about philosophers. It is hosted by comedian Danny Lobell, and has featured a variety of conversations with comedians discussing and learning about a variety of philosophers, including Lewis Black on William James, Janeane Garofalo on Tom Regan, Bill Burr on Adam Smith, Fred Stoller on Heraclitus, ..

Pretty Penny Paid for Plato

Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford has sold its most expensive book ever: a two volume edition of the complete works of Plato, in the original ancient Greek, published in 1513. The price? £75,000. The mystery is: who bought it? The only clue the article gives is that the purchase was made by “an overseas institution.”

“Significant” Women Philosophers

Charles Murray (American Enterprise Institute), speaking at the University of Texas yesterday, reiterates that “he had found no ‘evidence’ to prove that any woman had been a ‘significant original thinker in any of the world’s great philosophical traditions.'” Story here. Gifs of people facepalming themselves here. I wonder what he thinks we would learn from such a c..

You’ve Got To Know When To Tollens…

Professional poker player Sam Holden will be walking away from the table to pursue a degree in philosophy at the University of Kent. Story here.

At his blog, Holden writes:

Over the past few years, before properly considering life after poker, I’ve tried to embrace my inner geek. I find myself listening to debates, podcasts, lectures and speeches whilst playing o..

Impoverished Graduate Students

“The poverty of graduate school is often joked about. How many professors reminisce fondly about just scraping by in grad school? How many people joke about the number of people they fit in their hotel room at the conference or how many times they had to eat ramen?” For some students from poorer families, though, the poverty of graduate school is no laughing matter…

Philosophy in 1000 Words or Less

Andrew Chapman, a philosophy graduate student at University of Colorado, has started a website called 1000-Word Philosophy, a collection of introductory philosophy essays, each 1000 words or less. From the site’s about page:

Professional philosophy can seem abstract, esoteric, and hyper-specialized. But we all ask and try to answer philosophical questions myriad time..

4 Out of 5 Top “Global Thought Leaders” Are Philosophers

The Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI) recently released its 2013 list of “Global Thought Leaders” and 4 out of the top 5 are philosophers, as Peter Singer reports. How is the ranking done? “In our analysis, the importance and influence of a thinker and/or idea is measured not only by how well they come across in a particular segment or on a specific platform such ..

Nagel on Wallace on Regret

Thomas Nagel, who wrote, among other things, The View from Nowhere, reviews R. Jay Wallace‘s The View from Here in the London Review of Books. The book is about the “complex interaction and competition between the attitudes of affirmation and regret that are almost inevitable as we look back on our lives and celebrate or deplore the conditions and choices that have ..