Heap of Links


1. Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) is interviewed by Russ Roberts at EconTalk.
2. Chris LeBron (Yale) is interviewed at 3am Magazine on philosophy of race and “the struggle of humanity vs. humankind.”
3. Was Sartre indifferent to the slaughter of Jews? [Update: apparently this article was moved behind a paywall, so just below is a late addition to the heap:] 3a. Composer Scott Johnson’s latest work, “Mind Out of Matter,” features the words and voice of Daniel Dennett (Tufts). The chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound will perform the piece as part of the Peak Performances Series this coming weekend at Montclair State University.
4. A philosopy major and bioethics MA from NYU is the “mostly vegetarian” owner of Happy Valley Meat Company.
5. Gabriele Contessa has restarted Yet Another Philosopher’s Blog and has a post on analytic philosophy by people for whom English is a second language.
6. An interview with Nancy Sherman (Georgetown) about doing philosophy with the military.
7. A conversation between two AI chatbots on love, beauty, identity… they’ve got a ways to go.
8. Philosophy’s Western bias and what can be done about it: here and here.
9. Jacques Derrida interviews Ornette Coleman (from 1997).
10. Cynicism 101: “as much an anti-philosophy as it is a philosophy.”
11. Armand Leroi, the biologist and author of The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science, is interviewed on NPR’s On Point.
12. A theory about why academic writing is so awful.
13. Stoic parenting. (A “cover” of this.)

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David Wallace
David Wallace
9 years ago

The last paragraph of Pinker’s piece on academic writing more or less captures my own impression of the main problem:

“Few graduate programs teach writing. Few academic journals stipulate clarity among their criteria for acceptance, and few reviewers and editors enforce it. While no academic would confess to shoddy methodology or slapdash reading, many are blasé about their incompetence at writing.”

Put another way, it is extremely difficult to get good feedback on your writing. You *might* get a bit of it in grad school or as an undergraduate (I give as much style/structure feedback as I do content feedback, typically), but it’s very dependent on the person. And after graduation, feedback is almost non-existent – even books, these days, normally don’t get properly edited for style or structure.