April 2015
Solutions to the Jobs Problem Revisited
Last year, Daily Nous reported that Eleanor Dickey, professor of classics at University of Reading, had been collecting various possible responses to problems associated with the high ratio of PhD holders to academic jobs. The full report is here, and the helpful summary, which groups the more popular responses by type, is here.
Professor Dickey (et al) report th..
Website Responsibility
“If Your Website’s Full of Assholes, It’s Your Fault” is a 2011 post from well-known blogger Anil Dash in which he writes about a specific kind of challenge faced by bloggers and online media providers. They are often forced to defend their enterprises “because so many of the most visible, prominent, and popular places on the web are full of unkindness and hateful b..
A Philosophy Department’s Impressive Fight For Survival
Robert Stufflebeam, chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of New Orleans, shares some of the challenges his department faces, and some of the measures they have implemented in order to survive in hostile circumstances. He writes:
I’m the chair of the only remaining Department of Philosophy at a public university in the state of Louisiana. (LSU has ..
Honoraria in Philosophy
A philosopher writes in with a query about paying philosophers for talks and the like…
I’d like to learn more about honorarium practices for philosophy talks. How common is it to offer an honorarium? Under what circumstances (e.g. departmental colloquium, conference, public lecture, etc.)? What is a typical amount? It would be especially helpful if respondents ..
A Site To Help With Non-Academic Employment
Hiring the Humanities is a new website that aims to assist those currently working in the humanities find employment outside academia. It was started by James Gibson, a former philosophy PhD student, who now works as a programmer. The site has just launched, and is looking for content from people who have transitioned from academia to a non-academic careers. It aims..
A Philosophy Scholarship Program
Furman University has developed an exciting scholarship program for students interested in studying philosophy. J. Aaron Simmons, associate professor of philosophy there, kindly took some time to write up a description of it, posted below. Do any other schools have something like this?
Preemptively Changing the Narrative through a Philosophy Scholarship Progr..
Overheard at the Pacific
You know what to do.
Lack of Philosophical Progress Owed to Procrastination, Study Hopes to Find
Historians of philosophy and experimental philosophers have teamed up to determine why there has been so little progress in philosophy. “Socrates asked ‘what is the nature of the good life?’ a couple of thousand years ago,” says Jeffrey McDonough (Harvard), “and now, in 2015, my department is stuffed full of people still—supposedly—working on this question and o..