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New Political Philosophy Prize

David Sobel (Syracuse) announces the creation of the Marc Sanders Prize in Political Philosophy:

The Marc Sanders Prize in Political Philosophy is a biennial essay competition open to scholars who, at the time of submission deadline, are within fifteen (15) years of receiving a Ph.D. or are students currently enrolled in a graduate program. Independent scholars may..

Oregon Grad Students Warned of Deportation (see updates)

The University of Oregon administration has told international graduate students that they will be deported if they join the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation strike, according to UO assistant professor of philosophy Mark Alfano. Additionally, the administration is attempting to undermine the strike by decreeing that undergraduates taking courses that use teachin..

Response to McAdams’s Attack on Abbate

The following is a guest post * from a philosopher who has been in communication with Marquette University philosophy graduate student Cheryl Abbate about the events that occurred in her class and that have been at the center of much controversy recently. The post aims to correct several mistaken and misleading elements in associate professor of political science Joh..

Colorado Won’t Allow Outside Observer at Barnett’s Hearing (updated)

A faculty group is concerned that David Barnett, the tenured University of Colorado philosophy professor fighting for his job will not be allowed to have an outside observer at his dismissal hearing next week.

Barnett and the Colorado conference of the American Association of University Professors sought to have one of the group’s members watch a closed-door facul..

Philosophers Protest the Murder of 43 Students

Over a month has passed since the forced disappearance of the normalistas (student teachers) of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa, and still 43 remain missing.

On September 26, members of the Iguala municipal police and the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel ambushed the caravan of students as they traveled by bus within their home state of Gu..

Possible Graduate Strike at Univ. of Oregon (Updated)

Graduate student teaching fellows at the University of Oregon have published a letter expressing their intent to strike, starting on December 2nd, over the university administration’s unwillingness to offer the graduate teaching fellows (GTFs) two weeks of paid leave for illness or childbirth. The conflict between the negotiating parties has been exacerbated by the ..

Patrick Suppes (1922-2014) (several updates)

Patrick Suppes, emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford University, has died. Suppes was known for his work in several areas, most notably philosophy of science. Stanford University has posted a memorial notice here. His complete bibliography and the text of an intellectual autobiography he wrote in 1978 can be found here, and here is another site that collects..

Philosophy Grad Student Target of Political Smear Campaign (several updates)

A philosophy graduate student and instructor at Marquette University is the target of a political attack initiated by one of her students, facilitated by a Marquette political science professor, and promulgated by certain advocacy organizations.

Cheryl Abbate, a Marquette PhD student working on a dissertation in ethics, has provided me with information about the ..

Teaching on Same-Sex Marriage

Most colleges offer lower-level philosophy courses on contemporary moral problems, one of the aims of which is to teach students how to think philosophically about assorted social and political issues. There are more of these kinds of issues than could be covered adequately in a semester, so the instructor must select which to include, and there may be some difficul..

Update on Stubblefield Case

Anna Stubblefield, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers-Newark who had been accused of sexually assaulting a mentally disabled student in her office (previously), will be in court in December and January for a pair of evidence hearings, according to an article at NJ.com.

From the article:

Prosecutors allege Stubblefield, 44, of West Orange, repeatedly sexually..

Group Work in Philosophy Class

Here are problems with group-work that I have observed or heard about multiple times from students:

the members of the group (unless the group is the whole class) do not include an expert on either the topic for discussion or the assigned reading on it, so mistakes can go uncorrected and misunderstanding can be increased (if plausibly, confidently, or charisma..

Mathematical Logic & Foundations Chart (w/ further updates)

The above photo is a detail from a large, hand drawn chart entitled “Mathematical Logic and Foundations, 1847-1947.” It was made in 1976 by Joel Friedman (I believe this Joel Friedman, emeritus at UC Davis). A print of it has been hanging up in the University of South Carolina Department of Philosophy for as long as anyone here can remember. I do not know whether it..

Pre-PhD Program Coursework

A student writes in with a question:

I’m a student in my first semester at a terminal masters program, and as an undergraduate I mostly took courses outside of value theory. Would it help my application to a PhD program if I branched out and took a wide range of classes or should I double down and stick with the fields I enjoy?

More generally, to what extent d..

Assessment and Philosophy Courses

Most of the discussions regarding “assessment” are fine examples of exactly what we do not want to see college producing: vague and uniform truisms, hooked up with measures so meaningless as to guarantee that nothing will ever change. It is the deadened life of the bureaucratic mind. But imagine, as an alternative, academics charting the careers of students who have..

Andrei Marmor (USC) to Cornell (official)

It’s now official: Andrei Marmor, currently Professor of Philosophy and Maurice Jones Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Southern California, will be moving to Cornell, taking up joint appointments in the university’s Sage School of Philosophy and Law School over the summer of 2015. Marmor works in legal and moral philosophy. His wife, Elizabeth Garrett, ..

Open Access and Journal-less Publishing

Recently I was asked by the editors of a journal whose mission and scholarship I support and respect to review a book by a scholar I very much admire. In the past, I would have accepted the invitation without a second thought and proceeded to read the book and develop a review. Over the past few years, however, as my work has focused on questions of public scholarsh..

Philosophers and Cognitive Bias

Should the order in which a person considers thought experiments affect one’s responses to them? Rationally, it seems no. Yet the “order effect” is well-confirmed. What about philosophers? We are supposed to have a kind of expertise in handling thought experiments and are known (?) for thinking clearly and rationally; certainly the content of our judgments are not s..

On ‘Begs the Question’: A Poll

With alarming frequency I am hearing friends declare that we’ve lost “begs the question.” What used to be a distinctive phrase for the fallacy of assuming the truth of the very claim you are setting out to prove (aka petitio principii), “begs the question” is now widely used to mean “raises the question.” A Language Log post from over 4 years ago presented some data..

Cornel West Arrested in Ferguson

Cornel West (Princeton) was arrested in Ferguson, MO today while taking part in the “Ferguson October” rally, which has been attended by over 1,000 protesters. West said he attended the rally with the intent to get arrested. Details here and here.

(photo: Jim Young / Reuters, via The New York Times)

The Moral Psychology of Racist Brutality

Kate Manne (Cornell) writes in The Stone in The New York Times that the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, and the events that have occurred in its wake, suggest that a traditional understanding of racism is mistaken:

One possibility is that people are treated brutally because those who mistreat them fail to grasp their common humanity — or, similarly,..

Update from Leiter

In a post at his blog, Brian Leiter responds to the September Statement calling for him to relinquish control of the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR) by saying that “there may be a lot more to the story.” He also says that he and the Board of the PGR have made “considerable progress the last few days” toward “a plan for the future in which I step down as editor af..

Cosmopolitanism and Diversity in Philosophy

“The reason why most Anglo-American philosophers don’t worry about learning non-Western philosophy is that they assume cosmopolitanism is an ideal developed by Western philosophy. This assumption can create an amazing amount of institutional inertia. Western philosophers assume that the tradition of Plato and Spinoza and Russell just is the cosmopolitan tradition, a..

Leiter Responds: Immediate Departure “Unacceptable” (updated)

Brian Leiter has declared that the two of three options presented by the majority of the Philosophical Gourmet Report’s board members which included requests that he step down immediately are “unacceptable.” He explains that he has already put in a significant amount of work towards the production of the 2014 edition of the PGR so he as “at least co-edited” it. He a..

New Journal In Need of Submissions

I’ve received word of a new generalist philosophy journal that is in need of submissions: Proceedings of the Society of Drinking a Lot of Cough Syrup. You can see what kind of stuff they’re interested in from the abstracts on this page. From one of them: “Physics doesn’t care about location in constitution space. Don’t worry about it; physics doesn’t care about you ..

Change the Face of Philosophy — Right Now

Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute (PIKSI) is a weeklong summer school that brings undergraduates from underrepresented groups into graduate school for philosophy. It has been operating for nine years, in part with funding from the American Philosophical Association. That funding is no longer assured, and so PIKSI needs your help. Its organizers are run..

Nottingham Pulls Out of PGR (see 2nd Update from Nottingham)

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham has issued a statement asking to not be included in the Philosophical Gourmet Report while Brian Leiter has a leading or advisory role in it. Here is the statement:

We are concerned, as a department, about the recent behaviour of Professor Brian Leiter, editor of the Philosophical Gourmet Report, towa..

New Huge History of Philosophy Chart

Former philosophy student Merrill Cook has created an enormous and well-designed chart of the history of philosophy. The above is just an excerpt. For the whole thing, go here.