Daily Nous

Who Is On The New APA Graduate Student Council?

The American Philosophical Association (APA) announced plans last fall to launch a graduate student council that would be responsible for “reporting to the board of officers on issues of interest, concern, and relevance to philosophy graduate students.” The council has 12 seats. Four positions will be filled by graduate students elected by a vote of the student asso..

The CIA’s Reports on Philosophers

Via the interesting and often rather amusing Twitter feed of Nolen Gertz, a philosopher at the University of Twente, we learn of what is surely just some of the work that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has done on philosophers. (more…)

A Tool To Track Trump’s Tampering With Public Information

With the inauguration of the reckless, narcissistic, thin-skinned, lying, authoritarian Donald Trump around the corner, reasonable people everywhere are asking “what should we do?” Here’s what law professor and political theorist Paul Gowder (Iowa) did: he created a tool for anyone to use that monitors public data and sends alerts and documentation of its change. He..

Chaospet (Daily Nous Philosophy Comics)

Chaospet
by Ryan Lake

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Political Philosophy and the “Aggressive Use of the Law to Impose Controversial Rights”

Gerald Gaus (Arizona) reminds us of the law’s limited power for social change in a new essay at The Critique. There is only so much that the legal declaration of a right can do,and when controversial rights are imposed on a society, we should not be surprised by backlash. This is supposed to be part of what explains the electoral success of Donald Trump.

Legal th..

Philosophy as “The Most Minimalistic Art” and the Challenges of Interdisciplinary Work

I was attracted to philosophy because it is the most minimalistic art I can think of. To express ideas, you use only the most minimal, the most reduced resources: no body (as in theatre), no figures (as in pictorial art), no voice or sound (as in music), no story (as in literature)—just thoughts. They are ordered, ideally crystal-clear and sharp, but they are just..

Launching a PPE Program

A philosopher writes in seeking advice on starting a new program at his college:

I teach at a Catholic small liberal arts college. My department teaches philosophy in the core and offers a minor. I’m thinking of pushing for an integrated major common to many colleges and universities called PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics). I need to gather evidence, tes..

Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update

The weekly update took a couple of weeks off during winter break, when there aren’t many updates to update you about, but now it’s back. Here’s 2017’s first weekly report of what’s new at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (NDPR), and Wi-Phi. (more…)

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Hopes To Study Philosophy at Oxford

Malala Yousafzai, a 19-year old human rights activist advocating for women in Pakistan and co-winner of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, who survived being shot in the face by the Taliban for her work, is “anxiously waiting” to hear whether she has been admitted to the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) program at Oxford University. (more…)

Penn State Philosophy Wins $800,000 Grant For Diversity Initiatives

The Department of Philosophy at Penn State will receive an $800,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue and expand upon its previous work to promote diversity in philosophy. (more…)

A Whole Course About Combating Bullshit

The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. So-called higher education often rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture has elevated bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit, then take advantage of our lowered g..

Tenure Threatened in Iowa and Missouri

State legislators in Iowa and Missouri have introduced legislation to eliminate tenure for public colleges and universities in their states. While the Missouri bill would have schools cease tenure-track hiring in 2018, the Iowa bill goes further, proposing to take tenure away from those who already have it, according to reports from Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicl..

Self-Doubt and “Publish or Perish”

It took a while for Jonathan Dancy (University of Texas, University of Reading) to come around to the idea that he had any philosophical talent, he says, in an interview with Clifford Sosis (Coastal Carolina) at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher? As a result, he did not publish much in the early part of his career.

He received his BPhil from Oxford in 1971, for w..

Reconsidering Implicit Bias

At the time of this post, bibliographic philosophy database PhilPapers has 1,975,719 entries. Of these, only 74 works seem to be about “implicit bias”—subconscious bias concerning, for example, race, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexuality. One might think, then, that the idea of implicit bias hasn’t been of much importance in philosophy. Yet, while there is n..

John Deely (1942-2017)

John Deely, Professor in Residence in philosophy at St. Vincent College, died this past Saturday. Professor Deely worked in semiotics. Prior to his appointment at St. Vincent College, he taught at the University of St. Thomas (Houston, Texas) and Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. (more…)

From Prison in Illinois to Publication in The New Yorker with Help from a Philosophy Professor

Fifteen inmates at Statesville Correctional Center in Illinois took a course on mass incarceration with Northwestern University philosophy professor Jennifer Lackey. It was an interdisciplinary course with a range of guest lecturers, including Alex Kotlowitz, a writer and a senior lecturer in journalism at Northwestern. He gave them an assignment to write about thei..

A Visualization of Influence in the History of Philosophy

“I don’t know a lot about philosophy,” says Grant Louis Oliveira, a data analyst and quantitative social sciences researcher with an undergraduate degree in political science. He continues:

I’d like to change that and more rigorously explore my ideas, but I find the world of philosophy a bit impenetrable, and I don’t think I’m the only one. I know most the big na..

Why Read Old Philosophy? (guest post by Katja Grace)

The following is a guest post * by Katja Grace, a researcher at Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and philosophy PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University. It first appeared at her blog, Meteuphoric. (more…)

Mind Chunks (Daily Nous Philosophy Comics)

Mind Chunks
by Pete Mandik

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Philosophy In An Inclusive Key

Philosophy In An Inclusive Key, or PIKSI, is a philosophy summer program “designed to encourage undergraduates from underrepresented groups to consider future study in the field of philosophy.” (more…)

Millions Of Students Fail To Protest Curriculum (updated)

Millions of college students over the past decade have not protested their curricular requirements or assigned readings, a new study reports. The study, by Daryl B.X. Sepshuns and Yuall Nothis (both of Common Sense University) was published as news was breaking of students making unusual academic demands of their schools. (more…)

The Relationship Between The Philosophy And The Science Of The Mind

A persistent challenge to philosophy is whether it is rendered obsolete by science. Consider this exchange on the philosophy of mind:

Cognitive scientists are working to understand many issues raised by Kant—do you think the scientists are going to get conclusive answers to the question about consciousness and the mind—and other minds—and if they are, doesn..

The Worst Conversations You’ve Had As A Professor

Prodigal Academic, a science professor and blogger, lists the “worst conversations I’ve had as a professor.” They include:

telling a student who was stalking his TA to stop doing so
the first time dealing with a student who is literally crying over a grade
giving personal hygiene advice
being confronted with a screamer
telling a graduate student the..

Philosopher Wins 2 Million Euros to Study “Seeing Things You Don’t See”

Bence Nanay, professor of philosophy at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse College at Cambridge University, has won a 2 million euro grant for his project, “Seeing Things You Don’t See.” (more…)