Piccinini from Missouri-St. Louis to University of Missouri
Gualtiero Piccinini, currently professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, has accepted an offer from the University of Missouri (Columbia), where he will be professor of philosophy. (more…)
New Editors for JESP Announced
The current executive editor of the Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy (JESP) is stepping down, and the journal will be getting a new pair of editors and new institutional home. (more…)
The Questions a Referee Should Ask of the Paper They’re Reviewing
Concerned that referees for philosophy journals too often recommend a paper be rejected merely because they can think up objections to it, Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami) suggests a set of questions they should focus on instead. (more…)
Philosophy’s Importance in “Times Like These”
The Los Angeles Review of Books has just concluded publishing a series of articles on the importance of philosophy in “times like these”. (more…)
Teachers: Was the Semester AI-pocalyptic or Was It AI-OK?
A survey conducted at the end of last year indicated that 30% of college students had used ChatGPT for schoolwork. Undoubtedly, the number has gone up since then. Teachers: what have your experiences been like with student use of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs)? (more…)
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Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update
The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources and new reviews of philosophy books… (more…)
Gifts You Would Want: A Crowd-Sourced Gift Guide with a Prize (4 Updates)
Alas, I did not have time to put together a new gift guide this year, but I have an idea: suggest a gift and get a chance to win a gift.
Journal of the History of Philosophy 2023 Book Prize
The Journal of the History of Philosophy (JHP) has announced the winner of its 2023 Book Prize. (more…)
International Journal of Philosophical Studies Essay Prize Winners
The International Journal of Philosophical Studies (IJPS) has announced the winners of its 2023 essay prizes. (more…)
SUNY Fredonia President Recommends Eliminating Philosophy
In a presentation yesterday, Stephen Kolison, president of the State University of New York at Fredonia, proposed the elimination of 13 programs at the school, including philosophy. (more…)
Dyzenhaus Wins SSHRC Impact Awards Gold Medal
David Dyzenhaus, professor of law and philosophy at the University of Toronto, has been awarded a Gold Medal Impact Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). (more…)
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Philosophical Uses for LLMs: Modeling Philosophers
Now that OpenAI has made it possible for members of the (paying) public to customize its large language model (LLM), ChatGPT, with special instructions, extra knowledge, and particular combinations of skills, the prospects of using it to create useful, interesting, and maybe even insightful “model philosophers” have improved. (more…)
Israel, Hamas, and “Blowback” (guest post)
“The proportionality constraint is backward-looking in the following sense: to determine how bad a prospective harm is for a potential innocent victim, we sometimes need to look at what that victim has suffered in the past, and whether we’re responsible for what they’ve suffered” as well as “whether we should have acted differently in the past thereby avoiding the n..
New “Meta-Ranking” of Philosophy Journals
A new article in Synthese presents two new rankings of philosophy journals—a survey ranking and a composite of several existing rankings—and discusses their strengths and weaknesses. (more…)
Mark Rollins (1947-2023)
Mark Rollins, emeritus professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, has died. (more…)
Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update
The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources and new reviews of philosophy books… (more…)
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Recent additions to the Heap… (more…)
Externalist Explanations of Philosophy
Why did a particular philosophical view emerge or flourish at a particular time? Why did another fall into disfavor? Why are philosophers today thinking and writing about the particular questions, problems, ideas, and figures they are? (more…)
Philosophers Against Malaria: Fundraising Competition Across Departments
What good can philosophers do? Let’s see. (more…)
The Appropriateness of Appropriateness
A journal’s editorial team conditioned the acceptance of an article on the removal of two footnotes they said were “distracting,” its author reports. Distracting how? The author thinks the editors judged the footnotes to be salacious, and thus inappropriate for the journal, though it’s not clear that was their reasoning. (more…)
Lang on Academic Freedom
Gerald Lang (Leeds) has a thoughtful discussion of academic freedom, prompted by the UK government’s appointment of a “free speech tsar” (who happens to be Cambridge philosopher Arif Ahmed), over at the PEA Soup Blog. (more…)
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Proportionality, Psychic Harm, and the Day After (guest post)
“Once we count psychic harm, it looks like Israel’s war might be proportional. But it could be proportional only if the Israelis aren’t imposing on basically all Gazans a greater psychic burden than the psychic burden that Israelis hope to avoid,” which could be the case “if Israel takes it upon itself, as soon as possible, to reassure the Gazans that Gaza will not ..
Philosophy Professor vs. University on Accommodations
A philosophy professor at Queen’s University in Canada has been booted from the logic course she was teaching owing to a dispute between her and the university’s Exams Office over accommodating students who require the use of a computer for taking exams. (more…)
Offering Free and Low-Cost Philosophy Programs to the Public
Wisdom’s Edge Foundation is a non-profit organization that “brings philosophy to the edges of society.” (more…)
The Rise of English as the Global Lingua Franca of Academic Philosophy (guest post)
“We think it is more or less inevitable at this point that English will be the global lingua franca of academic philosophy for the foreseeable future. We also think it is for the most part a good thing. But it has also produced some problems…” (more…)