disciplines
TagPhilosophy’s Progress, If You Don’t Care Whether It’s Called Philosophy
Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen (GMU) asks, “has there been progress in philosophy?” His answer: “there is significant and ongoing progress in philosophy, we just don’t always name it as such.” (more…)
The “Insanely Low Acceptance Rates” of Philosophy Journals
The dirty secret of philosophy is that we have insanely low acceptance rates—often well under 10% —for papers. This low rate is only defensible if you think that publication in philosophy has the kind of inductive risk that any false positive leads to society’s catastrophe. Nobody thinks that. (more…)
What Our Practice of Philosophy Talks Says about Philosophy
“The main thing is to be aware of how many of the students have only a very narrow background, and the pre-talk is a good opportunity for you to bring them up to speed on the existing literature,” .
“I don’t know any of the existing literature for this talk,” said the visitor, without a hint of embarrassment. (more…)
Beliefs About Genetic & Environmental Determinism By Discipline
Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, a new journal, has published the results of a survey of academics, sorted by discipline, regarding their views about genetic and environmental determinism and the explanatory power of science. (more…)
Your Discipline Versus Your University?
An increasing number of academics simply adopt what Albert Hirschmann would call an “exit” strategy—they care more for their discipline or, more to the point, their research network than the university that employs their labour and affirms their status.
So says sociologist Steve Fuller (Warwick) in a brief interview published at Social Epistemology Review and R..
The Purification of Philosophy
institutionalization of philosophy made it into a discipline that could be seriously pursued only in an academic setting. This fact represents one of the enduring failures of contemporary philosophy.
So argue Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle (both of University of North Texas). Philosophy’s institutionalization in the modern research university was a kind of “pu..
The Endarkenment at Home: Benchmarking Academics (guest post by Elijah Millgram)
The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization is a new book by Elijah Millgram (Utah). In the book, Professor Millgram looks at the implications of our becoming, more and more, “a society of specialists” in which “communication across the barriers between the professions and disciplines is our own very pressing problem,” a problem that “threat..
The Philosophy of Philosophical Institutions
Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle (both of the University of North Texas) have published an essay, “Socrates Untenured,” at Inside Higher Ed that makes a case for what they call “field philosophy” — a “context-driven, problem-focused, and interdisciplinary” approach. Their hope is that “a new philosophical practice, where philosophers work in real time with a variet..