October 2015

Monthly Archives:

Mistaking Criticism for Discrimination (Ought Experiment)

Welcome back to Ought Experiment! This week’s question is a sensitive one, indeed. A professor writes that s/he’s struggling to reach a grad student who apparently interprets any criticism of her work as evidence of gender discrimination:

Dear Louie,

I’m hoping you can help me with a tricky teaching situation. There’s a student in my department who has, in the..

Live From 2003: BEARS Is Back Online

BEARS? Sounds familiar. Then I clicked and saw this —

—and it all came back to me.

Yes, kids, this is what the internet used to look like (and this was a pretty smart-looking site for the time).

Begun in 1995 and last active in 2003, the Brown Electronic Article Review Service was one of the first online journals in philosophy. Maybe the first? The ..

Projects Funded by New Directions in the Study of Mind

New Directions in the Study of Mind, a project headed by Tim Crane (Cambridge) and funded primarily with a £1.25 million grant from the Templeton Foundation, has announced the initiatives it will be supporting:

“Attention, Not Self: The Nature of the Conscious Mind” — Jonardon Ganeri (NYU)
“Primitive Colours and Non-reductive Minds” — Derek Brown (Brandon)
“..

Sanders Graduate Student Prizes Awarded

The American Philosophical Association (APA) has announced the winners of the 2015 Sanders Graduate Student Prize, sponsored by the Marc Sanders Foundation. They are:

Joshua Brandt (University of Toronto), “Partiality’s Negative Analogue”
Kevin Dorst (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), “A Contextualist Solution to Miner Disagreements”
Matthew Shields (G..

Chaospet (Daily Nous Philosophy Comics)

Chaospet
by Ryan Lake

(more…)

To φ Or Not To φ (Daily Nous Philosophy Comics)

To φ Or Not To φ
by Tanya Kostochka
(more…)

18 “Hope & Optimism” Projects Receive $2m Funding

Hope and Optimism: Conceptual and Empirical Investigations, an interdisciplinary initiative headed by Andrew Chignell (Cornell) and Samuel Newlands (Notre Dame) which last year received about $4.5 million from the John Templeton Foundation, has just announced $2 million in funding for 18 projects. Philosophers receiving funding in this round include:

Matthew Ben..

Earnings and Occupations of Humanities Undergrads

Data about the earnings, occupations, and unemployment of humanities undergraduates (as of 2013) is featured in a new report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Robert Townsend, director of the organization’s Washington office, writes:

As usual, the main narrative is about the humanities as a whole—where we can at least demonstrate that overall earn..

Problems with Academia.edu?

A professor who prefers to remain anonymous writes in:

Academia.com has recently, and without previous announcement, changed its appearance. This is, in itself, not remarkable, but the changes are vast and drastic and have an enormous effect on several of the features of the past; features which users used to have control over. For instance, they completely del..

Do the Tenured Speak Up Enough?

Tenure is, in part, designed to protect one from retaliation. It’s the tenured that can make the culture of silence (and shame) within a profession disappear…. Obviously they need help from their employers (universities and grant agencies), but it does make a difference.

What is so distressing about professional philosophy, is that too much of the hard work i..

Examples of Public Philosophy

Barry Maguire (UNC) is attempting to get a new prize for public philosophy up and running. By “public philosophy” he means “anything with significant philosophical content or method written by someone with significant philosophical trainining primarily for an audience of non-philosophers.”

He is collecting examples of public philosophy but is having trouble findi..

Grad Student Sues U. Miami, Colin McGinn, and Edward Erwin

The University of Miami graduate student who previously complained of sexual harassment by Colin McGinn has now filed a federal lawsuit against the university, McGinn, and McGinn’s former colleague, Edward Erwin. The Huffington Post reports:

She’s claiming the school violated its Title IX responsibilities by failing to fully investigate her sexual harassment clai..

Stubblefield Convicted of First-Degree Aggravated Sexual Assault

Anna Stubblefield, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers-Newark, was found guilty of two counts of felony first-degree aggravated sexual assault for raping a mentally disabled man she was introduced to in order to help him learn to communicate (previously). NJ.com reports:

The jury… convicted the 45-year-old philosophy professor of sexually assaulting a 34-year-..

A College without Philosophy? A Philosophy Department without Philosophers? (updated)

After program cut upon program cut, at what point does a liberal arts institution cease to be one?

That’s the question in an article at Inside Higher Ed that centers around faculty cuts at Wartburg College in Iowa, a Christian college.

This month, at least three tenure-track faculty members at Wartburg received notices that the college was not recommending the..

Aldo Antonelli (1962 – 2015) (several updates)

G. Aldo Antonelli, professor of philosophy at the University of California, Davis, died unexpectedly earlier this week. Professor Antonelli was known largely for his work in logic. Prior to taking up his position at UC Davis, he also taught for many years at UC Irvine, and held appointments at Pittsburgh, Yale, Stanford, Michigan State, and elsewhere. You can learn ..

Intellectually Safe Space

What is an “intellectually safe space”? In “What Does Intellectual Safety Really Mean?” Katelyn Hallman (North Florida) notes:

An intellectually safe environment, as typically construed, is something like an environment “in which a person feels comfortable sharing ideas and opinions without fear of harsh judgment or repercussions.” This conception of intellectual..

How to Encourage Service to the Profession?

A professor writes in:

We hear a lot of complaints about how the APA and about how journals are run from folks who don’t volunteer for the APA or serve (and have never served) in leadership positions at journals (e.g. as those responsible for finding referees and ensuring to the best of their limited abilities that referees are doing their jobs). Suggestions for..

Bernecker Selected as Humboldt Professor at Cologne (updated)

Sven Bernecker, professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, is one of the recipients of the latest round of Humboldt Professorships. The award, which includes 3.5 million euros, will bring him to the University of Cologne. Professor Bernecker works in epistemology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, Kant, and German Idealism. According to the Alex..

SEP, IEP, NDPR, Wi-Phi Weekly Update

Below are last week’s additions and updates to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (NDPR), and Wi-Phi Wireless Philosophy, appearing here via special arrangement with Philosophical Percolations. They were first posted in PhilPercs’ “Saturday Linkorama” along with lots of other..

Does Philosophy Improve Critical Thinking?

Following on the heels of last week’s discussion of non-philosophers teaching critical thinking, the Chronicle of Higher Education drew attention to a meta-analysis of studies about whether colleges succeed in teaching critical thinking at all. As it turns out, they do:

Students’ critical-thinking skills do improve in college. The difference is comparable to a st..

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon

You may have heard of, and if so probably by now forgotten about, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” A meme before the age of memes, it is older than some Daily Nous readers. Heck, Wikipedia describes it as a “parlour game.” No one has “parlours” anymore. Barely anyone has a “parlor,” even.

And yet, “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon” kind of works, doesn’t it?

Regardle..

APA Book Prize Results Announced

The winner of the 2015 American Philosophical Association’s Book Prize is Manuel Vargas (University of San Francisco) for his Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Oxford University Press).

Honorable mentions went to Adrienne Martin (Claremont McKenna) for her How We Hope: A Moral Psychology (Princeton University Press) and Michael Titelbaum f..

Meet the Daily Nous Cartoonists!

I am very excited to announce that Daily Nous will soon have its own comic strips!

The call for cartoonists generated so many good submissions that I couldn’t pick just one of them—instead, there will be four. Each of the four strips will appear one at a time, on Tuesdays or Thursdays, every other week. The artists (and their strips) are Rachel Katler (Ad Hoc),..

Applying for Jobs at a SLAC?

A revised version of the Guide for Applying to Jobs at Selective Liberal Arts Colleges has been published at Inside Higher Ed. Check it out. The original was created by a group of philosophers and first published here at Daily Nous over the summer.

Which Philosophy Ideas Make for Good Costumes?

Which philosophical ideas (or examples) would make for a good Halloween costume?

Yes, Brain in Vat. We all think we’ve thought of that one already. What else?

Eternal Recurrence? You went as that last year! And the year before.

I suppose you could go as anything. Just make a sign that says “p & ¬ p” and walk behind it.

How would you go about dressing up ..

Earlier in the week I put up a website that allows one to click through the tree-like structure of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the Heap of Links (in the right sidebar). I believe the visualization is by Pierre Bellon, a web engineer who has “old-school philosophy” as a hobby.

In response, David Stern (Iowa), sent in this helpful message:

T..

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