March 2016
Ad Hoc (Daily Nous Philosophy Comics)
Ad Hoc
by Rachel Katler
The Career Move That Dare Not Speak Its Name (Guest Post by Josh Parsons)
The following is a guest post* from Josh Parsons, currently an associate professor in the philosophy faculty at Oxford University and tutorial fellow in philosophy at Corpus Christi College.
The Career Move That Dare Not Speak Its Name
by Josh Parsons
My sister works in advertising, an industry where high-pressure workplaces are at least as common as they are..
$5.75 Million for Philosopher-Led Interdisciplinary Project on Public Discourse
Michael Lynch, professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, has been awarded a $5.75 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation for The Public Discourse Project: Balancing Humility and Conviction in Public Life, an interdisciplinary research and engagement project. Historian Brendan Kane is the co-principal investigator on the grant. It is the sin..
Demographic Data on U.S. Philosophy Faculty
Trends show a slow decrease in the extent to which U.S. full-time philosophy faculty at four-year institutions is male and white, according to data obtained from the National Center for Education Statistics by Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) and posted at The Splintered Mind:
Gender data:
1988: philosophy*: 91% male (vs. 75% for all fields).
1993: philosophy..
Philosophers On the 2016 U.S. Presidential Race
How is it that, at the same time, possibly the most principled and possibly the least principled politicians the U.S. has seen in recent times are both serious contenders for the presidency? How are voters weighing the progressiveness of supporting a woman candidate for president versus the regressiveness of creating another political dynasty? What does the failure,..
Hilary Putnam (1926-2016) (updated)
Hilary Putnam, Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, died earlier today. Professor Putnam was a tremendously influential philosopher, working across a broad range of fields, including philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, philosophy of math, and moral philosophy. (A list of his works is available here.) He received h..
Philosophy Professor Displays Sign Opposing Concealed Weapons on Campus, Gets Arrested
Amy Donahue, assistant professor of philosophy at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, was arrested at the Georgia Capitol this past Friday as she tried to display a sign opposing legislation that would permit concealed weapons on college campuses. According to the Savannah Morning News:
State Troopers handcuffed and arrested Kennesaw State University philosophy..
AI, Go, and Philosophical Argument
After more than four hours of tight play and a rapid-fire endgame, Google’s artificially intelligent Go-playing computer system has won a second contest against grandmaster Lee Sedol, taking a two-games-to-none lead in their historic best-of-five match in downtown Seoul. The surprisingly skillful Google machine, known as AlphaGo, now needs only one more win to claim..
Bernstein and Nolan to Notre Dame
Sara J. Bernstein, currently assistant professor of philosophy at Duke University, will be tenured associate professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, starting in Fall of 2016. Professor Bernstein works in metaphysics, especially the metaphysics of causation.
Daniel Nolan, currently professor of philosophy at Australian National University, will be..
Student Faces Tribunal for Calling Philosophy Professor “Racist”
Busi Mkhumbuzi, an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town (UCT), reports that she has been “summoned by the Student Tribunal” (part of the university’s apparatus for addressing offenses committed by students) for spreading “racist and defamatory remarks” about UCT philosophy professor David Benatar. Mkhumbuzi says she has called Benatar “racist, ableist and se..
Teaching and the Philosophical Canon
“Perhaps all professional philosophers have wrestled with the problem of how to cover all the important things in the limited time of a single course.” But what are the important things? And who are the important figures?
In a post at the Blog of the APA, Peter Adamson (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität), who produces the podcast History of Philosophy without any Ga..
Reasons to Reject an Advisee (Ought Experiment)
Welcome back to Ought Experiment! This week, a professor wonders when it’s permissible to reject a grad student’s request to serve on their committee, and how to avoid crushing a student if one does end up having to say no:
Dear Louie,
I hope you don’t think me a monster for this, but I have reason to suspect that a graduate student I’d strongly prefer not to ..
Fishing for First-Rate Philosophy Footnotes
Sought: examples of footnotes or endnotes in philosophical works that should not be missed. Of course, every footnote in everything you’ve written falls into that category, I know, but what about the works of others? Let’s be as broad-minded as possible as to what makes a note noteworthy here. It could be that the note:
- strangely makes a crucial point that quite..
New Wittgenstein (updated)
Previously unpublished notes taken by Yorick Smithies at lectures by Ludwig Wittgenstein between 1938 and 1941 at Cambridge University will be published later this year, according to a press release from the Austrian Science Fund FWF.
The notes have been edited and organized by Volker Munz (University of Klagenfurt, Carinthia) and his assistant, Bernhard Ritter. ..
Chaospet (Daily Nous Philosophy Comics)
Chaospet
by Ryan Lake
Small Changes to Improve Teaching
In a series of columns at the Chronicle of Higher Education, James M. Lang, a professor of English at Assumption College, has been suggesting small changes to teaching that, he argues, could make a big difference in student learning. Among the suggestions:
- Arrive early to have a little small talk with individual students (different ones each tim..
Daily Nous Turns 2
Daily Nous turns 2 today!
Time flies. I was looking through the old scrapbook the other day and it is amazing how much DN has changed since those first few months…
Daily Nous continues to grow. Over the past year it was visited nearly three and a half million times, and there are bunch of new features at the site, as I detailed in the end-of-2015 post.
..
Why Don’t We Study African Philosophy?
Over 100 billion people, it is estimated, have lived on earth. About one-seventh of the world’s population lives in Africa now. So, by way of a simplistic and historically irresponsible calculation, we could very roughly (and probably under-) estimate that 15 billion people have lived in Africa. 15 billion. Compare that with this estimate of the number of African ph..
Philosophy in the University: A Defense
“Far from being years of ‘enduring failure,’ the last 150 years have been philosophy’s best.”
So argues Scott Soames (University of Southern California) in an essay on the influence of academic philosophy in The New York Times column, The Stone. Framed as a response to “When Philosophy Lost Its Way,” by Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle (University of North Texas), ..
Philosopher to Sue NYC Police for 4th Amendment Violation
Damion Scott, a PhD student in philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook and an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, claims his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches was violated, as was a city code against racial-profiling, by two New York City police officers, according to an article in The New York Times (via Shelley Tremain at Discr..
Bias, Subjectivity, and Superficiality in Philosophy
The philosophy profession in the United States is overwhelmingly male and white. What explains this? In an essay in The Los Angeles Times, Myisha Cherry (UI Chicago) and Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) offer an explanation:
One of the main causes of homogeneity in philosophy, we believe, is subjectivity and bias in the evaluation of philosophical quality.
They ..
Fricker from Sheffield to CUNY
Miranda Fricker, currently professor of philosophy at University of Sheffield, will be taking up a full-time senior position at CUNY Graduate Center this September. Professor Fricker works in social epistemology, ethics, and feminist philosophy. She will maintain an affiliation at Sheffield, where she is co-investigator on a European funded research project into epi..
Crispin Sartwell Removed from Dickinson Campus (updated with responses from Nehamas and Zagzebski)
Crispin Sartwell, associate professor of philosophy at Dickinson College, reports today that he has been “removed from campus” for posting a video of Miranda Lambert’s song, “Time to Get a Gun.”
Over the past several days, Professor Sartwell had launched accusations at his blog that his work had been plagiarized or at least had gone wrongfully uncited by Alexande..
Central APA Open Thread
The Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association (APA) is taking place in Chicago. Are you there? Consider this an open space for comments, reports, news, feedback, etc., about the meeting.
Philosopher’s Guide to Bookstores
Is the best Manhattan bookstore for Nietzsche lovers East Village Books (slogan: so hardcore a bookstore that our website doesn’t work)? That’s what Stephanie Kotsikonas, a journalism student at CUNY reports in a post at her class blog, Journalistic Blogging, along with information about other bookstores in Manhattan with good philosophy sections. (UPDATE: the post ..
Philosophy Tag
Hey, remember Philosophy Tag? It died down in the middle of last year—it’s okay, things happen—but I think it’s a good way to draw attention to interesting or useful philosophical work, so I am reviving it.
For those who don’t recall, here is how it works. Like any game of tag, there’s an it. When you’re it, you have two weeks to do the following: choose an ..
To φ Or Not To φ (Daily Nous Philosophy Comics)
To φ Or Not To φ
by Tanya Kostochka
Talking Philosophy With Your Kids
Philosopher parents: how, if at all, do you talk philosophy with you own children?
I don’t give my children philosophy lessons, nor do we celebrate Socrates’ birthday. There may be a few more books of logic puzzles laying around the house than average, along with many of the children’s books listed here, but I don’t force philosophy on the kids. If the opportunit..