Your Suggestions, Please, and a Reminder
Dear Philosophers, I’m writing to you to ask for your assistance.
First, what news, issues, questions, problems, stories, events, etc., would you like to see covered at Daily Nous this coming year? I’m seeking many and varied suggestions, so please let loose with your ideas.
Second, please remember that if you or your department or school or organization or whatever have news, you should let me know about it, so I can let everyone else know about it. I think people often assume that if something is going on, I must already know about it. While that’s sometimes true, it sometimes isn’t, so please don’t be shy about passing along news. (Email me at [email protected].)
Thanks very much for your help with making Daily Nous useful!
I’d be interested in “big names” in subfields doing short articles highlighting, say, a dozen papers, published in the last couple of years in their subfield, that they think are particularly interesting or noteworthy, with a paragraph or two explaining why the paper makes it onto the list.
The “X many Y’s” list article-format is a bit of a clickbait cliché at this point! But with the right people invited to compile them, I think it would be interesting!
I love this idea, and think it would be extremely helpful both to people looking to catch up on work outside their sub-field and for people trying catch up on their own! The only thing I’d say is that I don’t think the authors would need to be limited to “big names” – grad students and early career academics are also great resources for this sort of info!
Thanks for the idea, Gareth. I will think about how I could make something like this work. In the meanwhile, readers might be interested in the brief “crash course” series of posts, which I might also try to revive.
I wonder if it might be possible to create here a repository for syllabi for various courses. We tried this at PEA Soup but it didn’t fly. Perhaps here might work as you have many more readers. It would be lovely if someone about to teach Environmental Ethics for the first time was able to take a look at 10 people’s syllabi for the class without having to know the right people or bother folks to make that happen.
Id love this. I often want to look at other syllabi for ideas to freshen up mine and a lot out there are stale. Also, when you have an idea for a new course at your university, it’s also nice not to have to totally reinvent the wheel if it’s already being offered other places.
Yes, I can make this happen here. Good idea, Dave. Thanks.
Dear David and Justin,
Syllabi for environmental ethics? It turns out that this is already being done by the International Society for Environmental Ethics, here: https://enviroethics.org/syllabi/ Feel free to look/share/contribute!
Whatever happened to Philosophy Tag?
https://dailynous.com/tag/philosophy-tag/
I liked this idea a lot, but on a few occasions the tagged didn’t want to be “it”. Maybe I can get it going again. Perhaps I should give whoever is tagged an option to pass on being “it” if they can recruit a substitute to play for them.
I’d just like to say that, as someone relatively new to philosophy, this site is a superbly helpful resource. Thanks a lot for running it, Justin.
Glad to hear that. Thanks for taking the time to say so.
I don’t know if it belongs here or in the pages of respected philosophy journals, but I’d like to see a genuine debate about the Illuminati threat.
You get better benefits from AARP tho.
One suggestion would be to try and extend Daily Nous beyond the (amazing) one-person operation that it is. There are already occasional guest posts, which I always read with a lot of interest, and I think that it would be interesting to see Daily Nous have a few Guest Editors who can run the site for a week at a time to bring in material, posts, and so on that would extend beyond the sorts of things that are typically on here.
E.g. Marx week! A week devoted to academic labor, unions, etc. A week devoted to metaphilosophical issues about the role of philosophy in ideal/non-ideal social justice. An “ethics of technology” week edited by a transhumanist, etc etc.
I love Daily Nous and think that you’re doing a great job of running this site Justin so please don’t take this as a knock against what you’re up to. Daily Nous, much more so than Leiter’s Blog, is really what I consider to be the “face” of public philosophy (it certainly isn’t the APA’s blog) and so think it could be cool to have that face look a bit different from time to time to better reflect the full spectrum of philosophy and philosophers (and their interests, foibles, and disagreements).
Bring back ought experiment
For those who don’t recall, Ought Experiment was the Daily Nous advice column, authored for most of its run by “Louie Generis,” and then during a brief revival, “Dear Ida.” I will consider bringing this back. Part of the challenge is finding the right person to write the column; another is making sure we have a steady enough flow of people writing in for advice.
I think that given the many bad actors in philosophy (liars, plagiarists, croneys and perpetuators of grant fraud, more on this in a moment) we should use this blog as a forum to name and shame, to bring (as Bob Dylan put it) what is done in the dark into the light. I was listening to a story about a philosopher the other day who embezzled money from a grant and used that money to buy an expensive motorbike. These are the stories I think people need to hear more about! The bad actors in this profession are everywhere – for ever two decent philosophers, there is at least one who walks with the devil (there was also recently a philosopher who has been said to have offered a journal editor $10,000 in bitcoin as well as business class plane tickets anywhere in the world (charged to that philosopher’s department travel budget, no less!) in order to reconsider an R&R that had been rejected, and to send to another referee. When I heard that, I shook my head, and I think readers of this blog would do the same! In summary, given the truly rotten deeds going on all around us, I feel we should use this blog as a place for more blame and shame, rather than to let all of this horrible behaviour remain unspoken. (I also have more stories I could tell than just the two above, including about theft of a manuscript!!)
Especially on this day–Jan. 6th–I wish to stress that what we need is not stories, but evidence of malfeasance. That will involve details of a legal nature that a blog like this is ill-equipped to manage.
Please don’t turn DN into a gossip site.
Gotta say, I don’t think anything said above by Don L is true. Just silliness.
I’m inclined to think this is satire. I hope so.
I have some suggestions that concern this website itself.
Two things:
First, sometimes stability is an issue. Links don’t work, they redirect wrongly, old news come up on top, new posts get buried…so it would be great if those things could be sorted out.
Secondly, the white color of the background is extremely bright. If I read this at my PC at night, it’s really intense. If I turn down the brightness, then I don’t see the text very well, because the font is very…thin…or light, I don’t know, so there’s not enough contrast. Sure, I can turn the dark reader extensions, but if I forget to turn that off when I go to another site, it all gets messed up. So I would suggest some improvements on that side – maybe a little less bright white, awith a bit thicker font, to improve readability.
Thanks in advance, whatever you decide.
Thanks for your suggestions. I’ve just added dark mode functionality for the site. The site will open in accordance with your device’s presets (e.g., if you’ve enabled your phone to open everything in dark mode, DN will open in dark mode). To switch between normal and dark mode, click the small rounded square icon with a moon on it that should be floating on the bottom right of your screen.
There are some aesthetic issues with the site in dark mode that I will have to fix, but for now it is there for people to use.
That’s fantastic! And fast! Thank you so much, I really appreciate it
Related to my previous comments, please add the option of editing one’s comments!
Everyone should have 15 minutes after submitting their comment to edit it. To do so, move your mouse cursor over your comment. A gear wheel should appear in the lower right corner. Click it, and an “edit” option should appear.
How about something on philosophers who write fiction?
Three suggestions here. A content idea, a site management idea, and a policy idea.
For content, why not a monthly post highlighting what articles have a high impact in their fields. Should be easy, just look at some random impact factor measure for articles in various fields. For instance, what’s hot in philosophy of mathematics these days? It’s not my area of interest but I’d appreciate having an idea of what they’re up to. Good discussion fodder on both the areas of interest and the impact factors themselves, if they throw something wacky out.
For site management, please bring on some more moderators. Several interesting articles have been closed for comment because you don’t have time to moderate. There are ample people who would help for free.
For policy, allow anonymous comments on hot button issues. Excluding people who don’t want to comment for professional reasons skews participation towards people invested in the status quo and excludes viewpoints from those who lack institutional power. There are a lot of bad actors who would jump in but with the above mod suggestion and a commitment to normal rules and their enforcement wouldn’t be unmanageable.
Looking forward to another great year from the team. The mini-heaps in particular have led me to read up on subjects and authors I wouldn’t otherwise have been exposed to.
One more, please increase the size of the font relative to the margins in the top bar. As of now the icons and text in the top bar are about 1/3 of its height. If you doubled their size and aligned the “DAILY NOUSE” in the middle with the icons on the left and right sides, it would be more functional and look better.
Please consider having the items in the Recent Comments sidebar link to those comments/replies.
YES
Can we request less talk of department reputations, rankings or “is your department a stud or a dud” cosmo-style adolescent nonsense. This was an embarassing, and, given the endless delays releasing the latest “Gourmet Report”, hopefully dead relic of the early to late aughts.