Topic Suggestions for the Coming Year
What issues, developments, topics, problems, questions, etc., do you want Daily Nous to post about?
[Brett Weston, “Hand and Ear”, 1928]
Please share your suggestions in the comments.
Thank you!
P.S. I have 4 Bluesky invite codes to give away. The first four commenters on this post who make (real) suggestions and include a request for one of those codes will get them.
Thanks for the opportunity to suggest topics. Here’s one:
why aren’t more philosophers vegan ( or at least vegetarian)? What are the *real* reasons for not being so? This directly relates to academic conferences and talks when there are meals: Philosophers are increasingly concerned about the climate/environmental impacts caused by flying to conferences, etc., So (in addition to allowing virtual options for attendance and the like), why not have all meals be vegan? What’s honestly so difficult about that? I’d really like to see this issue discussed because it often seems to be pushed under the rug or the elephant in the room.
Is the answer either (1) arguments for veganism aren’t as compelling as vegans believe, and/or (2) humans aren’t as rational and responsive to logic as philosophers would like to believe?
And as a matter of practicality: only some people are vegan, even among philosophers, so is the proposal really that conference organizers should force participants to be vegan, even at the risk of alienating participants and cannibalizing attendance at their own conferences? Hard to imagine that working, except for conferences related to veganism, when you’re already preaching to the choir…
That said, I ask for dietary preferences/requirements when I’m organizing an event and arrange for catering accordingly. When it comes to food/eating—which is the most basic or essential thing in human life and is connected to identity—I would “let a thousand flowers bloom” here (within reason) and try to be maximally accommodating and respectful of life-choices.
The proposal is not that conference organizers should force people to be vegan – it’s that conference organizers should provide only vegan food. I don’t think this is likely to cannibalize conference attendance, since most conferences don’t even provide that many meals.
That’s what I meant by “force participants to be vegan.” It still seems coercive to say or imply, “if you want to eat with us, without having to go out and buy your own food, then you’ll be eating vegan—we’re not providing or accommodating other options.”
Right, big conferences might not usually provide meals, but smaller meetings often do, e.g., workshops. I didn’t mean to limit this discussion to just conferences, and neither did Pete, the original comment-poster, as far as I can tell.
I’ve organized conference / workshop catering as DefaultVeg: the default is plant-based, and carnist alternatives are accommodated.
Whenever I have to organize a dinner that one of the attendants is vegan, I just book a vegan restaurant for convenience. This is in no way an imposition on others (or myself given that I am not vegan). food choices in an event are always limited. Ordering vegan food is no more coercing people to be vegan than ordering pizza is coercing people to be pizza eaters.
I don’t like (most) vegan food; I do like steak. If I am an attendant at your conference, would it be okay to just book a steakhouse for convenience? Food choices at an event are always limited; ordering steak is no more coercing people to be meat-eaters than ordering pizza is coercing people to be pizza eaters.
David, if you find a restaurant that there’ll be reasonable options for every attendee of my conference and I won’t need to carefully look at the menu in the website to check if it meets everyone’s dietary restriction, please feel free to just book it for me. I promise I will not feel oppressed.
PS. I am not a fan of North American steakhouses (they pale in comparison to the ones in my birth country), but I’ll accept even that.
By the way, I have also booked in the past Kosher or Halal restaurants and ordered Kosher or Halal catering for similar reasons. This is the kind of fascist I am.
David,
do you only eat steak? I’m guessing not. Vegans only eat vegan. I think that’s an important difference. Sergio’s comparison to Kosher or Halal is far more apt.
But the point isn’t about personal preferences. It’s about ethics in numerous ways: environmental impacts of animal agriculture are *far* greater for disadvantaged people; consuming animal products perpetuates a significant form of terrible cruelty; if we care about climate change, the most effective thing we can do (without costly tradeoffs to the world’s poorest) is reduce/eliminate (especially) beef/dairy consumption because methane is highly reversible (only lasts for about 10-12 or so years and is about 80 times more potent than carbon, which lasts between 300-1000 or so years in atmosphere)
“ David, do you only eat steak? I’m guessing not. Vegans only eat vegan. I think that’s an important difference.”
I don’t only eat steak, but I’ve not infrequently been at a vegan-catered event where I don’t eat anything being offered.
Of course, you can reasonably say that since veganism is ethically compelling, I should suck it up and learn to like it. But I was responding to the suggestion that it’s just not an imposition to provide vegan-only catering, not to the suggestion that it’s ethically required even if it is an imposition.
I’m sorry if you’re just joking and I am taking this seriously (hard to read tone on the internets). I assume that by “I don’t eat anything being offered” you mean you’d rather go several hours w/o eating than eating vegan food, rather than “Vegan food is not among my favourite foods”; most conference catering is subpar anyway, to be honest. If you have this kind of peculiar dietary requirements, I hope you’d let your hosts know in advance that you must have animal protein in your meals (in fact, one of our restaurants in our normal rotation here happens to be vegan, so if you came again for a talk here, we’d like to know not to make reservations there!). We once had a speaker that did not eat pizza or pasta; taking them to a Pizzeria would also have been really nasty (though even here it would be hardly a case of coercion).
For the record, I’m not vegan and I don’t find any of the arguments for veganism persuasive; yet I still can’t see how offering omnivores a vegan meal on rare occasions counts as wronging them.
I’m not weighing in on the moral or etiquette issues here, just indicating a plot on the landscape:
There are some people who get very ill if they try to eat vegan food. I am one of them. It has to do with a difficulty digesting the dietary fiber in plant-based foods.
I understand the ethical basis for veganism, and in fact stuck to a vegan diet myself for many years before developing this medical condition. Admittedly, it’s a rare condition, but at least one person who sometimes attends philosophy events has it. There is literally nothing I could eat at a vegan restaurant. Perhaps it is still right overall for me to be forced to choose between going without a meal or else missing that opportunity for joining the conversation — or perhaps it’s even right for me to give up my own life if the only way I can sustain it is by eating meat or eggs, as some ethical theories seem to entail. Still, maybe this empirical point is worth noting.
Meant to say ‘point on the landscape!’
understood. thanks for clarifying
(John O’Farrell, Things Can Only Get Better (Black Swan, 1998) p.276)
Bacon can be delicious. But the fact of cannibalism ala Dahmer-curious approbation doesn’t trump (appropriate term) higher-order legal or even paltry moral considerations. I eat meat; that doesn’t mean I’m moral in doing so. Am I at peace with that? No. But akrasia is a fact that I am well aware of as a personal failing. Just don’t be like me, ideally.
Good to know. It’s important that people are honest about how willing they are to contribute to significant cruelty for taste
It was a quote, in answer to the original “why aren’t more philosophers vegetarians?” question: the obvious and unstated reason, I thought, was that more philosophers aren’t vegetarians because meat tastes very good. John O’Farrell’s quote puts the point pithily. (He doesn’t speak for me, inasmuch as I don’t fully agree with his reasons to be vegetarian in the first place.)
So, why don’t you find the reasons persuasive?
In answer to your first question, for medical reasons I have for a long time been on a low-residue (meaning low-fiber) diet. At times, I have been able to tolerate little more than plain white rice and boiled poultry, and I’ve ended up the hospital for pushing the boundaries of my diet before. So there are some of us for whom eating meat is not a simple matter of taste. Obviously, my circumstances are unusual, but I sometimes feel as though people in positions like my own are neglected in these discussions. There should not be a presupposition that everybody could eat a vegan or vegetarian diet (or even a single such meal), if they so chose.
Yes, you’re right about this. Didn’t mean to suggest taste is the only reason for consuming animal food (I was replying to David Wallace’s comment)
I agree that this is a real issue. But I disagree that this is an issue pushed under the rug. Philosophers talk about being vegan, the moral reasons to be vegan, whether and how philosophy organization should go vegan, etc. a whole lot. This conversation is probably a staple of conference organizing and attending these days.
fwiw, I’m not even vegan–but am trying to be as I find the ethical case (not just animal cruelty, but other reasons I listed below) very persuasive and hard to impugn.
I can’t seem to find my other comment now. But basically, the reasons it seems compelling are the same as the OP mentioned
I would love to hear more about the developments of projects and groups that are reintroducing the work of women and other marginalized groups back into the history of philosophy. For example, one of the projects I know currently happening is the Extending New Narratives project (https://www.newnarrativesinphilosophy.net). I’m sure there are other projects and groups attempting to do the same, yet it is not something I have heard or seen too much about. Secondly, (and maybe controversially), I might like to see fewer posts about Artificial Intelligence/LLM’s. So far, a lot of the discussion seems to revolve around dealing with large language models when it comes to their use in assignments and how to deal with their use by students, and the consensus seems to be on almost every one of these posts that most people do not currently know, and have not yet had the time to try out new teaching/assessment methods. I’m not against these posts as a whole, but rather they seem to be really popular (not just here, but across the internet) right now, and yet the discussion seems to be pretty consistently the same across all of them. I’m yet to be on BlueSky, so I’d love one of those invite codes if you would happen to toss one my way.
Also, thank you for the opportunity to suggest topics, and for continually running one of the best online philosophy news resources.
Not a professional philosopher, but a perpetual student who keeps coming back to the conclusion I reached many years ago: for many, if not most, the most impactful and permanently useful skills, attitudes, and philosophical interests were acquired in just one or a few introductory course(s) facilitated by a gifted instructor and inspired reading selections.
I would like to see such 1000- and 2000-level courses be given the attention they deserve, as for many students they are their only exposure to philosophy and for many professors they constitute the bulk of their teaching load, at least by number of students.
Critical thinking, formal logic, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics to begin with, and 3000-level intros to philosophy of mind, language, science, religion, social and political philosophy …
Syllabi, readings (specific anthologies and supplemental texts), and teaching techniques would all, I think, be of wide interest. (To me, at least)
I think confidence and the role it plays in philosophical success would be a great topic. And I’d love an invite code.
to clarify (since maybe that was too vague– I wanted to get my request in the queue!) I have in mind something like, what role does self-confidence (or lack thereof) play in our ability to produce good work; how can we bolster our self-confidence if we don’t have it; how can we support those who struggle with confidence; what’s a good way to calibrate your self-confidence. Issues like that.
1) How can we more effectively make a case to the public and/or decision-makers about the value of philosophy? 2) Can anything be done to improve the journals system which results in worthwhile papers being long-delayed (to the serious disadvantage of graduate students and junior faculty) and heavy and seemingly redundant refereeing burdens on many? 3) Can anything be done to help reduce the hyperbole in letters of recommendation? 4) How can we reduce the amount of sexual harassment in the profession? 5) What can we do to help diversity the profession?
I would really like to discuss the possibility that we are, in fact, experiencing at some level at least, a global civilization collapse, and the implications of this new reality. How did past societies deal with their fate, what can we learn from their actions or lack thereof, and what should we do, now, facing our precarious future? Can we, using the force of reason, find a way to a better future? Is it too late? What could mobilize such a sweeping paradigm shift? What would.the ideal future even look like? Do we have that vision, or are we just reacting to crises post hoc and haphazardly, all the while longing for an idealized state of affairs we call the good old days when we felt invincible? Watching nature disintegrate at what now seems to be an exponential rate, and humanity split and polarize itself along ideological lines I can’t help but wonder why we aren’t moving forward. Why aren’t we fixing this? And what if we did?
I’d like to know more about alternative ways of organizing the job market. Why can’t I just put my CV and a few other docs on philpeople, set a few parameters (geography, specialty etc.) then set my status to “looking”, then let the hiring committees browse the available talent, DM the candidates they like to see if they’re serious. Such an endless waste of time applying for jobs.
For what it’s worth, this is at least a bit like how the entry-level law school teaching market works (or worked – it’s been several years since I’ve been on it, thank goodness!) Would-be applicants submit information that’s uploaded to a central service and put into a form (The FAR, or Faculty Appointments Register) that goes to all schools that sign up. It used to be a big paper binder, but of course now it’s electronic, and people can search it. You can also attach a cv. It was also traditional to send “letters of interst”, often including publications and the like, to schools you were particularly interested in, though it’s debatable how important those were. Schools make first round interview offers based on the FAR (and other materials they may ask for, in some cases.) These used to be done at a big conference in DC each fall, but I think they are now mostly done on-line. It has draw-backs – no matter how you do it, the form used will be such that it will make it hard to present some information, and it may make it easier to simply screen out some applicants. (Law is even more “prestige” heavy than philosophy, with the vast majority of professors coming for a tiny handful of schools. Supposedly some committees simply exclude everyone not from a small number of schools.) But, over-all it’s easier and less time consuming than the philosophy market. One thing to note, though, is that it’s now much more common for school HR departments to require people to fill out on-line applications early on, negating at least some of the value.
I don’t really have a suggestion of my own, but it might be interesting to see some discussion of the advantages – and possible disadvantages – of moving to a system like this, or something else.
How can philosophers — perhaps especially grad students, but in principle any philosopher — find other philosophers who are interested in niche research topics?
For example, suppose I’m interested in the philosophy of computational complexity. How could I find other philosophers with whom to discuss this topic? Of course, I could look up philosophers who have published papers on this topic. But there are probably lots of philosophers who are interested in this topic and who haven’t published papers on this topic.
I’d like to think about how to more equitably distribute the burdens of refereeing papers for journals. I frequently see some philosophers–generally people who are well-known, and who work at R1s with strong graduate programs–posting (usually complaining, sometimes perhaps humble-bragging) on social media about being inundated with dozens and dozens of referee requests each year. At the same time, I know many less-well-known philosophers–those working at smaller institutions and without grad programs, and thus less well-known–who receive few, if any, referee requests.
I assume that this happens because people at less prestigious/high profile institutions (who often, but not always, have less ability to travel to conferences because of less funding) are not known to journal editors, and editors can only invite referees whose work they know about. But there are a lot of people at teaching-focused, undergrad only, other institutions who are highly qualified referees with good subject area expertise from their own research, teaching, and graduate training. And the status quo not only overburdens those at the “top” of the field’s prestige metrics, but inadvertently excludes others.
Would it be better for everyone–including journal editors and authors–if our pool of referees expanded, and the folks getting dozens of requests got fewer requests while more people were given the opportunity to participate in the peer review process? Of course, there are some very narrow topics that there are only a handful of qualified referees in. But there are many other topics that could be competently refereed by a far broader range of people than are currently on most people’s radar.
Friendly Grad Student suggests that we should think about how to make it easier for people working on (but not yet extensively published in) niche topics to find each other. Perhaps the solution to both problems could be the same: some kind of database where people can specify the particular topics they’re working on, or flag what topics they’re willing to serve as referees for. PhilPeople has a “find a philosopher” search function based on users’ chosen content areas. But it’s not very helpful for finding referees or other people working on niche topics, since the categories are fairly broad and people often select only the broad field or sub-fields that they’re working in. I wonder if PhilPeople could have a “find a referee” function? At any rate, I think this is a problem worth talking more about.
It would be nice to have posts highlighting ongoing research projects or other ongoing major efforts by groups of philosophers (or interdisciplinary groups including philosophers). Either as shorter news articles or perhaps even as group interviews.
Perhaps a post on contemporary writing styles, please? I’ve noticed what I think is a move towards greater clarity (more sympathy for the reader), which is great, alongside greater informality, which isn’t always so great in my view. Some papers seem to be chopped up into such short and chatty sentences that they’re quite difficult (and annoying) to read. But maybe others like this style and can identify other features of good/bad writing that we can all think about.
I’d like to see more on what hiring actually looks like and what schools are looking for in candidates, especially when it comes to teaching focused schools. I don’t think that the standard picture of publish, publish, and publish preferably in journals in the top 20 in one of Leiter’s polls is really a formula for success for getting those jobs and I suspect that a lot of candidates are getting bad advice. But I’ll be honest, despite working at a CC I don’t know this with any certainty. I’d really like to see things on this backed by hard data and not philosophers’ intuitions or posts from people who’ve been involved in more than one search at teaching focused schools. Honestly, I’d like to see more discussion of hiring generally that’s backed by some actual data. As for what to have less of: Well people who’ve no data to back up what they’re saying opining about this subject for one thing.
This is a great idea. The Central APA/AAPT Teaching Hub had a three-hour panel hosting several speakers on applying for teaching focused positions in 2023. It was one of our best-attended teaching hub panels; there’s a lot of interest among grad students (and others) in getting advice for how to do teaching demos, what teaching-focused schools are looking for, how to write a teaching statement that isn’t nonsense, putting together a teaching portfolio, etc.
I’d love to see a series of posts about overcoming divisions within the field.
Here are just a few examples of the sorts of divisions I have in mind: divisions between (a) history of philosophy and analytic philosophy, (b) history of philosophy and continental philosophy, and (c) analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, (d) intuition-driven philosophy and non-intuition-driven philosophy, (e) experimental philosophy and non-experimental philosophy.
But I’d also be very interested in learning about other divisions in parts of the field that I’m not aware of (and whether people think they can/should be overcome).
Sometimes divisions exist for a reason, though, so perhaps we should also consider which divisions are worth keeping rather than eliminating/homogenizing.
Totally agreed!
Incidentally, there is now a very robust research community doing top-notch research on the history of philosophy of science. I mention this, in part, because it involves people with strong knowledge of philosophy of science, and strong knowledge of the history of philosophy of science. The community is very well supported by a very strong journal, HOPOS, whose editor, Lydia Patton, has done a wonderful job over the years. The sub-field benefitted from earlier work on the history of the Vienna Circle by the likes of Alan Richardson, Thomas Uebel, and George Reisch. But the research is not limited to the 20th Century, though that is where my own interests principally lie. I think this research has fed back into our understanding of contemporary issues in the philosophy of science. For example, we have a better understanding of an argument like the pessimistic induction after there is a good, comprehensive research on the history of the argument or similar arguments.
I hope it’s not violating the rules but I had one or two more thoughts. One is that I’d really like to see more on what non-tenure track jobs are like and whether they represent viable career paths for people. I’m sure that some non-TT jobs do and I get the impression that one very good trend in academia that’s mostly flown under the radar is that many schools are transforming their non-TT positions into something that pays a livable wage and has some stability. I was pleasantly surprised to notice that my old employer UT Knoxville has done this. I think more discussion of this would be good in two respects. One I think a lot of graduate students have no idea that “non-tenure track” can mean a lot of things– there’s an impression that they’re all class by class adjunct gigs– and that some are actually pretty desirable. (I’d take a lecturer position at a state flagship over a TT job at a tiny liberal arts college holding on to solvency by its fingernails any day of the week.) I also think it would be good to credit schools that are doing the right thing on this and to put some pressure on those who could and aren’t. And just generally I’d like to see more guest posts here, especially from people who don’t get much of a platform in philosophy. Maybe you could even solicit grad students or heck undergraduates to do a few now and then?
There are some good suggestions here. I’ll try to amplify a couple, and maybe toss in one or two of my own. In no particular order.
1. I’d like to see more attention given to the alt-ac scene, and to opportunities where academic philosophers contribute to projects outside academia.
2. On a related front, I’m curious to know more about the experiences of those in non-TT and non-permanent positions, and about the opportunities available on that front. I’m lucky enough to have landed at a good school with a faculty and student body I’m very fond of, but that required thinking about the field in ways I wasn’t prepared for. It’s also required that I cobble together employment from a bunch of different sources. The job market is rather unlike what I was given to expect when I started doctoral study 15 years ago, but there wasn’t much good information available at the time. I get the sense that things have changed, and if I’d known then half of what I know now I’d have made different decisions. I suspect others in my situation, and current and prospective graduate students, would benefit from more information about the non-TT and non-permanent job scene.
3. I’ll just echo the call for more information on teaching jobs, and about pedagogy. Particularly when it comes to online teaching, LLMs are going to change the way we assess work and accredit students with degrees. If we don’t address this head-on, university degrees won’t be worth the paper they’re printed on.
4. Concerning better information about the philosophy job market, I’d also like to see the interest in employment data keep apace, and I hope Daily Nous remains a venue for open, forthright discussion about that data. So far, it seems like junior members of the profession are doing most of the work. One might hope that more senior figures would also take part in the production, interpretation, and dissemination of this data.
5. I think it would be fun to have a semi-regular “philosophical iconoclasms” forum, or something in that vein. Especially at top programs, there seems to be a tendency to “read” the history of philosophy, and contemporary topics, in terms of particular frameworks. Especially where these frameworks are both widely held outside those programs, and unquestioned by their adherents, there’s value to be had in learning about the alternatives. I’ll give two examples of what I have in mind. Work on the history of analytic philosophy (e.g. by Greg Frost-Arnold, Kevin J. Harrelson, Joel Katzav, Adam Tuboly, and Krist Vaesan) suggest that the contemporary landscape would look much different if things had gone slightly otherwise at a few crucial points in the previous century. Second, the dominance of model-theoretic possible-world semantics — as a basis for theorizing about semantic meaning across wide swaths of the philosophies of language and mind, linguistics, and formal logic — is largely the result of work that came together at UCLA in the late 1960s and early 1970s. If that university and period hadn’t seen philosophers and linguists like Rudolph Carnap, Alonzo Church, Keith Donnellan, Donald Kalish, Hans Kamp, David Kaplan, David Lewis, Richard Montague, and Barbara Partee doing what they were doing, today’s widely shared picture of linguistic and mental content would likely look very different. Each of these research areas open up into novel regions of conceptual territory, with the possibility of reframing some of those widely held and unquestioned frameworks.
6. I’d appreciate discussion threads about particular conference circuits and professional organizations. In June I attended a conference in Krakow run by a European organization dedicated to philosophy for children (SOPHIA), and in August I attended the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress (RoME) in Boulder. I’ll try to visit each again, but I wasn’t aware about either until I saw announcements on Philos-L. Philosophers would benefit from a semi-regular series that introduced us to organizations like these, in North America and abroad.
Alright, I’ll stop there. Thanks, Justin — you’re doing quite a valuable service to the profession with this blog.