Happy New Year, philosofriends! Before Daily Nous returns to a more regular posting schedule (next week) I thought it would be worth taking a look at the philosophy-related news and issues that captured the attention of the philosophy profession in 2023.

[photo by Justin Weinberg]

• Wiley’s decision to fire the founder and longtime editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy, Robert Goodin, which raises questions about editorial independence, academic freedom, corporate influence and the means for resisting it, and the future of journal publishing in the profession
• Australian Catholic University’s decision to close the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy, which in some ways fits with a continuing broader pattern of the closing of philosophy programs, but was shocking owing to both the Institute’s research strength and to ACU’s betrayal of faculty it had recently recruited for positions there
• Philosophy of Physics publishing its inaugural issue; it was not the only recently launched journal related to philosophy and science
• Templeton Foundation’s elimination of its “Philosophy & Theology” department, leading to uncertainty regarding its future funding for philosophy projects
• The stabbing of a philosophy professor, apparently targeted specifically for teaching philosophy of gender, and some of her students, during a class meeting*
• The UK government appointing a philosopher as its first “free speech tsar”, which prompted further discussion of speech on campus as well as governmental interference in campus affairs.
• Yale University officially replacing its graduate course requirement of logic with a formal methods requirement, which is related to various discussions here about the kinds of training philosophers should have.
• Dave Chalmers winning a 25-year old bet against Christof Koch over whether someone would have discovered a specific signature of consciousness in the brain by now, and the fallout from the publicity regarding that bet, including controversy over an open letter calling integrated information theory “pseudoscience”.

Academic philosophy journals were discussed across a number of posts in 2023, apart from the news about the Journal of Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Physics. Some of the more popular posts on the subject include:

• Journal Articles: Quality & Quantity
• Rejection Rates Should Not Be a Measure of Journal Quality
• The Future of Philosophy Journals
• Goodin on Journals, Editors, and Publishers
• New “Meta-Ranking” of Philosophy Journals
• New Site Collects and Standardizes Philosophy Journal Information
• Zombie Plagiarism in Philosophy
• How to Alleviate the Referee Crisis: A Proposal

Relatedly, there were several posts about philosophical writing and communication:

• The Various Literary Forms of Philosophy
• Journal to Begin Featuring Short Philosophical Essays
• Philosophy & Public Affairs to Publish New Article Types
• The Rise of English as the Global Lingua Franca of Academic Philosophy
• Some Remarks on Form in Philosophy
• Philosophy Through Comics
• Team Philosophy

Large language models such as ChatGPT and the prospect of other developments in AI, continued to prompt several kinds of discussions here. Some were about the technology and its significance, such as:

• Philosophers on Next-Generation Large Language Models
• Philosophy Sites in the Google Dataset Used to Train Some LLMs
• A Petition to Pause Training of AI Systems
• “I want to be free”
• How to Tell Whether an AI is Conscious
• A Case for AI Wellbeing

Other discussions concerned how LLMs might be used by academics to write or philosophize:

• Philosophical Uses for LLMs: Modeling Philosophers
• COPE: AI Tools Aren’t Authors. Philosophers: Not So Fast
• How Academics Can Make Use of ChatGPT

And several focused on the challenges of teaching students who have access to this technology, such as:

• Teachers: Was the Semester AI-pocalyptic or Was it AI-OK?
• Policing Is not Pedagogy: On the Supposed Threat of ChatGPT
• The AI Threat, the Humanities, and Self-Cultivation
• Resources for Teaching in the Age of ChatGPT & other LLMs
• The AI-Immune Assignment Challenge
• Teaching Philosophy in a World with ChatGPT

There were, of course, other discussions of teaching and teaching resources, including:

• Do the Thing: Philosophy Teaching with Practical Workshops
• “Am I the Unethical One?” A Philosophy Professor & His Cheating Students
• An Accessible and User-Friendly Argument-Mapping App
• Logic Courseware, Surveyed
• A Little Logic Each Day (Semantics, too)

Several posts about data and information related to graduate programs in philosophy were published this year, including:

• New Interface for Academic Philosophy Data & Analysis
• Percent of U.S. Philosophy PhD Recipients Who Are Women: A 50-Year Perspective
• Doctoral Program Attrition
• New Guide to Terminal MA Programs in Philosophy

A number of posts were about philosophy job market information, such as:

• New Data on the Employment of Philosophy PhDs
• Alternative Models for the Philosophy Job Market
• The Demand for “AI & Philosophy” Hires & Expertise — and Its Precedents
• 2022-23 Philosophy Job Market Report
• Job Market Report, 2023 Secondary Cycle
• Areas of Specialization in Philosophy — Data from 2022-23

And though there were many posts about cuts to philosophy programs and colleges eliminating philosophy majors, there were also a couple of news items about some positive developments:

• A Philosophy Department is Born
• Starting a PPE Program on a Shoestring: Why & How

As usual, there were several posts discussing metaphilosophical matters such as what philosophy is or what it ought to be, or what philosophers should do or be like, including:

• What’s the Point of Philosophy (as an academic discipline)?
• Philosophy as Glial Cell
• The Social Turn in Philosophy: Promises and Perils
• A Plea for Synthetic Philosophy
• Externalist Explanations of Philosophy
• Desperate Honesty
• Philosophy as Art
• Philosophy, Science, and Religion
• The Rigor of Philosophy & the Complexity of the World
• How Risk-Averse Is Academic Philosophy?

And some on whether studying philosophy improves one’s thinking:

• Does Studying Philosophy Develop Special Skills That Improve One’s Intuitions?
• What the Evidence Says about whether Studying Philosophy Makes People Better Thinkers

There were a number of posts about public philosophy and outreach, among which were:

• The Fourth Branch
• The Power of a Good Press Release
• Ethics Center Hires Director of Storytelling and Public Engagment
• How Not to Intervene in Public Discourse

That last one was part of the very popular series, “Philosophers on the Israel-Hamas Conflict“, which now has nine posts in it.

It and another in that series were among the most commented upon posts of 2023, the top five of which are:

• What It’s Like to Be a Philosopher with Unpopular Views on a Controversial Subject: 505 comments
• “Am I the Unethical One?” A Philosophy Professor & His Cheating Students: 397 comments
• How not to Intervene in Public Discourse: 257 comments
• Proportionality, Psychic Harm, and the Day After: 171 comments
• Philosopher to Be Appointed UK’s First “Free Speech Tsar”: 163 comments

Faculty moves announced in 2023 can be found here.

2023 saw the deaths of several philosophers. You can see a list of them, with links to memorial notices, here.

One of the last posts of the previous year was Philosophy You Liked Published in 2023. That post is still open for comments, and I urge readers to continue to add to the growing list of works there.

Some notes of thanks:

Thank you to the philosophers who authored guest posts for Daily Nous over the past year, including during the second annual Summer Guest Post Series, which I am hoping will be a regular feature from now on.

Thanks to John Hunt (tech support), Michael Glawson (online philosophy resources weekly updates), Dustin Sigsbee (assistant editor, Fall 2023) and the very talented philosopher-comics Pete Mandik, Tanya Kostochka, Rachel Katler, and Ryan Lake.

Thanks, also, to the supporters of Daily Nous and the organizations that advertise here.

Thanks to the people who write in to let me know about news, information, and achievements.

Finally, thank you, Daily Nous readers. It is a privilege to provide this service, and I appreciate you reading and commenting on the posts here. 2024 will see the tenth anniversary of Daily Nous—can you believe it?—and I certainly wouldn’t have kept it running all these years without you.

Of course, I recognize that not everyone reading the site likes me, my views, and how I run things. I’m open to criticism, of course, but I’m also reassured by the saying, “you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. It’s reassuring because philosophers are people, too, and anyone who has spent any time observing philosophers can tell you that being pleased all the time is not something we want.

With that, so long 2023.

I hope you all have a beautiful 2024.

— Justin Weinberg

* Some readers have asked why DN has not followed-up on this news story, particularly on how the victims are doing and what steps the university has taken in response. The answer is in part owed to preferences of those involved in the incident, as conveyed to us by others. We can report, though, that the attacker has been charged with attempted murder, four counts of assault with a weapon, three counts of aggravated assault, two counts of possessing a weapon, and one count of mischief for damaging a Pride flag, and has a court date coming up in January, according to the Waterloo Region Record.