Philosophy News in 2024

What were the big philosophy news stories of 2024?

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In that first category was a story about the destruction and creation of philosophy journals.

It’s instructive to recall the prequel to this drama, which starred The Journal of Political Philosophy (JPP). Back in 2023, publishing behemoth Wiley said it would fire JPP’s editor-in-chief, Robert Goodin, if he didn’t agree to raise the number of articles the journal publishes. In response, JPP’s editorial team and board resigned and over 1000 scholars who work in political philosophy pledged not to referee for or submit to the journal until Wiley backed down. Wiley didn’t back down. Goodin was fired. JPP collapsed. In January a successor journal with the same editorial team as JPP, but fully open-access, emerged from the ashes. Called Political Philosophy, it published its first article in March.

Wiley apparently was responding to changes in the journal article market, anticipating the continued growth of open-access articles which threaten its subscription revenue, and hoping to make more money in open-access publishing fees by increasing the number of articles in its journals. In the case of JPP, this turned into a tale of the goose that laid the golden eggs, followed by triumphant phoenix-like rebirth.

Inspired by this turn of events, in May, the editorial team and board at Philosophy & Public Affairs (PPA), another Wiley journal, announced that they, too, were resigning and would be creating a new open-access philosophy journal. The impending loss of PPA was, to many, shocking; JPP was a highly regarded journal, but PPA had been around about twice as long and had published many well-known articles by some very influential philosophers.

Still, the move seemed to have the support of many philosophers, including the founding editors of PPA, and in August, the successor journal was announced. Called Free & Equal—a name which turned out to be controversial (mainly because of its apparent allusion to Rawls)—the journal has the same editorial team as the recently disbanded PPA, and it started accepting submissions in September.

And then something unexpected happened: a case of philosophy imitating… philosophy.

In October, Wiley announced that it had assembled a new editorial team for the supposedly destroyed and replaced Philosophy & Public Affairs.

I was reminded of this bit from Derek Parfit’s teletransporter example:

Whether the profession will “welcome the opportunities” this development offers remains unclear, as do the conditions of journal identity over time.

FYI, both Free & Equal and Philosophy & Public Affairs have recently published articles.

This all took place against a background of continued dissatisfaction with the journal ecology in academic philosophy.

(See the reposts of the reader favorite, “Philosophy Journal Horror Stories” and the—alas? of course?—less popular “Notably Good Experiences with Philosophy Journals“; feel free to add to them.)

Some of that dissatisfaction stems from the reviewing process. See this post soliciting suggestions for modest actionable improvements journals can take to help improve the situation (as well as the links at the end for background on it). One journal began offering a refereeing award. Another began publishing letters to the editor. (There were also more radical recommendations.)

Some of the dissatisfaction came from the fact that much philosophical work is stuck behind paywalls, rendering it less accessible to the public and others without access to institutional subscriptions to them. There are now a number of open-access philosophy journals, and though some journals, such as the Journal of the American Philosophical Association have converted to open-access, the process can be challenging.

Those curious about journals’ policies, operations, the citation rates of its publications, and other information can check out the Philosophy Journal Insight Project. (There was also a study begun on what makes for a good philosophy journal.)

And in other journal news, this past September, six publishers of academic journals found themselves served with an antitrust lawsuit.

In the category of cultural developments of wide interest, of course, is artificial intelligence, or as some of you like to call it, “artificial intelligence”.

So many aspects of this topic consumed our attention over the past year.

Though we talked about it more here in 2023 (for example), over the past year we continued to confront the use of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) by students as a cheating tool (as well as the question of how to advise students about its use).

But it can also be a teaching tool, a reading tool, as well as a subject we teach about.

Questionable use of LLMs is not limited to students. They’ve been used by professors to referee papers. Publishers have sold your work to technology firms for the purposes of training AIs and others are asking about doing so. I’m not sure of the extent of its use by authors submitting work to philosophy journals, but philosophy journals are taking up the problem of what policies to have about AI-generated content in submissions. And at least one dean suggested that professors make use of LLMs for help with their teaching while their TAs were striking for better pay.

There were also discussions about the capabilities of current LLMs (also here), as well as how they might affect philosophy and how it is done. One philosopher had an AI doppelgänger of himself made (an “ExTRA“). Others suggested that LLMs may help revive philosophical dialogues (and suggested their creation as a good assignment for students).  There were questions about how AI could be used as a tool in the history of philosophy. There was the hope that the profession’s response to what LLMs can do well would be to increasingly value playfulness and imagination in philosophical work. And the team at PhilPapers began trying to improve its capabilities as a research tool by training LLMs with its users’ help.

Meanwhile, the philosophy profession is taking AI more and more seriously as a research subject. For example, this past year saw the launch of the journal Philosophy of AI, the creation by the American Philosophical Association (APA) of two $10,000 prizes for philosophical work on artificial intelligence, and the opening at Oxford of something they’re calling a “Human-Centered AI Lab“, a name the awkwardness of which is presumably meant to assure us that people are still in charge there.

The value of philosophy is, naturally, a perennial topic of interest among philosophers, and this year saw discussion of it develop in a few different ways.

One is through empirical research on the effects studying philosophy has on people’s critical thinking skills. Philosophy departments have long touted the intellectual benefits of studying philosophy and to support this have cited the exceptionally good performance of philosophy students on a variety of standardized tests. But there has always been the question of what explains these results: are the students good at reasoning because they study philosophy, or do they study philosophy because they’re good at reasoning?

Following up on a largely inconclusive look at this question at the end of 2023, in 2024 Michael Prinzing (Baylor) and Michael Vazquez (UNC) embarked on further study of it, releasing the results this past October. They concluded that there is some “initial and suggestive evidence” in favor of the claim that majoring in philosophy makes students, in general, better thinkers. One hopes this is a prelude to more research on this topic.

The value of philosophy is also at the center of the push to include philosophy in pre-college curricula in the United States, where it is largely absent. In July, Alex Guerrero (Rutgers) argued that the philosophy profession should be pushing for the development of an Advanced Placement high school course in philosophy and a philosophy essay contest for high school students. Then, in December, Tushar Irani (Wesleyan) shared with us his dual-enrollment philosophy course, and proposed it as a model for bringing philosophy to high school students.

There were also posts about getting students to appreciate the practical value of philosophy and about the kinds of careers philosophy majors end up in.

While philosophers are scrutinizing the value of what they do and how to teach it to more students, they also seem to be increasingly open to doing public-facing work—and people appear to be showing more and more interest in it. That’s to say, it was a pretty good year for public philosophy.

The BBC and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council selected ten researchers as their “New Generation Thinkers” and two were philosophers. Vox included four philosophers among its “Future Perfect 50” list of “thinkers, innovators, and changemakers who are working to make the future a better place.”

For the first time this century (perhaps longer), a philosopher’s book was longlisted—and then shortlisted—for the National Book Award.

There continue to be a lot of philosophy podcasts—so many that we added a list of new episodes, compiled by Jason Chen (Ohio State/Akron), to each Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update.

The Berggruen Institute launched a new philosophy essay competition (with $25,000 prizes) in March and announced its first winners in October.

And the Marc Sanders Foundation revived its Media Fellows Program, which provides instruction to philosophers, from experts, about how to write, speak to, and produce for the general public in major media market spaces.

Communicating the value of philosophy to students and getting the public interested in philosophy are two ways of indirectly pushing back against cuts to philosophy programs (who knows how effective, though).

Such cuts continued this year. SUNY Fredonia, Valparaiso University, the University of Kent, and Manhattan College were among the schools to lose their philosophy major programs, and programs were threatened elsewhere, despite the apparent lack of evidence that cutting philosophy programs helps schools achieve their goals.

When it came to cuts, some schools treated some of their philosophers badly (examples here and here and here).

The Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford was shut down this year, too.

In general there seems to be a decrease in demand for academic philosophers, and it is unclear what can be done to slow or reverse that.

That said, some new programs came into existence. There seems to be a trend of new MA programs that bring together philosophy with science (for example, philosophy and data science, or philosophy and computing).

Some departments received significant gifts.

And some philosophers continued to find funding in unexpected places.

Data about the academic philosophy job market was compiled in several posts by Charles Lassiter (Gonzaga), including one analyzing how many people are applying for which types of jobs.

Data about philosophy program placement rates continued to be collected by Academic Philosophy Data Analysis (APDA).

And efforts to expand both philosophy graduate students’ and philosophy graduate programs’ conceptions of the job market to include non-academic jobs continued, with, among other things, a new “Philosophers in Industry Office Hours“.

Since philosophers find philosophy valuable, it is not surprising that they’d be concerned with questions about who gets to do philosophy.

One of the most popular posts at DN this past year was “The ‘Academic Great Gatsby Curve’ in Philosophy“, which concerned an analysis of data “on over 300,000 academics across 22 disciplines who in total published close to 10 million papers between 2000 and 2013.” The study found that of those disciplines, philosophy has both the most academic inequality and the least academic mobility.

A website, #first-gen philosophers, was launched featuring essays by philosophers who were first-generation college students, and we discussed one by Jennifer Morton (Penn) here.

Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) shared a trove of data about the numbers and kinds of people majoring in philosophy.

APDA surveyed philosophy graduate students about department climate, mental health, employment, and demographics.

Related to climate, there was a post on how to advise or support victims of sexual harassment in academia in contexts of institutional failure.

There was significant interest in a study of neurodiversity, philosophers, and philosophical views that got started this past year, as well as a study aiming to quantify and compare the challenges faced by native and non-native English speakers in philosophy.

And it seemed that these reflections on being “addicted” to philosophy from someone who left academia resonated with a number of readers, as did this interview with a pair of philosophers who spent years adjuncting before landing tenure track positions.

Academic freedom and freedom of speech were the topics of several popular posts at Daily Nous over the year.

• The University of Cologne withdrew its invitation to Nancy Fraser (New School) to take up a visiting position that the university considers a “special honor,” because Professor Fraser had been a sigbnatory of the “Philosophy for Palestine” open letter published in November, 2023.
• The president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges removed political theorist Jodi Dean from her courses because she authored a pro-Palestinian blog post.
• The Leverhulme Trust investigated one of its early career fellows in philosophy at Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge for his writing on the relationship between race and IQ. Emmanuel College subsequently “cut ties” with the fellow.
• Scholars objected to a decision by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education to accept a politically biased and “unconstitutional” evaluation of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences that made it impossible to function.
• An Italian philosophy professor was charged with “criminal defamation” for describing a politician’s views as “neo-Hitlerite.” (She was eventually acquitted.)
• The New Bioethics journal accepted a paper for one of its special issues arguing in favor of restricting abortion, but then put its publication “on hold” following complaints about it on social media. The journal’s editor ended up deciding to reject the paper, in part, it seems, because he thinks that journals should have different standards for white, male authors (the author was a white male). (Some longtime readers may recall this classic “special issue” episode with its perfect coda.)
• One university was caught secretly video-recording at least one of its professor’s courses using technology installed in the classroom for remote learning during the pandemic.

Student protests and the question of the extent to which protest speech by students should be protected continued to be of interest to philosophers. See especially the piece by Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) on the tangled issues of student protests, free speech, and academic freedom.

Information about state-level legislation in the U.S. that threatens academic freedom or otherwise interferes in education is being collected and shared by PEN America.

To what extent are philosophers especially at risk of threats to academic freedom or “cancellation”? That question was raised by Joseph Heath (Toronto).

What about student freedom in the classroom? A study conducted by a philosopher and a psychologist found that “autonomy-supportive policies effectively increase classroom attendance and subject mastery.”

There are some new resources for philosophy teachers and students. A pair of philosophers at Notre Dame developed the Philosophy Teaching Library, an open access collection of introductory primary texts with “textual commentary, illustrative examples, and detailed argument breakdowns.”

A new initiative from Philosophers for Sustainability provides philosophy instructors with free “plug and play” teaching modules on philosophy related to sustainability, the environment, and climate change.

The American Association of Philosophy Teachers (AAPT) launched a new teaching mentorship program designed for philosophers teaching in small philosophy departments.

The Northeast Workshop to Learn about Multicultural Philosophy (NEWLAMP) is continuing to run summer programs for philosophy instructors aiming to learn about and integrate into their courses under-represented philosophical traditions.

There was some discussion about teaching philosophy with “non-linguistic media.” (Related: the development of a searchable map of Principia Mathematica.)

We looked back at one “old” resource, too: a collection of online guides for students about writing philosophy papers.

And a philosophy department chair curious about departmental teaching assessment floated the idea of a history of philosophy test.

When it comes to graduate study in philosophy, several questions came up, including:

• Are there more applicants to programs than in the past?
• How can one find out about program application requirements and funding?
• What questions should prospective students ask when deciding between graduate programs, and of whom?
• What’s it like to be a student in that department?
• How can one survive graduate school?
• Do the programs offer enough money?
• What should one look for in a dissertation advisor?
• How can we reduce time-to-degree for PhD students?
• How should philosophy grad students spend their summer?
• Where can one go to study Indian philosophy?
• What do the new “Gourmet” rankings say?
• Are we less rankings-obsessed than we used to be?
• What are departments’ placement rates?

I hope to include the discussion of more questions from graduate students this year, so please feel free to send yours in.

Prospective graduate students may be interested in checking out faculty moves over the past year.

What are philosophers doing when they do philosophy? What should they be doing? 2024 saw several posts here on philosophical methodology, the sociology of philosophy, and other metaphilosophical matters.

John Bengson (Texas), Terence Cuneo (Vermont), and Russ Shafer-Landau (Wisconsin) put forward a defense of what they describe as a “sound method for constructing and assessing philosophical theories—one capable of generating theories, in diverse subfields, that deliver philosophy’s ultimate goal.”

Sophie Grace Chappell (Open University) discussed how methodological norms in moral philosophy have excluded certain forms of evidence, and why this is a problem.

Joshua Knobe (Yale) argued that “philosophy of mind is very different now“, yet our professional norms for the subfield have not kept up.

There was a discussion of the charge by Michael Bishop (Florida State) that epistemology is guilty of an “institutional neglect of science.”

Nandi Theunissen (Rice) asked about philosophy’s disciplinary norms and how they serve and fail to serve the aims of philosophy.

We asked what we aren’t philosophizing about, but should, discovered who is cited the most in some of our philosophizing, considered a collectivist approach to intellectual virtues and vices, and saw the invention of a new tool that may change how we understand the history of philosophy.

We shared recent philosophy we liked (keep adding to that list) and what kinds of publications we’re most proud of.

We also discussed comparisons of philosophers and animals, joked about scary philosophy and the misuse of philosophical terms, and poked fun at ourselves a bit, too.

Turning outwards to the “real world,” philosophers had plenty to say about current events and other developments in 2024. I encourage you to peruse the Heap of Links for many examples of this—though it only (🙂) contains the most recent two thousand links shared on the site.

Some of the posts here on these matters included an argument that American academic philosophers should speak out to condemn the Israeli assault on Gaza, an open letter from Gaza academics, and a call to support higher education in Gaza. There was also a discussion of moral philosophy as war propaganda.

A special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica was published on the Russia-Ukraine war.

Speaking of war, a philosopher’s system of applied ontology was officially adopted this year by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Some philosophers became current events. Here’s an example. Surprisingly, Plato did, too. And 21 philosophers from Yale submitted an amici curiae brief in the Supreme Court case of United States v. Skrmetti.

The hot topic of misinformation was given some heat by Eric Winsberg (South Florida/Cambridge). The still hotter topic of the moral dimensions of the killing of a health insurance CEO was discussed by Saba Bazargan-Forward (UCSD).

And there were posts about what the U.S. presidential election means for philosophy. (Keep an eye on this stuff, too.)

The post at Daily Nous with the highest traffic this year was the memorial notice for Daniel Dennett, who died on April 19th. It was viewed over 64,000 times just on the day it was published—some further evidence, if you needed it, of Dennett’s stature and influence beyond the halls of academic philosophy.

He was only one of many philosophers, including some other very well-known philosophers, who died in 2024. I encourage you to read about them here.

Daily Nous turned 10 this past March. Thanks to you all for reading, commenting, providing ideas for discussion, sharing links, writing guest posts, and offering feedback. Thanks also to John Hunt, Michael Glawson, and Dustin Sigsbee for their help with the site.

Well, 2025 is here. Posting will be ramping up to a normal pace over the next few days or so.

I hope your year is off to a good start so far, philosofriends.

— Justin

P.S. If you want more review of “Philosophy in 2024” you can check out this episode of Philosophy Talk.