Kevin Vallier (Bowling Green) has begun a five part series of posts assessing the normative political philosophy in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. He writes:

In this series, I am interested only in the following question: supposing that Piketty is right about the nature of capitalism, what are the normative implications? My answer will be that it’s fa..

You can invent a silly product, market it well, and use the proceeds to fund a charity. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the newest inductee into the pantheon of famous philosophy majors: “Banana Bill” — the inventer of the banana slicer. Do not neglect to read the reviews of this esteemed product. (via Dale Miller)

Ergo is a new general, open access philosophy journal that launches today. In their introduction, Franz Huber and Jonathan Weisberg describe the data and other factors that led to the creation of the new journal. They also reveal their own statistics, including acceptance rates and time-to-decisions.

Besides the introduction, there are four articles in the current ..

Aesthetics for Birds received a grant from the American Society for Aesthetics for a redesign of the site that makes it, uh, “readymade” for more aesthetical action. Lots of..

Oxford University has offered the prestigious White’s Chair of Moral Philosophy to Jeff McMahan (Rutgers). The chair is currently held by John Broome. Recent holders include James Griffin, Bernard Williams, and R.M. Hare. McMahan has yet to make a decision about the offer.

Dan Kaufman, who had been barred since March for unspecified reasons from the University of Colorado, where he is associate professor of philosophy, is no longer “banished” from campus. Story here.

Tamara Keith, NPR’s White House correspondent, majored in philosophy and recently returned to her alma mater, Berkeley, to speak to graduating philosophy majors there. Story here.

…for good reasons? How about more? That’s a finding of a recent survey conducted at over 100 British universities. So do we add this to the list of reasons to major in philosophy?

At the suggestion of a friend I am creating a new page at Daily Nous for people to list their successes finding employment outside of academia. The idea of the page is to, first, show readers what some of the alternatives to academia are and give them a sense of their options, and second, to more accurately reflect the reality of the philosophy job market. So if you..

Over at the Justice Everywhere blog, Anca Gheaus (Sheffield) takes up the question of whether the practice of asking for, reading, and giving weight to reference letters as part of our hiring decisions is on balance good or bad. She says bad, looking at the ways in which the practice of soliciting and relying on letters of recommendation reinforces the influence of ..