Heap of Links

"The humanities are subversive" -- what a prof at a science-oriented school tells his students about why they should care about the humanities
An online magazine the contents of which is viewable only on devices not connected to the internet -- an interesting response to the distractions of online reading (via Nautilus)
What is rationality and why is it valuable? -- a discussion of "The Value of Rationality" by Ralph Wedgewood (USC)
To reduce the risk of moral catastrophes, should society hire lots more philosophers? -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) is somewhat skeptical
"Odysseus texts Penelope to let her know that he’s running late." -- Classical tragedies that could have been prevented with smartphones
Chico the Philosurfer has a series of videos aimed at bringing philosophy to high school students and others -- he's a former teacher at a prep school in California
"Let me admit up front that, until this interview, I hadn't thought much at all about disability's relations to philosophy" -- Stephen Yablo (MIT) is interviewed at Discrimination and Disadvantage
"We can never really be post-truth" -- Simon Blackburn (Cambridge) interviewed at Vox
"Professors with voices critical of dominant ideologies have long been targets" -- Jason Stanley (Yale) interviewed about fascism and anti-intellectualism
To really expand the canon, philosophy needs not just more historical texts but "a way into them" -- Lisa Shapiro (Simon Fraser) on the importance of secondary literature on non-canonical figures
"The reason to cultivate hope in uncertain times is Kant's reason: we have a duty to work for the improvement of our societies, but energetic action to serve the public good is not possible without hope" -- an interview with Martha Nussbaum (Chicago)
18th Century fan art by Jacob Böhme enthusiasts -- who is going to make a pop-up book of your philosophy?
A philosophical appreciation of the hip-hop magazine "The Source" -- from Lawrence Ware (Oklahoma State)
Avital Ronell (NYU), a professor of German and Comparative Literature known for work in contemporary Continental philosophy, is found to have sexually harassed a male student -- NY Times looks at the case and a now infamous letter from other academics defending her
What is media impartiality? -- Joe Mazor (LSE) offers an account
"The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood" by Tommy Curry (Texas A&M) is one of the winners of the American Book Awards -- awarded by the Before Columbus Foundation
"An incident of sexual harassment occurred at the annual American Society for Aesthetics conference last November. ... I am the accuser."
A philosopher is writing a book composed of "Batman slapping Robin" memes and commentary thereon -- the author is Simon Evnine (Miami), and he's blogging about it
What's going on when people preface their remarks with phrases like, "as a [member of some demographic group]"? -- Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) takes a look
The ethics of miscarriage, reproductive loss, and fetal death -- Kathryn Norlock (Trent) on Radical Philosophy Radio
"Historians [of philosophy] will chide you for claiming something about the past that they are happy to claim about the present" -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) on "myths in the history of philosophy"
Novel teaching practices in philosophy courses -- share yours
Black Mirror & Philosophy: The Syllabus -- as if philosophy itself weren't disturbing enough!
The costs and benefits of philosophical argumentation -- Stephanie Kapusta (Dalhousie) is inteviewed on the discursive norms of obligation, trans* issues, feminist philosophy, and more
"We would rather secretly believe we are special than confront the real consequences of the paradox" -- ruminations on Fermi's Paradox from astrophysicist Milan Ćirković (University of Novi Sad)
Do Parfit’s “Harmless Torturers” hang out on social media? — Paul Bloom and Matthew Jordan think so
"The accused harasser is on the program" -- the American Society for Aesthetics has new discrimination and harassment policies but some have raised concerns about its upcoming meeting
What is it to be fit? -- Self Magazine interviews philosophers Samantha Brennan (Guelph) and Tracy Isaacs (Western)
Are universities trying to do too much? -- a professor and an administrator agree on the answer: yes
"Academic philosophers are slow to accept outsiders as thinking with the depth and rigor that they expect from their peers" -- Tommie Shelby (Harvard) on the philosophical thought of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Enraged by idiots? -- maybe they're not idiots
"I'm really very proud to be following on in the footsteps of people like Peirce and James and Dewey, even" -- Simon Blackburn (Cambridge) talks about truth
Feminism and philosophy -- Elinor Mason (Edinburgh) is interviewed as she prepares for her upcoming show at the 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Ethics vs. Batman -- action, intention, and responsibility (via Paul Bloom)
A venue for "in-depth discussion of scholarly works published within the last year" in the History of Modern Philosophy -- check out The SGIR Review
Buy Thoreau's house: 6 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, 3-car garage, updated kitchen -- They even quote Thoreau in the sales blurb. Yours for just $3 million (via Carol Hay)
Moroccan government reintroduces philosophy into its high school curriculum -- it had been removed in 2017 following controversy over its content
The Western canon "challenges both the political left and the political right" -- argues David Lay Williams (DePaul)
When is a ban on the development of technology the wisest course? -- a balanced yet frightening look at a possible future with widespread facial recognition technology
A philosopher is helping develop appealing diets for cancer patients and others with altered taste -- Barry Smith (UCL) is known for his work on the senses
Originality in philosophy is "nothing but the reformulation of theses or arguments" -- but that's not a dismissal, as Martin Lenz (Groningen) explains
The Nietzsche-inspired playlist -- a lot of heavy metal, plus some... David Bowie?
DC and Maryland have a philosophy-trained law professor to thank for a decision allowing their anti-corruption lawsuit against Trump to proceed -- John Mikhail (Georgetown) was mentioned 17 times in the decision
"Researchers who leave academia are not failed academics" -- what to do to change perceptions and prepare graduate students for professional careers outside academia (via Branden Fitelson)
"Whether an influence is manipulative depends on how it is being used" -- Robert Noggle (Central Michigan) on the difference between persuasion and manipulation
How to teach usually neglected women philosophers by showing them as "active participants in the philosophical dialogues of their era" -- new teaching materials from Project Vox
"The Good Place," NBC's philosophy-centered sitcom, has a podcast (via Philosophy Matters)
"It is not the transition from premises to conclusion that is often at fault but the premises themselves." -- Gerald Dworkin on the need to adjust critical thinking courses in light of current information technology and its abuses
Philosophy begins with doubt, some say, but what is doubt? -- Andrew Moon (VCU) introduces his view of doubt using ants (see the fuller argument in the linked paper)
"Though some think that Western philosophy has entered a golden age, others of us fear that it may have ended, that there is and will be no next member of the series after Cavell, after Lewis, after Derrida" -- Abe Stone (UC Santa Cruz) on lessons learned from Stanley Cavell
Over 20 interviews with philosophers on philosophy of action -- at the Philosophy of Action website (via István Zárdai)
Against trends, this university just last semester launched a philosophy major -- it is based in UC Merced's Cognitive and Information Sciences Department
Academic books are not meant to be read cover to cover -- they are meant to be "gutted" or "broken"
A philosophy PhD student at Oxford takes on the pseudo-science of anti-Semitism -- but would it have been better to leave it ignored? (via Benjamin McKean)
"We have the aspiration to the domestic rule of law, an international arena where it is only ever partly at work, and the problem of what happens---literally and figuratively---at the border between the two" -- Jacob Levy (McGill) on the Trump administration's battle against the rule of law
"I do remember the surprise I felt at her anger. I remember expecting her to understand." -- the ethics of privacy-violating art (via Michael Spicher)
From Trolleyology to vaccination policy -- can the former help us understand the latter? (via Danielle Wenner)
Watercolor and ink chibi-style portraits of philosophers -- by Yuzuko Nakamura (via Liam Kofi Bright)
"There’s no reliable way to separate free will from luck." -- The Boston Globe takes up questions of luck, freedom, and criminal law (via Gregg Caruso)
Is the key to further advances in artificial intelligence teaching machines about causation? Is a clue to their autonomy their engagement in counterfactual reasoning? -- a pioneer in AI talks about possible next steps for the field
"An unfortunate side effect of democracy is that it incentivizes citizens to be ignorant, irrational, tribalistic, and to not use their votes in very serious ways" -- an interview with Jason Brennan (Georgetown) who discusses his "attempt to correct for that pathology while keeping what’s good about a democratic system"
An invention to solve the trolley problem -- from SMBC
Is the passage of time an illusion? -- Huw Price (Cambridge) and Alison Fernandes (Warwick) discuss time with physicist Erik Verlinde
Students are required to attend three Phish shows during the course -- in the philosophy of Phish course taught by Stephanie Jenkins (Oregon State)
Some instruments used to understand conservatism may, in a way, beg the question -- a look at the social science of political identity, in New York Magazine
"Deciding what we eat and why is very much a reflection of our character" -- Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY) on the Stoic case for vegetarianism
"Your dissertation will be the longest and most thorough thing you've ever written. That's all." -- Check out "Dr. Eric's 3-Step Remedy" to get your dissertation moving
"Historical evidence regarding the influence of philosophy on science is overwhelming" -- physicist Carlo Rovelli at Scientific American
Discovered under the hardened lava of Vesuvius, the 2000 blackened papyrus scrolls are "the only intact library known from the classical world," and were thought mostly unreadable -- until now
The Jean-Paul Sartre welcome mat -- you know what it says (via Nigel Warburton)
Skepticism about some forms of service-learning in philosophy courses -- "Diverting attention away from theoretical concerns in an effort to make philosophy ‘relevant’ will instead make it redundant and irrelevant," argues Spencer Case (Colorado)
"The logic puzzle you can only solve with your brightest friend" -- can you figure it out?
Women thinkers in antiquity and the middle ages -- a 10-lecture series by Peter Adamson (KCL/LMU) on YouTube
Of all the possible titles for a guide to the poisonous plants of Virginia, they chose "The Socrates Project" -- further evidence that philosophy is in, right?
What is meat? -- if you're interested in philosophy of language, philosophy of science, ethics, and food, dig in
How evidence, theory, models, simulations, probability, and values factor into climate science -- Eric Winsberg (USF) in conversation with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
"Love and envy thrive in the same conditions of similarity and equality... Is that as bad as it sounds?" -- it depends on the kind of envy, argues Sara Protasi (Puget Sound)
To credibly and responsibly call Russia on its electoral interferences, we need to establish multilateral norms for such interference in general, and to do that, we need to be honest about what the US itself has done -- Jack Goldsmith (Harvard) discusses some "uncomfortable questions"
"If we’re not careful, we will be living in an entirely synthetic age," and we will have lost something very valuable: "the world outside our control" -- an interview with Christopher Preston (Montana-Missoula)
Wonder Cupboard is a new philosophy and history of science podcast aimed at non-specialists -- the latest episode asks: "why does science work?"
A philosophical project on powerlessness aims to change the care of terminally ill patients -- Béatrice Han-Pile (Essex) is interviewed about the work she has done with healthcare professionals
"We feel shame when something happens to make us feel like we’re no longer ourselves" -- Krista K. Thomason (Swarthmore) on how shame is about our identities
"Transwomen are to women as adoptive parents are to parents" -- is this a useful analogy? Sophie Grace Chappell (Open U.) thinks so.
Interviews with over 20 philosophers who each do some form of public philosophy -- at Engaged Philosophy
"Most of all, we feel like a bad joke... like impostors.... Why, from the top of a nasty gender hierarchy, should we feel so risible?" -- "What Is It Like To Be A Man?" by Philip Christman (Michigan)
"Psychology research by philosophers is robust and replicates better than other areas of psychology" -- a nice write-up of recent work, posted about here in May, on reproducibility in experimental philosophy
Martha Nussbaum discusses emotions, politics, philosophy, feminism and more -- in an interview at Moment
Four factors that explain how "Aristotelian metaphysics can be scientifically defensible" -- from Tim Crane (CEU)
Want to help transcribe letters by David Lewis on a variety of philosophical topics? -- Manchester's David Lewis Project is looking to "crowdcraft" some work
When philosopher Joel Kupperman (now emeritus at U Conn) was a kid, he was "the most famous prodigy in America" -- his childhood is now the subject of a graphic novel by his son, Michael Kupperman (via Benjamin McKean)
"Is the concept of being 'philosophically interesting' something other than a fancy way of re-stating one’s personal intellectual tastes?" -- one of several questions Ethan Mills (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga) asks at his blog, "Examined Worlds"
"The very atmosphere in which we move and breathe deprives us of the perception we need to recognize our predicament" -- reflections from Rochelle Gurstein on what we lose when we lose our privacy
"The people I know who have [been] the most successful in the profession have indeed been, by and large, those who developed good relationships" -- from an entry in the "Mid-Career Reflections" series at The Philosophers' Cocoon
"Socially-centered virtue ethics" -- Sebastian Purcell (SUNY Cortland) on what the Aztecs contribute to moral philosophy
"I would require all students to take two philosophy courses---one in their first year and another just before graduation" -- psychologist Howard Gardner (Harvard) on why philosophy is an important part of college education
"Until viewers do become better interpreters of photographic portraits, Pyke’s portraits will not always serve the public image of philosophers, and philosophy, well." -- Michael Newall (Kent) takes a critical look at Steve Pyke's portraits of philosophers
Are you opposed to meritocracy and the institutionalized celebration of genius? -- here's a list of readings that may convince you to be, curated by Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)
"An NHS doctor is teaching philosophy to eight and nine-year-olds in the hope of safeguarding their mental health" -- using Legos, costumes, conversations, and movies to give kids the skills to think clearly
The acclaimed anime of Miyazaki and the later thought of Heidegger -- Edward McDougall (Durham) on what we can learn about technology, nature, and transformation, by looking at them together
Are people who think we lack free will more likely to behave immorally? -- Surpisingly, no, according to a new study
"Facial recognition technology poses serious and imminent threats to civil liberties and human rights." -- philosophers & other academics make the case in The Guardian
Electoral reform, John Rawls, and... Dr. Who? -- Stephen Tweedale (Simon Fraser) is thinking philosophically about British Columbia's upcoming referendum
You'd think that Scientific American would be a publication that respects expertise -- so why do its editors choose to publish error-riddled columns on philosophy by Michael Shermer?
"Our moral relations to people are different from our moral relations to the other animals... -- But we have reason for treating what is good for an animal as good absolutely," says Christine Korsgaard (Harvard) in Prospect Magazine
Love, humor, and the good life -- Mark Alfano (Delft) on why we look for a sense of humor in potential mates
"If we measure the danger to our institutions by the number of disagreements they must manage, then diversity is dangerous. However, disagreement can also protect us from danger." -- Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) offers a clear-eyed and empirically-informed account of the value of diversity
"Human anomalies receive little or no attention in philosophy, because they destabilize those deeply embedded conventions of thought in the field that undergird most of the research that goes on in it." -- an interview with philosopher and artist Adrian Piper, a self-described "anomaly", about her ideas and art, on the occasion of her MOMA retrospective.
The political philosophy of time -- Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) talks with Elizabeth Cohen (Syracuse) about her innovative "The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice"
"Everyone knows about grade inflation, but this is GPA distortion, and few people looking at a student’s GPA know it happens" -- research by philosophy professor David Meeler (Winthrop) on grade forgiveness, discussed at The Atlantic
"I thought I would die. I assumed I would die... because if the symptoms didn't kill me outright, I'd kill myself." Travis Rieder (JHU), who has a bioethics research program on the ethical and policy issues surrounding America’s opioid epidemic, discusses his personal experience with opioid withdrawal and its lessons
"You need to be able to disagree, even strongly, with people and still respect and even trust them. This means thinking them people of good will who are trying, as you are, to solve problems, [but] there are limits" -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) interviewed about fear, trust, and hope in today's political climate
The philosophy of Mexicanness -- an excerpt from a 1951 essay by Emilio Uranga, introduced by Carlos Alberto Sánchez (San José State) & Robert Eli Sanchez, Jr. (Mt. St. Mary's, LA)
Don't raise the significance level; acknowledge the significance of Bayes -- David Papineau (KCL) explains Bayesianism and why it is important for addressing today's replication crises
Avital Ronell (NYU), accused of sexually harassing a male philosophy student, has horrible friends -- here's an article about that stupid letter they wrote in support of her, including their pathetic defenses of it and their bizarre conspiracy theories
The time before dystopia -- Is there a lesson in its omission from most dystopian fiction?
Waiting for a response from a philosophy journal? There’s an app for that. — from Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto), a little app that displays wait time forecasts and data from the APA Journal Survey
How to give a good gift -- Jennifer J. Rothschild (Florida) on giving gifts well
"Feminists should challenge the ways patriarchy and fear violently constrain the ways being a woman can be embodied and enacted" -- Aaron Jaffe (Juilliard) on recent discussions in philosophy about trans women
A bet made 20 years ago, for a case of fine wine, over whether, within 25 years, someone would discover a specific signature of consciousness in the brain -- Christof Koch, a neuroscientist, bet in favor. David Chalmers bet against.
Philosophy illustrated, New Yorker Style -- in the actual New Yorker, by Edward Steed
Two new operas: one about Walter Benjamin and one about Hannah Arendt -- debuting in Germany this season, and reviewed in the NYT
"Philosophy is a social institution with its own set of hierarchies, vested interests, and professional norms which can be quite orthogonal to truth, knowledge, and justice" -- Robin Zheng (Yale-NUS) interviewed about her recent work on contingent labor and gender in academia
"But new to me is this fresh, rude thought: This is it." -- Philosopher and poet Brook J. Sadler (USF) is the 2018 Spring Poetry Winner at Causeway Lit
Part of the practical value of philosophy, say, for businesses, is that it fosters "perceptive thinking" -- the "the art of... getting inside what something is, of assessing the web of relations that constitute a thing."
"Plato's Lair" is an immersive installation by Peter Hanmer -- and winner of the 2017 Gillian Dickinson North East Young Sculptor competition
The phrase "necessary and sufficient" is often misused by scientists -- and the result is sloppy neuroscience
The "Ask-A-Philosopher" table -- a wonderful example of public philosophy
"Access to the general public, granted by institutions like television networks, newspapers, magazines, and university lectures, is a finite resource" -- what is the just way to apportion that resource? Bryan Van Norden on the right to an audience
Philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo (Georgetown) is also a musician -- do yourself a favor and check this out
There's no reason to believe in homeopathic medicine -- yet might there be a reason to allow NHS doctors to prescribe it? John Worrall (LSE) considers the question
Utilitarians try to ruin the World Cup -- or perhaps this is a reductio of utilitarianism?
The reversal of the Flynn effect -- what explains it?
Favorite philosophy article titles -- add yours
The Aristotle Menu -- developed by gastronomy professor Giorgos Palisidis, it has been served at 17 places in the Chalkidiki area of Greece
Swedish university libraries will stop their subscriptions to Elsevier journals as of June 30th -- the publisher refuses to meet the open-access demands of the library consortium (via Sebastian Lutz)
What is public philosophy, anyway? -- "It should be philosophy, in that it uses philosophical techniques, methods, and concepts. It should also be in the public interest, in that it addresses issues of civic import and in ways that are accessible to the general public."
"A deeper knowledge of philosophy would have lessened the need to go through some of the experiences I did to learn what I learnt. It would have made me better at my job." -- a soldier on how philosophy can help in battle and its aftermath
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a sham -- undisclosed acting and coaching in one of the most famous psychology experiments
Hans Sluga (UC Berkeley) has been blogging -- here's one entry on political philosophy as a "diagnostic practice"
Google needs help with the metaphysics and ethics of causation -- Ryan Jenkins (CalPoly) in The Washington Post
The luxury philosophy weekend getaway -- for people interested in talking philosophy during "sangria brunches, sundowners under the pear tree, and nightcaps by the fireplace"
The Time Project -- a collection of essays on time by painters, sculptors, musicians, filmmakers, curators, and a neuroscientist, to be published in Nautilus over the next month
More evidence that philosophy is "in": you'll be able to verbally spar with Socrates in the new Assassin's Creed "Odyssey" game -- "We wanted to make him feel different than every other quest-giver in the world because he did treat people differently and he thought very differently"
The aesthetics of music usually is focused on the listening, but what about the playing? -- Mary Beth Willard (Weber State) on how "there’s just something gorgeous about the feeling when the fingering, after lots of practice, becomes natural."
Friedrich Nietzsche or Janelle Monáe? -- can you guess who said what? (via Jean Kazez)
On productivity and types of careers in philosophy -- Schliesser replies to Aboulafia
"I would still say to anyone who might be considering getting a philosopher as a father, don’t do it!" -- philosophers on fatherhood, in the NYT
"Our political divisions... now run so deep as to subvert our attempts to explain the dangers they pose" -- Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) on why "we ought to give up the idea that there is such a thing as fake news"
There has been more forced "eugenic" sterilization recently than you might think -- and the chair of a philosophy department signed off on some of it. Robert Wilson (La Trobe) explains.
DN readers can get 20% off tix for the big HowTheLightGetsIn philosophy festival -- just use the code "DNous20" at checkout
"The hand of Kant lies behind both Bohr and Kuhn." and it's Kant who "pulled off the grandest intellectual hocus-pocus in scholarly history" -- Tim Maudlin (NYU) reviews a pair of popular books on science and philosophy
Business Ethics Quarterly issues "Expression of Concern" over self-plagiarism case (via Michael Dougherty)
"Neither a victory for the right wing nor a tragedy for the left wing, but a call to both sides of the culture wars to cool off and do better." -- John Corvino (Wayne State) on the gay wedding cake case decision (via What's Wrong)
"Every well informed empiricist should be a standpoint epistemologist" -- so argues Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)
Unpopular opinion: philosophy edition -- Elizabeth Piccuito (Maryland) gathers some examples
Is philosophy as a profession harmed by findings that show that those who study moral philosophy are no more moral than anyone else? -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR) takes up the question
“So, what are you working on?” "Nothing." -- Mitchell Aboulafia (Manhattan College) on "the productivity syndrome" in philosophy
Moral inquiry, moral change, and lessons from history -- Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan) on the Examining Ethics Podcast
Rawls's real concern: "Can a society committed to the freedom and equality of its citizens... arrange social institutions [to] reliably cultivate within persons the attitudes and dispositions required for social justice?" -- William Edmundson (Georgia State) talks with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) about Rawls, the "reticent socialist"
"When the government or any other external power intervenes... in the university to mandate or censor its curriculum... its standards, then the autonomous judgment of the faculty is undermined, and knowledge is restricted and distorted" -- Judith Butler (Berkeley) on academic freedom
Do you dismiss x-phi work on folk intuitions because such intuitions are merely quick, unreflective responses? -- If so, then these x-philosophers have a new study for you
Do we have the right to believe whatever we want to believe? -- No, says Daniel DeNicola (Gettysburg)
Aristotle, Plato, and Thales are trending -- as baby names
"'How do we approach these [ancient Indian] texts scientifically and critically?' The answer was, 'Obviously not as Indians read them, for Indians never developed scientific, critical thinking.'" -- Vishwa Adluri (Hunter College) on Indology and the philosophical and ethical dimensions of interpretation (via Bharath Vallabha)
"We magnify our powers through trust in others, and we atrophy them through distrust. The solution to broken trust caused by gun violence may be investing more trust in each other, which is intuitive and counterintuitive at the same time." -- Mavis Biss (Loyola Maryland) in The Stone at The New York Times
"I’m not sure that philosophy as we know it has a future" -- an interview with Jürgen Habermas
"Dismissive claims by famous physicists that philosophy is a useless intellectual exercise... seem to start from the false assumption that philosophy has to be of use for scientists" -- Michela Massimi (Edinburgh) is interviewed on the occasion of her receipt of the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal
Why do we need philosophers in order to adequately study character? -- "philosophers can be helpful in contributing... conceptual clarity and precision" and "psychology by itself can’t tell us what the virtues are," says Christian Miller (Wake Forest)
"If you say 'We know a movement isn’t being silenced because it’s got lots of supporters, is widely discussed, and has popular leaders' then you’re mixing up the numerator and the denominator" --interesting thoughts on silencing
A philosophy professor who moonlights as a mind-reader -- a profile of Alexander George (Amherst College), his act, and its connection to his teaching
"Sometimes we do want to ‘win’ an argument and convince our opponent. But too much focus on this may lead to something of value being lost, such as the deep understanding of the other that can come through conversation." -- Christina Easton (LSE) on public discourse
Why all theories of consciousness are question-begging -- "All general theories of consciousness commit to the falsity of some view against which there is no currently available decisive argument. They thereby commit beyond the evidence," argues Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR)
A book co-authored by a philosophy instructor-turned-psychologist is a best-seller in Japan -- it is called, "The Courage To Be Disliked"
"Peterson offers no effective antidote to the problem of the toxic masculine despair he reinforces and dignifies, having misrepresented it as a general and hence presumably equal opportunity crisis of Being." -- Kate Manne (Cornell) reviews Jordan Peterson's "12 Rules"
"A complete 100-percent-provable guarantee" that self-driving cars won’t crash into trees, traffic, etc. -- based on a problem posed in 1900 by David Hilbert called "sum of squares"
"People often say that philosophy has a lot to offer, and I think it’s true. But it has a lot to offer only if it’s participating alongside other people who have a lot to offer; listening as much as talking" -- an interview with Julian Baggini at Epoché
A single page of Marx's draft of Capital sells for over $500,000 -- buyer rumored to be Fulvia Morgana
The beginnings of a movement to stop relying on student evaluations of teaching -- and replace them with peer observation and more holistic teaching evaluation systems
"It’s pretty embarrassing to our profession that students can read, say, 500 or even 1,000 pages of material and come away thinking that the first time a woman had anything to say of any importance in philosophy was in 1970" -- an interview with Andrew Janiak (Duke)
Philosophy journal data analyzed, with attention to differences between information from author surveys and the journals themselves -- by Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto)
"That which escapes the sciences lies at the heart of the humanities, and the reverse is also true... they’re not rivals" -- OUP's Peter Ohlin interviews NYU's Richard Foley on the subject of academic research
"One of the norms governing ordinary conversation is that to disagree too much is to be disagreeable" -- but what if "disagree" was pretty much your job description (ahem, philosophers)? Jonny Thakkar's paean to pains in the arse.
How can A be convicted of murdering B when B was killed not by A but by C, and C's killing of B was found to be justified, i.e., not a murder? -- Zachary Hoskins on an unjust prosecution and sentencing
Where philosophy of perception meets applied ethics -- a fascinating look at visual phenomenology and virtual reality from Michael Madary (Johannes Gutenberg U., Mainz)
An infectiously enthusiastic, witty, and ebullient romp of a vendetta -- Philip Kitcher on Errol Morris on Thomas Kuhn
Defining "fake news" -- Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) give it a shot
An excellent ethics exam question -- from Lewis Powell (Buffalo)
"Restrictive laws have a unique capacity to change the social meaning of a dangerous activity" -- so should we ban minors from purchasing items high in added sugar? Theodore Bach (Bowling Green - Firelands College) thinks so.
On calling immigrants "animals" -- David Livingstone Smith (New England) on dehumanizing language, on WNYC
The idea of a course on African, Latin American, and Native American philosophy raises lots of questions -- "but I do think that engaging in a detailed way with this work... helps us to think more about what philosophy is and ought to be," says Alex Guerrero (Rutgers) (p.4)
The moral dilemma at the center of "Avengers: Infinity War" -- Vox does some moral philosophy 101 at the movies
How to protect your epistemic environment -- Shane Ryan (Nazarbeyev U.) shares his ideas with Joe Humphreys in The Irish Times (via Daniel Brunson)
Near-death experiences -- a talk from John Martin Fischer (UCR), on the occasion of his appointment as a University Professor (he is the first philosopher in the UC system to hold that position)
Free speech, hate speech, respect, and human dignity -- Tina Botts (CSU Fresno) comments on the controversy regarding a professor's controversial tweets about Barbara Bush
In her new one-woman (and one-dog) show, Isabella Rossellini "transforms herself into Aristotle, Descartes, F.S. Skinner, Charles Darwin, and more, to deliver a vivid monologue about the brilliance of the animal kingdom" -- it's called "Link Link Circus" (via Jeff Sebo, who taught Rossellini in a course on animal minds & consulted on a draft of the script's philosophical material)
In modern investment terms, Thales bought call options on the olive presses and paid a small premium for the option -- why was this "one of the most important events... in market history"?
To say that "all accusations should be taken seriously and pursued" is "a way of saying we confer presumptive credibility on accusers, not that we simply believe without question every accusation" -- Linda Martín Alcoff (CUNY) on sexual assault, repentant sexists, and accountability
"Our common institutional setting induces social-epistemic similarities between philosophy and science, despite the cultural or methodological differences between us" -- an interview with Liam Kofi Bright (Carnegie Mellon)
A statue of Mary Wollstonecraft will be erected in Newington Green in north London -- it will be by artist Maggi Hambling
"I think that philosophy of science can be a great bridge between science and the public. It’s almost like science journalism at a very sophisticated level." -- Eric Winsberg (South Florida) is interviewed as part of the Dialogues on Disability series
Antiheroes (e.g., Tony Soprano, Walter White) are among people's favorite characters; what about antiheroines? -- Adriana Clavel-Vazquez (Hull) on aesthetics, imagination, and the "rough heroine"
Why honor matters -- Tamler Sommers (Houston) talks honor, dignity, courage, and philosophy with Robert Wright
The death of Wittgenstein's boyfriend almost drove him to suicide -- John Preston (Reading) on David Pinsent
Can the state recognition of marriage be justified? -- Clare Chambers (Cambridge) argues that it cannot
How philosophy became so important in Monaco -- a death, a princess, and a good teacher
"Philosophical and ethical discussion is impoverished" if certain issues are left out of the discussion of trans women -- Kathleen Stock (Sussex) lists several of them
New videos featuring Jenny Saul, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Nancy Sherman, Alexander Douglas, and others -- from the Royal Institute of Philosophy
The seduction model of online radicalization -- Mark Alfano (Delft) on when the internet says, "I know what you're thinking"
About the Bertrand Russell archives at McMaster University -- some details from librarian Vivian Marie Lewis (McMaster)
Administrative bloat? "Most of the growth in non-faculty employees is among lower-level student and academic affairs staff members, not among highly-paid deans" -- Robert Kelchen (Seton Hall) looks at the data (via MR)
How sexual harassment and assault distort scholars’ lives in the academy -- Janet Stemwedel (San Jose State) and others share their experiences
"Is anyone recording this particular juncture of the trolley route, and, if so, do I have access to that footage?" -- CIA nominee Gina Haspel is asked about the trolley problem
Should you be told if the "person" you're speaking with is really an AI? -- some of the ethical issues of advanced AI in the commercial domain
Interestingness: is it a fundamental value? -- Lorraine Besser (Middlebury) on "the sense of being engaged, enthralled, or captivated by a certain experience"
“I don’t like my mother,” a 38-year-old Nietzsche wrote to a friend. -- "In truth, at this point, Franziska Nietzsche probably didn’t particularly like her son either."
How did "imagination" become a hot topic in philosophy? -- Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna) tells part of the story
Where to find the left arm of Thomas Aquinas -- it's next to some unknown person's preserved heart
Experimental psychologists find that "responses to [trolley-like] hypothetical dilemmas are not predictive of real-life dilemma behavior" -- that such hypotheticals were not intended to generate predictions is only one problem with this research project
Filmmaker Errol Morris writes about Kuhn, Putnam, and Chomsky -- and includes excerpts from his interviews with the latter two
How "Spinoza's Dream," by David Nachmanoff, came to be -- it's an album on which each song is about a different philosopher
There is such a thing as character, but we mostly lack virtues and vices -- Christian Miller (Wake Forest) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
Do we have a right not to be lonely? -- Kimberley Brownlee (Warwick) considers the question
Why the lecture has a place "at the cutting edge of higher education" -- Amanda Fulford (Leeds Trinity) and Áine Mahon (UCD) defend the much-maligned form of teaching
"The photographs in the exhibition are powerful expressions of that 'strange heart', of Parfit’s highly distinctive intellectual and aesthetic temperament" -- a review of an exhibit of Parfit's photographs
Experimental philosophy: its various research programs, criticisms, and defenses -- a useful overview
Using fMRI on brains to detect happiness -- why that's a bad idea
The Boston Public Library has put high-res, zoomable scans of its collection of M.C. Escher prints online -- The detail. Woah.
"Can we intend to be misinterpreted?" and other interesting questions about language -- an interview with Peter Pagin (Stockholm)
“We should never feel that we have reached that point in life where we no longer have the responsibility to ask questions and then pursue answers” -- 81-year-old John Voelpel just earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of South Florida
How to explain the value of citations to your students -- from Dan Martin (Central Florida)
The role of imagination in eating, drinking, tasting -- Aaron Meskin (Leeds) thinks it involves "cognitive penetration"
So maybe Wittgenstein didn't invent the emoji -- Landon D.C. Elkind (Iowa) sets the record straight
A new tool: search the websites of philosophers with over 1000 followers on Twitter -- from TrueSciPhi
Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is famous, but it "was a step backwards, and its fame appears to rest partly on collective amnesia" -- during his formative years, Quine could have (but apparently didn't) consulted a widely read anthology "in order to find particularly neat statements of what came to be some of his central positions"
Philosophers on Kanye's recent philosophizing -- finally, something philosophers agree on
" We... ostracize and curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of Blessed God and with the consent of this entire holy congregation." -- Steven Nadler (Wisconsin) on which of Spinoza's ideas were responsible for that happening
Human artifacts don't last that long, geologically speaking -- so perhaps ours is not the first industrial civilization to have emerged on Earth (via Sammuel Byer)
Truth-conditional semantics, genetics, and race -- a brief look at the work of Quayshawn Spencer (U. Penn)
"Yeah, after I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, ‘Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?’" -- Sartre had a bad trip
"I think incivility is the kind of tool that would make us worse if we used it" -- thoughtful remarks from Liam Kofi Bright (Carnegie Mellon) on the importance of civility and "ostentatious decency"
Philosophers should be more willing to take up questions about the meaning of life -- says Kieran Setiya (MIT)
"People are mad at me again because they don't read carefully" -- a future classic
"Descartes was not nuts to ponder if everything he experienced was simply just a evil demon trying to troll him." -- media, information, knowledge, and the failure of expert systems (via Eric Winsberg)
A short story about transferring memories, with commentary by two philosophers -- at Slate (via Daniel Brunson)
"Dear Nigger Professor" -- George Yancy (Emory) shares and discusses the verbal abuse hurled at him following his NYT op-ed on racism
"Even if the corporation never hears your voice or your group’s, you will hear it. That voice needs to be one that you can respect." -- Brandon Hogan (Howard) on reasons for boycotts
How Wittgenstein invented the emoji -- “If I were a good draughtsman, I could convey an innumerable number of expressions by four strokes.”
"Total Eclipse of Descartes" -- a philosophical comedy performance / lecture from Rob Newman
"There is no campus free speech crisis: a close look at the evidence" -- we're at the debunking the debunking of the debunkers stage
Have a PopSocket on your phone? -- the invention of a former philosophy professor, its sales have increased "tenfold each year and delivered 35 million units in 2017 alone"
Search the websites of leading philosophy podcasts -- a new feature from TrueSciPhi
"He was wrong about the future of capitalism, he was wrong about what would happen when, after a revolution, workers took over government, he was wrong about the post-revolutionary decline of the coercive state..." -- Peter Singer on Karl Marx
Should we have fewer children in order to help the environment? -- Philippe van Basshuysen (LSE) and Eric Brandstedt (Lund) have a pair of posts on the questions
"If pleasures are so similar, why don’t people ever orgasm from pleasure associated with food or art? Actually some do." -- what do scientists know, and not know, about pleasure? (via Gerald Dworkin)
Why philosophy still matters -- Vermont Public Radio to host live call-in discussion with Terence Cuneo (UVM) and Kenny Walden (Dartmouth) today (4/24/18) at noon
"The question should not be how to exorcize even the hint of erotic ambiguity from the academic workplace, but rather how to allow our classrooms to remain safe spaces amid such ambiguities" -- a pair of Yale professors break the taboo on discussing the "erotic dimension of mentorship"
"One white reader said that his only regret was that he didn’t call me the N-word to my face and then beat me until I was half dead" -- George Yancy (Emory) is interviewed about the reaction to his NYT column on racism and the book that grew out of it
Repairing the culture of argument -- Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin (Vanderbilt) on what it takes
"Epistemic considerations matter for the legitimacy of democratic decisions" -- Fabienne Peter (Warwick) interviewed on epistemic democracy and more
Zeno: "Looking for someone willing to meet me halfway" -- dating profiles of antiquity's most eligible authors
How close are we to real-life Westworld-style robots? -- philosopher Jeff Sebo (NYU) and a variety of others take up the question at Vulture
The logic of time travel in the movies -- this fun video—-with film clips, helpful diagrams, and clear explanations—-was created with the help of philosophers Sara Bernstein (Notre Dame) and Ryan Wasserman (Western Washington)
"Lesser minds turned [postmodernism] into a crass attack on any claims to possess knowledge or truth" -- but in Jean-François Lyotard’s hands, it was "an often insightful analysis of the changing nature of the ownership and production of knowledge," says Julian Baggini
“Plato in L.A.: Contemporary Artists’ Visions,” a new exhibit at the Getty Villa, opened this week -- "every artist featured has made an effort to connect to and intellectually engage with Plato’s philosophy," says Getty director Timothy Potts
"JJ Redick's first slide posed the following to his teammates: 'Are we living in base reality?'" -- The 76ers discuss the simulation argument. Really (whatever that means). (via Seth Mayer)
Philosophical reflections on photography in the age of Instagram -- there is #nofilter on Daniel Star (Boston University)
Student evaluations (on Rate My Professor) suggest a bias in favor of "hot" professors and a bias against "difficult" ones -- but no significant gender bias
U. Wisconsin Stevens Point has the second-highest philosophy enrollment numbers in the Wisconsin System (Madison has just 4 more students) -- but they still might eliminate the philosophy program there
Philosophy students from Western Michigan University travel to Alaskan villages and towns -- to help people with their taxes
The movie "Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to be Free" will debut in the US this week -- "She initially sets out to form a “trinity” with Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Rée... but, not surprisingly, the plan goes south because both philosophers want to marry her."
Is this the first ever conference on ethics in mathematics? -- it's sponsored by the Cambridge University Ethics in Mathematics Society, which helps mathematicians "understand that their work, output, insight and labour can be used not only for good, but also for bad" (via James Franklin)
"Man Fears He May Never Trust Again After Treasured Picture Of Duck Turns Out To Be Rabbit" -- "How was I such a fool?" (via Bob Kirkman)
On Wittgenstein's views about science, language, mind, and more -- an interview with Bill Child (Oxford)
A philosophy instructor at Boston College gives her students extra credit for going on dates -- a film about Kerry Cronin's "Dating Project" is airing at theaters nationwide tonight (April 17) only
Some knowledge is embodied, and some embodied knowledge encodes social norms. What does that imply for changing problematic norms? -- Madeline Eller (Georgetown) explores the topic
"Loss aversion proponents have over-interpreted [Kahneman & Tversky's] findings.... Studies have been systematically misrepresented to reflect loss aversion, though they did not find it" -- via @DegenRolf, who comments: "loss aversion, the first law of behavioral economics, enters psychology's reproducibility crisis"
When it comes to mental illness, both the "rescue" mindset and the "blame" mindset are problematic -- better is "Responsibility Without Blame," argues Hanna Pickard (Birmingham)
What do we get when we combine utilitarianism and strong AI? -- an even stronger repugnant conclusion, argues Alexander Pruss (Baylor)
Two philosophers get fit, "the feminist way" -- Samantha Brennan (Guelph) talks about the book she and Tracy Isaacs (Western) wrote, in The Globe and Mail
Should we even be trying to get in touch with aliens? That and other ethical and linguistic issues in astrobiology -- Kelly Smith (Clemson) discusses this with others on NPR's Science Friday
"To a student who has never encountered a discipline before, the professor teaching the introductory course is the discipline... If the professor is dull, the student will think the same of the discipline" -- why the best teachers should teach intro
A new play that explores the ethical and personal ramifications of brain-altering technologies will debut next month -- it's written by philosopher Karola Kreitmair (Stanford)
Why are so many graduate students depressed? -- some speculations in response to a recent study showing 40% of grad students suffer from some form of depression
Could philosophical debate aid prisoner rehabilitation? -- Kirstine Szifris (Manchester Metropolitan) on her experiences teaching philosophy to prisoners
The significance of philosophy to mathematics -- Richard Zach (Calgary) points to good account
"What could a philosopher have to offer a modern business?" -- Scotty Hendricks covers some real-world examples
"Epistemic bubbles are rather ramshackle; they go up easily, and they collapse easily, too. Echo chambers are far more pernicious and far more robust" -- a fascinating look at the social and psychological elements of our epistemic situation and its discontents, from C. Thi Nguyen (Utah Valley)
The call for a new academic discipline: Machine Behavior -- we need to study not only machines' source code and architecture, but also ethics, social effects, and the "opacity caused by complexity"
Top 5 philosophy TAs ranked by how cool their leather jackets are -- "You just know anybody who pops that baby on in the morning can really break down Plato's Allegory of the Cave in a way that a freshman business major trying to fulfill their humanities requirement can really 'get.'"
The Blog of the APA begins new interview series on diversifying the philosophical canon -- first up: Peter Adamson (LMU)
What makes heavy metal music *heavy*? -- Jay Miller (Warren Wilson College)
The impact of artificial intelligence: a new era? -- interviews with Luciano Floridi (Oxford), Huw Price (Cambridge), and others
"Look, we find ourselves living under certain kinds of pressures to make the world sensible to ourselves. How much and what kind of theory do we need?" -- a lengthy interview with Bernard Williams (published in Cogito in 1994)
"When you think a sentence in your head, your brain sends signals to your mouth and jaw. MIT Media Lab's headset reads those signals with 92 percent accuracy" -- more "mind-reading" technology
"I feel the weight of these huge questions. And I know I can’t get the answers to them, and I find that oppressive" -- a profile of philosophy popularizer Bryan Magee
"We can all know that we have rights without having to check our genes" -- Jeff Sebo (NYU) on chimps, persons, and rights (NYT)
Frog and Toad in philosophy -- noted at JSTOR Daily
Philosophers on politics in the Trump era -- Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, Harry Frankfurt, and Joseph Heath on CBC Radio (via Dirk Felleman)
"As an academic, she devoted much of her career to social-justice activism and the philosophy of race and disability..." If she reneged on any claims she had made about... his capacity to give consent, she would be admitting... that she had become a vector of white, able-bodied supremacy — that that she was the boogeyman she had sworn to fight.
Descartes may have had "exploding head syndrome" -- which may be the condition with the greatest gap between how alarming it sounds and what it actually is
Prosblogion, the group philosophy of religion blog, has ceased operations -- Helen de Cruz (Oxford Brookes) eulogizes the site and discusses the future of online philosophical conversation
"Undercounting the undocumented might introduce bias into our public policy" -- Michael Blake (Washington) on the possible citizenship question on the 2020 census
The relatively unknown works of 18th century French philosopher Andre-Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval have finally been translated and published in English -- Lloyd Strickland (Manchester Metropolitan), who translated the works, calls Prémontval’s work "original and often provocative"
"There's much on the counter-insurgency battlefield not fully covered by the law...philosophy provided arguments to support the law and navigate issues not covered by it." -- a former army intelligence officer explains how philosophy can help soldiers cope in complex war zones
"Although part of our aim was to enhance the intellectual life of these kids, we had a simultaneous aim---a long game---to change how philosophy is viewed..." -- a detailed interview with Claire Katz (Texas A&M) on the pre-college philosophy summer camp she runs
Dennett responds to Strawson on consciousness, and Strawson replies -- in the NYRB
There's much of interest in this interview of Donald Davidson by Ernie LePore (from the mid-1980's) -- philosophy, life (including in the Navy, at war), and other tidbits, e.g.: Davidson and Leonard Bernstein were classmates who would play four-hand piano together
The "radical" way the department chair treated adjunct faculty -- "her goal was to get her adjunct faculty hired into tenure track positions" (via Justin Klocksiem)
"Ours is a species that dares to hope in the face of hopelessness; it is on this day that those hopes can be made to look even more forlorn." -- April Fools is the worst. Samir Chopra (CUNY) explains why.
A new series on Africana philosophy -- at the History Of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
"Given how biased these metrics are, institutions of higher learning simply cannot continue to allow them to influence tenure and promotion decisions" -- Carol Hay (U Mass Lowell) on student evaluations of teaching, in The Boston Globe
"What is the operation by which a self relates itself to its own self, transparently? Selfie." -- The Kim Kierkegaardashian twitter feed is now a book
"Seneca was torn. To the Stoics, contributing to public affairs was a critical duty of the philosopher. Could Seneca decline to serve because he disagreed with the emperor? Could he leave a deranged Nero unsupervised?" -- Stoicism and public service under a problematic leader
Argument mapping in an epistemology class -- Adam Elga (Princeton) shows us how it worked in his course
Against oversimplistic deployments of "trolley problems" -- "they are just tools for thought, not recipes for ready-made action," says Ian Bogost in The Atlantic (via Daniel Brunson)
"A philosopher can nudge and question, take leaders on uncomfortable journeys, even be a disruptive force" -- The Guardian writes about philosophers who've consulted for businesses
A philosophical look at Westworld -- Scott McLemee previews "Westworld and Philosophy" at IHE
"Seeing equality requires that you first believe it" -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) reviews "One Another's Equals" by Jeremy Waldron (NYU)
What does Spinoza have to do with transitioning towards environmentally sustainable habits? -- Andrea Sangiacomo (Groningen) explains
Moral philosophy shows how controversial issues like abortion are very complicated, and that can help public discussion of them -- Travis Rieder (JHU) is a guest on the Public Health United podcast
A few works by philosophers are on this list of "25 of the most expensive books you can buy on the internet" -- note that the one by Karl Marx is more expensive than the one by Adam Smith
Opaque power -- Åsa Burman (Stockholm) is interviewed about social ontology
Role playing games in philosophy class -- the students get into it, and end up doing more work for class, says professor Nicole Wyatt (Calgary)
You've heard of virtual reality, but what about virtual embodiment? -- how philosophers, computer scientists, and psychologists are using new technology to explore how we understand ourselves and the world, in The New Yorker
"The secret to happiness may be unhappiness" -- a neuroscientist looks at what unhappiness does to the brain
"The victims of the toxic idea that Americans with dark skin are biologically destined to be, on average, intellectually inferior to Americans of light skin are not the white men who have promoted it but the black Americans who have endured it." -- on the "courage" of those who complain about political correctness
The aesthetics of tattoos -- a new series by Roy T. Cook (Minnesota)
Julia Kristeva alleged to have been an agent of the State Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian National Army -- now emeritus at the University of Paris Diderot-Paris 7, she was recruited in 1971 and went by the alias "Sabina"
"Looking at Jeremy Bentham’s auto-icon I pondered why we are so scared of what is both natural and indeed necessary, if life is to continue" -- Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY) visits Bentham during his stay at the Met-Breuer
"This exposure compromises our privacy, to be sure, but it also compromises our freedom" -- Philip Pettit (Princeton/ANU) on social media (updated)
Concrete suggestions for increasing diversity in philosophy journals sought -- at this link and at an upcoming Pacific APA session
The endless process of error detection and error correction -- it's just good intellectual hygiene
The life and ideas of Andy Clark (Edinburgh) -- a lengthy profile in The New Yorker by Larissa MacFarquhar
A look at the PGR's board -- does its composition help explain the rankings?
What it is like for women in philosophy -- quotes from women in philosophy and academic publishing
Lazy ants, Melville's Bartleby, and tenured professors -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley) sees if they have anything in common, with illustrations by her sister, Julia de Bres (Luxembourg)
Issues with the PGR's rankings in Chinese Philosophy -- "the ranking yields a list that looks decidedly weird"
"Our society lacks an information ethics adequate to its deepening dependence on data" -- Colin Koopman (Oregon) on the need for "an ethics of data to be engineered right into the information skyscrapers being built today"
The central character in James Wood's new novel, Upstate, is a philosophy professor -- a mixed review at The Guardian
A philosopher takes a close look at Steven Pinker's new book -- Gary Gutting (Notre Dame) notes the "impressive positive case for the Enlightenment" which nonetheless "falls short" when it comes to philosophy
New learning outcome assessment for philosophy courses -- the "Meaning of Life" quiz
Derek Parfit, wearing a leather cape, standing on a frozen river, holding a camera, facing down an approaching ice breaker -- when Parfit led a field trip to the USSR in 1981
The nature of hope -- Adrienne Martin (Claremont McKenna) talks with Myisha Cherry (Illinois, Chicago)
Do babies imagine? How? And how could we know? -- Claudia Passos-Ferreira (NYU) asks about the development of mental imagery in infants
"One can manifest all of these traits [of intellectual humility] without in fact lowering one’s confidence in one’s beliefs at all" -- that Duncan Pritchard (Edinburgh) is sticking to his guns on this doesn't mean he is intellectually arrogant
"Oh, the shit you'll do after you're tenured" -- McSweeney's Seussifies tenure
Fascinating series of articles on robots and ethics -- from Evan Selinger (RIT)
"Once you start measuring people's job perfomance, they will switch to optimizing for what you’re measuring, rather than putting their best efforts into actually doing good work" -- is there a lesson in this for academia (via Pekka Väyrynen)
Traffic lights, but instead of illuminated circles, they have illuminated images of Karl Marx -- part of Trier's celebration of the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth
"It just blew my mind... that's like the coolest thing I've seen" -- the product manager for Atomic Skiing on his first philosophy course and how studying philosophy helped his career
A philosophy and politics undergrad at Pittsburgh is running for a seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives -- philosophy helps with "trying to understand how you need to set up the problem," says 20 year-old Jacob Pavlecic
"There’s more to come" -- William H. (Bill) Miller III, who donated $75m to JHU's Philosophy Department, in an interview in The Chronicle
"What a good society does is based on a different set of considerations and principles than what a good person does" -- Laurie Shrage (Florida International) on how to think about abortion
Philosophy of race discussion -- with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Priyamvada Gopal, and Nasar Meer
"The number of study places available in each discipline should be linked to labour market need" -- a proposal in Denmark with potentially dire consequences for the humanities
Frankfurt's conception of "bullshit" has never been more relevant --alas
William Jackson Harper (Chidi from "The Good Place") and Kwame Anthony Appiah team up -- to answer ethics questions on NPR's "Ask Me Another"
"There is nothing unethical about reneging on a temporary, contingent position to accept a tenure-track offer" -- that and other judgments about the ethics of backing out of academic job offers
Landmark moments for women in philosophy -- including an interactive timeline
Creating brains in vats -- mini-ones, for now.
More than ever, there is too much to know -- the rational move is to know which knowers have good reputations, and rely on them
Bid on a replica of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond (or click on the banner at the top of the page for other items, like a pencil from the Thoreau Pencil Factory)
Public philosophy: kinds, challenges, and ideals -- Caleb Harrison and Macy Salzberger (UNC) talk with Skye Cleary
What exactly is wrong with the alt-right's anti-Semitism? -- Jonathan Anomaly (Arizona) and Nathan Cofnas (Oxford) take a close look
"Monuments make the public forget as much as they facilitate remembering" -- Alessandra Tanesini (Cardiff) on how the psychology of memory is relevant to the ethics of monuments
"The product is 100% fatal," yet is aimed at providing its users with an indefinitely long life... later -- the latest mind-uploading venture (via Ben Hale)
Buzzfeed tells its vast readership: here are 37 philosophers you really should know about -- and they're all women
No one has an obligation to have sex with you, but... ...there are important moral & political questions to be asked about sexual desire, argues Amia Srinivasan (Oxford)
When there's a better option, no matter what you choose -- Larry Temkin (Rutgers) shows us just how common failures of "the Axiom of Transitivity for Better Than" may be
What is a moment? -- the physics, neuroscience, linguistics, and philosophy of time
New feminist philosophy curriculum at Oxford -- with two recent hires in the area and two more to come
Philosophy, its history, and its relationship to religion -- a discussion with Peter Adamson (LMU) and Carlos Fraenkel (McGill)
Animated film portrays the philosophy of Zhuangzi -- it's called "The Country of Summer Insects"
A philosopher's case against feminism -- a draft for an upcoming "left and right" philosophy reader
"Humanists: we need to tell deans and legislators---even if they will not listen---that the university can be many things, but without us, a university it will not be" -- a thoughtful essay on the value of the humanities by Justin Stover (Oxford)
Derek Parfit's photography will exhibited this coming May -- at Narrative Projects, an art gallery in London
What is the silliest claim ever made by philosophers? -- Galen Strawson (Texas) tells us
Philosophy of Art and the PGR -- "to get into the top group... it apparently positively helps if you have at most one or two aestheticians (rather than a confusing plethora)"
Meeting with each of your undergraduate students -- philosophy professor Hollace Graff (Oakton) leads a project to improve student retention
The first in a series of articles on philosophical theories of art and their influence on artists -- the philosophy of Plato and the art of Greg Lookerse, from Michael Spicher (BU Met)
How academics used their research skills and social media to investigate and fight pension cut plans in the UK -- Michael Otsuka (LSE) has been one of the most vocal critics
41 lectures from Oxford's "General Philosophy" course -- taught by Peter Millican
Is Plato “one of the most profound liberators" of women? -- Emily Wilson (U. Penn) on Mary Townsend (Tulane) on the "woman questions" in The Republic
Our probabilistic memory systems and our counterfactual imaginations -- Felipe de Brigard (Duke) discusses his work on the connection between them
"Our resident microbes orchestrate the adaptive immune system, influence the brain, and contribute more gene functions than our own genome" -- what does this mean for our understanding of the individual human self?
When is it permissible to have sex with conjoined twins? -- the runner-up essay for the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics, grad level, by James Kirkpatrick (Oxford)
Immigration and the natural lottery -- thoughts from Campbell Brown (LSE)
Trying to understand "academic mobbing" -- at Quillette
An empirically-informed account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception -- Susanna Schellenberg (Rutgers) is currently guest-blogging at Brains
An open-access symposium on John Martin Fischer's "Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will" -- in Science, Religion, & Culture
Can teaching philosophy to prisoners improve prison culture? -- Kirstine Szifris (Manchester Metropolitan) thinks so
Philosophical views of the relationship between one's self and one's desires are relevant to drug policy -- Brendan de Kenessey (Harvard) explains, at Vox (via Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin)
The Princess of Monaco, Charlotte Casiraghi, has co-authored a philosophy book -- "Archipel Des Passions" is about the emotions
"The question is whether the fact of his victimization has the significance of a moral excuse. We believe that it does not." -- Matthew Talbert and Jessica Wolfendale (West Virginia) on the moral responsibility of child soldiers
“We might be the highest-paid philosophers” -- Comedians Keith and Kenny Lucas, philosophy majors, on how "we’re actually using our degree for something"
“When you have an old sofa, everything settles into the bottom and you have to plump up the cushions... Well the same thing happened with Bentham” -- getting Bentham ready for his trip abroad
"Let your child know that a liberal-arts degree can be a great launching pad for a career in just about any industry" -- Michael Zimm, classicist-turned-digital-creative-strategist, in the Wall Street Journal
In defense of complaining -- philosophers discuss "Can't Complain" by Kate Norlock (Trent)
An interview with Bill Miller, the investor who recently donated $75m to JHU's Philosophy Department -- at the Blog of the APA
"What makes systematic philosophy more than mere coherentism?" The former's starting points must be connected to reality -- Schliesser on Chappell on philosophical expertise
"There is nothing uniquely Western about humanity’s attempt to understand the world and our place" -- Lloyd Strickland (Manchester Metropolitan) on diversifying philosophy
The pleasures of cooking -- a neglected area of aesthetics, delightfully explorered by C. Thi Nguyen (Utah Valley)
Reasons for being mindful of prestige bias in philosophy hiring -- from Helen de Cruz (Oxford Brookes)
"My workload had become inhumane" -- an academic explains why she physically collapsed on the job
"Scan newspapers for incidents of censorship at universities, then weave them together into a narrative, without paying attention to which kinds of universities you’re talking about and how many universities there are" -- how to write your standard declinist commentary about free speech on campus
Could artificial intelligences ever create real art? -- and if so, what needs to happen so that it can?
"Philosophical expertise seems compatible with being completely off the rails when it comes to the substantive content of one's philosophical views" -- Richard Yetter Chappell (York) on whether there's a reason to defer to more expert philosophers
Philosophy, language, and epidemiology -- work on harm and language by Lynne Tirrell (Connecticut) featured in Epidemiology Monitor
The trailer for the new movie, "The Young Karl Marx" -- called "both intellectually serious and engagingly free-spirited" by the NYT
A new biography of Alain Locke -- reviewed in the NYT
"Because of my anxieties, I have come to understand why I’m the philosopher I am, why I hold the views I do" -- Samir Chopra (Brooklyn/CUNY) on the philosophical dimensions of anxiety
"Serenade (after Plato's Symposium)" for solo violin, harp percussion, and string orchestra -- by Leonard Bernstein
Philosophers are "probably just as susceptible to post-hoc rationalization, maybe even more, than the rest of the population" -- Jonathan Ellis (UC Santa Cruz) and Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) explain
"Mill’s distinctive form of liberalism, with its emphasis on individual freedom from the confining effect of social norms, had a great deal to do with his relationship with Taylor" -- Sunstein on Hayek on Mill (from 2015)
Anger, forgiveness, and public philosophy -- Myisha Cherry (Illinois, Chicago) talks with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
Two philosophers "overanalyze science fiction to mine it for delicious philosophical concepts" -- the new "Philosophers in Space" podcast
A regularly updated calendar of ancient philosophy events and CFPs -- visit, subscribe, or follow on Twitter; created by Caleb Cohoe (Metropolitan State)
A "more scientifically interesting and empirically tractable" version of the problem of induction? -- Stuart Glennan (Butler Univ.) on when and why generalizations hold and fail
Inclusion, improvement, and robots -- Evan Selinger (RIT) on some of the moral and legal issues arising regarding increasingly sophisticated robots
An overlooked philosophical aspect of "The Good Place" -- what is Janet?
A philosopher and a bat scientist get together to discuss -- you know
APA board endorses statement condemning Polish law criminalizing references to Polish complicity in Nazi war crimes -- "keeping with the APA’s broader support for philosophers whose professional rights are at risk"
"However good one is at this, philosophical training will make you better" -- investor Bill Miller, on how philosophy affected his career
Hi-Phi Nation is a genius work of public philosophy; if you are not listening to it and telling everyone you know about it you should be -- and here's an interview with its creator, Barry Lam (Vassar)
Possible worlds, impossible worlds, and whether some things do not exist -- an interview with Franz Berto (Amsterdam)
Recent changes at the journal Nietzsche-Studien -- including new editors and advisory board members
"The podcast that gets philosophical about everything" -- a conversation-based philosophy podcast from Dustyn Addington (U. Washington) & Whitney Johnson
"The world's top expert on impostor syndrome..." (xkcd)
New "women in philosophy" posters -- from the APA
"The most common explanation was that they believed the person they’d given the electric shocks to... hadn’t really been harmed" -- an analysis of interviews conducted right after Milgram's famous experiment raise questions about its lessons
"Although we are drowning in bullshit, cleaning up the mess doesn’t require Herculean labor." -- Philip Kitcher (Columbia) on the varieties of bullshit in current politics and what to do about it
"There is something quintessentially human about nonsensical conversations" -- something we shouldn't forget when developing the linguistic capacities of artificial intelligence, says Mariana Lin
"Where there is natural talk of right and wrong actions, there is also talk of good people and assholes. You don’t have to be a virtue ethicist to be interested in these things" -- Nomy Arpaly (Brown) on Aristotle, cool dudes, and virtue
"The Soul of Wittgenstein" -- a new play
"The complexity, difficulty, and artistry of Plato’s dialogues" -- an interview with Jill Frank (Cornell)
Animated videos of Plantinga's arguments -- from Notre Dame's Center for the Philosophy of Religion (via Josh Seachris and Dean Zimmerman)
"A form of academic disparagement that counts as perfectly acceptable in our circles and yet simultaneously seems a perfectly apt description of itself." -- thoughts on a recent critique of critical studies from someone who was once "thoroughly convinced that continental philosophy was bullshit"
Philosophical approaches to tragedy -- and their connection to "philosophical temperament"
The student wrote a lengthy email to her philosophy instructor, "trying to convince her Australia, the country, does indeed exist" -- unfortunately this does not appear to be part of a clever lesson about epistemology or social ontology
“I think you’re much better than her. I think you’re a real philosopher.” -- Kate Manne (Cornell) interviewed on her ideas about, and experiences with, misogyny
"Mr. Trump is purposely using the term in an offhand way so as to trivialize it, empty it of its gravity" -- Eva Feder Kittay (Stony Brook) on "treason" in a letter to the New York Times
The philosophers who consult on "The Good Place" -- Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA) and Todd May (Clemson)
The 4th volume of Foucault's "The History of Sexuality" will finally be published -- French publisher Gallimard will release "Confessions of the Flesh" this Friday
Some pragmatism and early modern philosophy texts online -- Peirce, James, Emerson, Hume, Berkeley, and more, courtesy of P.D. Magnus (Albany)
Why was Quine dissatisfied with "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"? -- Sander Verhaegh (Tilburg) explains
So many interesting questions -- this year, Edge.org asks its respondents for questions, not answers
"Critical studies" is supposed to be normative -- so why, asks Joseph Heath (Toronto), is there so little explicit normative argumentation and so much "vituperativeness and rhetorical overkill"?
Philosophy-related political cartoons -- sketched at the Night of Philosophy
Human dignity is an important but relatively recent moral concept; where did it originate? -- no, not from Kant, says Remy Debes (Memphis)
A pre-publication draft of Descartes' "Meditations" -- found by Jeremy Hyman (Arkansas, Fayetteville)
"Underestimating the imagination is itself a failure of imagination" -- Saam Trivedi (Brooklyn College, CUNY) suggests philosophers take some field trips
Changes at the Blog of the APA -- Skye Cleary will be the new lead editor
A philosophy PhD student at the University of Colorado is seeking a seat in the state legislature -- Jay Geyer is running as an independent
"There’s something intrinsically self-defeating about getting things done" -- The New Yorker's Joshua Rothman looks at Kieran Setiya's (MIT) book on midlife crises
If Bart Streumer (Groningen) is right, there's no reason to listen to him talk about his book at this link -- on the plus side, there's no reason *not* to, either.
Why should gender be the state's business? -- Robin Dembroff (Yale) in the NYRB
"Philosophy of science... can help us be better scientists" -- say two scientists, writing in The Guardian
Why moral philosophers should be reading anthropology -- are you aware of the field's "ethical turn"?
What is political theory? -- a working definition and five tasks for it, at Digressions & Impressions
"Free will can be injured just like other human abilities" -- Micah Johnson on criminal behavior, brain injuries, and free will
"They are the mechanical realizations of much larger sets of institutional intentions, involving the plans of designers and the decisions of people" -- Michael Robillard (Oxford) on moral responsibility and killer robots
"Apologists for empire are [not] simply living in the past. They seek, rather, to rewrite the past as a way of shaping current debates. That makes it even more important that their ideas and arguments are challenged openly" -- Kenan Malik on the "Case for Colonialism" controversy
There's no crisis in the humanities -- rather, "the democratisation of higher education has broadened the portfolio of courses, to a decline in the share of degrees awarded in... humanities and...sciences. By any measure, the humanities have weathered the transition better."
Philosophy, public debate, and respectful engagement -- a discussion with John Corvino (Wayne State) and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
"I... want to help philosophers connect with popular culture in a way that we academic types often find difficult" -- an interview with Micah Tillman, host of the Top 40 Philosophy podcast
A collection of Simone de Beauvoir's love letters were just sold to Yale University -- by a lover of hers who was worried about efforts to erase him from her life story
Perhaps philosophical education should concern itself with "raising apprentices of listening rather than masters of discourse" -- Pablo Muruzábal Lamberti on listening and philosophical dialogue
Free speech on college campuses -- Gerald Dworkin tries to "complicate in a useful way the tensions in the debate"
The varieties of introductory philosophy courses -- a new series at the Philosophers' Cocoon
Illustrations of philosophical thought experiments -- from Helen de Cruz (Oxford Brookes)
Former FBI Director James Comey will be teaching "Ethical Leadership" at William & Mary -- Which case studies will be on the syllabus? “I have no comment on that."
"My approach to deciphering the Critique has been no different than to cracking a safe" -- "I was a bank robber until I read Kant"
"The challenge is to find a policy that copes with the market failures while conforming to moral commitments" -- Daniel M. Hausman (Wisconsin) on health policy in the U.S.
The philosophy of jokes -- a discussion with Jack Weinstein (North Dakota) and Al Gini (Loyola, Chicago) on Why? Radio
"U.K.’s immigration officers have denied a Pakistani humanist’s application for asylum after he failed to adequately answer questions about Plato and Aristotle" -- because his knowledge of humanism was "rudimentary at best," the gov't dismissed his fears of religious persecution in Pakistan
A collaborative book by Heidegger and Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida forms the basis of an exhibit at the Guggenheim Bilbao -- it includes lithographic stones on which the philosopher handwrote the text of his essay
"Artificial intelligence can now bullshit its way through conversations just as well as humans can" -- the technique is called "lexical acquisition through implicit confirmation"
Corrupt The Youth -- Briana Toole (Texas) discusses the philosophy outreach program she created
"People in the assessment world have known for some time that their work was not producing results. It is also apparent that most of them assumed that the reason it did not work was not their fault. It was your fault." -- It's not.
How philosophy makes progress -- look at the questions we ask, says Daniel Stoljar (ANU)
A new exhibition space dedicated to Portuguese philosopher Damião de Gois -- a modern structure inside an old church
"I’m sure that I, too, will be blamed for calling Mr. Trump a racist." -- George Yancy (Emory) on American's choice: "King's Dream or Trump's Nightmare?"
How should philosophy be taught in Jordan? -- "Currently, there is an ongoing heated debate in Jordan at the official educational level over teaching philosophy after it had been suspended decades ago due to political and ideological considerations"
Another philosopher is running for Congress -- Richard Winfield (Univ. of Georgia) is seeking the Democratic nomination for Georgia's 10th District
(more on Winfield's bid for office here)
"Philosophy, at its best, embodies a kind of cosmopolitan ideal... superficial distinctions between people are erased, and what remains are opportunities for peaceful collaborative effort in a transnational and transtemporal republic of letters" -- as we learn from a look at Carnap & Xunzi
A new "angry professor book project" -- from Kieran Healy (Duke)
At Google, "each and every team member must feel confident speaking up and making mistakes" -- two things philosophers have lots of experience with, no?
Questions about the philosophy of math -- answered by Alexander Paseau (Oxford)
My letter writer has died; what do I do? -- Miss Manners did not cover this
How utilitarian are you? -- test yourself on the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale
What would make anti-racist optimism rational? -- thoughts from Gina Schouten (Harvard), one of the new bloggers at Crooked Timber
"If I am both my children and my mother, if I carry traces of my sibling and remnants of pregnancies that never resulted in birth, does that change who I am and the way I behave in the world?" -- genetics and the separateness of persons
Does philosophy advance "through singular, brilliant, novel insights" or through "the grind" of small changes to "a vast, complex network of well defended, nearly fully formed positions"? -- Charles Pence (LSU) on brilliance and merit in philosophy (via Liam K. Bright)
"Colors are not properties of minds (visual experiences), objects, or lights, but of perceptual processes---interactions that involve all three" -- Mazviita Chirimuuta (Pittsburgh) talks about color at Nautilus
What's sold in the Metaphysical Supplies Shoppe? -- Occam's Disposable Razors, Cartesian Candles, and "some kinds of crystals and shit"
Philosophers at CEU introduce the basic issues in philosophy of perception -- in a brief and stylish video made by Jonny Hunter, a student there
Needed: "a robust political ethics of resistance" -- an interview with Tommie Shelby (Harvard) on ghettos, justice, and philosophy
White nationalists (and others?) don't appreciate that they are "beings not merely stamped by culture but creators of it as well" -- Roman Altshuler (Kutztown) at the Philosophical Salon
The Breakfast Club and belief in God -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) on trying to believe
Which philosophy videos (under 20 min long) posted on YouTube over the past year are the most popular? -- Wisecrack's productions are doing especially well
Style, evidence, genealogy, metaphilosophy, and other problems Indian philosophy faces -- an account from Christian Coseru (Charleston)
The logic community -- Greg Restall (Melbourne) wraps up his series of 12 things he loves about philosophical logic
"Women perceived a deontological man as... more desirable for long-term mating" -- and even as "short-term mates", the study found, "utilitarian men were undesirable" (via Nina Strohminger)
"Many puzzles about consciousness and qualia are based on flawed pictures of what such ‘things’ might be" -- an interview with Andy Clark (Edinburgh)
"I need not fear that the lecture will make the texts too easy; they remain full of possibility. And it is useful to remember how difficult it was for me when I read them for the first time." -- the case for lecturing more, from Adriel Trott (Wabash)
Gödel's 1939 unpublished lecture notes for a course in basic logic -- now published, by the Logical Society of Belgrade
Students pester women professors more (via FP)
A philosophy professor is running for Congress -- Randy Auxier (SIUC) seeks the Green Party's nomination
“She philosophized about vagueness—-and lived with it too” — a profile of the late Delia Graff Fara, in the New York Times
Experimental aesthetics -- a cookoff to test nominees for Sellars' "incompatible food triad"
"One of the reasons a lot of philosophers struggle with depression is that we spend so long sharpening our knives they cut deeper when we turn them on ourselves" -- long post on mental illness, philosophy, academic employment, and the late Mark Fisher (aka k-punk), from Peter Wolfendale
Aliveness -- Sean Kelly (Harvard) on a gift he received from Hubert Dreyfus
What to believe about credence -- an interview with Richard Pettigrew (Bristol)
Philosophy isn't the only discipline with journal editors resigning over the publication of controversial papers -- the author says his theory provides a solution to two of Hilbert's problems about infinite numbers
Family braces for philosophy major's return home -- "Samantha Lamothe, the youngest in the family, bought a new pair of headphones to help avoid any conversation with her big brother."
"Humanities and social science PhD's are not, on average, any more satisfied with academic jobs than non-academic jobs" -- some data, discussed at the Philosophers' Cocoon
The philosophical investigator -- "instead of locating missing wives or cracking unsolved crimes, he deals with missing souls and unsolved philosophical problems. He helps people to find their ideas again" (via Daniel Brunson)
"It’s only a very modern trend that philosophy and science are at all in any way divorced" -- a video interview with Branden Fitelson (Northeastern)
Derek Parfit, photographer -- a collection of his photos
Sharing consciousness -- craniopagus twins prompt questions about the mind and the self
Dude, where's my car? -- well, philosophy might help you find it (via Miguel F. Dos Santos)
Love and existentialism -- an interview with philosopher Skye Cleary
Five philosophical questions to ask about the "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" -- the BBC consults with John Donaldson (Glasgow), who teaches "Star Wars and Philosophy"
The social side of accident theory -- we shouldn't neglect "the social- and organization-level failures that sometimes lead to massive technological failures," says Daniel Little (Michigan-Dearborn)
The coffee habits of famous philosophers -- illustrated
The role imagination plays in the decision-making process -- it may explain "why we make irrational, unreliable choices as often as we do," says Dimitria Electra Gatzia (U. Akron Wayne College)
Fodor's critique of neo-Darwinism -- revisited in The New Yorker
"Just as we believe no one should live in poverty or have access to insufficient resources, the opposite is equally true: no one should have more than a defined amount of particular resources" -- says Ingrid Robeyns (Utrecht)
"Pickle" is a philosophy podcast for kids -- from WNYC and ABC (a version of the latter's "Short & Curly")
"Intentionally changing character is hard" -- Nomy Arpaly (Brown) on some of the difficulties of becoming a better person
Everything you've wanted to know about reference (and something you didn't want to know about fish) -- an interview with Eliot Michaelson (KCL)
"The princess and the philosopher both found themselves out of their depth in different ways" -- weeks before the premiere of the original Star Wars, Carrie Fisher hired a personal philosophy tutor
"There's more to being a good person than being a do-gooder" -- Larry Temkin (Rutgers), interviewed by Katrien Devolder (Oxford) on Singer, Parfit, and the ethics of altruism
"The Rap Guide to Consciousness" -- via Daniel Dennett, who calls it "wise, funny, accurate---and musical!"
"Sophia" is a new online philosophy magazine -- it's the creation of a group of former University of Glasgow philosophy students
Eurocentrism, racism, and philistinism in philosophy -- Daniel Kaufman (Missouri State) talks with Bryan Van Norden (Vassar College)
Epistemic vices -- an interview with Quassim Cassam (Warwick)
Alan White (Wisconsin-Manitowoc) is retiring -- he "perfected the topic-focused method of teaching Philosophy 101"
(He also wrote a lot of philosophy songs.)
Reddit AMA this morning (12/11/17) with Jonardon Ganeri (NYU Abu Dhabi) -- starts at 11am
What could possibly deter a tenured full philosophy professor from naming her harasser? -- read this to find out
A defense of lying to your kids about Santa Claus -- from Stephen Tweedale (SFU)
A philosophy PhD left academia to become a "pick-up artist" -- is that relevant to whether he ought to to be invited to philosophy conferences or contribute to edited volumes?
Experimenting with a real world version of the "bystander" part of the trolley problem -- with real trains, real tracks, real workers, & a real person at the switch (via Eddy Nahmias)
Today only: 1/2 off haircuts -- ok we may need more than today (via Mark Alfano)
"The myth of just intellectual allotment — of quality that invariably corresponds with moral merit — is worse than false: It’s dangerous" -- Becca Rothfeld (Harvard) on whether sexual predators can be good scholars (via Jennifer Frey)
Over 300 in-depth interviews with philosophers -- organized into "pretty rough" categories
A crowd-sourced survey of incidents of sexual harassment in academia -- to date, there are 19 different entries listing "philosophy" as the discipline (via IHE)
"He knows there’s sand and water and other facts about beaches. But he can’t conjure up beaches he’s visited in his mind, nor does he have any capacity to create a mental image of a beach" -- it's called congenital aphantasia
"A small step towards making AI systems less specialized" -- from the paper's abstract: "Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play" (via MR)
"We think that bees have experiences that feel like something to the bee. We don’t think the bees are aware of having experiences that feel like something to them." -- What is it like to be a bee?
When employers tell you what you can wear -- The BBC consults with Clare Chambers (Cambridge) and Anne Phillips (LSE) on when dress codes are reasonable
An interview with T.M. Scanlon (Harvard) (video)
"The theories of well-being that are most successful by the lights of philosophers are not the ones that are usable by the lights of scientists" -- Anna Alexandrova (Cambridge) on what to expect from theories of well-being
Would Aristotle unfriend that person? -- Alexis Elder (Minnesota Duluth) on using social media wisely and well
The first of a four-part dialogue on eating meat, from Michael Huemer (Colorado) -- see his PhilPapers profile for the other 3 (via David Killoren)
A provocative and moving short story about a woman who is trying to become a horse -- "Horse" by Amy Bonnafons (audio)
Can physics help solve problems in number theory? -- Minhyong Kim thinks "rational solutions are somehow like the trajectory of light"
"We pay attention to different things when we think about an event than when we experience it" -- for instance, sexual harassment, says Jen Zamzow (UCLA, Concordia)
From Ancient Greece to the contemporary campus: two conception of free speech -- Teresa M. Bejan (Oxford) in The Atlantic (via Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin)
A couple of philosophers agree: this is "scary shit" -- Trump and the "propaganda tactics found in the well-worn playbook of how to demonize entire categories of humans"
"The really remarkable thing about the world isn’t how much things change, but how they achieve stability for any length of time" -- John Dupré (Exeter) asks: what are the implications of this for metaphysics?
Philosophy undergrads at St. Olaf interact with students in Iran -- for World Philosophy Day
Who one really is "deep down" -- Joshua Knobe (Yale) on the idea of the "true self"
"Nearly all the grammar mavens agree that exclamation marks are overused" -- but they're wrong, argues Trip Glazer (Arkansas)!
A couple of philosophers are attempting to convince Alabamians to vote for Roy Moore -- and even the National Review thinks they're doing a lousy job of it
In memory of Derek Parfit -- a conference later this month at Rutgers
Inequality and democracy -- Tommie Shelby (Harvard) talks with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
"Looking down, she unbuckled his belt. ‘We’re grown-ups.’ Perhaps he wasn’t quite in the moment, because he thought of Kierkegaard and Socrates..." -- philosophy takes a turn in this year's Bad Sex In Fiction shortlist
"A collection of philosophers who write and podcast about issues in politics... rooted in the idea that philosophers owe more to society" -- check out The Vim
Sexual misconduct by political theorist Gopal Balakrishnan (Santa Cruz) -- alleged in several accounts
The TH!NK philosophy program for elementary students, created by Marcello Fiocco (Irvine) -- profiled at CHE
(previously)
"The defense of freedom and of the liberal society can’t be an exclusively legal concern" -- Jacob Levy (McGill) on why "only politics can save us"
In praise of Philippa Foot -- by Nakul Krishna (Cambridge)
"The unhappiness expressed by so many university academics might really result from an uneasy conscience about their own curiosity" -- at the Partially Examined Life
The wishes of the dead -- Barry Lam (Vassar) is featured on WAMC's Academic Minute
"Like everyone else, Benatar finds his views disturbing" -- a profile, such as is possible, of the reclusive David Benatar, in The New Yorker
"Schmitt, You and Me" -- a film installation in which gun shop employees read passages from the work of Carl Scmitt (at UC Irvine)
Ask Rivka Weinberg anything -- the philosopher (at Scripps) will be on Reddit this morning
"Greatly aided by the crispness of thinking that comes with philosophical training" -- influential Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman on the value of his educational background in philosophy
Discriminating between cake-discrimination cases -- John Corvino (Wayne State) in the NYT's The Stone
The best philosophy books for beginners -- suggestions from several philosophers
Interviews as assignments in philosophy courses -- how Stephanie Jenkins (Oregon State) does it
New cognitive biases poster -- now with definitions (and more entries)
Last year's Thanksgiving post -- on gratitude
Hume, the world's worst detective (EC)
"Things male academics have said to me" -- a list
"Searching for Logic" is an open source logic textbook that focuses on searching for information, rather than deduction -- from Adam Morton (UBC)
"All our tidy reasoning about what mortals must expect and should accept doesn’t replace the ‘ornery’ truth of our dependence on beloved elders" -- Amy Olberding (Oklahoma) on the death of the elderly
To reduce corruption in college sports, tell the truth -- says Samuel Gorovitz (Syracuse)
"Together, we’ll try to figure out what’s right and true. And what you end up believing is, well, up to you." -- Bas van der Vossen writes to his students about academic freedom and his Koch-funded position
Dehumanization may not be the problem: "our best and our worst tendencies arise precisely from seeing others as human" -- Paul Bloom (Yale) looks at recent work by David Livingstone Smith, Kate Manne, and others
"Not only can he correct the philosophers when they’re playing science wrong, but he can correct the scientists when they get the philosophy wrong." -- a profile of Massimo Pigliucci (City College of NY)
"You take a look at the vast variety of people that move into the profession of being a data scientist... there's... a big group coming from philosophy" -- says Mike Gregoire, CEO of CA Technologies
The "hidden curriculum" of "unfortunate attitudes and practices" professors teach their grad students -- thoughts from Steven M. Cahn (CUNY)
What does philosophy mean to you? -- answers from several philosophers
"It conveys very nicely the kind of things we try to teach all the time... But the virtues we teach are not the virtues of public philosophy." -- so says Eric Schliesser in "Leading Philosophers Clueless about 'Public' Philosophy, Yet Wish to Control It"
A graphic novel defending open borders is in the works -- by economist Bryan Caplan (GMU) and cartoonist Zach Weinersmith (SMBC) (via Jason Brennan)
The geography of political philosophy -- an interactive map from OUP
The current limits and potential future of computing power -- a short, accessible video from NIST
"Am I optimistic? Yes. What feminist, studying world history, would not be?" -- Martha Nussbaum on sexual harassment, sexual assault, and gender justice (via LR)
The Woody Allen / Louis CK Problem -- we can distinguish "the content of the work from the content of the author's values," says Kathleen Stock (Sussex)
Judith Butler (Berkeley) burned in effigy at conference in Brazil -- "How can you know if your research is having an impact? When a mob holding Bibles and crucifixes burns an effigy of you outside your seminar."
The difference between pedophilia and child sexual abuse, and why it's important -- commentary from Brian Earp (Yale)
"Disabled philosophers make up approximately 1 percent of full-time philosophy faculty in Canada" -- Canadian universities will be collecting demographic data to increase diversity at their campuses
Philosophy comics on the web -- a roundup in The Hindu Business Line
"I can only guess whether he was the kind of old bachelor / who gave gifts to girls like a man sitting down / to an out-of-tune piano and who stubbornly keeps playing it. / A dram of vodka. A gunshot to the temple. The last dream" -- poetry by philosopher Elvira Basevich (Michigan-Dearborn)
"On this view there is essentially no connection between academic study, or rational inquiry, and the sort of political positions that individuals take" -- Joseph Heath (Toronto) on the ideas underlying calls for affirmative action for conservatives in academia
"I would like to see a class teaching critical thinking or philosophy in every school" -- a mass shooting survivor fights violent political extremism among youth by engaging with their ideas (via Preston Stovall)
The philosophy of friendship... with animals -- John Hadley (Western Sydney) discusses it at The Philosopher's Zone
Dine with Kant -- Alix Cohen (Edinburgh) is hosting
A "realistic view of science as both value-laden and reliable" -- it's best to be transparent about the operation of values in science, argues Kevin Elliott (MSU)
"Getting clear on the illicit authority that misogyny confers on certain actors and ways we can combat that partly by using disciplines like philosophy" -- Kate Manne (Cornell) on WNYC
"The ideal of ongoing self-government among equals does not entail that citizens must perpetually enact their civic role." -- so give your family a break and try "keeping politics in its place" this Thanksgiving, okay?
The absurd -- The Very Bad Wizards look at Nagel, Camus, and others
"Children need to learn the value of thoughtful disagreement" -- on the value of disagreement done well
"It was rather like when I was a smoker. I accepted the evidence... and always had the sense that one day I would give up. But I kept delaying the inevitable." -- Ray Monk on going cold tofurkey
Varieties of time travel -- in assorted works of fiction (via Kottke)
Philosophers on the collective action problem of tax competition -- Danielle Wenner and Kevin Zollman (CMU) in the NYT (via LKB)
Have you heard The Pansychist? -- it's a philosophy podcast out of the UK with over 35,000 listeners a week
The humor in Wittgenstein's philosophy -- by David Egan (Hunter College)
Do's and don'ts for the "personal statement" part of your philosophy grad school application -- from Geoff Pynn (NIU)
Saudi Arabia grants citizenship to Sophia, a robot, raising questions & concerns -- the robot seems to have rights that human women in Saudi Arabia do not
The Oxford Philosophy Festival includes a kind of "speed dating" event, but not for dating -- it's later this month
Altruism in nature -- the start of a short series of posts by Jonathan Birch (LSE) on the biology of cooperation
"But surely all the training and practice in thinking things through clearly makes philosophers immune to the kind of self-serving motivated reasoning that everyone else succumbs to?" -- er
The first episode of Season 2 of the terrific Hi-Phi Nation is out -- it's on "demographic inevitability, the midlife crisis, and how we seek happiness in the face of our approaching death."
More than just grade inflation -- the problems with grading at American colleges
"It seems to help me think when things are just on the edge of what I can normally handle." -- a philosopher describes his experience taking a "smart drug"
The Philosophical Rasika Report -- where grad students should go to study Indian philosophy
The lies and the truth about "sex, love, and the aging woman" --Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) in the NYT's The Stone
GLAUCON: Now that we have determined the nature of justice, education, and proper governance, is it finally time for us to go home? THRASYMACHUS: We have left out the most pernicious evil that can be visited upon a citizenry. -- Plato on political correctness
The favorite Twitter feeds of philosophers who themselves have at least 1000 Twitter followers -- if you don't already, follow Daily Nous
"Rather than looking for the knock-down argument against X, let's focus on what may be promising in X and to supply the missing premise or distinction." -- Eric Schliesser on helping others improve their arguments
"Waiter, there's a beetle in my soup" -- a philosopher creates a video game based on soup and Wittgenstein
"Poly" is hot -- in political philosophy
Who needs truth? -- Catherine Elgin (Harvard) describes her deontological approach to epistemology
Ethics, the environment, and the future -- an interview with John Broome (Oxford)
"Who is this French woman Kant is discussing?" -- Andrew Janiak (Duke) on women in early modern philosophy
"Labels of Love" -- the podcast series from Carrie Jenkins (UBC)
Writer's block? -- it's not necessarily an obstacle to publication
"The universe should not actually exist” -- physicists are unable to find the asymmetry between matter and antimatter that would explain "why antimatter did not destroy the universe at the beginning of time"
What is religion? -- a review of three recent answers, including that of atheist Tim Crane (Cambridge)
Grade inflation and ageism -- a case for dropping transcript requirements from philosophy job applications
Against relying on authorial intent in aesthetic criticism -- a surprisingly fascinating look at the 1986 animated movie, The Transformers. Really. (via Tim Carmody)
"We have no idea how many other humans are involved in bringing about the results of our daily actions, and we have no idea how many other humans are taking advantage of the efforts we go through to perform these actions." -- Kenny Easwaran (Texas A & M) on how we use each other
"The highest aspiration of philosophy is to be both rigorous and humanistic, to place analytical thought in the service of human values... Baseball shows us that it can be done," says Kieran Setiya (MIT)
"The album is a good shower listen. It would also make for good background music or a good listen for any kind of Halloween party". -- a review of the latest album from John Malkovich's group, featuring the words of Plato & Aristotle
"While I’m increasingly nervous that Mill might be wrong, I’m no less nervous that he might be correct and yet go unheeded when it matters most" -- Dale Miller (ODU) on the marketplace of ideas (via What's Wrong?)
"Desiring death or a natural life sentence for those who inflict traumatic violence is a rational response" -- Amber Rose Carlson (Vanderbilt) asks: "Is there a 'rational' punishment for my rapist?"
"It rapidly found its way to superhuman abilities." -- "Starting with zero knowledge of Go strategy and no training by humans, the new iteration of the program... needed just three days to invent advanced strategies undiscovered by human players in the multi-millennia history of the game."
The "thinker theory" of free speech -- Seana Shiffrin discusses her theory of free speech on the latest "Why We Argue"
"If I could make any plea for a change based upon my experiences, I would ask that my fellow professors be sensitive to the mental health needs of their students." -- an interview with Brian Montgomery (UT El Paso)
Punk rock philosophy -- a new series of posts by Roy T. Cook (Minnesota) at Aesthetics for Birds
Not "the most fashionable philosophers" -- an interview with Mark Textor (KCL) about his work on Frege, Bolzano and Brentano
"The very numbness that can be so adaptive to survival, can also erect walls that stand in the way of human attachment and trust." -- Nancy Sherman (Georgetown) on stoicism and the military
"An increasingly isolated Pythagoras was left by his wife and four children around 515 B.C., shortly after he accused they themselves of being triangles" -- the Pythagorean conspiracy theorems
"Meritocracy was once a progressive force... but its historical moment has passed" -- against merit: a reading list
Should you try to have sexual relations with people over whom you hold professional power? -- the moral significance of what the relevant parties do not know
"You just have to sit and think about it for a terribly long time as hard as you can" -- a profile of Jeff McMahan (Oxford) and his current work, at Quartz
Science doesn't need more mavericks -- but it does need to become more speculative and risk-friendly, argues Adrian Currie (Cambridge)
"Professional philosophy is---like most academic disciplines---a gift-giving credit economy" -- in which "the more one can give, the more one receives, indirectly, in return"
"Comparing teachers and scholars criticizing sexism and racism to perpetrators of violence and hate speech closes down discussions necessary to address... those very harms" -- Kelly Oliver (Vanderbilt) on outrage in academia
"Pointlessness is terrible. Life is pointless, and that is really not ok." -- an interview with Rivka Weinberg (Scripps)
"The ways in which those who try to make themselves invulnerable... undermine what makes us most human" -- reading about the philosophy of vulnerability during a hurricane
Kant: Are you guys talking about snack mix? Glaucon: But of course. Join us.
Understanding and operationalizing curiosity -- in order to program artificial intelligence to be curious
"We wouldn't have all these problems... ...if people just learned to be more logical and science-driven."
What makes for good advice? -- the Open Questions podcast discusses this with Eric Wiland (Missouri - St. Louis) and advice columnist Ellie Tesher
The aesthetic aspect of means-end rationality -- an unnecessarily but amusingly complicated argument from Elijah Millgram (Utah)
A new bizarrely popular game has players take on role of an artificial intelligence running the universe’s most efficient paperclip company -- and it was inspired by a thought experiment from philosopher Nick Bostrom (Oxford)
What do normal people normally mean by "normal"? -- it depends, according to recent research in various disciplines, including x-phi & cog sci
Do we hold people responsible for their genes? -- Philip Robbins & Paul Litton (Missouri) find we are harder on mentally ill criminals when the cause of their illness is genetic
Next time you feel bad about how you're spending your time -- especially if you're a utilitarian
Blade Runner: "manna from heaven to a philosopher teaching personal identity" -- Helen Beebee (Manchester) explains
He sat down to write about Kant 's attempt "to secure certainty about what the real world is like out of certainty about what our experience of it is like" -- and then the earthquake struck
Naturalism in philosophy is not on the wane -- but Maarten Boudry (Ghent) explains why it may seem that it is
What is mental health? -- Anna Alexandrova (Cambridge) on the complicated concept
The new research unit will aim “to help technologists put ethics into practice, and to help society anticipate and direct the impact of AI so that it works for the benefit of all” -- Google's Deepmind now has an ethics group
A philosophy professor and his class collaborate with an art museum for an exhibit -- "The Meaning of Life: Visual Analogy"
Are erections voluntary? -- Nomy Arpaly (Brown) on adjusting credences and, uh, "believing at pill?"
Philosophers to play role in UK Supreme Court case on abortion policy in Northern Ireland -- testimony from Simon Blackburn, A. C. Grayling, and John Harris will be included
Academia's focus on "excellence" discourages both intellectual risk-taking and 'normal science' (via Adriel Trott's blog, The Trott Line)
"The alt-right is drunk on bad readings of Nietzsche" -- Sean Illing at Vox
"If one takes philosophy as one's vocation, [one] does so with less hope of glory as one of history's celebrated geniuses, but as one among many making a small and under-appreciated contribution to a greater whole." -- Liam Kofi Bright (CMU) on individualism and communalism in philosophy
Conflicting aims in end-of-life care -- and an argument for assisted suicide, from Frances Kamm at Boston Review
How elite are the backgrounds of philosophers, in comparison to other academics? -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) presents some data
"If we want to do democracy right, we need sometimes to do something else entirely" -- words of wisdom from Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
"There is great reluctance to recognize how much needs to be done to reconstruct ethically adequate standards for communication" -- Onora O'Neill on technology and communication, in The Washington Post
"If we cannot choose which theory is correct based on the empirical results, what can help us?" -- Valia Allori (Northern Illinois) assesses the gravity of the problem
If there are "creatures that know what they are doing but do not know why" -- the orthodox view in philosophy of action is wrong
How to make good use of political polarization -- experimentation via contests
Philosophers discuss Blade Runner -- in Smithsonian Magazine
We're not living in a computer simulation, scientists conclude -- "just storing information about a couple of hundred electrons would require a computer memory that would physically require more atoms than exist in the universe."
(Not so fast, scientists ↑ )
Should we redefine statistical significance? -- philosophers take up the question at The Brains Blog
One of Richard Rorty's last interviews -- it aired live on KZSU in November, 2005
Bharath Vallabha has a new blog -- "Cosmic Awareness"
Mill's search for a source of joy "that could survive the unbearable goodness of the world he sought to achieve" -- he found it in the "capacity to be moved by beauty," says Adam Etinson (St. Andrews)
Thinking of starting a philosophy blog? -- read this first
"Some philosophers seek the Truth but others choose Dare" -- different approaches to philosophical disagreement
Libertarianism as if black liberty matters -- thoughts on racism, freedom, and U.S. politics from Jacob Levy (McGill)
The moral problems of driverless cars (and trolleys, etc.) -- a whole episode of Radiolab on them
The philosophical issues in Star Trek -- how Star Trek really did "boldly go where no show has gone before"
In response to your “concerns” about our current open-plan creative campus, we are pleased to announce our new building -- a towering panopticon à la Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century vision of utilitarian corporate efficiency!
Derek Parfit submitted a draft of a paper to Philosophy & Public Affairs the day before he died -- It has just been published.
"Embodiment" in philosophy of religion -- one of several topics covered in an interview with Ola Sigurdson (Gothenburg)
"The pleasures of rock climbing and the pleasures of philosophy turn out to be strangely similar" -- says C. Thi Nguyen (Utah State) in Philosophers Magazine (via AfB)
Which paper did the editors think was best? Who was the top commentator? -- the PEA Soup blog announces the winners of these and other prizes
"The story of the seventeenth-century woman who undertook a grand deception" to write philosophy -- how Rachel Kadish describes the protagonist in her new novel, "The Weight of Ink"
"Everybody is somebody's fault..." -- ask the ever-interesting philosopher Rivka Weinberg anything, even "unfair questions"
"We should, above all, realize that we are being trained" -- Samir Chopra (Brooklyn/CUNY) on social media & how it's changing our relationship to the world
"They were involved in politics as criticism of groupthink and 'the same old same old.'" -- Josiah Ober (Stanford) on the political relevance of Plato, Aristotle, and other classical thinkers
"The world’s capacity to produce outrages far outstrips the human capacity to respond emotionally to them" -- Spencer Case (Colorado) on how outraged we should be about "selective outrage"
Kant's categorical imperative makes the big time -- or at least Melvyn Bragg's "In Our Time" on BBC radio, with Alison Hills, David Oderberg, and John Callanan
"The exploration has completely changed my life." How the electron made a philosopher. -- Shan Gao (Shanxi University) discusses his work in philosophy of physics
Resources for teaching argument mapping -- from Simon Cullen
Libertarianism vs. meritocracy -- libertarianism doesn't take merit seriously, argues Thomas Mulligan (Georgetown)
What questions does string theory answer? Which does it leave unanswered? -- a talk by James Ladyman (Bristol)
The Australasian Philosophy Family Tree -- additions sought
Is there a point to moral philosophy? -- And will moral philosophers accept the answer? "Like people in love who are told the loved one isn’t worth their love, they won’t believe it"
The way modern academia measures research achievement means that some of the worst articles are the most successful -- "how academia has been hacked"
"The Good Place," the network sitcom featuring a philosophy professor, is back for a second season -- but don't read this if you haven't watched the first season yet
Hayek's recollections of his meetings with his second cousin, Wittgenstein -- "Whether he... had discovered that, after all, I was just another Philistine, I do not know" (via Brandon Christensen)
Retracting philosophy articles: are there more than just procedural grounds for it? -- Eric Schliesser comments
What makes a student a "star"? -- not "instagenius," but rather "the ability to keep showing up when things do not go well" (via Samantha Brennan)
Mathematicians measure infinities -- and find they're equal
The Illusions Index -- a resource for deceiving your senses (via Umut Baysan)
Emerita Quito, "the Philippines’ greatest female philosopher," has died -- she wrote over 20 books and was "a trailblazing scholar, a prolific writer, and a sought-after lecturer"
The Bertrand Russell archive at McMaster University will have a new home -- "the archive is the largest available on Russell anywhere"
The Eagles' Don Henley and filmmaker Ken Burns are Thoreau fans -- and Burns has made a short film about the philosopher
"It’s time that faculty members honored the work that graduate students do by actually scrutinizing it---as opposed to demanding that they produce more and more of it" -- CHE picks up on Velleman's publication proposal
The University of Colorado just bought $47,000 worth of merchandise from a former philosophy professor it tried to fire -- David Barnett's PopSockets are just that good
"Gavagai" -- an "extraordinary movie" -- but it's unclear what its message is
Philosophy Talk, the radio show, names new hosts -- John Perry will become "host emeritus"
"We avoid the interference available to our digital providers only insofar as they are willing to be indulgent" -- Philip Pettit (Princeton/ANU) on online freedom
Philosophobia: a new philosophy podcast -- from Steve Tatlow (Durham University)
"We seem to have forgotten that private government exists; we believe, incorrectly, that 'the state is the only form of government'" -- the next hot topic in political philosophy, I'd bet, courtesy of Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan)
"How to leave Classics" (or philosophy?) "and thrive in the marketplace" -- the artificial scarcity of academia has "impinged ability to understand themselves and their possibilities" (via L.A. Paul)
Awesomeness and suckiness -- a conversation with Nick Riggle (San Diego) at the WMFA podcast
What kind of person was Gottlob Frege? -- What little information we have doesn't paint a pretty picture, says Ray Monk
How much would each researcher receive if competitive government research funding were distributed equally among researchers? -- a fair amount, according to a snapshot analysis by Krist Vaesen & Joel Katzav
The Origins and Implications of White Nationalism in the U.S. -- a faculty panel at Brown University
A philosopher looks at the self-help slogan "live in the present" -- there's an insight in there, says Kieran Setiya (MIT)
Minds Online starts today -- it's an open access, online conference on topics in the philosophy and science of mind
Teaching philosophy via Harry Potter -- "You can bring your wands, but you can't use them on exams," says professor Carolyn Hartz (St. Cloud State)
"I think it was like ‘Pass me the cornflakes, Hilary, now let’s get back to talking about Dewey.’" -- a profile of the marriage of Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam, on the occasion of a new collection of essays by them
Donald Trump and American plutocracy -- an interview with Hans Sluga (Berkeley) - starts near the 8:00 mark
The pop music of philosopher Ben Bramble (Trinity College, Dublin)
Aesthetics for Birds, the philosophy of art blog, significantly increases its staff -- goal: "much broader, more diverse, and more frequent content"
When a troll trash-talks an academic expert without realizing he's doing so on her Facebook page -- "I have some fantastic news for you..."
Come for the insights relating comedy to philosophy, stay for the joke about cultural appropriation -- philosophy student-turned-comic David Heti chats with his sister, Sheila
New scholarly podcast about the Late Antique, Medieval, and Byzantine eras -- three episodes up so far
Grading rubrics for philosophy courses -- Christina Hendricks (UBC) has some examples and is looking for more
Michael Dummett's grammar advice -- graded by linguist Geoffrey Pullum (Edinburgh) at CHE
New blog on philosophical questions about imagination and fiction -- check out "Thinking About Fiction" from Kathleen Stock (Sussex)
"I love women" -- empirical psychological research on implicit bias doesn't---and couldn't---live up to its billing, argue two philosophers
When you're a professor, "not only can you get away with being stupid, you wind up with social license to become even more stupid" -- Joseph Heath (Toronto) on absent-mindedness as social deviance
"The reduction of suffering due to disease... is doubtless good. So, one might think that every step we take in that direction consistent with justice, short of extinguishing our humanity, is surely good." -- a philosopher's experience as a patient prompts reflections on the post-human
"When divine reason dropped out of the picture, a deep rupture occurred, which obliterated philosophy’s purpose as it had been conceived by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and many philosophers after them." -- Carlos Fraenkel (McGill) on the purpose of philosophy
"Research into the ethical dimensions of art receives little support from the world’s museums... despite the fact that ethical questions about art arise on a seemingly weekly basis and command substantial public attention," writes Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley)
A list of philosophical questions -- with each linked to a podcast discussing it
12 things to love about philosophical logic -- Greg Restall (Melbourne) introduces a series of posts at his blog
We cannot have perfectly reliable beliefs about what we don’t believe -- Roy T. Cook (Minnesota) on paradoxes of belief
Philosopher gives up emeritus title after his university honors Putin -- Mihály Vajda no longer wishes to be associated with the University of Debrecen
"Philosophers treat the imagination with both despair and delight" -- Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna) on the uses of imagination
The ideas and friendship of Hume and Smith -- discussed by Dennis Rasmussen (Tufts)
"Being an octopus might be more like being a human than we have tended to think" -- Amia Srinivasan on the octopus research of Peter Godfrey-Smith and Sy Montgomery
How often do articles in (non-English) European language journals cite English-language vs. same-language works? -- the latest in a series of language analyses of philosophy articles, at The Splintered Mind
What is it for something to be alive? -- it's not an easy question, as Marc Lange (UNC) explains
Don't fight hate -- says David Livingston Smith (New England)
The uses and abuses of idealization -- an interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) in Prospect Magazine
Emerging pop singer Brynn Elliott is a philosophy major -- "she took a course on Albert Einstein and wound up writing a whole concept album for an assignment"
Does the peeping Tom who is never discovered harm his victims? -- David Boonin (Colorado) takes up the question at "What's Wrong?"
The charge that a professor who publicly criticizes a group can't be trusted to fairly grade members of that group -- it comes at a steep cost
A report on a philosophy camp for teens -- from Fred Guy (Baltimore)
"In support of a recent tenure case, our department gave the acceptance rates at journals as evidence of their significance" -- P.D. Magnus (Albany) on the problem with that
Advice for students: "think for yourself" -- a group of professors warn students about the "tyranny of public opinion" (via IHE)
A symposium of sociologists on Charlottesville -- in Contexts Magazine
American Historical Association statement on Confederate monuments (via IHE)
What it feels like to be in Houston -- Anne Jacobson (Houston), flooded in but fine, reports
Should epistemology be part of the pre-college curriculum? -- it's "something all other subjects contain but do not properly address"
Which item in your office would you save from a fire? -- various academics respond
Onora O’Neill on trust, politics, and philosophy -- Nietzsche and Moore are problems, says the "unrepentant, card-carrying old Kantian"
"We need to pry apart the equation of personhood and property at the core of white supremacy" -- Lisa Guenther (Queens) and Abigail Levin (Niagara) unpack "you will not replace us"
Hume on punching Nazis -- look at the bigger picture, he would counsel
Philosophy is about questioning assumptions -- so philosophers should attend to one of the big ones, says Jennifer Scuro (New Rochelle): ableism
A link to more philosophy links -- at Omnivore (via Saba Bazargan-Forward)
Rousseau was "a diligent student of... the moral psychology of the wealthy" -- what would he say about Louise Linton?
A relatively new online philosophy magazine -- "Epoché" aims to "use the wealth of concepts present in the labor of philosophy, ancient, modern, and new, to provide fragments of clarity, moments of pause"
"If a bit of generosity in our teaching can help [our students], if a bit more patience with their challenges can make the difference between hard-won success and crushing struggle, then it’s our duty as teachers to provide it" -- on so-called snowflakes
Finland's black metal music scene is into philosophy -- for example, the band Verge is partial to a Williams-like critique of Kant
Statue removal efforts hit philosophy -- conservatives in Turkey want a statue of Diogenes taken down
The surprising significance of two random-looking shapes -- on fruitful classification in mathematics (for your "reality is counterintuitive" file)
How Kant's ethics goes wrong, in 1000 words -- Nomy Arpaly (Brown) on Kant and well-being
The latest on the lawsuit against Laura Kipnis -- a memo in opposition to her motion to dismiss has been filed
Black children who appear in juvenile court in the week following a loss by the area college's football team get harsher sentences -- Erin Tarver (Emory) on that and other morally salient aspects of college football
Should journals publish work by graduate students? -- the discussion continues at Inside Higher Ed
"Their willingness to engage near-death experiences with philosophical seriousness is... courageous and, institutionally speaking, path-breaking" -- philosophers look at the possibility of life after death
Racial explanations: "taboo" in philosophy? -- no, not now, but in the first half of the 20th Century; Schliesser on Bright on race and logical empiricism
Steps towards measuring the virtues -- on developing a scale of intellectual humility
"What do we want?" "To question everything!" "When do we want it?" "Well, actually, what if time is an illusion?" -- philosophers go on strike (EC)
As you plan for the upcoming semester -- don't forget to plan for having a life outside of work
"It would be foolish to pretend that there aren’t obvious biological differences between human beings and that these differences are tied to certain geographical regions... but there’s a big difference between race and diversity" says David Livingstone Smith (New England)
Philosophers at theme parks -- in The New Yorker (via Tanya Kostochka)
"The enormous, singular joke of our epoch is not funny" -- Justin E. H. Smith (University of Paris) on theories of humor
A philosophy PhD who struggled with depression as a grad student will be giving a talk at their school on it -- what should they say?
What is it like to be a dog? -- a question at the intersection of law, brain science, and philosophy
"The surfer is thus something of a new model of civic virtue. The real troublemaker is the workaholic." -- Aaron James (UC Irvine) philosophizes about surfing
New philosophy blog of interviews with early-career legal and moral philosophers -- from Lucas Miotto (Edinburgh)
The "real meaning of life" for philosophers (EC)
Lessons from a lack of interpretive charity -- and what Nancy Maclean and the public choice theorists she criticizes have in common
A twitter feud over race and Roman history, fueled by scientism -- Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY) explains the mistake
On the value of studying "minor" figures in the history of philosophy -- how to address those who are skeptical
A student draws portraits of philosophers in the style of "cute anime boys"
The Franz Kafka video game -- now available for your iPhone, etc.
"I'm contacting an author whose manuscript was due in 1987. A full 30 years ago. ...The rest of you can feel better now for being a little late."
"I know what a philosophy class looks like... I had never seen a class this dumbed down" -- refusing to lower standards, one philosophy instructor quit and another was fired (via Debra Nails)
Philosophy has "a very high nuance rate in the first few decades of the twentieth century, which then sharply declines, and rejoins the upward trend in the 1980s" -- Kieran Healy (Duke) on "nuance" over time in several disciplines
At the intersection of metaphysics and political philosophy -- David Strohmaier (Sheffield) on the ontology of nation-states, at his philosophy blog
"Even philosophers whose work is in areas of real public interest, such as applied ethics, can struggle to get a hearing above the noise of pundits, preachers and politicians" -- what should philosophers do to better influence public debate?
Nomy Arpaly (Brown) now has her own blog -- it's called "The View From The Owl's Roost"
Two philosophers shortlisted for the 2017 Royal Society Science Book Prize (via Holly Lawford Smith)
Relying primarily on law enforcement to address structural problems tells the disadvantaged: we "don't really care about them" -- Tommie Shelby (Harvard) on calls for tougher policing
Daniel Dennett (Tufts) and David Papineau (KCL) debate on the pages of TLS -- with an introduction from Tim Crane (Cambridge/CEU)
Philosophy journal corrects the official record regarding articles by Bruce Le Catt (via Michael Dougherty)
First generation college students are the most likely to major in the humanities or social sciences --A look at liberal-arts graduates and the "five factors... that can spur long-term success for anyone from a non-elite background"
Race and philosophy -- an interview with Charles Mills (CUNY)
Thank you for calling the philosophy helpline "For Descartes, please press (1,0,0). You have pressed it, therefore you will be connected to him. But who is it that is really doing the pressing?"
A long, organized, descriptive list of digital tools for researchers -- for a variety of types of tasks
"For the sake of my empire, I have robbed Montesquieu without mentioning him by name... I hope he will pardon me this plagiarism for the good of 20 million people" -- how Catherine the Great borrowed from Enlightenment thinkers to create "one of the most remarkable political treatises ever"
Wittgenstein fan tags monument in Chicago -- I suppose the spray paint does make a kind of "shhhh" sound
A good, online, interactive game theory game -- a cool teaching tool (via Victor Kumar)
Sometimes it seems that doing the right thing is impossible -- because sometimes it is, says Lisa Tessman (Binghamton)
There will be no new posts at "Philosopher" -- but creator Meena Krishnamurthy (Michigan) says existing posts will remain up
Some questions in the philosophy of wine -- a conversation with Barry Smith (U. of London)
Deaths in the Iliad: an infographic -- including "stand-out performances in battle" (via Daniel O'Connell)
Is a reason to perform some act always a reason to perform that act rather than some other one? -- Justin Snedegar (St. Andrews) talks with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
That "aha" moment when you come to think you know something -- what has happened in your mind? Scientists experiment to try to figure that out
Ways in which the concern that something is "just not feasible" goes awry -- Nicholas Southwood (ANU) with some rather good points
For the first time in the U.S., scientists have created genetically modified human embryos -- new technique allowed scientists to avoid problems of earlier efforts
A Facebook page has been set up to continue discussion of the Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project -- organized by philosopher Jen Scuro (New Rochelle)
"A warning from Aristophanes to Socrates on the precarious position the philosopher is in" -- in Forbes
"Why is the bathroom ground zero?" -- Jean Kazez (SMU) on the Texas bathroom bill
It's useful to distinguish between "being to blame for bringing about an event and being a bad person" -- Robert Hartman (Gothenburg) on moral luck
The science of redefining the kilogram -- since the original has "gained weight"
A journey with Rorty -- one of several essays on him in the LARB (see "related" for others)
Beyond the "naive view" of the problem with fake news -- from Neil Levy (Macquarie)
The philosophy of free speech at work when people protest certain speakers -- Jason Stanley (Yale) at The Philosopher's Zone
French psychoanalysist, philosopher, & essayist Anne Dufourmantelle drowns in attempt to rescue children -- she is the author of, among other things, "In Praise of Risk"
"Part of the reason for Cold War philosophy’s continuing dominance is that... it has never been directly confronted on a philosophical level" -- an interpretation of the role of rational choice theory in philosophy and culture
"It is very difficult to change the mindset of adult human beings" -- Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY) on why we need more philosophy and science books for children
"it is still an open question whether there is fundamental ontology and laws and if there is whether they can be found by the methods of physics" -- an interview with Barry Loewer (Rutgers)
A volume on ethical and social issues arising out of the 2016 US presidential election and the Trump administration -- from the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal
Which heretic are you? -- a quiz based on Steven and Ben Nadler’s graphic novel account of the seventeenth-century thinkers (via Rob Tempio)
"According to one study, 22 percent to 57 percent of faculty members, depending on the campus, reported being stalked by students." -- some information and advice from a professor who was stalked by a student
Settling that Russell thing once and for all (don't miss the mouseover text)
"Two major methodological challenges arise equally in contemporary cosmology and particle physics" -- Michela Massimi (Edinburgh) in The Guardian
"American public discourse doesn’t give us helpful ways to talk about the dictatorial rule of employers" -- Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan) on how we're governed by our employers (Vox)
The homes of German philosophers -- some photos
Should policy-relevant researchers stay out of politics? -- thoughts on academic research, political change, and the connection between them
The trailer for the Amartya Sen documentary -- and India's Central Board of Film Certification's censorship of certain words in it
When philosophers invent problems (SMBC)
"Is life a worthwhile risk?" -- Rivka Weinberg (Scripps) on the environmental factors relevant to that question
"The objects it creates might only be virtual, but the challenges it raises are all too real" -- the ethics and politics of augmented reality
"When you ask why he didn’t show up to your party, he says there are four causes" -- if famous philosophers were your friends
Which students study the most? -- philosophy majors are third on the list
"A Columbia classmate... challenged Danaher to a bout in the philosophy department. [He] locked the door, grabbed him in a headlock, and threw him to the ground..." -- how a grad student in philosophy became a master of Brazilian jujitsu (via Paul Bloom)
"Kant is even wondering if suicide, which he definitively considered wrong under any circumstances... might not be justified in the Age of Trump" -- famous philosophers on the current US president (via @Twhite92Boone)
The ontological argument -- for the existence of Batman
A philosophical novel based on Descartes' Meditations -- and the story behind it
"The self comes into being with the first act of attention" -- Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced) on the possibility of a substantive self
"Is that your philosophy of life?" "No." Sigh.
What's wrong with a new book about the history of libertarian ideas -- besides the history itself
Thoreau's neighbors -- Walden as refuge for outcasts
A primer on Althusser -- via an interview with William Lewis (Skidmore)
A brief history of beauty (via Aesthetics for Birds)
How to answer the "parasite" objection to a universal basic income -- Hillel Steiner (Manchester) at the relatively new site "Know It Wall"
Russell Brand discusses philosophy with Simon Critchley (New School) -- on Brand's "Under The Skin" show
"I think of the laws of any country as akin to the formal rules in a game like soccer or tennis" -- an interview on sports and philosophy with David Papineau (KCL)
"Dangerous Ideas": a humanities course -- co-created by philosopher Debra Satz (Stanford)
"Nature itself is non-local" -- Eddy Chen & Isaac Wilhelm (Rutgers) use an antalogy to explain a puzzle in quantum mechanics
"I now wish that I had strived for a proper liberal arts education" -- leading Silicon Valley engineer worries that she and other techies "haven’t spent anywhere near enough time thinking about these larger questions of what it is that we are building"
Emerging technologies for treating mental illness are a form of "mind control" -- raising questions that an interdisciplinary team of philosophers, psychologists, and engineers are taking up
These philosophers are doing their part to keep philosophy cool (via Colin Ruloff)
The philosophical French president -- he studied under Ricoeur (via John McCumber)
Five short takes on Kipnis' Unwanted Advances plus a response of a sort from the author -- the one by Friedman is especially on point & goes unanswered by Kipnis (via Matt McAdam)
How to talk to famous professors -- including "five time-tested approaches"
"Could we still claim our mantle as true philosophers if we, as a matter of policy, uncritically made use of our inherited concepts?" -- Liam Kofi Bright (CMU) on the idea of and motivation for decolonising philosophy
Why philosophy majors would make great entrepreneurs -- by entrepreneur Nicholas Miller (elaborating on a previous piece in The Observer)
Socrates' idea of a perfectly just city -- discussed by MM McCabe (KCL) on BBC Radio
"I certainly don’t have any plans" to eliminate the Center for Thomistic Studies -- says the new president of St. Thomas, Houston
The "private government" that rules over most of us -- an interview with Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan)
Good and bad arguments -- Trudy Govier (Lethbridge) talks with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) at Why We Argue
Are natural laws necessary by virtue of being natural laws, or are they natural laws by virtue of being necessary? -- an interview with Marc Lange (UNC Chapel Hill)
People's "ex post evaluation of well-being is generally higher when identical consequences result from a high-risk situation than from a low-risk situation" (via MR)
Philosophy is solved -- by freshman philosophy student (EC)
"Your cognitive capacity is significantly reduced when your smartphone is within reach -- even if it's off" -- and even if you think you're paying it no attention
Derrida and analytic philosophy -- does "Derrida undermine... the ground beneath the projects analytic metaphysicians pursue"?
What it's like to chair a philosophy department -- reflections from Ronald Sundstrom (San Francisco)
Schopenhauer has a bad flight (via Micah Bailey)
On seeing a color you couldn't imagine before -- Neil Sinhababu (NUS) tries on color-correction glasses
What it is like to be a philosopher consulting for a tv sitcom -- a discussion with Todd May (Clemson) about his work with the creators of "The Good Place"
The Institute for Art and Ideas offers several free online courses taught by philosophers -- the latest is "Evidence and Ideology" with Nancy Cartwright (Durham, UCSD)
A defense of majoring in philosophy -- in The Washington Post
Is the "open-endedness" of modern life a problem to be solved? -- Patricia Marino (Waterloo) raises the question
Archaeologists discover fully intact 17th-Century belief system -- in an Ohio Congressman
How a medieval bishop clamped down on Aristotle scholars and spurred multiverse theory -- in our world, at least
Some perspective on human knowledge and the earning of a PhD -- an illustration (kind of an internet-age classic)
"In response to growing anti-intellectualism and hostility towards philosophy, a crack team of the deadliest philosophers ever assembled was formed..." (EC)
The sex life and sexual ideas of Augustine -- in The New Yorker
"A star may have an internal life that allows it to 'feel,' but whatever that feeling is, it is much less than the feeling of being an E. coli" -- when panpsychism makes NBC news
The original "brain in the vat" example and perhaps the inspiration for Nozick's experience machine -- an excerpt from "A Philosopher's Nightmare" by Jonathan Harrison (1966)
Would you sacrifice a human life to save the Mona Lisa? -- a case for "yes"
"Writing advice to my students that would have also been good sex advice for my high school boyfriends" -- from Helena de Bres (Wellesley)
New mini-philosophy course based on Game of Thrones at University of Glasgow -- unfortunately not called "I drink and I know things"
"Darwin's idea that the struggle between species was an engine of creation... undermined transcendentalist assumptions that nature was inherently good" -- how Darwin influenced Thoreau
Before you teach your students the Monty Hall Problem -- teach the Mosteller Hall puzzle
The colonialist and utilitarian origins of liberal freedom as non-interference -- plus a look at republican freedom as non-domination, in an interview with Philip Pettit (via Nigel Warburton)
"Public universities have sunk into economic frailty over the last decades" -- who or what can save them?
"We are living in a golden age of sexual creativity" -- a description of the porn-enabled "erotic renaissance that is... unprecedented in human history" (text only, but explicit)
What is a good death? -- reflections from Luc Bovens (LSE)
The technological wherewithal of a species is not the same thing as intelligence -- which is something we should remember in our search for intelligent life
Five volumes of Bentham's correspondence are now available in open access form -- here's the link to the first (via Phil Baker)
Philosophy job market mentoring program -- time for those interested in receiving and providing mentoring to sign up
"By focusing on the lives of creatures like ants, it may be possible to formulate a version of the problem of evil which, in certain ways, is even harder to solve than traditional versions" -- Dustin Crummett (Notre Dame) discusses the problem
The graphic (novel) account of Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise -- from Ben Nadler and Steven Nadler
Philosophical theses you have never seen because they're extremely weak -- though they are frequently funny
"Our talk was kindling too damp to light, / so we accepted the cold of silence..." -- go be wrecked by the poetry of Brook Sadler (USF)
Explaining philosophy with humor -- Tom Cathcart and Daniel Klein on the Philosophy Bakes Bread podcast
"Things that ought to be impossible actually aren’t" -- the study of "near-miss mathematics"
Compatibilism: a parable -- don't get too excited
Why "open access" is slower to catch on in the humanities -- a post by Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project
"Public-facing" philosophy can shape "peer-facing" philosophy -- it's not just a one way street from the academy to the town square, says Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam)
Pyramids and Tubes -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) compares different shapes academia can take
"I graduated with a B.A. in philosophy and it was by far the best major I could have taken in college" -- NBC News correspondent Katy Tur
The extended cognition of spiders (via Robert Long)
"Morality is a cultural construction in something like the way bridges are" -- they must be designed "according to what would adequately fulfill their function and the nature of materials that" says David Wong (Duke)
So you want to be a public philosopher? -- Carrie Jenkins (UBC) has some ideas, advice, and strategies for you
With so much information about philosophy programs and philosophers now readily accessible, do we still need rankings? -- David Sobel (Syracuse) raises the question
Defending liberal toleration as a response to moral and social diversity -- Peter Balint (UNSW Canberra) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
Might we benefit animals by eating them? -- a lecture by Jeff McMahan (Oxford)
"The entire country is starting to seem like the character from 'The Matrix" who preferred his life in the constructed reality to life in the real world" -- Michael Lynch (U Conn) on our "common reality"
Ask Barry Lam (Vassar), creator and host of the excellent philosophy show Hi-Phi Nation, anything -- today on Reddit
Enhancement, transhumanism, disability, and biopolitics -- a symposium on The Bioethics of Enhancement by Melinda Hall (Stetson)
Does voter ignorance undermine democracy? -- Ilya Somin (George Mason) and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) discuss
Noam Chomsky, the"American Socrates" -- interview, information, illustration, a musical tribute (?) and more
"The crucial distinction between engaging in debate and suppressing it" -- it's weakened "when thoughtful, civil, quiet protesters get tarred with the same 'safe-space snowflake' brush as their violent, disruptive, or censorious counterparts"
"Carnap’s complete mishandling of Heidegger’s philosophy helps us to see what goes wrong in any attempt to create a perfect language" -- "language’s power to bewitch is also its creative power to present startling new ways of looking at the world," says Charlie Huenemann (Utah State)
Spinoza’s heresy over the nature of God -- the "symbolic core" of a new novel, The Weight of Ink, by Rachel Kadish
The opportunity costs and side effects of "expecting increasing technical facility in whole parts of the discipline" -- commentary on the call to train philosophers in statistics and other formal methods
Better than straight lecturing is "active-learning," in which "students pivot quickly from a short lecture to solving a specific problem" -- Stanford physics professor and Nobel laureate Carl Weiman wants to improve undergraduate teaching
A new blog with a focus on African philosophy -- from Omedi Ochieng (Denison)
"Be open to surprises" -- a brief interview with Christopher Hamilton (KCL) on our era of app-enabled love
"Anyone who reads beyond the scandalous title will immediately recognize that the book is a critique..." -- Jacob Blumenfeld (New School), translator of "Communism for Kids"
"In contrast to the values of morality, which depend on and encourage our similarities to each other, values like friendship (or beauty) depend on and encourage our differences" -- a rich and wide-ranging interview with Alexander Nehamas (Princeton)
Is "honorable service at the senior political level under Donald Trump" possible? -- an informed and in-depth look at the question from Quinta Jurecic (Brookings)
Why is there beauty in nature? -- because it's adaptive? Richard Prum (Yale) thinks we shouldn't assume so.
"Ferocious pleas for comity can also serve as an evasive maneuver---a way to dodge important debates about the favorite habits of a discipline" -- Daniel Engber in Slate on recent controversies in philosophy and psychology
"Too much moral philosophy operates on the conceit that morality resides in the territory of discrete choice and decision" -- but habits, instincts, reflexes play a role; etiquette can "provide a mechanism by which these too can bend toward justice"
How to prepare for graduate school while poor -- a wiki guide
A philosophy professor will be biking coast-to-coast to raise money for Habitat For Humanity -- go Jose Luis Bermudez (Texas A&M)! (via Kathryn Pogin)
Old Plato was reckon'd Divine / He wisely to vertue was prone / But had it not been for good wine / His merits we never had known -- a 1710 precursor to the Monty Python "Philosopher's Song"? (via Daniel Brunson)
Philosophy instructor arrested for striking a Trump supporter in the head with a bicycle u-lock -- his most recent class? "Introduction to Ethics"
"There’s no evidence that anyone was fooled into believing that this paper was real" --James Stacy Taylor (College of NJ) on how the only folks hoaxed were the so-called "skeptics"
"What if you had the opportunity to become a vampire, irreversibly---and everyone you knew who had become one said 'It's utterly indescribable'" -- how should you decide? L.A. Paul (UNC) talks with Julia Galef at Rationally Speaking
"The reality of the psychological is one of the most important lessons of fMRI studies of the brain" -- Tim Crane (Cambridge) on understanding consciousness and "how we can be"
"This is making my brain all tingly, like that time I put Pop Rocks on a q-tip" -- the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt becomes a philosophy student in the show's 3rd season
"You don’t defeat a slippery slope by jumping off the cliff and taking the shortcut to the bottom" -- Hayek's problem with socialism was that it eventually empowers the "ruthless, lawless authoritarians of the right," argues Jacob Levy (McGill)
How to turn children into "bullshit detectors" -- the experimental work of Andy Oxman (via Timothy O'Keefe)
"I could run... [but] not this time... I'm really good at explaining complicated fuckery" -- Rachel McKinnon (Charleston) describes and responds to online harassment she has been subject to
Pluralism without fragmentation -- Michael P. Wolf (Washington & Jefferson) on Sellars on normativity
Sometimes, when we swear, "it’s just incidental that we’re expressing ourselves using language at all" -- an interview on cursing with Rebecca Roache (Royal Holloway)
Interviews with philosophers, centered around their reading -- Luciano Floridi, David Papineau, Massimo Pigliucci, Angie Hobbs, and others
"Far more is at stake... than the fate of an excellent philosophy program and the lives of its students and faculty" -- Jennifer Frey (South Carolina) on recent threats to tenure
"The Socratics and the Anti-Socratics" -- the Tuvel controversy and competing conceptions of philosophical expertise
"It’s important to be fair and meticulous when reputations are at stake, even if it gets in the way of a good story." -- a review of the Kipnis book at Slate
Philosophy, Stoicism, and the military mindset -- Nancy Sherman (Georgetown) is a guest on a veteran's podcast
Why does philosophy "fall short of accepted practices" in handling plagiarism? -- "the need to retract a plagiarized article on medieval metaphysics... appears less urgent than to correct deficient articles in fields like pharmacology..."
Writing Referee Reports: A Beginner's Guide -- from Lewis Powell (Buffalo)
"Underneath the hyper-charged war of words lies a wonkier but no less significant battle over philosophical method" -- the New York Times reports on the Tuvel controversy
A new, free, online logic textbook -- by Craig DeLancey (SUNY Oswego)
"Could it be that altruism and reciprocity are not in fact grounded in the higher cognitive faculties possessed only by humans and mammals?" -- thoughts from David Schwartz (Randolph College) whose car... well, you just have to see it
What did Tommy Curry (Texas A&M) really say? -- a closer look at the raw material of the recent controversy
Trouble with peer review -- some notable historical examples
The ethics of "awesome" -- an interview with philosophers and former professional rollerblader Nick Riggle (San Diego)
"Which Field Is More F*cked: Philosophy or Psychology?" -- the Very Bad Wizards discuss
Defending the reality of time -- an interview with Tim Maudlin (NYU)
On the lawsuit against Kipnis and the arguments in her book (and see the links towards the end of the post)
"The descriptive and normative are inextricably intermingled" -- Doris, Machery, and Stich on the relevance of psychology to ethics
"Epistemological insiderism" -- a sociologist on the Tuvel controversy, in the NYT
Attending a philosophy conference remotely -- a brief look at the whats, hows, pros, and cons
Philosophy, lactose-intolerance, and the biology of race -- a discussion with Quayshawn Spencer (U Penn)
30 tattoos of Socrates -- really
A rather careful look at a part of Laura Kipnis's book -- at a new philosophy blog, Epistepocalypse
Five senses? Sorry Aristotle, it's more like 22-33 -- Barry Smith (Univ. of London) on avoiding philosophy that's "worthless because it’s not actually getting to grips with how things really are"
A philosophical symposium on "Black Lives Matter" -- in the recent issue of the Journal of Political Philosophy
"There is a cosmic purpose, a reason for existence ...but human beings are irrelevant to that purpose," argues Tim Mulgan (St. Andrews)
Is dark matter more diverse than we've thought? Could there be life made of it? -- learning what we don't really know (an ongoing series)
Plato, the behavioral economist -- "many of his insights are remarkably similar to the descriptions of the cognitive biases found by Kahneman and Tversky"
"What great man influenced him? When they couldn’t find one, they gave up" -- they should have tried looking for the *woman* who influenced Descartes' Meditations
The most entertaining history of the world video (with brief mentions of some philosophers)
"Researchers created a 3D image of Descartes’s brain... by scanning the impression it left on the inside of his skull" -- turns out he had a big frontal cortex
If the professor gives the students higher marks, the students return the favor -- another problem with student evaluations of teaching
"Using paraconsistent logical systems to put together a story about contradictory butt pounding across different universes would be a feat of sexual and logical perversion that I don’t think anyone has ever achieved" -- an interview with the singular Neil Sinhababu (NUS)
A contest to name Crayola's new crayon, based on a previously missing shade of blue -- someone has already submitted "Hume's Blue"
Not nice. Not necessary. Not sexy. -- John Corvino (Wayne State) on racial preferences on dating apps/sites
"Machiavelli’s advice for rulers was ruthless and pragmatic—and he may have intended for it to secretly destroy them" -- he wore "a variety of masks" but his ideas had "remarkable consistency," writes Erica Benner
"There is no subject so imbued with drama, intrigue, and fast-paced action as 17th-century Western philosophy" -- perfect for a graphic novel (a chapter of which you can read at the link)
"Racialized... liberalism has been the problem rather than liberalism as such, but... it is understandably hard to appreciate this considering that the former has been the dominant form of liberalism for hundreds of years" -- an interview with Charles Mills (CUNY)
If you have one thought too many, the many think you're less good -- new social psych research: "participants rated an impartial actor as less morally good and his or her action as less moral compared to a partial actor"
The next president of France was once an assistant to Paul Ricoeur -- do the philosopher's ideas provide insight into how Emmanuel Macron will govern?
"Why is the idea that optimal performance occurs in a state of flow so widespread, if it’s wrong?" -- it sounds appeallingly effortless, says Barbara Gail Montero (CUNY), but doing ballet or philosophy well is not
Rather than complain about political correctness as such, "we might usefully distinguish among five categories of attitudes towards speech," says Michael C. Dorf (Cornell)
Study? Student in duct shuns it, having successfully stolen exam before -- but this time, he gets caught
"Why philosophy majors make the best entrepreneurs" -- five brief reasons from software entrepreneur Nick Miller
The philosophical lesson in the claim that giraffes are taller than ants -- from David Detmer (Purdue)
U. Wisconsin grad students start philosophy outreach program -- "We believe that no matter what you are doing, philosophy can help you do it better"
"Unsubstantiated claims about unspecified harms" -- José Luis Bermúdez (Texas A&M) on the Hypatia controversy
Why are academic philosophers fearful? -- the profession seems punitive, but "it’s punitive in so many different directions, it’s hard to know where to begin"
A map of philosophy -- video version (via @anitaleirfall)
and an image of the whole map
"Crucial to bridging the divides that we have is a willingness to engage with people... who don't think like us" -- Karen Stohr (Georgetown) talks about talking politics
"There are important things about other people that we are not good at imagining." -- particularly the variety and extent of the harms they suffer, says Adam Morton (UBC)
"One may think that that the functions of analytical philosophy... have in common the encouragement to speak the truth come what may... ...Surprisingly enough that's not true"
"It is an aspect of the human condition in late modernity that we have to live with multiple identities and find a way to negotiate among them" -- a short interview with Seyla Benhabib (Yale)
There are more pragmatists than you might have thought -- all about pragmatism, with Cheryl Misak (Toronto)
An "inclusive bibliography on race, gender, and related topics" -- a Google doc created in response to the Hypatia controversy
"I sometimes pretend that the amygdala of my brain is in my pinky toe" -- on the "backfire effect": your brain's defense against threatening ideas
"Can we accept, morally speaking, say a five percent drop in the wages of some American workers in exchange for a 400 percent gain in the incomes of immigrant workers?" "That’s a question for philosophy. That’s a question for ethics."
Which ideas should have a place on university campuses? -- "one of the most important factors concerns the likely merits of the proposed contribution," says Patricia Marino (Waterloo)
"I would rather do anything else than grade your Final Papers" (only a year old, but already timeless)
"A bully whose behavior is positively reinforced by frightened colleagues quickly becomes out of control" -- what's needed are "moral leaders," says M.G. Piety (Drexel)
Martha Nussbaum's Jefferson Lecture will be livestreamed tonight (May 1st) -- 7:35 Eastern Time
Which philosopher is still important to you today? -- interviews with folks on the street in Germany (in German w/ subtitles)
"Someone who runs to catch a bus is not necessarily a runner; someone who commits a crime is not necessarily a criminal" -- a distinction erased by the Trump administration, argues Jason Stanley (Yale)
There were 704 submissions to the APA's Philosophy Through Fiction contest -- and the winner was just announced
"A large part of the human self-model is grounded in the body, in gut feelings, in inner organ perceptions, in the vestibular sense, and therefore you cannot really copy the human self-model out of the biological body" -- an interview with Thomas Metzinger
"However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life." -- George Orwell's 1940 review of Hitler's Mein Kampf
"This conception of feminism accommodates the fact that traditions, and particular traditional practices, are often antifeminist without suggesting that tradition as such is the enemy" -- Serene Khader (Brooklyn/CUNY) on the "feminism v. Islam" frame
A new series of characteristically wonderful short videos from John Corvino (Wayne State) -- on religious liberty and discrimination (watch past the credits!)
More of our disagreements than you think are reasonable -- so says Kevin Vallier (Bowling Green), who offers three tips to help recognize this
Are you comfortable with the tradeoffs you've chosen? -- perhaps you're using "The Happy Coincidence Defense" or "The-Most-I-Can-Do Sweet Spot"
New: The Australasian Philosophical Review -- the first issue is now out (click on the blue T & F Online button)
"Experts in philosophy or foreign languages will ultimately command the most interest from employers in the next decade" -- according to billionaire Mark Cuban (via Andrew Sepielli)
Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale... about the value of professors?
"I want my mommy" -- teaching philosophy to kids isn't that easy
The ethics of Passover & benefiting from injustice -- should Jews celebrate that God supposedly killed thousands of innocent Egyptian boys, or should they atone for it?
"There is no distinction between the legitimate and black market" when it comes to antiquities -- Liza Oliver and Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley) on the ethics of acquiring ancient art
"Every morning before I get up I read my email on my phone, and am delighted if I can turn down three or four invitations... before I even get up" -- Martha Nussbaum answers some questions
"We need to find a way to formally recognize the skills, the work, the talent, and the contributions to the profession of our present-day philosophical 'distillers'" -- on making philosophy understood to the general public
"The audience is moved, but also (in Plato’s sense) self-moved, to the extent that they are led to think for themselves" -- Tushar Irani (Wesleyan) on how "good rhetoric also does the work of reason"
More on that "negative mass" fluid mentioned last week in the Heap -- perhaps not as wild as we might have thought (via Alex Grzankowski)
"I’m hoping to do my small part to make the movement endure more." -- Chris Lebron (Yale) profiled in The Chronicle in regards to his book on Black Lives Matter
Undergrads can now major in philosophy at UT Dallas -- previously it was just available as a minor
Controversy over "Communism for Kids" -- translated from the German by philosophy graduate student Jacob Blumenfeld (New School)
"You don’t need to feel like you’re succeeding" -- and other ways to figure out whether academia is for you
A Facebook group for those interested in philosophy of body practices, including yoga, martial arts, qigong, etc. -- organized by Lisa Miracchi (Penn) and Steven Geisz (Tampa)
"A joke is basically syllogistic" -- comedians Kenny and Keith Lucas, aka the Lucas Brothers, read a lot of philosophy
Article attributed to disabled man Anna Stubblefield was found guilty of sexually assaulting is retracted -- but not, perhaps, for the reason you might think
"Machines will become morally much better than we are, or morally much worse. But the point is that we won’t be able to tell which is which" -- Regina Rini (NYU) with some fascinating thoughts about the future of morality
In philosophy of science, will increased scientific specialization crowd out the philosophy? -- Celso Neto (Calgary) on the future of philosophy of science
"I hadn’t even noticed she was being talked over" -- a philosophy undergrad reflecting on her professor calling out interruptions
"One can’t inquire unless one has a target to aim at and that, in turn, requires knowing what one is inquiring into---the very thing [one doesn't] know. -- Gail Fine (Cornell) on the Meno paradox
Physicists develop a fluid with "negative mass": the harder you push it away, the faster it accelerates towards you -- file under: reality > intuition
"Just because the jokes you tell never change, doesn't mean that nothing does" (EC)
"Few people are capable of characterizing their own research to professional peers" -- reflections on the academic cover letter
Science popularizer Bill Nye changes mind about philosophy -- "Bring it on," he says (◔_◔)
"A messy and perhaps inelegant conception of how psychological kinds stand in relation to other scientific kinds" -- Thomas Polger & Lawrence Shapiro on why multiple realizability isn't complicated enough
"Your brain acts as if your future self is someone you don’t know very well and, frankly, someone you don’t care about" -- brain imaging and the bias towards the near
"Death does not solve the problem of life’s cosmic meaninglessness and will often... diminish the kind of meaning that is attainable" -- a brief interview with David Benatar (Cape Town) on The Human Predicament
You don't need to be a dirt-loving tree-hugger to act in environmentally friendly ways -- Ben Hale (Colorado) in conversation with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
"What we see is constantly informed by what we know and what we were thus already busy (both consciously and non-consciously) expecting." -- Andy Clark (Edinburgh) on brains as "prediction machines"
They work. But we don't know quite how. -- on our understanding of current artificial intelligence
Kurt Vonnegut's writing advice -- culled from several sources
What was the universe like before The Big Bang? -- some speculation from Sean Carroll and others
A closer look---without an actual look---at evidence excluded from the Stubblefield trial -- at Slate
"Philosophy generates lots of theories but little consensus" -- but "this insight provides a way to break the philosophical stalemate" (via Simon C. May)
On hoping that you are living a worthwhile life -- reflections from Luc Bovens (LSE)
Mini-interviews with philosophers, now arranged by theme -- 400 of them!
Moroccan gov't to revise philosophy textbooks in response to philosophers' charge that they "distorted" philosophy towards Islamic extremism
"Public intellectuals are necessary to filter the quality thinkers from the charlatans" -- Daniel Drezner (Tufts) on public intellectuals, thought leaders, & the marketplace of ideas
When did modern philosophy begin? -- Steven Nadler (Wisconsin) on A.C. Grayling's The Age of Genius
Fascinating questions about and insights into the morality of war -- from Saba Bazargan-Forward (UCSD)
"There is no evidence that people are actually concerned with economic inequality at all... Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness"
Philosophical questions about emoji -- at Aesthetics for Birds
A new large study on the differences between male and female brains -- "the researchers themselves aren’t sure which sorts of size differences do and don’t matter"
Consequences, rights, and uncertainty -- a publicly-oriented discussion w/ David Owens (KCL), activist Gita Sahgal, and Sebastian Farquhar (Ctr. Effective Altruism)
Cross-cultural study shows limited generalizability---and occasional reversal---of "Knobe Effect" -- "results highlight the importance of factoring cultural context in our understanding of moral cognition" (via Daniel Brunson)
The hard problem of matter "Like the hard problem of consciousness, cannot be solved by experiment and observation or by gathering more physical detail" (via Robert Long)
What can we learn about the self from studying leaves? -- perhaps that the self is itself a society?
"Base-rates of Negative Traits: Instructions for Use in Criminal Trials" by Federico Picinali (LSE) is the Journal of Applied Philosophy's 2016 Best Article Winner
About 1/3 of PhD students are at risk of developing a psychiatric disorder -- but these risks can be offset by having an inspirational advisor and being able to envision one's PhD as a good career move
Do you know about Unpaywall? -- a browser extension to "instantly deliver legal, open-access, full text as you browse"
“We seem to intuitively understand that if we can get ourselves to believe something first, we’ll be more effective at getting others to believe it” -- the evolution of self-deception (via Gerald Dworkin)
A philosophy professor and his students create an interactive film -- "Black Coffee" premieres April 21st
"By replacing the human driver with its AI driver, automakers are taking on a lot of moral and legal responsibility " -- so what are its design principles for ethics?
"Let’s see how art and philosophy can create a championship for the meaning of things" -- an interview with Mériam Korichi, the creator of Night of Philosophy
"A perceptual experience may itself be irrational, because it is brought about by irrational influences" -- Susanna Siegel (Harvard) is blogging this week at Brains about rationality and perception
"To grieve and mourn, one does not want those who will too ably measure and make tidy life’s alarming collapses... One wants philosophers who fall apart, who come undone with weeping, talk to graves, and cry out for the return of souls that don’t exist."
The popularity of different philosophical topics -- as measured by number of downloads of its corresponding "Crash Course" episode
"There is much less of a connection between reasons and rationality than many people assume" -- an interview with John Broome (Oxford)
"Significant progress has been made in creating a body of philosophical work dealing with and oriented by the Africana experience in modernity... The task now is to de-ghettoize it and get the Euro-American establishment to face up to the challenge it raises," says Charles Mills (CUNY)
There are better strategies for getting rid of people's cognitive biases than teaching them critical thinking -- use "contextual debiasing" to alter "extra-psychic, environmental, and social structures"
In defense of fanciful thought experiments -- Patrick Lin (Cal Poly) at Forbes
Norms in the wild -- Cristina Bicchieri (University of Pennsylvania) talks about group behavior and social norms with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
The philosophy tool kit -- Alan Hájek (ANU) with a primer for non-philosophers on what philosophical reasoning is like
Philosophers on the biology of desire and addiction -- a symposium at The Brains Blog
Each class is 7.5 hours long. "You will put your cell phone in a box when you enter the class... There will be absolutely no napping." -- a course on "existential despair" at the University of Pennsylvania
How to write a doctoral dissertation -- advice from Robert Paul Wolff (from a few years back)
Hateful language, lack of imagination, and the politics of fear -- David Livingstone Smith (University of New England) and Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) discuss
"There are philosophical mistakes in the way we think about motherhood, which influence how we treat pregnant women and new mothers" -- Fiona Woollard (Southampton) on the philosophy of early motherhood
The Bentham Seminars -- now available for download
"The self is empirically tractable," so it should be getting more attention in psychiatry -- thoughts from Şerife Tekin (Daemen College)
Vice President Mike Pence is at dinner with his wife when something fissiony happens -- Patrick Stokes gives us the details in a piece that is very well done. And that's rare.
"I’d say we need not only drones but also Big Bird, and poetry and philosophy" -- the NYT's Nicholas Kristof goes to bat for philosophy and the humanities
Do ants do things for reasons? Keshav Singh (UNC) takes a close look
He was rushed to the emergency room, anesthetized, and put on a ventilator; when he woke, still intubated, he gestured for a pen and paper to write down his thoughts on a student's thesis -- Jeff McMahan (Oxford) has written a beautiful obituary of Derek Parfit (via David Sobel)
Biggest threat to higher ed? "Too much emphasis on comparative achievement, not enough on the pleasure of learning or the importance of doing at least some things really well." -- an interview with Baroness Onora O'Neill (Cambridge)
What to think when you're accused of ableism -- well, it's probably partly true, says Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR)
The "Philosophers' Ships" -- Lenin's name for the boats by which he exiled philosophers and other academics, students, journalists, and other intellectuals
Asking Matthew Liao anything about asking him anything -- at the Blog of the APA
"Asymmetrical polarization" -- political polarization happens, but not evenly across the political spectrum
"Founded in 2012 with a single course on Aristotle and Plato in the back of a New York City bar..." the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research brings philosophy and other subjects into the everyday lives of working adults
1 out of every 46 Americans are in prison, on parole, or probation -- Chris Surprenant (New Orleans) discusses mass incarceration
All ravens are black... or are they?
Do species have intrinsic value? -- Ross Barham (Melbourne) thinks Schopenhauer might help with that question
Procreating is likely the most carbon-intensive activity an individual can engage in -- how should that factor into our decision to have kids? A discussion with Travis Rieder (JHU)
"For subtle reasons, it’s not possible to count the intersection points all at once" -- to learn why, get paper, scissors, tape, and a pencil; we need a Möbius strip
An interview with hip-hop artist and philosophy major Olmeca -- by two philosophy students at the Univ. of Puget Sound
Are colleges suppressing free speech? -- a discussion with Jason Stanley (Yale) and Samantha Harris of FIRE
"This gathering will bring together / Pioneers in the field of / “Wellbeing.” / We remind you that this is / a Legitimate scholarly field / And not something that / Someone / Made up." -- a poem about your university's brand new institute's conference
A trolley case in the idiom of ancient Chinese philosophy -- and how Mo Zi would respond to it
What is an explanation? -- and other interesting questions put to Brad Skow (MIT)
Philosophical counseling and its discontents -- a former practitioner looks at some new criticisms
Philosophy, Nazism, and Evil -- a discussion at The Forum
A 700+ page historical novel about Socrates and ancient Greece -- written in Spanish
"I know it’s counter-intuitive to advocate overriding those who have been wrongly overridden" -- Kate Manne (Cornell) on reporting sexual assault and harassment
"There are few times in life, when a person can feel as powerful as God" -- like when you're farming your ants (a brief program at the Daily Ant by Barry Lam)
We now have the ability to digitally scan and 3D-print works of art -- Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley) discusses the questions this raises
"It is an offense against the law, and typically morality as well, for one to willingly and knowingly be in receipt of stolen goods" -- Graham Oddie (Colorado) on the Gorsuch nomination (via David Boonin)
The philosophy of ruins -- the work of Elizabeth Scarbrough (FIU)
"Bespoke transformative experiences that radicalize viewers" -- Mark Alfano on transformative experiences, personal identity, and YouTube
"If people feel that arguments are more virtuous than anecdote..." -- then they may never tell you why they find that bad argument compelling, so ask
In praise of hierarchy -- a forum with Angle, Appiah, Baggini, Bell, Berggruen, Fraenkel, Risse, Romano, Tiwald, Wang, and others
An open-source "intro to reasoning" text -- what should be added to it?
What it will take for philosophy departments to give teaching more than just lip service -- thoughts from Steven Cahn (CUNY)
The role of philosophy in the creation of the computer -- in The Atlantic (via Daniel Fogal)
"The issue most often cited by Arabs as their first step on the road to disbelief was the apparent unfairness of divine justice" -- atheism in the Arab world
"Complete standstill. Unending torments." -- Kafka on how the writing's going (an excerpt from his journal)
That liberal democracy provides few outlets for outright domination sows the seeds for backlash -- when Fukuyama used Trump as an example 25 years ago, did he know how right he'd be?
"I have taken a great deal of pains (and it really has been painful) trying to get hold of his ideas, but with the feeling all the time that they were slipping through my fingers" (Hare on A Theory of Justice) -- Should authors respond to reviews of their books?
Do soldiers have a "diminished moral status that makes killing them less morally bad than killings outside of war"? -- Helen Frowe (Stockholm) discusses the question
Cynics these days -- John Kaag (U Mass Lowell) on how "modern cynics truncate, or pointedly misunderstand, the full scope of cynicism as a school of thought"
How rational is our rationality? -- an interview with Miriam Schoenfield (Texas)
"Yoga is the practical element of a complex philosophical worldview" -- says Lisa Miracchi (Pennsylvania)
What rights, if any, do people considered outsiders have? -- at least rights against arbitrary treatment and discrimination, argues Adam Hosein (Colorado)
Aristotle the advice columnist -- at The Point
Consider the ant -- in case you were thinking about, say, eating them, says Cheryl Abbate (Colorado)
Think of philosophy for kids as a kind of inoculation against indoctrination
Middlebury's protesting students respond to their professors (via John Protevi)
Trump wants to remove funding for the NEH -- here is an easy way to call or email your representatives about this
"You can fake protest" -- Eric Schliesser on the faculty complaints "about students who have not yet resigned themselves to a life of quiet despair"
Edgar Allen Poe was "at once more rationalistic and more pathological" than the Transcendentalists -- Using Emerson to understand Poe
The simulation argument is based on evidence from the purportedly simulated universe -- does that weaken the argument by making it paradoxical or strengthen it by injecting further doubt into any counterevidence?
Time, philosophy of action, free will, and more -- an interview with Roman Altshuler (Kutztown)
The "uncanny valley": people tend to find replicas of humans that are almost-but-not-quite-human-enough-looking creepy -- and it turns out there's also an "uncanny valley of the mind"
"Is Reason a Neutral Tool in Comparative Philosophy?" -- a forum with Jonardon Ganeri, Mustafa Abu Sway, Paul Boghossain, Georgina Stewart (via Omnivore)
The "Passions of Philosophers outside Philosophy" (PoPoP) series -- philosophers share their non-philosophy hobbies at the Philosophers' Cocoon
A philosopher's arguments against bans on faculty-student relationships -- in Times Higher Education
"Math seems difficult and a teacher is there to make it seem simpler, but in the humanities, it's often necessary to start by taking something that seems simple and showing students how difficult it is." -- humanities teaching is hard
"Information respect" and shopping -- philosopher Evan Selinger (RIT) asks communications prof Joseph Turow (Annenberg) a few questions
A collection of influential essays by J.L. Austin (et al) from Aristotelian Society publications -- accessible for free (for the month)
Happy 2588th birthday, Lao Zi, we got you a 5 ton cake -- more "whoa" than "wu wei"
An economist looks at the emergence, consequences, and remedies for market power in scholarly publishing, in a new free book (via MR)
What can a philosopher tell you about toxic chemicals? -- ask Carl Cranor (UCR)
The real difference between analytic and Continental philosophers (via @MetaEpistemic)
The life and death of the Library of Alexandria -- the vision and creation of two students of Aristotle
"If you work at a college campus, you know that these sweeping denunciations are not accurate" (as I said in the Charles Murray post, beware the availability heuristic)
Can Kierkegaard help us understand Trump? -- Katalin Balog (Rutgers-Newark) thinks so
"Exercises in systematic, dishonest misunderstandings of the claims made by their supposed targets" -- Samir Chopra (Brooklyn) on recent remarks by Dennett and Williamson
The group writing retreat -- an approach to getting the words out
"If we praise forgiveness as a response to wrongdoing, as many do, we should also actively combat the influences that undermine the ability of some to forgive freely." -- Luke Brunning (Oxford) and Per-Erik Milam (Gothenburg) on forgiving Dylann Roof
When a student cries -- remember that "not all tears are equal"
Ram Neta (UNC) discusses ants and philosophy -- at The Daily Ant
The libertarian case for "safe spaces" -- they're manifestations of freedom of association
Think it's bad that "literally" now sometimes means "figuratively"? There's worse news: "literally" doesn't "literally" mean "literally" in the sense of "literally" you have in mind.
Sartre vs. Camus -- the artful animation of the conflict and friendship between the two philosophers
The search for the first recipient of the MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award has begun "The award will go to a person or group engaged in what we believe is extraordinary disobedience for the benefit of society"
What Plato's Republic tells us about today's politics -- and the attempt to make the people "drones without stings," from Jill Frank (Cornell)
Are creativity and psychopathology intimately related? -- there's empirical research that suggests they are
"The aim of historic restoration is not to recover material authenticity, but to restore our relationship with the past" -- argues Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley)
A mini-conference on inclusion and diversity in philosophy will be taking place at the Pacific APA
"A Vote Of No Confidence in Trump's Epistemic Abilities" -- a petition directed at Paul Ryan and the RNC (via PhilPercs)
A new resource for students of the intellectual traditions of South Asia -- a "prosopographical database"
Should social policy focus on structures or on individuals? -- a forum with pieces by Alex Madva, Saray Ayala-Lopez, Sally Haslanger, & Jenny Saul
The multiverse and the problem of evil -- thoughts from Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers)
21 versions of the basic computer game, "Snake," each with its own philosophical theme -- some are clever and amusing
"The neglect of the history of philosophy journals is a neglect of central philosophical questions" argues Joel Katzav (Queensland)
When Oxford philosophy was dominated by women, rather than men -- an account from one of those women
Is an econ course for high schoolers called "Philosophy 101" just free-market propaganda? -- the course is offered by University of Arizona's Center for the Philosophy of Freedom
Would Socrates have survived Twitter? -- Madeline Donnelly (McMaster U Library) on intellectual freedom (brief video)
Could the next scientific breakthrough come from the past? -- old texts have provided "scientific ideas addressing current thinking in fresh ways"
Afghan refugee Alidad Shiri was just a boy of 10 when he set off alone on a four-year odyssey to Europe. Now aged 25, he is about to graduate with a degree in philosophy from the University of Trento.
A "Video Games & Philosophy" week-long program for high school and junior high students -- offered by the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point
When does an action harm someone? -- join the discussion at PEA Soup
"Unwarranted distrust that is predicated on prejudice is pervasive phenomenon whose moral complexity theorists have yet to reckon fully with" -- Jason D'Cruz (Albany) is working on it
Textual evidence confirms that a 2015 discovery is the earliest known image of Confucius (via Smithsonian)
"If philosophers were required to write science fiction, people might actually understand what they were saying" -- but perhaps any philosophy that can be summed up in a jettisoned escape pod belongs in one
Finance and trading strategies based on the ideas of Thales? (possibly for the abuse of philosophers file)
What does singer-songwriter José González listen to "to keep him sane when he's on the road"? -- a philosophy podcast (NYT)
Giant neuron around the circumference of mouse brains found -- along with giant speculation about its significance
The APA's board of officers votes to reappoint its chair, vice chair, and the organization's executive director: Cheshire Calhoun, Richard Bett, and Amy Ferrer
A social contract theory for a diverse world -- Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) talks political philosophy with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
"Some of the things that make for good philosophy also make for bad public philosophy" -- Barry Lam (Vassar) interviewed about his work on Hi-Phi Nation
Finding value in moral reasoning based on false premises -- thoughts from Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan)
"Intelligence has been used to justify privilege and domination throughout more than 2,000 years of history... is it any wonder that the imminent prospect of super-smart robots fills us with dread?"
Interviews with philosophers and others working on "consciousness and its altered states" -- from the Alius research group
Thoreau's Walden: the video game -- “It’s an attempt to make a game that has a kind of stillness at its core” says the game's developer
Physicist Sean Carroll and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace have a chat about the nature of reality
Peter Singer answers twenty questions -- in the Journal of Practical Ethics
Philosophers write about ants -- a new weekly series at The Daily Ant blog (via Kathyrn Pogin)
Is mathematics going to "blow up"? -- incompleteness, infinity, and emulation theory
The tools for improving rational discourse have become tools for subverting it -- Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) on the "Owl of Minerva Problem"
Intellectualizing your anxiety into a sense of superiority (don't neglect the mouseover text)
Poisoning the wells of reasoned public discourse -- Alexander George (Amherst) on our "forger in chief"
It's a job in philosophy, but it looks pretty bad -- should you take it?
The philosophy of Westworld -- the latest Wisecrack video (spoilers)
"Nevertheless, She Persisted" -- ancient philosophy edition
Thoughts on grounding from The New York Times marketing department (via Daniel Kokotajlo)
Russell Hardin (NYU), a political scientist and theorist whose work influenced many philosophers, has died
"The 'golden trio' of behaviours for female orgasm," according to empirical work by philosopher-biologist Elisabeth Lloyd (Indiana) (via Feminist Philosophers)
How long can love last? -- Naomi Goulder (New College of the Humanities) and others discuss love and time
To handle "toxic speech" we may need more than just more speech -- we may need the rhetorical analogs of antidotes and vaccines, says Lynne Tirrell (U Mass Boston)
Tim Robbins will play a philosophy professor in a new HBO series -- from the creator of Six Feet Under and True Blood
A statue of György Lukács will be removed from the park in Budapest where it has stood for 32 years -- a victim of anti-semitism in contemporary Hungarian politics
"A brief defence of paying attention to... biographical details of the authors we study" -- a case for "moderate historicism" from Liam Kofi Bright (CMU)
"I do not want the omnipresent ability to communicate with anyone who is absent" -- Philip Reed (Canisius) on why to not have a cell phone (via John Schwenkler)
Does this little argument about consciousness bug you? -- why?
"We all need worthy opponents to challenge us in our search for truth. It is absolutely essential to the quality of our enterprise." -- John Etchemendy (Stanford) on the "intellectual monocultures" that have taken over certain disciplines
Influential economist Kenneth Arrow has died -- known for his "impossibility theorem," among other ideas
The "mash-up" song genre raises questions in aesthetics, metaphysics, law, and music theory -- and makes for an excellent episode of Hi-Phi Nation
Why are we so committed to the idea of moral responsibility? -- a symposium on a skeptical take
A new opera featuring the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Wittgenstein, and others -- it gets a surprisingly rave review from Alex Ross in The New Yorker
How ridiculous is it to ask about whether plants have minds? -- surprisingly not that ridiculous, says Chauncey Maher (Dickinson) in the first of a series of posts on the subject
Is it a cake or a cookie? -- food for thought
Work-life balance in academia -- some coping mechanisms
Are university presses publishing fewer humanities monographs? -- or is more aiming for "the broadest possible readership" just pushing books out of the monograph category?
Utilitarianism, liberalism, and the alleged need for campus conservatives -- John Holbo (NUS) continues his trenchant critique of Jonathan Haidt's "heterodoxy"
The pattern underlying several well-known paradoxes -- and some new ones, too
At the moment, nothing is funny -- so J.E.H. Smith's project on gelastics (experiences of the funny), described here, will have to wait
Monumental agency -- on "the challenge of attributing rational planning and action to a very large and distributed organization"
A new edition of a free and creative-commons textbook on logic and critical reasoning is in the works -- from Brendan Myers (Heritage College)
The "slow professor movement" aims at "reclaiming the intellectual life of the the university"
"the gap between / the words I said / and those I remember saying // is just wide enough to contain / the remains that remain / of what I assumed I knew" -- great interview with philosopher and poet Troy Jollimore (CSU Chico)
A philosopher, surprised at the persistence of caste bias in the UK, takes it up as a research subject -- Meena Dhanda (Wolverhampton) on her own form of socially engaged philosophy
All about Habermas -- a review of a new biography of the philosopher
Peter Singer on what it means to do philosophy -- and related topics. And surfing.
"It does take courage" to be a conservative student on a liberal campus -- "but don’t compare disagreement with your ideas to suppression"
"You've been self-treating your depression all these years with philosophy" -- an interview with Whitney Mutch (Alabama)
A discussion of artificial superintelligence, consciousness, and related topics -- Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, and others
Trump's Razor -- move over, Ockham
Women in early analytic philosophy -- four articles in a special issue of the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy
Are complex phenomena “nothing but the sum of their parts”, or are they “more than the sum of their parts”? -- Carl Gillet (NIU) discusses his book on this debate with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
Charles Taylor (McGill) tempers his secularism after mosque shooting (was the choice of photo cleverness or just luck?)
"Research for All" is a new journal for ideas for bringing academic research and the public together -- it's more than just informing the public of your findings
"What sets off the siren on my charlatan detector is the consciousness with which Wittgenstein inhabited the role of the genius" -- Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson) on Wittgenstein's "genius"
WhatTheFuckJustHappenedToday.com -- helpful
Is human nature fundamentally good? -- a sketch of an argument from Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR)
Ethics in the news and culture -- have you checked out The Prindle Post lately?
"The fact that you’ve become an expert in philosophy does not impair your ability to become an expert in something else---the exact opposite is true" -- an interview with Zachary Ernst, software engineer & former philosophy prof
PhilPapers has a new look -- and is more mobile-friendly
Thomas Pogge, trigger warnings, and the space of reasons -- Daniel Tippens on the conflict of moral and epistemic values
"Why Monogamy is Marvelous," "Could Trump Be His Own Valentine," "To Swipe or Not to Swipe" -- and other philosophical Valentines Day articles at The Critique
OUP's Peter Momtchiloff and Bloomsbury's Liza Thompson discuss philosophy publishing (via Matt McAdam)
Christopher Kelp (KU Leuven) & Miriam Schoenfield (NYU/MIT) are winners of the Young Epistemologist Prize -- awarded by the organizers of the Rutgers Epistemology Conference
One minute time machine: a love story of sorts -- video, possibly NSFW for sexual language (via Massimo Pigliucci)
The humanities depend on "a revolving door of new Ph.D.s who work temporarily for unsustainable wages before giving up and being replaced by next year’s surplus doctorates" -- exploitation in academia
"Willpower may simply be a pre-scientific idea... born from social attitudes and philosophical speculation rather than research" -- maybe we should dump the very idea of it
A Marx-Engels bromance movie? (via Nolen Gertz)
What's going on with the proposed elimination of the philosophy major at Eastern Illinois? -- an update
17 universities file amicus brief against Trump's EO on immigration: Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Northwestern, U Penn, Princeton, Stanford, Vanderbilt, & Yale
The time when Kurt Gödel went to take his US citizenship test, accompanied by Albert Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern -- and Gödel attempted to "prove" the Constitution's flaws allow the US to become fascist (via Martin O'Neill)
Ordinary people, philosophers, and psychologists all seem to reject the definition of "happiness" that scientists use -- "People think there’s more to being happy than just feeling good. Perhaps to truly be happy, you also have to be good."
Philosophy and philosophical implications of quantum mechanics -- very interesting interview with Peter Lewis (Miami)
When a university puts the guest lecturer who has written on the politics of the body in an inaccessible venue -- just the tip of the iceberg of challenges faced by disabled academics
A radio program on Parfit -- The Philosopher's Zone, in Australia
"Pointing out problems that many mathematicians preferred to ignore" -- case study: geometry
Free speech controversy about lecture on free speech at Brown -- it seems the use-mention distinction would have been helpful here
More on what the left can learn from Richard Rorty -- at Vox
"Star Wars and Philosophy": the open-access short course -- offered by the University of Glasgow
Teach curiosity -- it may be society's only hope
A statue of Socrates will be installed in the EU's Court of Justice which houses art from all over Europe
"The secret to happiness is find something bigger than you and devote your life to it" -- says Daniel Dennett
"Isn’t it better to be white and economically forgotten than to be economically forgotten and to be black under the same circumstances?" -- George Yancy on Black History Month
Does Brandom's view imply that "causing pain and deprivation and death...to mute people is not intrinsically evil"? -- an ableist interpretation of Brandom (and Rorty)
Bolstering the power of exit for government employees who cannot in good conscience work under Trump -- a proposal (via Gerald Dworkin)
How do we know that "if some upstream condition A had been different, then downstream outcome C would have happened instead of what actually happened"? The epistemology of historical counterfactuals
"Compared to nihilism, hypocrisy is a vice well worth preserving" -- Jacob Levy (McGill) on why "we should be less worried by hypocrisy than by its absence"
Rosi Braidotti (Utrecht) will be delivering the 2017 Tanner Lectures -- her topic: "Posthuman, All Too Human"
Nussbaum on "Hamilton" (the musical) and political virtue -- with commentary from others, at Boston Review
"The stark difference in the use of democratic vocabulary between Trump and prior presidents" -- a linguistic analysis by David Beaver (Texas) and Jason Stanley (Yale)
How ordinary Americans carried out inhumane acts for Trump -- life in Milgram experiments, first for gov't employees, then for the rest of us
Hume Society issues statement on the Immigration Order -- it is "working to assess the impact of this executive order on our members and participants in our upcoming meetings in Rhode Island"
Most people think they are more moral than others -- what are the consequences of this particular "self-enhancement" effect?
"Why should labs be reserved for the sciences?" -- a professor Germanic studies and cognitive science describes his Experimental Humanities Lab
Trump's bullshitting and why it's so problematic
Should ethics professors be held to higher ethical standards in their personal behavior? -- four "to some extent competing" considerations from Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR)
An interview with one of the "Night of Philosophy" organizers: Ian Olasov (CUNY)
"Uncompromising internalism" about the mental -- an interesting and informative interview of Katalin Farkas (CEU)
"When we embody another person’s action or emotion, we embody the temporal distortions that come with it" -- and that might help us control the subjective experience of time's passage
"Politeness calls for the interaction of the mind and the heart" -- Henri Bergson on the varieties of politeness
"We must each relearn many basic life lessons during our individual lifetimes, lessons that millions or billions of others already learned in their previous lifetimes." Inefficient, no? -- a few big but neglected social problems (via MR)
"911---what's your emergency?" "I work from home"
"It is our job to put intellectual resources in the hands of students who will encounter... deplorable ideas throughout their lives" -- In defense of a Socratic model of teaching, as opposed to Millian and Maoist ones
Jason Brennan (Georgetown) insists on $1000 to review book by author he calls a "crackpot philospher" -- and the author raises the money. (The latest in the series, "Is this the most Jason Brennan thing ever?")
"Instead of a vision of freedom, the founders gave us a framework for an indefinite continuation of their revolutionary struggle over what freedom should mean" -- Gary Gutting (Notre Dame) on patriotism
What good are the humanities? -- a talk by Talbot Brewer (Virginia)
We're more likely to believe good news than bad news -- this doesn't seem like good news
Polyamory and the philosophy and biology of love -- a profile of Carrie Jenkins (UBC)
"Agents appear at doorways, in restaurants, asking for documents, looking for enemies of the people" -- Jason Stanley (Yale) on his family's experiences as enemies and refugees
Charles Taylor interviewed on the Quebec Mosque shooting and Trump's Immigration Order
The art you liked when you were younger is probably not as good as you thought -- but it has a valuable relationship to your "all things considered well-informed aesthetic judgment," says Bence Nanay (Antwerp)
The ethics of artificial intelligence -- Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, Apple, and Microsoft are working on it, together
The philosophy of love has been "a frankly embarrassing catalogue of pompous people tripping over their own assumptions" -- says Carrie Jenkins (UBC), whose new book on the subject is reviewed at the LARB
Varieties of ignorance -- Thomas Hofweber (UNC) on ineffable facts
The Journal of Philosophy and modern Indian philosophy in the 20th Century -- and analytic philosophers' silence about marginalization
"The barriers to letting people in thus act as a kind of cage to keep people in." -- we are "squarely in liberalism-of-fear territory now," writes Jacob Levy (McGill)
Truth "is essentially circular; there is no non-circular way of giving an extensionally adequate definition of truth" -- an interview with Anil Gupta (Pittsburgh)
The moral failure that is Trump's immigration order -- Joseph Carens (Toronto) interviewed at Vox
Is desert making a come back in political philosophy? -- Fred Feldman (UMass) talk with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt))
“Absolutely I feel it works... I haven’t seen it work. But I think it works,” says Trump -- "If torture is wrong, it’s wrong whether or not it works," says John Schwenkler (FSU)
Consent: a bright line, but a low bar -- Patricia Marino (Waterloo) on avoiding "an awful way to interact with the people you care about"
Writing about philosophy for non-philosophers -- an interview with the journalist with the philosophy beat at Quartz
"Do you consider yourself lucky because good things happen to you, or do good things happen to you because you consider yourself lucky?" -- luck, psychology, and the good life
Reflections from philosophers on the Women's March
"Academia has become an ever-present third party in our relationship, for better and for worse" -- academics and the personal relationships
"Most often, we do not stop to distinguish the typical from the acceptable, the infrequent from the deviant... Combating this tendency in ourselves and others is — perhaps now more than ever — something to be vigilant about."
The "Lego Brain" challenge to physicalism -- from Gordon Hawkes (Calgary)
Philosophical writing by current and former students on current affairs and philosophy -- "Undercurrent Philosophy"
"Continental philosophy needs to honestly appraise the nature of its relation to the scientific civilization it purports to decode and guide, lest it become mere fantasy, or worse yet, conceptual religion."
List of the Alt- and Rogue- Twitter handles of gov't agencies whose official social media Trump shut down. Follow them. -- from Mark Alfano (Delft)
If Descartes' robot "daughter" had written history, what could we have learned about the relationship between humans and machines?
Cornell philosophy PhD student Philippe Lemoine has a new blog -- focused mainly, so far, on political issues
"When it is not possible to be factual and balanced at the same time, democratic institutions risk collapse" -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR) in the LA Times
What is a sexual orientation? If it involves sexual desires, what's a sexual desire? -- thoughts from Esa Diaz-Leon (Barcelona)
"He is a baboon flinging shit at the liberal tradition and the liberal order" -- libertarianism and Trump
The trolley graveyard (maybe not what you're thinking)
Alternative facts and Quinean holism -- Alan Jay Levinovitz (JMU) at Vox
A step-by-step interactive walk through of Plato's Euthyphro -- via Don Barker
The ontology and value of internet memes -- case study: Pepe the Frog
Do I torture the terrorist, or let my baby be blown up by the bomb that he had rigged the baby with... ...my baby, whom he had left at some remote location while himself winding up in a situation where he could be tortured by me?
"Evolution did not design us to solve or even recognize this kind of problem" -- Dale Jamieson (NYU) on climate change
Are you an "independent agent?" Perhaps a "synergistic citizen"? Or...? -- a taxonomy of post-tenure professors
"We need to ensure that our new smart technologies will be at the service of the human project, not vice versa" -- how do we get to a "good AI society"?
The displacement of refugees is assumed by most to be "exceptional and temporary," but it's not -- and so it deserves a more thorough treatment from moral and political philosophers, argues Serena Parekh (Northeastern)
A year's worth of philosophy podcast episodes <